Miss Mole

by E. H. Young

  In the meantime, Hannah likened herself again to her little ship, becalmed after a storm, and using the calm for overhauling her condition, in readiness for the next misadventure. The misadventure would come. Small lonely ships which set out on perilous voyages, must be prepared for worse treatment than bigger ones receive, especially when they are hampered by bad records, but, changing the metaphor, Hannah refused to be the dog with a bad name who, foreseeing hanging, waits passively for his punishment. There was work for her to do, and though there was humour in the thought that she would not be allowed to do it if Robert Corder knew about her past, and that the time might yet come when he would look back with horror at the confidences he had made to the unscrupulous Miss Mole, she was not going to lose her pleasure while it lasted, and she was proud of her little triumphs, culminating, on this day which had seemed so unrelievedly black, in Robert Corder’s asking of a favour, and its inevitable effect of making Hannah like him rather better.

  She was thinking that she might even learn to like Mr. Pilgrim, when a sound at the front door drove her into the hall, and there was Ethel, with a new stubborn look on her face. The study door opened a minute later, but it was discreetly shut by an unseen hand, for Hannah was asking Ethel if she had had any supper, saying she had fasted herself since five o’clock, and proposing that they should go into the larder and see what they could find.

  This was the sort of greeting Ethel had not looked for and, braced to meet abuse, she collapsed under kindness to the extent of accompanying Miss Mole into the kitchen. ‘I’ve been to Highfields Chapel,’ she said, anxious to sustain her attitude of independence, ‘and then I went to see Patsy Withers.’

  ‘But she’s the one who’s been telling tales about you.’

  ‘That’s why I went.’

  ‘H’m,’ said Hannah, ‘people who tell tales seem to have an attraction for you. And just look what they’ve done to the joint while I was out! Mangled it! And wasted,’ she eyed it calculatingly, ‘at least half a pound, I should say.’

  ‘It may have been wasted, but it wasn’t eaten,’ Ethel said, and Hannah looked at her with quick appreciation, but Ethel was not trying to be funny; she was merely stating a fact. ‘And that reminds me,’ she went on, and now it was she who looked at Hannah, ‘I met Mr. Blenkinsop just now.’

  ‘Why does it remind you? Oh, I suppose he made part of the midday meal. Well, what was he doing?’

  ‘Having a walk, he said.’

  ‘I should have thought he’d walked enough.’

  ‘You never told us you were going out with him.’

  ‘You never told us you were going to Mr. Pilgrim’s chapel. I don’t think we’ll have any of this reminiscent mutton. I’ll warm some soup. And was Miss Withers pleased to see you?’

  ‘She was more pleased to see me go,’ Ethel said with her unconscious humour. ‘Mr. Blenkinsop was walking up and down on the other side of the road.’

  ‘Dear me! I’m afraid I’ve wound him up and he can’t run down. And did Mr. Pilgrim preach a good sermon?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ethel said unwillingly, ‘but that’s quite a different thing.’

  ‘I don’t follow you,’ Hannah said politely as she stirred the soup.

  ‘I mean, going out with Mr. Blenkinsop is quite different from going to a service.’

  ‘That was what I hoped,’ Hannah admitted.

  ‘And I don’t see why I shouldn’t go where I can get – get what I want.’

  ‘Ah, don’t try too hard for it,’ Hannah said, and she spoke dreamily because she was thinking of Mr. Blenkinsop, walking up and down the road. Did he think she meant to do something desperate? And would he walk up and down all night? It seemed to her that the kindest, the most painful, and yet the pleasantest thing she could do was to run out and tell him all was well.

  She put a bowl of steaming soup in front of Ethel. ‘Drink that,’ she said. ‘I shall be back in a minute.’

  Mr. Blenkinsop was turning slowly and coming towards her when she reached the pavement, and she hurried across the road to him.

  ‘It’s all right, it’s all right!’ she exclaimed, half laughing, and putting out a hand, she said, ‘Forgive me. I’ve spoilt your day, I’ve spoilt everything, but it was only a temporary insanity. Now I’m in as right a mind as I ever had.’

