by E. H. Young
‘Not in Beresford Road, I’m afraid.’
‘No, not owls.’ She looked at Hannah as though she meant to say something, and then decided to say something else. ‘Do you go to your home when you have a holiday?’
‘It isn’t mine any longer. It was sold when my father and mother died, twenty years ago.’
‘Twenty years! Then,’ said Ruth, shutting her eyes and creasing her forehead, ‘I suppose you’ve got used to it by this time,’ and Hannah knew Ruth was thinking about death and about her mother, and the question it had been impossible to ask Robert Corder was answered.
She felt a sharp pain in her throat, yet she could envy Ruth a love which, in all probability, had been without a blemish. The memory of it was something to be cherished, and such a memory had been denied to Hannah Mole.
She heaved a deep sigh. ‘I don’t think getting used to things is the right way to deal with them,’ she said. ‘I think –’ she was talking more to herself than to Ruth, ‘I think that’s wasting them. You’ve got to use them all the time.’ She changed her tone and said cheerfully, ‘And I didn’t lose the whole of my home. I kept a tiny bit of it, a little cottage and an orchard. I couldn’t bear to let it go and that’s all I could afford to keep when the debts were paid.’
‘Then you can go there, in your holidays, and hear the owls again.’
‘Well, no, I can’t very well,’ Hannah said.
‘Why not?’
‘It’s let.’
‘Oh, I see. What a pity. But you get the money for it.’
‘That’s the idea,’ Hannah said.
Ruth sighed regretfully. ‘I’d like to hear those owls, Miss Mole –’ there was the pause Hannah was beginning to know – ‘do you like parrots? I hate them.’
‘You’re full of hates, child. What’s the matter with parrots? God made them, I suppose.’
‘Yes, but he made Mr. Samson too. When you were in the country, you hadn’t any neighbours, had you?’
‘Cows, sheep, horses, pigs, the owls –’
‘But not a parrot or Mr. Samson. I wish he didn’t live next door. He always tries to talk to me when he sees me, over the hedge of the back garden. And once he asked me to go into the house. He said he’d got a kitten for me. So I said I didn’t like kittens, but really, Miss Mole, I adore them. But I was frightened of him and sometimes I dream about him. But I used to find – I mean, if you talk about nasty things to somebody, they stop worrying you.’
‘And how long has this been worrying you?’
‘Oh, ever since – about two years ago when he tried to give me the kitten.’
‘Poor old man!’ Hannah said.
‘I think he’s an old beast.’
‘There you are again! Is there anything you happen to care for, besides kittens?’
‘Lots of things,’ Ruth said.
‘Well, I should like to hear about them, some time, for a change. And I daresay Mr. Samson’s lonely too.’
‘Too?’ Ruth repeated with a catch of her breath.
‘Yes. Like me,’ Hannah said. ‘Good night.’
A surprising answer for that little egotist and a good exit, she said to herself with satisfaction. It would do Ruth no harm to learn that other people, even those middle-aged people who seem so secure to youth, could suffer like herself, and Hannah doubted whether, until this moment, any-one in the house had given Miss Mole a thought detached from some personal connection. Her comfort and happiness, for which the family might have felt some responsibility, was either assumed or ignored. She could well believe that Robert Corder considered any inmate of his house a fortunate person, but even to Wilfrid, who was as much an alien as herself, she was only a kind of mirror in which he could study his own reflection, while Ruth’s growing curiosity was only a love of hearing stories. This lack of interest was not flattering, but it had its advantages – like everything else – she told herself, as she entered her dark bedroom and went to the open window.
