“Lydia has no business to go off like this. If your father had any sense . . .”
But the scorn ran off the imperturbable Bert. He had begun to root about for the tea, bread, jam, as Lydia came up along the cinder path, wheeling Lennie in a push chair.
“Hallo, every one. Kettle boiling? Just off, Bert? Good Lord! Where’s Daisy? Why isn’t tea ready?”
Nancy stood and watched her, as she flung herself upon the business of spreading margarine and cutting bread. Lydia had her mother’s strong impatient movement, her brother’s hot temper and quick smile; but she frowned with anxiety when Bert told her of Daisy’s escapade. That frown pleased Nancy. The girl had begun to learn the lesson of the poor— to dread any unexpected action, to know that any deviation from routine meant loss.
“Where’s Dad?”
“Nag’s Head—or Brimsley’s.”
“They say,” observed Nancy conversationally, “that Nat Brimsley is courting the Pudsey girl at Maythorpe.”
“Nat Brimsley? Courting?” Bert gave a great gulp of laughter. Lydia looked up from carefully measuring tea into the pot.
“Why not?” mocked Lydia. “You’re a bit of a lad yourself, aren’t you? What price Vi Alcock?”
Beneath her momentary anxieties she was happy, elated by music and exercise. It did not occur to her to be intimidated by Nancy Mitchell, who stood like a glowering witch upon their doorstep.
“Vi? What about her?”
“She was at rehearsal doing Jeanette’s part. Jean’s poorly. Cissie Tadman brought her a message.”
“What’s that to do with me?”
“I don’t know. Do I, Mrs. Mitchell? Have a cup of tea, won’t you?”
“No, thanks. I must be going.”
But she did not go, for Gertie appeared then at the door between the two compartments.
“Come on an’ have tea, Gert. How’s the head?”
In her flannelette petticoat, bare-footed, the child drooped miserably.
“It’s bad. I don’t want any tea. I thought you was never coming home, Lyd.”
“Well, here I am. Come on. A cup’ll do you good.”
“If you ask me,” said Nancy, “I should say that child had a temperature.”
“It’s only a bit of cold,” Lydia began, but Gertie persisted: “I feel right poorly.”
Lydia pushed her own cup and plate aside and drew the child towards her.
“Come here, pet. Come here to Lyd.”
Her conscience smote her. She should not have gone to Kiplington. She should not have left the children.
“She does seem hot,” she said tentatively, glancing up at the only adult person. That appeal touched Nancy. It was the recognition of authority that she needed. She said: “I’ve got a thermometer. I’ll get it.”
She hurried across to Bella Vista, suddenly compassionate. Those lost untidy children. That dreadful room.
Baby Peggy lay under the tarpaulin hood, ‘awake but happy, playing with a rubber ring from which bells hung. It was right that she should glow with health while the Hollies suffered. Justice soothed Nancy. She chirruped at the pram, clicking her fingers, then went indoors for the thermometer.
As a girl she had attended first-aid classes organised by the Red Cross and she now kept a medicine chest with bandages and iodine. She enjoyed binding cut fingers and treating insect bites. Her skill gave her a sort of professional superiority over the campers.
She took the thermometer and hurried back to the Hollies. Gertie lay limply on Lydia’s knee. Bert was just taking his departure. Alice was returning with the reluctant Daisy.
“Wait, please,” Nancy said to Bert. “If this child’s, really sick, you may have to take a message.”
“I’m not sick, only poorly,” whimpered Gertie.
“I’ve got a date,” Bert protested, but he waited. They all hung round the invalid, shuffling, staring. Nancy kept the thermometer in a little longer than was necessary, just to show her power. But when she withdrew it, genuine anxiety gripped her, like a hand on her spine.
“Has she got a temperature?” asked Lydia.
“A bit.”
“It’s that cold.”
“Did you say some one at that dancing class had measles?”
“Jeanette.”
