The Passionate Heart (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  The Passionate Heart

  Ursula Bloom

  Copyright © The Estate of Ursula Bloom 2021

  This edition first published 2021 by Wyndham Books

  (Wyndham Media Ltd)

  27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX

  First published 1930

  www.wyndhambooks.com

  The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover images © Everett Collection (Shutterstock)

  Cover design © Wyndham Media Ltd

  TIMELESS CLASSICS COLLECTION

  by Ursula Bloom

  Wonder Cruise

  Three Sisters

  Dinah’s Husband

  The Painted Lady

  The Hunter’s Moon

  Fruit on the Bough

  Three Sons

  Facade

  Forty is Beginning

  The Passionate Heart

  Nine Lives

  Spring in September

  Lovely Shadow

  The Golden Flame

  Many more titles coming soon

  www.ursulabloom.com

  Ursula Bloom: A Life in Words podcast

  Listen to the free, five-part podcast series based on the autobiographical writing of Ursula Bloom. The podcast covers Ursula’s life as a young woman on the Home Front in the Great War, and her rise to success and fame in the publishing world of the 1920s to 1940s.

  www.ursulabloom.com/ursula-bloom-a-life-in-words-podcast

  Contents

  PART I – MAMMA

  PART II – GEORGE

  PART III – MURIEL

  PART IV – JASMINE

  PART V – HUBERT

  PART VI – PETER

  Preview: Wonder Cruise by Ursula Bloom

  Preview: Youth at the Gate by Ursula Bloom

  Preview: Promises by Catherine Gaskin

  Preview: Victoria Four-thirty by Cecil Roberts

  Preview: Wind on the Heath by Naomi Jacob

  Preview: The Print Petticoat by Lucilla Andrews

  Preview: A Shaft of Light by John Finch

  Timeless Classics Collection by Ursula Bloom

  IN HOMAGE

  TO

  MY BRAVE LADY, WHO SLEEPS BY THE SEA

  Guess now who holds thee? ‘Death,’ I said. But, there

  The silver answer rang … ‘Not death, but love!’

  ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

  How tired we feel, my heart and I!

  We seem of no use in the world:

  Our fancies hang grey and uncurled

  About men’s eyes indifferently;

  Our voices which thrilled you so, will let

  You sleep; our tears are only wet;

  What do we here, my heart and I?

  ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

  Out of the suffering, comes the serious mind: Out of

  the salvation, the grateful heart: Out of the endurance,

  the fortitude: Out of the deliverance, the faith.

  JOHN RUSKIN.

  PART I: MAMMA

  I

  Mamma was playing croquet in the garden with Mr. Jones; Mamma was losing! Mary knew that, by the indignant whisk of Mamma’s skirt as she swished from hoop to hoop.

  Mamma hated losing, although she always protested that a game was a game, and therefore didn’t signify; all the same, there was something in Mamma’s nature which demanded insistently that she should win; it was vital; and to lose to Mr. Jones was the most sickening of all defeats.

  Poor Papa! He had been just Papa during his lifetime, but death had earned him the adjective ‘poor’; he was now for ever enshrined as ‘Poor Papa’. He had died when Mary was seven. She had the vaguest memories of poor Papa, as of someone very tall and very slender, who was always kind and gentle. All that was dim, thrust into the recesses of memory by the acuter picture of poor Papa put into a long box, and Mamma crying a great deal, and Johnny, who was eight years Mary’s senior, wearing a new black suit, and being superior about it.

  Later, when Mary had been sent to school at Bonn, Mamma had married Mr. Jones.

  Mary had hated Bonn with a fierce and bitter hatred, but Mamma had held determined notions as to education, and had stuck to them. A mere triviality like homesickness never influenced Mamma. She was a small, shrewd woman, with a long, thin face and, like most small women, she had a grim obstinacy and a fierce temper all her own. Only the unwary crossed Mamma and even they never did it twice.

  Mr. Jones had discovered that long ago. He was of weak personality, and only once had he divulged the fact that life with Mamma had not been altogether blissful. He had been heard to mention, when someone had spoken of the departed Mr. Grierson: ‘Poor Papa, indeed! Damned lucky Papa.’ That had been the only occasion on which he had voiced his inner sentiments.