She knelt down and, laying her hands on the sill, she rested her chin on them. The roofs of the opposite houses were wet with a shower the clouds had dropped as they scurried before a harassing little wind, like ships sacrificing their cargo under pursuit, and the wind that chased them brought to Hannah’s credulous nostrils a damp smell of apples and moss. Far away, against the dark sky, sweeping in ascending fields from the docks of Radstowe, she thought, or imagined, she could see the high ground hiding her own country. It lay snugly behind that barrier, with its little farms and orchards, its flat lands criss-crossed by willow-edged ditches and cupped by hills. It was a country that satisfied two sides of Hannah’s nature. She loved the homeliness of the farms and cottages, washed with pink or white, each with its big or little orchard where spotted pigs rooted in the long grass: she loved the hills groined with pale lime-stone and their solitary moor-like tops where the heather became black with distance, but it was in the mingling of the familiar and the unknown that she found her chief delight. They seemed separate, but they were one: the homesteads and the fields were only flesh on the bones of earth and the same heart was beating under the grey rocks and the apple trees, just as Hannah’s heart was beating alike for the woman who wanted her own fireside, and the one who wanted to wander, the one with a sane desire for love and its obligations and the other who had learnt to fear anything in the nature of a contract.
Her own fireside was over there, behind the barrier, and if she ever sat at it again it would be alone, or with a dog or cat for company. It was ten years since she had been inside the house and since then she had seen it only once, coming upon it stealthily and peering through the apple trees to make sure of its existence outside her dreams. She had taken care not to intrude on the tenant, lest he should think she came in search of the rent he never paid, but she had seen that the house was really there, a little flat-fronted cottage, badly needing another wash of pink, with a plume of smoke very blue against a cold grey sky. That was five years ago and anything might have happened to it since then. It hurt her to think of it neglected, perhaps deserted. It was cruel to ignore it, absurd to own property about which her pride forbade her to ask questions; she was acting with recklessness of the future when she might want her home, but she had been a fool and she must pay for her folly.
The folly had had its sweetness and she remembered the sweetness and folly together, the precious and the worthless, without any sense of incongruity. All life could be likened to that episode, and all human beings, and the worst sorrows came from the failure to accept imperfection, knowing it for the alloy it was and yet, by some strange spiritual alchemy, seeing it as pure gold.
‘Like a wedding ring,’ Hannah said, twisting her lips ironically.
A little spatter of rain fell between her and those memories. She looked from the dim line on the horizon to the lights of Radstowe, far below on her left hand, and she thought they were like the camp-fires of innumerable explorers in a strange and dangerous country. Each man tended his own fire sedulously and to one, as to Hannah Mole, what lay beyond the ring of light was hopeful adventure; to another, as to Ruth, the justification of his fears was in the darkness.
Hopeful adventure, even here in Robert Corder’s house! She was grateful to Fortune who, in making her a servant, had remembered to give her freedom and happiness in herself. She might have been meek and dutiful and dull inside as well as out, or she might have been discontented and defiant. She was lucky, she thought, as she knelt there with her face towards the cottage which might be crumbling and her back to the narrow room which held everything else she had, for the chief of her possessions, as she knew, was the power to see those lights as camp-fires, and herself as an adventuress. She was not sure she told the truth in saying she was lonely. Yes, lonely and tired too, sometimes, and chilled by the thought of poor and solitary old age, but these were moods that passed and there remained for her good company the many natures in her own thin body. And the rich old gentleman was steadily approaching.
The thought of him reminde
d her of Mr. Samson, who had offered Ruth a kitten, and withheld information from Robert Corder. He seemed to make a habit of talking to people over hedges; she would give him another opportunity, she decided, and very busy with her inventions about him, she undressed swiftly. He might be a bad old man, but he might be a rich one, and if he was so free with his kittens for a little girl, she said to herself in the vulgar manner that made Lilia wince, he might be equally free with his money for an older one.
‘Upon my word,’ she said aloud, ‘I believe I’d marry anyone who asked me – except Robert Corder,’ and she chuckled as she got into bed and chuckled again when she remembered that she was lying on Wilfrid’s mattress.