Nancy unbuttoned the child’s petticoat and pulled down the crumpled flannel. Her chest was mottled red with rash.
“It’s measles all right. Put her to bed. It’s too late to keep the others away. You’d better call at Dr. Campbell’s, Bert. Tell him your sister’s got a rash and a temperature of a hundred and three point two.”
She spoke with bright efficiency, but the words “too late” fell like doom upon her heart. Gertie had been near Peggy. Her child’s glowing face, those curls, her smile, her lovely rounded neck, swam before her vision. Already she tasted the horror of suspense.
“Isn’t that high?” breathed Lydia.
“Not for a child. Every child has to get measles some day. Of course, you would go to that dancing class.”
It was Lydia to whom she spoke, but the reassurance was for her own sick heart.
She hurried back to her own home. In a frenzy of panic, she flung off the dress that she had worn in the Hollies’ coach and in spite of the damp hung it outside on the line to air. It had stopped raining.
She washed her hands with carbolic soap.
But it was too late. She knew that it was too late. She was certain that the Holly children had given Peggy measles.
She went to the pram and lifted her baby and carried her indoors. She sat down by the window and began to examine with fearful attention that small beloved body—every crease in the dimpled flesh, the rings round the back of the fat little neck, the faint down on the spine. The child was perfect.
“Ga, ga, ga, ga!” chuckled Peggy. Her mother’s frantic clutches were moves in a game. She laughed and gurgled, blowing ecstatic bubbles.
Nancy’s lips went down to the soft rosy skin. She smelled it, she kissed it, burying her face in warm fragrant flesh, adoring the child with passion quickened by fear.
It’s only measles, she told herself. Measles is nothing. But her reasonable words brought her no comfort. She snatched the child to her breast and paced the room, her tears falling on to the damp fair curls, the wild-rose face. She did not even know that she was crying.
We must go away. It’s not safe here. I’ll write to mother.
But Fred had quarrelled with Mrs. Whitfield and Nancy knew her mother. If she went home it would mean a breach with Fred. She did not care. At that moment there was room in her heart for Peggy alone.
“Don’t get it. Darling, darling, mother’s little darling. I’ll save you. It’s all right. It’s all right.”
It might have been the baby who was frightened.
Fred, limping stiffly after his long fruitless battle against the wind, against indifference, against the apathy of a suspicious world, found her thus when he came home to tea.
“Peggy?” he cried, his face blanching, if indeed it were possible to grow paler.
“Gert Holly’s got measles.”
“Oh, is that all?”
After his moment of piercing terror, it seemed a little thing.
Nancy’s strained nerves snapped.
“Is that all? Is that all? When Peggy’s bound to get it, and maybe she’ll die and just as well for her. We never should have had a child. Now we’ll get rid of it. She’d be better dead. And I’d be better dead too. I’m going to have another, d’you hear? I’m going to have another child! And how are we going to live? Oh, God! How are we going to live?”
2
Mrs. Beddows Has Three Men to Think of
JIM BEDDOWS drove his wife to Flintonbridge Agricultural Show, and Emma Beddows wished he wouldn’t do it. His driving terrified her. He knew nothing about the internal mechanism of motor-cars and lacked patience and road sense. He treated his rattling 1929 Ford with the same irascible impatience which his horses had end
ured from him for the past half-century. Emma had an idea that motor-cars were not so meek as horses.
But when Mr. Beddows was in a car, he drove it, just as when he had paid for a joint, he carved it. That his daughter could do the first and his wife the second far better than he, affected the issue not at all. Mrs. Beddows made no protest. When Sybil once suggested: “You know, darling, Daddy does hack the sirloin about frightfully; I do wish you’d carve,” she replied: “Well, it’s his sirloin, isn’t it? He paid for it. He has a right to carve it if he wants to.” To those who expected a county alderman and local celebrity to dominate her own household, Mrs. Beddows replied: “I prefer to see a cock crow on his own dunghill.”