  ‘I can’t leave it at that,’ Mr. Blenkinsop muttered, holding her hand firmly.

  ‘But it’s too late to get me certified to-night.’

  ‘Can’t you be serious, just for once?’ he begged.

  ‘I’ve been serious for hours. That was the mistake. One’s self is the wrong subject for seriousness, Mr. Blenkinsop.’

  ‘But I’m serious for you.’

  ‘I was afraid so. That was why I came out. To tell you there was no need, and to say good night.’

  ‘I shan’t have a good night,’ he said testily.

  ‘That will be a change, won’t it?’ she asked, and giving his hand a parting pressure and freeing it with some difficulty, she went back into the house.

  Ethel was making large eyes over the bowl of soup. ‘Wherever have you been, Miss Mole?’

  ‘Turning Policeman X off his beat. It’s time the poor man had some supper, and I’m hungry too. Didn’t Miss Withers offer you anything to eat?’

  ‘Yes, she did, but I wouldn’t have it. Of course I wouldn’t! What did she want to interfere for?’

  ‘Why does anyone want to interfere? If we could all live and let live, we should be happier.’

  Ethel grew restive. ‘I know what you’re hinting at, and nobody wants to do you any harm, Miss Mole.’

  ‘They can’t,’ Hannah said stoutly.

  ‘But we have to do what’s right.’

  ‘I’m sure Miss Withers used those very words.’

  ‘But it’s so different! I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of. It’s not wrong just because it vexes Father.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Hannah said, ‘but what does Mr. Pilgrim think about it?’

  ‘He says it helps him to have me there.’

  ‘So you’re trying to help him, and Miss Withers is trying to help your father.’

  ‘No, she isn’t. She’s trying to make him think we need somebody to look after us. She said she felt like a mother towards us, Miss Mole, and that’s what she’d like to be. I told her you could do everything we needed, and we didn’t want anybody else.’

  ‘That was very nice of you,’ Hannah said, ‘and one in the eye for Patsy!’

  ‘And that’s what worries me,’ Ethel said. ‘One of the things. You’re so kind, Miss Mole, and so unselfish, but Mr. Pilgrim says he doesn’t see how you could have a cousin so exactly like you. And there’s Ruth to be thought of.’

  ‘Ruth!’ Hannah controlled herself and waited.

  ‘He says you and your cousin would have to be twins.’

  ‘So we are – spiritually. Poor Mr. Pilgrim! Poor Miss Withers! How anxious some people are for the welfare of some of the others! And I’m anxious about yours and that’s enough to make you suspicious, I’ll admit, but I really mean it. Listen. If Mr. Pilgrim finds you such a help, he’ll come and look for you when he wants you.’

  ‘But Father doesn’t like him.’

  ‘Perhaps he’ll learn to,’ Hannah said hopefully, ‘but he won’t if you desert the chapel. It really isn’t quite fair to him, you know. Now, don’t start crying! What are you crying for?’ she asked and she regretted the sharpness of her voice when she heard Ethel’s answer, pathetic in its distrust of herself and in her helpless readiness to confess it. ‘Because Mr. Pilgrim may not come.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll come,’ Hannah said. ‘Why, he’ll come if it’s only to have another look at me! Has he told you why he’s so curious about me?’

  ‘No, he says it isn’t fit for me to hear.’

  ‘Then you may be sure he’ll tell you,’ Hannah said encouragingly.

  Chapter 37

  She ought to have told Mr. Blenkinsop to give up all thoughts of th
e little house. It was ill-omened, it was a place in which no happiness would be found. She ought to have told him that, and to have asked him to think again before he acted, to have pointed to herself and told him that the world would be against him, and the world had a nasty way of making its displeasure felt, but she had been thinking of her own misery, she, whom Ethel called unselfish, and she had not warned him of his dangers, the disillusions which are worse when they come to unlawful lovers, the bonds which tighten irksomely when there is only chivalry to prevent their being unloosed. And Mr. Blenkinsop would have replied that this was no concern of hers, just as Hannah would have replied to any friend who had tried to interfere with her. Mr. Blenkinsop would much prefer being left to look after himself; he was as old as she was, as he had taken care to tell her, and it was odd that he should have taken her into his confidence at all, but, for some reason or other, that was what people did. Ruth, Ethel, Robert Corder, had all done it and perhaps Mr. Pilgrim would find he had to ask her how he had best deal with the duty pressing on him in connection with herself! That would not surprise her; nothing would surprise her after the events of this day, and it seemed impossible that it should be only a few hours since she had stood in the lane and seen the chimneys of her house.