  Mary had remained at Bonn-am-Rhein until Mamma and Mr. Jones had passed the Paradise of the honeymoon and had ‘settled down’. By that time Mary was eighteen. She had loathed Bonn and Wilhelm Strasse, and the Fräuleins; she had hated the hard brodchen and the thin, unsustaining süppe; she had yearned for England again. Yet she had been a little afraid of England with Mamma and Mr. Jones. Johnny had left home. He had been the apple of Mamma’s fond eye, and she had done her best to ruin any career which he had contemplated by over-spoiling and a lavish hand with finance. Johnny drank! Mamma had suggested that it showed a certain manliness, and refused to believe that Johnny drank to excess. Nobody ever disputed anything with Mamma, however wrong she might be, and Mamma invariably was wrong.

  Whilst Mary was in Bonn the war broke out, and Johnny flung discretion to the winds and went off to the Transvaal with the Volunteers and every penny he could wrest from a willing Mamma. Johnny did not care, and whenever his finances waned to a low ebb he adopted the simple expedient of writing home to Mamma and describing his despair and the proximity of a lonely grave on the veldt. Mamma always wept tears of chagrin, lamented her sad lot at having lost poor Papa, and her only boy a soldier (later she added to it that she had thrown herself away on that nincompoop Mr. Jones), and, having sent everything she could to Johnny, would severely rate everybody in the house because they did not appreciate the dear boy properly. Nobody understood Johnny except Mamma, and Mamma understood him in reality not at all. In Bonn Mary had held no brief for Johnny; she understood him as it is only given to sisters to understand brothers. When she arrived home she found Johnny enshrined as a saint in the household; photographs of Johnny in his brave uniform decorated the rooms; he was spoken of in much the same way as one spoke of poor Papa. Johnny reigned supreme.

  Mary was nineteen when she arrived home, and now she was twenty. In the intervening months she had learnt much. Firstly that Mamma and Mr. Jones did not get on. Mamma had married Mr. Jones because he was of good family, and Mr. Jones had married Mamma because she was comfortably off, and the good family had no means. The good family had not taken to Mamma, and she in her turn had, so Mr. Jones said, become incredibly mean with her money. Secondly, Mary had found that the quiet peace of the little country town was a menace. It was a grim monotony, broken only by the fact that their household was a country desolat
ed by a volcano, and the volcano was Mamma. The servants were terrified of her, Mr. Jones was wretchedly afraid, even Mary was afraid. One could not please Mamma, one could not pacify her; she had based her life entirely on Queen Victoria, and was habitually autocratic. Mary had once overheard the gardener, who had been intolerably rebuked, allude to Mamma as ‘that old she-devil’; the maids were too terrified of her to dare to express their opinions; Mary herself was torn between trying very hard to love her from a sense of duty, and detesting her as the person who systematically made her miserable.

  At the moment the girl was sitting in the dining-room, whilst Harriet laid the tea, and she was hoping to finish the frock which she was trying to make before the croquet ended. It was going to end badly! She knew that from the chinking echo of mallet against ball, and Mamma declaring loudly and hotly that it didn’t signify, and what was a game to her if it wasn’t treated as a game? There was the swish of her skirt and, mingled with it, the pathetic protestations of Mr. Jones becoming more and more alarmed. Poor Mr. Jones! He had not the sense to make a series of bad strokes, and miss everything, if only to appease Mamma. Harriet looked up in nervous apprehension; she also knew the sounds too well. She glanced at Mary’s fairish head bent over the sewing.

  ‘It’s pretty stuff, miss,’ Harriet ventured. ‘Is it new?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘Mr. Bunting said it was voile; quite a new sort of stuff; I’ve never heard of it before.’

  ‘And you’re making it nice, miss.’

  ‘Eel-trap sleeves,’ Mary answered with no little pride, for they were the newest thing and she was not at all sure yet whether they were going to prove satisfactory or not.