Jim Beddows did the crowing at Willow Lodge.
So the Beddows family, husband and wife in front, Sybil and Wendy behind, honked, pounced and jerked their way along the crowded roads to Flintonbridge. It was by good luck rather than good management that they avoided accidents, but they suffered all the minor inconveniences of bad driving. They lingered in dust from other vehicles, they cut in when that was least advisable, they scorned sneers and shouts and cursings. Twice their engine stopped dead after halts by crossroads.
But it was a fine day, and that was something. The warm summer had bleached the hedgerows early. When they were not white with dust they were smothered in Old Man’s Beard. White bedstraw sprinkled the grass like fallen powder. A field of rye grass brushed lightly by the wind wore the bloom of half-ripe peach.
“Road’s plaguey dusty,” grumbled Mr. Beddows. He enjoyed complaining to his wife about her public business. “Why don’t you sprinkle ’em?”
“What with? There’s a drought on, isn’t there? Do you want us to waste water, or must we spit on them?”
Jim roared and tried to slap his thigh with pleasure. He made good capital at markets out of his wife’s quick tongue. But it is not easy to slap your thigh while driving on to a fairground.
Converging traffic puzzled the local policemen. They puffed and sweated in their tight uniforms, as Fords, Daimlers, pony traps, milk floats, wagons, bicycles and carriers’ carts all sought simultaneous entry through one narrow gate. Jim Beddows had succumbed unwillingly to the notion of a car-park. To pay two shillings simply to stand one’s car in a crowded field exasperated him. But previous attempts to find his own accommodation had involved him in insuperable difficulties. With bad grace, he submitted.
Willie had gone earlier. He was judging poultry. Jim Beddows set off to inspect the exhibits. He enjoyed shows, sales, races and markets. The one commodity with which he was prepared to be completely generous was his unasked opinion. He shouldered his way through the crowds, small, wiry, self-sufficient, his large white false teeth gleaming amicably below his grey moustache. They contradicted the pessimism of his opinions which were, too often for his neighbours’ comfort, insufferably right.
Emma Beddows watched him march off, saw him pause to criticise a new type of self-binding reaper adapted for horse or tractor. His remarks were loud and coldly genial, in his auctioneer’s trained carrying voice.
She hoped that he was not cadging for a meal or a commission. Each time she saw him practising his technique of economy, her heart sickened. She had never grown accustomed to his habits of reading other men’s papers over their shoulders in the train, and smoking other men’s cigarettes, and leaving hotels before his turn came to pay for a round of drinks.
His parsimony represented her failure. She had thought before she married him that he was what he superficially appeared—gay, genial, courageous—a sturdy and reliable little Yorkshireman. Later, she blamed herself for her failure to change him. She believed that successful wives could transform their husbands into whatever pattern they chose for them. Now she had learned to accept him as he was, and in the privacy of her own house could serve his whims with humour and devotion. But she had never reconciled herself to his public behaviour. Her own generosity was, more than she realised, a gesture of repentance. She would pay back to the county what he had taken as by right.
She could hear him now.
“Wheat’s not looking so bad,” said a young farmer— wistfully, hoping for confirmation from this experienced dealer.
“Don’t like the look of it,” Jim Beddows snubbed him. “It’ll make a rare-looking crop and then weigh light. Corn’s not well filled.”
Turnbull of Maythorpe had joined them.
“Well, Beddows,” he said. “I’m going to put my boy into the butchering. Farming’s a mug’s game. Wheat’s nowhere and middleman makes all profits. But folks will always eat beef and mutton. I knew a chap who started with a couple of hides and a chopper, and died worth over thirty thousand pounds.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Jim Beddows answered. “It doesn’t always work out like that. Butchers used to get six pounds a hide or thereabouts. They’re lucky if they get six shillings now.”