  She lay in bed, and the peace she had felt in the dining-room would not stay in a mind busy with pictures of that house. She saw it as it was when she saved it from the sale of everything else her father had possessed, a four-roomed cottage washed in a pale pink which was stained with drippings from the roof: there were overgrown, weedy flowerbeds under the windows, but the true cottage flowers were there, and there were apple trees, with whitened trunks, in the rough grass of the orchard. She was a girl then, resisting the advice of her elders against keeping a property she could not use, and she had kept it and let it to the young farm hand who already occupied it, and who had gone to the war and not returned. She tried not to see it as it was when she had made it ready for her own soldier, the flower-beds weeded, the rooms re-papered with her own hands, the outside walls washed anew and the stains hidden, and a blue leather of smoke rising from the chimney, like a banner in honour of her happiness, but, try as she would, she could not help remembering it. She remembered how the pink of its walls had been coarsened against the lovely pink of the apple blossom, and how all the colours, the green of the grass, the new green of the trees, the blossom, the waving tassels of the larch trees beyond the house, the red-brown plumage of the new fowls, had seemed more brilliant, more delicate and more wonderful than any colours she had seen before, and she remembered the absurd, pretty things she had said to herself about them all, and had said to no one else.

  That silence was a comfort to her as she turned restlessly in her bed. She had given him everything she had except the tenderest and most foolish of her thoughts, restrained from giving those by some instinct which she had not acknowledged, and for which she now thanked God. And again she found excuses for him. She had never been sentimental, never shown herself sensitive; she had been gay and practical and energetic and when the time came for parting, she had gone off with a light word, pretending, in her pride, that his conception of their relationship was her own. He had not understood that she could be hurt: that was it: he had not understood.

  She pressed her fingers against her eyeballs and, as though she had pressed a button, the pictures moved away, leaving nothing but a blur of darkness, shot with gold and blue and purple, and this passed, too, and there was the orchard again, in the sun, and Mrs. Ridding was hanging washing on a line swung between two apple trees. Hannah saw her quite dearly, with the sunshine on her fair head, her arms raised, a clothes peg in her mouth, and the baby crawling in the grass, clumsily and carefully fingering the daisies and pulling them off at their heads, and Hannah cried ‘No, no!’ in a voice that startled the narrow quietness of her bedroom. They should not have her cottage. It would be ill for them and, somehow, ill for Hannah. They must go somewhere else; yet, when she pictured them elsewhere, she had the same sinking of the heart.

  What did this mean? she asked, starting up in bed. Propped against her pillows, she stared for a long time at the oblong of her window, with nothing but air and trees and hills between it and the lane where she had stood that day, and when she lay down she did it stealthily, as though any noise, any quick movement, would rouse into activity, into reality, a suspicion of herself which must be allowed to die. Surely she had enough to bear without this new, absurd, hopeless pain, but this was one which it was in her power to stop, and she would stop it. She lay, rigid under this determination, and suddenly, unawares, she began to laugh, quietly, with her mouth against the bed-clothes. Mr. Blenkinsop had always made her laugh and she would laugh now if she never did it again. It was queer to love a man because he made you laugh without intention, or was the laughter born of love and the love of a conviction that you could trust him to the end of time? She did not know, but her laughter ceased, and the suspicion had become reality, and it no longer hurt her.

  ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive,’ she said aloud, and she raised dubious eyebrows above her closed eyelids and turned down the corners of her mouth, for she had made previous trial of giving and not receiving. ‘But it depends on the person you give to,’ she said, and with surprising quickness, with more surprising happiness, she went to sleep.

