by E. H. Young
‘Black silk and jet trimmings. It’s the only wear for a housekeeper.’
‘And Uncle Jim’s got all those lovely things!’ Ruth sighed.
‘If you dare to say anything to him about me, I’ll never speak to you again!’ Hannah whispered vehemently, but Uncle Jim did not need a hint. He was looking at the mass of stuff he had bought and wondering how he was to get rid of it and Hannah’s modest protests were useless when he thrust a roll of silk into her arms.
Ruth’s happiness was now complete. ‘And won’t Mrs. Spenser-Smith be secretly vexed when she sees us all looking so grand!’ she cried.
Chapter 24
Hannah had the homeless and the childless person’s dislike for Christmas. There were a few people from whom, in the course of her career, she had not been completely severed, and to these she wrote, but the paucity of her acquaintances and her lack of real intimacy with them were very present to her at this time of the year and almost persuaded her of some failure in herself, but it was not easy, and Robert Corder had lately emphasized the fact, to make friends outside the house in which she was a dependent, and to most of the people she had served, often wholeheartedly, sometimes with misguided zeal, becoming absorbed in their affairs as though they were her own, she remained as mere Miss Mole, whose importance vanished with her useful presence. She was accustomed to this state of things but it still amazed her. A human being, to her, was a continuous wonder, a group of human beings made a drama of which she was half creator, half spectator, and she was baffled to know how people amused themselves without this entertainment which never palled and never ended. Hannah was not one of those who considered it a waste of time to lose a train and have to wait on a station platform, who shut their eyes, or read a paper, in railway carriages: she was thrilled by the sight of strangers and by the emanation of their personalities, and it was hard to understand that they did not get the same excitement from her neighbourhood.
When she considered the Corder family dispassionately, she could see that the material for her drama was not promising. The egoism of the Reverend Robert offered the most scope, for the egoism of a person whose abilities are mediocre must have a humorous element, but in Ethel, in Ruth, in the quiet Howard, in Captain Jim Erley, in his shirt-sleeves, as he busied himself about the gas, how could she find so much interest? Was her own egoism enlarging the significance of these who made her little world or was she really seeing the whole world in miniature, which was all the ordinary human eye could manage? The shaking of an empire was not more agitating than the imminence of Howard’s disclosure about the ministry; the intrigues of diplomacy were not more complicated and needed no more skill than Mr. Pilgrim’s intrusion into this life shared with the Corders, and the news of a great victory could hardly gratify its engineers more deeply than Uncle Jim gratified Miss Mole when he stepped off the dining-room table and said, ‘You’ve done Ruth a lot of good. If I’d known you were here I might have stuck to the sea a bit longer.’
‘Think of that!’ Hannah said, concealing her pleasure under this light retort. ‘But you might have been drowned on your next voyage and Ruth wouldn’t have liked that. The reason she looks so happy is because you’re here.’
‘No, she’s different. Not so jumpy. I’m grateful to you.’
‘Well, I’m not a permanency,’ Hannah said rather tartly, ‘and she must learn to rely on herself.’
‘You’re not going to leave them, are you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I shouldn’t blame you,’ Uncle Jim muttered indiscreetly. He put on his coat and Hannah felt that he would have said more if he had remained without it. She had lost her buccaneer, but the brother of Mrs. Corder, the brother-in-law of the Reverend Robert, was still there and her desire to know what the feelings of these three had been in connection with each other, was almost a pain.
She took a step at a venture. ‘Is that a good photograph of Mrs. Corder, in the study?’
‘It depends who’s looking at it. My brother-in-law would say no, I should say no, and so would Ruth, but we’d all mean something different. She was something different with all of us, I suppose.’
‘And what would Mr. Samson say?’
‘Who’s he? I’ve never heard of him.’ He made a grimace. ‘One of the deacons?’
Hannah laughed and did not answer. She had learnt another thing she wished to know, but she had not finished yet. ‘You can’t have had time to see much of your nephew.’
‘Well, we stayed up rather late last night,’ he said, and he and Hannah eyed each other calculatingly; he measured her trustworthiness and she his willingness to trust.