“I’m thinking of killing my own meat,” said the young farmer. “And running a country produce shop like that in Yarrold. They seem to be doing all right.”
“Aye. For the first year.”
Must he never allow any one a hope? fretted Emma Beddows, knowing too well the answer.
“But you wait till you get on the markets. The butchers’ll freeze you out. The private households won’t want you. Mark my words—ladies don’t like to see the farmer who shoots all winter with their husbands driving up to the back door in a white coat with a pair o’ meat scales. These stunts do well enough for a time. Then they fall off and you’re worse than you were.”
There was no room in Jim’s world for enterprise or originality.
I’ve got Chloe, thought Mrs. Beddows. I’ve got Sybil.
The hot sun beat down upon the trodden field. Human and animal smells mingled. If only, thought Mrs. Beddows. But it was no use. She caught sight of Dr. Campbell’s red familiar face. He bred prize hogs himself, and never missed a show in the South Riding. She waved to him and summoned him to her. Again and again when her own affairs became intolerable, she could stifle all thoughts of them by public business. Her heart ached with affection and pity and regret for the dapper little man with his core of jealous bitterness who was her husband, so she turned to Dr. Campbell and began to discuss with him the problem of Holly measles at the Shacks.
Sybil interrupted them. She and Wendy had been looking round for Willie and came to report his whereabouts.
“Tell him we’ll pick him up after the jumping’s over,” Mrs. Beddows said, then turned to see the tall bowed figure of her colleague on the council, Alderman Astell. He was leaning over a pen containing two white shiny creatures, washed and groomed to snowy radiance, and a red ticket of first prize tied to the hurdle.
“Hallo! What are you doing here?” she called, lively and welcoming.
“Admiring these,” Astell indicated the goats. “I’ve never seen anything like them. They remind me of something.”
“Your Bible. The sheep and the goats,” she said promptly. “But these goats are trying to get past St. Peter into Heaven by disguising themselves in white robes.”
He laughed. “No. That’s not it. Something I learned at school—about the time when lilies blow.”
“It was the time when lilies blow
And clouds are highest up in air,
Lord Ronald brought a lily-white doe
To give to his cousin, Lady Clare.”
recited Mrs. Beddows. She heaved her plump little body up on to the hurdle and balanced there, resting her feet that ached already in tight patent leather shoes. Her flower-decked hat slid to the back of her head; her face was fiery crimson; her patterned foulard dress worked up to her knees, displaying her shapely calves and green silk petticoat. She smiled at Joe Astell, liking him, proud of her memory for verses learned sixty years ago.
“That’s it. That’s it,” he cried.
“I trow they did not part in scorn
Lovers long-betroth’d were they:
They two will wed t
he morrow morn;
God’s blessing on the day!
‘He does not love me for my birth,
Nor for my lands so broad and fair;
He loves me for my own true worths,
And that is well,’ said Lady Clare.
In there came old Alice the nurse,
Said, ‘Who was this that went from thee?’
‘It was my cousin,’ said Lady Clare,
‘To-morrow he weds with me.’
‘O God be thank’d,’ said Alice the nurse.
‘That all comes round so just and fair,
Lord Ronald is heir of all your lands,
And you are not the Lady Clare.’
‘Are you out of your mind, my nurse, my nurse?’
said Lady Clare, ‘that ye speak so wild?’
‘As God’s above,’ said Alice the nurse,
‘I speak the truth: you are my child.’
‘The old Earl’s daughter died at my breast;
I speak the truth, as I live by bread!
I buried her like my own sweet child,
And put my child in her stead!’
‘Falsely, false have ye done,
O Mother,’ she said, ‘if this be true,
To keep the best man under the sun
So many years from his due.’
‘Nay now, my child,’ said Alice the nurse,
‘But keep the secret for your life,
And all you have will be Lord Ronald’s
When you are man and wife.’
‘If I’m a beggar born,’ she said,
South Riding Page 28