  ‘Oh my!’ said Harriet. From the June sweetness of the garden came the sound of Mamma obviously losing badly, of Mr. Jones still protesting, of the vicious thwack of croquet ball against croquet ball. Mary caught Harriet’s eye and averted her own. Harriet went on laying the table: watercress in a glass dish, neat bread and butter and a dough cake. There was something comforting about Harriet in her black frock and wide white apron, and the prim cap with streamers. Harriet was always dependable, though obviously flustered.

  The croquet balls became mute. Mary began folding her sewing, for already there was the sound of people approaching.

  ‘Not that I care,’ Mamma was saying. ‘What is a game to me? A stupid way of passing an hour. What does it signify? Nothing at all. I don’t care.’

  ‘But ‒’ from Mr. Jones.

  ‘Now don’t start making stupid remarks. You’ve won. I don’t know how you’ve won, but you’ve won. I was hoop up at the first half, yet you mysteriously overtook me in the second round. Oh no, it doesn’t signify at all. I’m not interested enough in games to cheat so that I may win. I hate cheats. Ah …’

  Mamma had come in at the french windows with her skirts still swishing, and her long golden earrings jingling. It was plain to even the least discerning that Mamma was very cross indeed. ‘I suppose you’ve been here all the afternoon?’ she demanded.

  ‘Yes, Mamma.’

  Mr. Jones seized the opportunity to direct the line of attack from himself, which was a little ruse to which he often resorted.

  ‘I wonder you could not find something to do to help your poor Mamma,’ he suggested amiably. ‘There must be lots of little jobs that need doing; she does everything.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Mamma agreed hotly. ‘And nobody ever considers me or cares about me. That’s what comes of making a continual drudge of oneself to one’s children; no thanks, no pity, no praise.’ Mamma seated herself violently at the head of the table and glared upon it with ferocity. ‘And where is the tea?’ she demanded. ‘I, who always like my meals punctually. What are those servants doing?’

  They heard the gimmer of the tray approaching, held in Harriet’s shaking hands. Harriet had never got quite used to Mamma, and she shook with fright. But luck was on Harriet’s side, for at the very moment when she appeared in the doorway to meet the challenge in Mamma’s eye, the hall bell pealed clangingly through the house.

  ‘There,’ said Mr. Jones, who wanted his tea. ‘Now who can that be?’

  ‘I’ll go,’ Mary volunteered. In Germany they had always gone. The Fräuleins had been delightfully casual. But Mamma, who always remembered Queen Victoria, looked supremely shocked.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said she; ‘what on earth are you thinking about? You girls nowadays get more and more immodest. I’m sure I hardly know what to think about your disgraceful manners. Answering the door, indeed! Why do you suppose I keep Harriet?’

  ‘Ah, why indeed?’ echoed Mr. Jones in his desperate effort to keep on Mamma’s side at all costs. Mary bit her lip; she had hated Bonn and the Fräuleins, but this was worse. Mamma who was as large in dogmatism as she was small in stature, and that wretched sycophant Mr. Jones, fawning upon her in an endeavour to keep in her good books. Mr. Jones was detestable.

  Harriet deposited the tea-tray and retreated hastily to the door. A moment later she reappeared, ushering in Mr. Nason. Really, if one had only thought, one might have associated that vigorous peal of the bell with Mr. Nason. He was the vicar, and he usually elected to call at tea-time and stay until the entire meal was demolished. Mamma was immediately enchanted! Poor Papa had been ‘trade’; it is quite true that he was on the wholesale side, and there had been nothing nauseating or vulgar like a shop, but the fact of poor Papa having been ‘trade’ had drawn a very distinct line between herself and professional people. She had hoped that her marriage with Mr. Jones would instate her in those circles which her ambition coveted, but Mr. Jones (though of exceedingly good birth) had been of no profession either; he had, in fact, been ‘trade’ too, for he had come to attend to poor Papa’s business, and that was how they had met. Poor Papa’s business had gone to pieces, and Mr. Jones’s affairs had flourished to the extent of marrying the widow, and thereby entitling himself to a considerable share in the proceeds. But people unfortunately remembered that poor Papa had been a mere manufacturer, and, forgetful of the exceedingly good birth of Mr. Jones, stamped him as a manufacturer too, so that Mamma and her ambitions were more than a little foiled. She was astute enough to receive Mr. Nason’s parochial visits amiably, in the hope that one day Mrs. Nason would be induced to call, and then the visits, ceasing to be parochial ones, would become part of a social ritual, all of which would be very gratifying indeed.