‘I’m not supposed to know about him,’ she said at last. ‘I’m surprised Ethel hasn’t told me, but she’s rather preoccupied, perhaps.’ She gave him a sidelong look out of eyes in which green was the predominating colour, but these words struck no response from Uncle Jim; he had not received Ethel’s confidences as well as Howard’s, and Hannah left this side issue. ‘Family disturbances are very bad for Ruth,’ she said.
‘I’d like to adopt her,’ Uncle Jim said suddenly, and, just as suddenly, Hannah felt a rush of enmity towards him.
‘But that,’ she said coldly, ‘could not be arranged in a few days, within which time we’re going to have trouble.’
‘And I don’t see how it’s to be avoided.’
‘The right words in the right quarter –’ Hannah said thoughtfully. She did not believe that Robert Corder had any great desire to see his son a minister with a more valuable degree than his own and a social distinction he had missed. He would, of course, be able to make Howard feel his inferiority, but it would be less easy to suggest it, allied with fatherly love, to other people, and nothing else would satisfy him. A little flattery, a little comparative disparagement of Howard, would do much to mollify him, but who was going to offer it? There was no hope of that from Uncle Jim and it would come somewhat startlingly from Miss Mole. Even Robert Corder might suspect some motive in her admiration, and Hannah sighed audibly at the difficulty, the impossibility, of acting wisely for the future.
‘The right quarter,’ said Uncle Jim, ‘seems to be this Mrs. Somebody who’s financing the boy. It’s very awkward for him. He’s had two years of her patronage and that’s what’s going to worry his father most. Throwing her money in her face! And I gather she’s a lady of some importance.’
A slow smile curved Hannah’s lips. She had a sense of power which affected her physically, with a tickling feeling of pleasure. She was in haste to use that power, her mission to the Corder family enlarged its sphere, she saw herself as an appointed agent, and, for the moment, she had finished with Uncle Jim.
‘You’ll see Mrs. Spenser-Smith at the party,’ she said.
‘Must I go to the party?’ he asked in dismay. ‘I haven’t got any evening clothes.’
‘They won’t be missed,’ Hannah assured him.
She dusted the table on which she meant to cut out Ruth’s silk dress, and, looking busy, she spread out the material and fetched her pins and scissors, and Uncle Jim watched these preparations critically, for a few minutes, before he rolled away. Then Hannah ran upstairs to her room, enjoying her unnecessary stealth. She sat down by the wide-opened window with a pad of note-paper on her knee, and the energy she had meant to concentrate on a letter to Lilia was dissipated through the eyes which could see the coloured roofs of Radstowe, the plumes of smoke, the spires, the factory chimneys, the distant fields sweeping up to the high ground which blocked the view of her own country. For her, much as she disliked the day itself, the approach of Christmas was the approach of spring in the West country. There might be snow and frosts later, but always, at this season, there was a damp mildness in the air, a message telling her that the earth was being stirred by tiny pushing feet, pressing downwards so that spikes, eager to be green, might reach upwards, and she fancied she could smell primroses, that scent delicate as the flower’s colour, soft as its pale cup. She knew a place wh
ere she thought primroses might be blooming even now, standing up among their strong crinkled leaves like some marvellously fine work on the rough palm of its maker, but from that thought and the view of Radstowe she turned aside. The primroses grew too near her cottage and innumerable reminders of other lives lessened the urgency of the task she had set herself.
This was to write her little letter of thanks to Mrs. Spenser-Smith, as Robert Corder had directed, in the first person, and to do it with a gratitude which would make Lilia flush in annoyance and conceal the letter from Ernest, and she meant to add a threat that if Lilia chose to make trouble about Howard, her loving cousin would know how to make it for her, but this proved more difficult than she had thought and she tore up her attempt. Lilia might appear in Beresford Road, confident of her ability to right anything and demanding to know what it was. It would be better to go and see her, to suggest a probable cause of offence, to drop several hints from which Lilia could pick up the one she thought least objectionable, to leave her in no doubt that Hannah had a counter-stroke for any indignant thrust at the family whose welfare she had so much at heart, and to set Lilia wondering at this loyalty. Lilia would curb any amount of indignation rather than have her relationship to poor Miss Mole made known. She would have been wiser to have announced it, regretfully, as a distant connection, from the first; now she must face the accusation of snobbishness and suffer from the truth of it, the accusation of deceit and explain it away without convincing anyone.