That was a dishonourable trick, she supposed, but it did not prevent her from sleeping well. It was not the first she had played in the course of her career and it would not be the last. Each week she took threepence from the housekeeping money to put in the plate on Sunday, and she owed Mrs. Widdows exactly a penny halfpenny, the price of a reel of silk. But what did Mrs. Widdows owe her in the form of kindness? And why should she pay for listening to sermons she could hear for nothing from Robert Corder on any other day of the week? These rigid codes of conduct were made for people who did not know morality when they saw it. It was immoral for the hardest-worked person in the house to lie on the hardest bed: it would be wrong for Mr. Corder’s housekeeper to let the offertory plate go by without a contribution, but it was worse to rob the poor in the person of herself. She was quite happy about the weekly threepence and quite safe, for, to do Robert Corder justice, he did not interfere with her expenditure or overlook her accounts, and she recognized his little outburst for what it was, but there might yet be trouble with Ethel about the mattress.
Strange that, in a world where pain seemed inevitable, there should be trouble about a mattress! Yes, it seemed inevitable, not for her, who knew how to protect herself, but for nearly everybody else: for little Mrs. Ridding with that enigmatical look on her face, for Ethel, busy with her suspicions, for Ruth with her fears, even for Mr. Blenkinsop with his frustrated desire for peace.
She fell asleep, thinking of Mr. Blenkinsop with the bags of gold under his arms.
Chapter 13
Ruth had not learnt to accept imperfection. She saw it all round her and she was in a constant state of rebellion against it. She saw it in herself, in her father, in Ethel, in the house and in her circumstances. Nothing, to her mind, was what it should have been. The loss of her mother was not included in this criticism. That was a disaster for which there was no expression. She did not join it to these minor but persistent frets as a cause for discontent. It was too big for comparison or connection with anything else she knew. It came from outside and, in a way, it remained outside, as a black, cold cloud would have been outside her body, but it had emptied her life of all that had been soft and gracious and amusing in it. Her father had told her that God, for His own good purposes, had taken her mother to Himself and, unwilling as she always was to believe in His decisions, she had to submit to this one. No power but God’s was great enough to bring about so terrible a catastrophe, and she did not wonder that He wanted her for Himself. It was selfish to take her, but it was natural, and she had to endure the loss patiently because she was helpless under it. The things against which Ruth rebelled were those which might so easily have been different, and her mother’s death had not created them; they had merely become more apparent and some of them were actually easier to bear without her. The closeness of her contact with her mother’s mind had doubled her embarrassment when her father was didactic or petty and Ethel was unreasonable: the quick sympathy which both tried to hide had magnified the importance of what they both deplored: they suffered for and wanted to protect each other, and Ruth could be more stoical when it was only her father and sister and not her mother’s husband and daughter who offended her. The tension of one side of Ruth’s life had slackened a little when her mother died, while, on another, it had tightened. Now that she need not be careful to pretend, now that she could neither love nor laugh – and it would have surprised Mrs. Corder’s acquaintances and, perhaps, her husband, to know how often she had made Ruth laugh – she could concentrate on her dissatisfactions. She had her ideal of what a home should be. The mother in it would be her mother, but the father would be different. If it was necessary for him to be a minister of religion, he would be the vicar of the Established Church, and the church itself would be old and dim and beautiful and people would not shake hands across the yellow pews and talk intimately about their ailments and their children. They would do that, if they must, in the sunny churchyard, and quietly, with the hush of the service on them and the influence of stained glass and carved stone. The house would be old too, with a cedar on the lawn, and several dogs, and inside there would be pretty and precious things, things which had belonged to ancestors, portraits and old silver, and the ancestors would be admirals and generals and judges. The sons of that house would go to public schools and universities and no one would think it necessary to mention it; the girls would have beauty and beautiful clothes and gracious love affairs: they would not giggle with young men, like Ethel, or be cross with everybody, like Ruth: there would be order in that household and quiet servants. She was not sure whether the father would be more like a country gentleman than a vicar, interested in agriculture and sport, or whether he would be vague and gentle, with some absorbing hobby which made him lovably absent-minded, but she knew he would never embarrass his wife and children, he would neither be effusive nor condescending with his parishioners, and his children need not hesitate to ask anyone to tea. School life and home life could merge into each other safely and though, like all vicars, he would be more or less of a public character, he could be trusted not to say things at which his children’s friends could sneer.