  ‘And how is dear Mrs. Nason?’ gushed Mamma, as though the two ladies were on the best of good terms.

  Mr. Nason, who was tall and in figure very like the Mr. Noah which Mary had kept in a wooden ark in her extreme youth, gravely bowed. He always wore very long tight coats in a fashion that had been popular in the ’eighties, which probably intensified his likeness to Mr. Noah. ‘My wife,’ he said, ‘is at Great Yarmouth, which is very nice at this time of year, and not too crowded.’

  ‘I am sure it is delightful,’ said Mamma, ‘and such grand air.’

  ‘You have good news of your son at the front?’

  ‘Excellent news. Johnny does not think the war will last much longer.’

  ‘Perhaps not. It has lasted too long already; and the price of food too.’

  ‘Robbery,’ Mamma asserted indignantly. ‘I’ve never known eggs such a wicked price at this time of year. They are actually daring to ask eighteen a shilling, because I ordered some to-day, and one cannot make a cake out of less than six eggs. It’s scandalous.’

  Mr. Nason turned to Mary. ‘You keep up your German?’ he enquired.

  ‘I try,’ she told him. Out in Bonn, where one spoke all the time, it had been so easy; here it was very difficult. Her reading, too, which she had supposed would be possible, was very tedious. Goethe and Schiller seemed out of place when Mamma was in one of her volcanic moods rounding up the household in style, with Mr. Jones fawning at her heels, ever ready to draw attention to ‘idle girls who had nothing to do but read rubbish’.

  ‘I am afraid Mary’s education has been sa
dly wasted,’ Mamma put in. ‘She only cares for that stupid lace-making, and for sewing. I’m sure I don’t know what she did in Bonn.’

  ‘The young officers, perhaps,’ said Mr. Jones ill-advisedly. ‘I hear they are very gay, especially the Death’s Head Hussars.’

  Mary was silent.

  ‘The Germans are a very fine race,’ said Mr. Nason, taking his second piece of plum cake. ‘There is a blood bond between them and England. Our dear Queen, of course; we shall always be fast friends.’

  ‘Indeed, the dear Queen,’ said Mamma reverently. ‘Brother races.’

  Then came a silence, broken only by the steady munching, and the clicking noise of Mr. Nason’s false teeth. They really did fit abominably. ‘I’ve got some news for you,’ he said at last; ‘I am changing my curate.’

  ‘Surely our nice Mr. Philpott is not leaving?’ Mamma demanded, in surprised dismay. Once Mrs. Philpott had called; it was to collect for the Zenanas, but it was a call. Mamma had preened herself upon that point for weeks.

  ‘I am having no more married curates,’ Mr. Nason went on. ‘They do not attend to their duty. Nearly all the visiting devolves on to my shoulders, and I am not as young as I once was. Their wives, too ‒ they make enemies.’

  ‘Oh, indeed?’ Mamma was immediately all ears.

  ‘It makes my position at the vicarage very trying, very trying indeed.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mamma, ‘and for Mrs. Nason, too. Very difficult, I am sure. Have you found a suitable successor to our nice Mr. Philpott?’

  ‘I have.’ Mr. Nason was exceedingly pompous over it. ‘His name is George Carew.’

  ‘George Carew?’ echoed Mamma and Mary in one voice, and again incredulously, ‘George Carew?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr. Nason. ‘Why?’

  ‘Not George Carew from Stainesmore?’ asked Mamma warily. ‘Surely not?’

  ‘It is,’ said Mr. Nason, who was getting a little ruffled. ‘And why not?’

  ‘Because we lived at Lynch all our days.’ Mamma was quite tremulous. ‘I was married at Lynch, Mary and Johnny were born there, poor Papa’ ‒ she brought out a handkerchief ‒ ‘is buried there. It is two miles from Stainesmore, so we know the Carews, all the Carews.’