Hannah had no time to spare, but she made enough of it for the expedition across the downs and an interview with Lilia which sent her chuckling home again, burdened though she was with Christmas presents for the Corders.
‘As you are here, you may as well take them and save the postage,’ Lilia said.
‘And how am I to explain where I got them?’
‘That’s your affair, Hannah. I’ve never known you at a loss for a lie,’ Lilia said severely.
Hannah pecked her cheek and wished her a happy Christmas. ‘And you’ll see us all at your party. I didn’t mean to come and embarrass you, dear, but Mr. Corder insisted that I should. He implied that he wouldn’t enjoy it without me.’
‘You won’t get me to believe that,’ Lilia said, but she was puzzled. A woman who attended to a man’s comfort could be a potent influence, and men were very simple. Perhaps she had reckoned too surely on the safety of Hannah’s plain exterior. She was capable and Lilia could not deny her a peculiar kind of charm. Her arrival involved worry, but her departure took something exhilarating from the house and if she, who had disturbing doubts about the niceness of Hannah’s conscience, could feel like this, how much more likely was Robert Corder to become dependent on her gay resourcefulness. And Lilia remembered that there were years of Hannah’s life of which she did not know the history, and it suddenly occurred to her that Hannah’s anxiety for the happiness of the Corders could more naturally be interpreted as anxiety for herself, and this thought made Hannah’s playful threats more dangerous, for, bad as it was to have a cousin who was a housekeeper, it was worse to have one with a past.
Willingly carrying the parcels, to save Lilia a few pence, Hannah hurried back. There was bound to be a storm when Howard broke his news, but she believed she had reduced its violence and curtailed it. She had done a lot for Ruth, according to Uncle Jim, she had done something for Howard, and, if she could secure a reasonable existence for Ethel, her life, she told herself dramatically, would not have been lived in vain; but the last was the hardest of her undertakings and when she cast about for that middle-aged minister who might solve Ethel’s problem, she could see no one but Mr. Pilgrim, bearing olive and myrtle for Ethel and a sword for Hannah Mole.
She threw a longing glance at Mr. Samson’s windows as she passed. There was the old gentleman who might have been her salvation, but he had already told her that he lived on an annuity and had no dependents to consider except the cats and birds, and for their future he had made arrangements. ‘Then what is the good of my coming to see you?’ Hannah had asked, and sent him off into one of his throaty chuckles.
Undeterred by the thought of the annuity, she went to see him that evening when the family was gathered in the drawing-room. She had made him a new night cover for the canary’s cage as a Christmas offering, and she hoped to give it to him and return before her absence was discovered, but Mr. Samson detained her. He had found among the jumble of objects he had collected in his travels, a fine piece of lace for Miss Fitt, and when she had thanked him and heard how he acquired it and how much less than its value he had paid for it, when he had draped it round her shoulders and said that that, at least, was not a misfit, it was nearly ten o’clock and time for Mr. Corder’s tea, and Mr. Corder was hovering in the hall when she opened the front door.
He looked at her bare head, at the parcel in her hand, and for the first time, he was openly angry with her, too angry to notice the tautening of her body and the lift of her head. He considered it most improper for Miss Mole to leave the house without warning; nobody had known where she was; they were all extremely worried, and had searched everywhere for her.
‘Not everywhere,’ Hannah said, smiling a little. The trump card was up her sleeve and she was going to bring it out. ‘If you had called next door you would have found me with Mr. Samson.’
‘Mr. Samson! I very much object, Miss Mole, to any member of my household visiting that disreputable old man.’
‘Is he disreputable? I think he’s lonely, and he misses Mrs. Corder. She used to go and see him regularly, you know – at least once a week,’ Hannah said, and she went upstairs to lay away, like a magpie, her lace with her roll of Chinese silk, but she had not reached her room before her triumph left her. She had been unreasonably reprimanded and provoked, but was it worth while to hurt the man? Moreover, she had been hoping for this occasion and she was ashamed. She had rushed across the downs to do these people a service because it was one she would enjoy, and, indulging herself again, she had done more harm than she had prevented. She had imperilled the peace and goodwill for which she had pretended to be so anxious and planted a little barb, from which the wound might fester, in the heart of a man about whom she had chosen to know nothing but the worse.