These were the surroundings and the conditions Ruth wanted and her mother had not taken them with her. Ruth had wanted them almost as much while she lived, and in, default of the unattainable, she posed at school as a stout Non-conformist and a despiser of aristocracy who was fiercely loyal to her humble Puritan forbears. There were girls in her form who went to Beresford Road Chapel and, while her father preached, Ruth was listening with those girls’ ears and framing replies to criticism, though with much criticism she had not to deal. The girls were as ready as their parents to admire, Ruth had her reflected glory, but she could not risk the loss of it by introducing these admirers into the home. Her father had his place in the pulpit, Ruth had hers in the school, where, with her defiances and the humour her family never saw, she was considered an amusing and original character by her contemporaries, but how would she appear to them when her father called her Ruthie and teased her and made rather foolish jokes in his desire to put the young people at their ease and to show that he could be a jolly, ordinary man? Their conception of her would be changed; she would be different too, and she could never again be the self which came most naturally to her at school.
It would have been simple in the old Vicarage; in Beresford Road it was impossible. She kept her two lives apart, despising herself for snobbishness and lack of courage, but keeping the place she had made for herself and living almost freely for half her time. No one there would have suspected her of the fears that assailed her at night or of yearnings for beauty within and without. She was a hard worker and though this keenness and an odd sense of fair play constrained her from being tiresome in class, these virtues were forgiven for the sake of her readiness to see and mimic the peculiarities of her superiors; the Ruth who strolled homewards with her friends was gay and impudent, or downright and cynical according to her mood and the impression she wished to make, and very different from the one who, later on, brooded over the supper-table, and to a Ruth who, one day, was showing off more successfully than usual, it was terrible to turn and see the approaching figure of Miss Mole, clad in a very old-fashioned ulster. It might have been a handsome, and it must have been a sturdy garment when it was bought: it
had a character which the oncoming of dusk and the drizzling rain could not disguise: it gave Miss Mole a waist where waists no longer existed and a breadth of shoulder out of all proportion to her thin frame; it was impossible not to notice it and it was all Ruth could do to sustain her mirth under the sound of those rapidly-approaching footsteps.
The figure passed; Ruth felt a nudge at each side of her; someone giggled and Ruth continued her chatter, but when she parted from her companions, she began to run, drawing sharp breaths through her piteously-parted lips. She was like Peter: she had denied her friend, and if those girls ever saw the ulster again and recognized Miss Mole as the wearer what would they think of Ruth? They had nudged and giggled and she had not said a word. She ought to have called out to Miss Mole and stopped her, but she had been afraid of ridicule. She had not only committed a disloyal act, but one which might be discovered, and in that bitter moment she learnt that secret sin could be forgotten, while sin revealed to the world could be remembered for ever. All she could do now was to hurry and wipe away some of the stain.
Going home was not quite as bad as it had been for the last two years, she was not so anxious to linger in the streets, her habit of running past the next-door house and entering her own with a rush, was an old one, and Miss Mole, lighting the hall gas, showed no surprise at Ruth’s breathless entrance, though her sharply benevolent eyes may have seen more than the dampness of Ruth’s clothes as she said briskly, ‘Don’t stand about in your coat. And you’ll change your stockings, won’t you?’
‘What about you, Miss Mole?’ Ruth said faintly. ‘You’re wet too.’
Miss Mole patted the abominable ulster. ‘It can’t get through this. Do go and change or you’ll have a cold and it seems a pity to waste one when there isn’t a party to dodge.’
Ruth’s smile was wan. Miss Mole, revealing herself as a person of humour and understanding, was simply making things worse for her. She went towards the stairs where there was more shadow. ‘Did you come across Regent Square?’