  But a happiness that comes at night, when all things, both good and evil, are possible, is harder to sustain on a cold winter morning, and though Hannah woke to the knowledge that some beneficence had lulled her to sleep and given her dreams of a vague felicity, she rose in a stern state of mind and, as she twisted up her hair before the mirror, she looked disdainfully at a face which was sadly yellow in the gas-light. That look expressed her opinion of herself and her realization of how she appeared to other people; and during the next few days, she went about her work in a passionate earnestness, quite different from the leisurely manner in which Miss Mole usually fulfilled her duties, a manner which shirked nothing, but was not designed to impress the rest of the household with her superior energy and ability. Now she washed and ironed curtains, dusted books, turned out cupboards which had been comfortably neglected for months, overlooked the linen, got out the sewing-machine which was an instrument she detested, and made the dining-room uninhabitable while she tore sheets asunder, turned the edges to the middle and rapidly machined them together.

  Perched in her chair, out of reach of these white billows, Ruth watched this activity disapprovingly. ‘I don’t like this at all,’ she said.

  ‘And do you think I do? If there’s anything I loathe it’s making this nasty little needle hop along the hems. It’s like a one-legged man running a race. I hate to make him go so fast, yet I can’t bear to let him go slowly, and I know the cotton in the spindle will give out before I get to the end, and I detest the noise, and I hope you’ll all be very uncomfortable when you’re lying on these seams. I’m not taking any particular care to get them flat.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it won’t last.’

  ‘No, nothing lasts. That’s why I’m doing it.’

  ‘You mean – to save the sheets from wearing out?’ Hannah stopped her turning of the handle and let the one-legged man have a few moments’ rest. ‘Exactly,’ she said. It had been on the tip of her tongue to say that in saving the sheets from wearing out, she was trying to wear out her emotions, but that was not an answer for Ruth, and she knew Ruth’s questions often had more purpose than a desire for direct information. Nevertheless, she supplied the information. ‘When sheets get thin in the middle, the careful housewife turns the middles to the sides. Unsightly, sometimes uncomfortable, but economical.’

  ‘But the cupboards were not getting thin in the middle, or the books.’

  ‘Most of the books were thin all through,’ Hannah said with a chuckle. ‘I had a good look at them. Dusting books is one of the lesser evils, and cooking’s another. You can pause for refreshment on the way.’

  ‘And it
seems to me,’ Ruth went on, ‘that you’re either worried about something, or –’ her voice changed its note, ‘you’re putting everything in order, in a hurry. Rather like making a will and paying your debts when you think you’re going to die. It isn’t that, is it?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what it is,’ Hannah said with a great effect of frankness. ‘I’m bad tempered.’

  ‘Oh! Not worried? Not worried about Ethel?’

  ‘Ethel? Why?’

  ‘You’ve been so busy, I suppose you haven’t noticed, but she’s been very pleasant for the last few days. And after that row with Father! I expected she’d be awful.’

  ‘It must have done her good,’ Hannah said.

  ‘I’d rather she wasn’t quite so nice, though, and I wish you wouldn’t be so busy about things that don’t really matter. You see, I’m afraid you’ll miss something important.’

  ‘Well, if I do, you won’t. Don’t be so fussy. I’ll tell you what we’ll do to-morrow. We’ll have our walk.’

  ‘But the spring isn’t here.’

  ‘Then I’ll have it alone.’

  ‘No. I didn’t mean that, but it’s rather like the cupboards and the books, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t see the resemblance,’ Hannah said, turning the handle of the sewing-machine again, but Ruth had found the right reason for Hannah’s suggestion. They must have their walk while they could and if they were together when spring came, well, then they could have another.

  Ethel was amiably ready to look after Doris and the house. Not a single gleam of her eyes betrayed any jealousy that Miss Mole and Ruth were going off together with sandwiches in their pockets and no expectation of returning before dark; she showed no further anxiety for the moral welfare of her young sister, and Hannah and Ruth both silently came to the conclusion that their absence suited her.