Chapter 25
Christmas Eve had dawned long before Hannah went to sleep. She could not help thinking about Robert Corder and though, having learnt certain forms of self-control, she did not toss and turn on Wilfrid’s mattress, she was unhappy and restless in her mind. She tried to keep back the persistent thought by recalling as many past Christmas Days as she could and vainly hoped sleep would overtake her before she had done. There were the Christmas Days of her childhood, like glorified Sundays, with the church bells ringing a livelier chime and the sounds of the cows and the horses in their stables and the feet of the farm hands and her father as they moved about the yard and did those jobs which no festival could interrupt, and when she was very young, Hannah would mentally transport one of their own cow sheds and some of their own cows to a distant land where palm trees grew, and imagine the infant Christ opening his eyes to see the soft brown ones of Daisy, Cowslip and Primrose. The church bells and the church decorations were all the gaiety Hannah got out of those early Christmas Days. She opened her stocking alone, in the darkness, received more than usually hearty kisses from her parents when she went downstairs, and solemnly walked with them to church, and she had not been aware of missing anything. After church and greetings among neighbours, which gave her a secret feeling of grandeur, of participation in a rite, there was the Christmas dinner of a turkey they had reared from babyhood, a nap for her father and mother in the afternoon and a quiet time for Hannah playing with her toys and those imaginary friends who lived in one of the kitchen cupboards, and came out and went back at her will. When she was at school in Radstowe, she heard about parties and pantomimes, and jogged home, at the beginning of the holidays, to that quiet place where such things were not, but by this time she had books and the peo
ple in them for her companions, and the friends who lived in the cupboard had been absorbed into herself, to issue as manifestations of Hannah Mole with all their beauty and ability, and such adventures, in embryo, as must befall the brilliant and the fair.
And here she was, a housekeeper in Beresford Road, at fifty pounds a year, remembering nearly twenty Christmas Days far from the big farm kitchen, with the tall clock ticking time away in the callousness common to all clocks, the smell of burning wood, the noises of moving beasts, of clinking pails and slow, heavy footsteps. Few later events were as clear to her as the details incident to that country life, and there came over her as she lay in bed, conscious of the widespread city outside her window, a hunger for quiet places and the conditions in which she had been bred. It would have been better for her if she had stayed in the farm when her parents died, struggling against debt, forcing a living out of the fields which responded with such faithfulness to care, with her own livestock about her and in time, perhaps, she would have married some young farmer who put capacity before good looks, and by him she would have had lusty children, clumping to the village school in their rough boots, as she had done, their little ears and noses whipped red by the wind. A good, hard life, that would have been, worthier of an active human being than this trailing from house to house, a dependent on the whims and tempers of other people and a victim of her own; she would have been spared her disillusionment about that love affair which had seemed so romantic until she discovered that a man might be a hero in battle and an essential weakling when the inspiration was removed; and there would have been no time for making drama of every look and word she met and heard, when she was wrestling with the enduring things, the fruits of the earth and her own body. But, at nineteen, a girl who had faith in a different future and saw every possibility of adventure and happiness in the world beyond, would have been wise, indeed, if she had taken up that heavy burden so that, at forty, looking back, she might escape tins vision of herself dragging her skirts through other people’s dust. Now it was with an effort that she remembered to believe in the goodness of things as they were, for the cruelty she had inflicted on Robert Corder was the first deliberately unkind thing she had ever done, and it had shocked her into a humility she sadly lacked and made her hope it would be a lesson she would not forget. Was he asleep, down there, in the room he had shared with the woman who had never breathed a word to him about Mr. Samson? It horrified Hannah to think of the grief that might be gnawing him at the first realization that he had not had all the confidence of his wife, the first suspicion that she had withheld it because of something unreceptive in himself, and if such suffering as this was beyond his power or did not fit the measure of his devotion to his wife or the devotion he had expected from her, he must be in a supreme state of irritation at having revealed his ignorance to Miss Mole. His words might be twisted into another meaning or explained as inapplicable to his wife, but his look of amazement, his dumbness, his perfect stillness, must be as memorable to him as to Hannah. He would not forgive her for possessing that information, she could not forgive herself for passing it on, yet she could not help maliciously wondering how he would try to punish her. She had learnt, by this time, that his actions did not match his anger, but he would probably find himself compelled to say something in an attempt to blur the memory of his sharp-cut silence and to put Miss Mole in her place.
