by Ursula Bloom
‘Such a splendid daughter,’ sobbed Mamma. ‘How I shall miss her. George, you’ve won a treasure. But what ‒ what have I lost?’
Mary felt that she would cry too, if she were not careful. There was the reassuring touch of George’s hand on her arm. He was steering her through it all, she need not worry any longer. At this moment she felt a sudden burst of gratitude to Johnny. He was carrying things along with a swing; he was charging about with a large bag of confetti and armed with all the old shoes he could collect. He was entering upon the affair with proper wedding spirit.
There was Wally. ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘If only Congo Imperials ‒’
‘Oh, Wally, it wasn’t to be.’
‘I know. Still, I mustn’t be depressing. I wish you joy. Lots of it. You’re a lucky fellow, George.’
They shook hands.
Outside, the carriage waited, ornamented by Johnny with a maze of white ribbons and old shoes. He helped Mary in.
‘Good luck, old girl. May your troubles only be little ones. Keep an eye on old George, and don’t let him get out of hand. In you go, George. Be good to Mary. Have a fine honeymoon, health, wealth, and happiness … Off you go … I say …’ he was running by the side of the carriage, for the horses, cold with waiting, had started. ‘Here is something for you.’
The quickening speed of the horses caused his head to disappear with a jerk from the aperture of the window. George found himself clutching a small parcel.
‘Whatever …’ he demanded, and opened it. Johnny’s wit was often crude.
It was a baby’s shoe.
PART II: GEORGE
I
They spent their honeymoon at Bournemouth, at that time of year very beautiful. Mary always looked back upon that time as a period of probation, of wondering, of uncertainty, of guilty doubts rearing up their heads where there should only have been blissful serenity.
One ought to be sure on a honeymoon. It is no time for vague wonderings, it should be determined. But Mary was desperately unsure. She had been so miserably unhappy at home ‒ although, of course, Mamma had had her funny side at times ‒ that perhaps she had expected too much of marriage. She was not certain. She had taken a step forward into a new country, and was now in the unhappy position of the stranger who is at a sad loss in alien surroundings. Suddenly, out of a world where she had known everybody, she knew nobody. There was nobody. There was only George.
Before marriage, however well a girl supposes that she knows her husband, she is woefully ignorant. It is a period of groping in the dark. George as the adoring lover had been one person; George as husband was another.
And the change seemed to have come about so suddenly that she was taken aback. There had been the wedding, and the final departure, with everybody on the doorstep, Mamma in tears, Mr. Jones looking uncomfortable as he invariably did, Johnny noisy and cheerful, Wally looking ash-white. Other people like Mr. and Mrs. Nason and the doctor and his wife crowding together and trying to look wildly hilarious, and only succeeding in forcing their hilarity. Then they had driven away, they had changed into the train and had heaved a sigh of relief at being away from everybody and everything. That was when Mary had discovered the ugly mark which the real orange-blossom had made on her frock. She had shown it in dismay to George, but he had not been sympathetic; he had merely told her that she was not romantic. These two words had lain like lead on her heart all through her honeymoon.
George was a dear, of course, but she had always thought that his continual ideal of romance was a trifle ridiculous. Johnny had qualified it differently, in the brusque way in which Johnny would qualify anything; ‘damned silly,’ said Johnny. There had been the incident of the ivy-leaf. She would not have let Johnny know of the ivy-leaf for all she could see. That would have supplied him with an eternal source of mirth. She could not have borne that.
The honeymoon went on. She was bitterly ashamed of that doubt which had crept in upon her like some evil infection. She knew that the fault was hers. George was a model husband; it was so amazing to sit there with George kissing her, and know that it was quite proper, and that Mamma could not burst in like a whirlwind. George, big, tall and brave, and they were married. It seemed almost uncanny. Yet in her mind she classified him as two Georges. There was the George whom she loved, the hero who had rescued her from her uncomfortable position (she termed it fancifully ‘the dragon’s country’, the dragon being Mamma. ‘And a queen of dragons,’ said George when he knew how she termed it. ‘Glory be for peace’). And then there was the other man, the romantic person who wanted to sit all day and read poetry to her. There had been a great deal too much poetry at Bonn, Schiller and Goethe, and the old Fräuleins dwelling with zest upon the ever necessary reading essential to a young lady of fashionable society. What manner of society they imagined that she would adorn, Mary had no idea. Surely Schiller and Goethe were not necessary when one was destined to long days with Mamma, and Mr. Jones, the Nasons, Wally, Johnny, and Isabel? Or even the kind but rather uncultured conversation with Harriet in her own room?
But it seemed that George loved poetry. Not Schiller or Goethe, because he understood little of them, but Tennyson and Longfellow, and Rossetti and Adelaide Proctor. It seemed that George had read some novel wherein the hero read poems to his new-made wife all through the honeymoon. It had appealed to George and he had decided to copy it himself. And having set his heart upon it, nothing would deter him. George was fired by a tremendous enthusiasm for reading poetry. There was nothing really wrong about it, save the absurdity. She wished that she did not see the absurd part of George, large and ponderous, reading out of a small book:
‘Minnie and Winnie
Slept in a shell.
Sleep, little ladies.
And they slept well.
‘Pink was the shell within,
Silver without;
Sounds of the great sea
Wander’d about.’
‘Really,’ said Mary, ‘I don’t think Tennyson should have allowed that to be published.’
‘I think it is particularly sweet,’ George retaliated, and began again.
‘Airy, fairy Lilian,
Flitting fairy Lilian,
When I ask her if she love me,
Clasp her tiny hands above me,
Laughing all she can.
She’ll not tell me if she love me.
Cruel little Lilian.’
Mary took in a deep sigh. ‘I don’t call it poetry; where is the thought?’
‘You want so much.’ George laid down the book with a sigh of resignation. ‘You want strength and thought all the time; you aren’t satisfied with just beauty. You’re not a very sentimental person, are you?’
She went across the little homely room of her lodgings, and knelt at his feet. ‘George, dear, I am sentimental; I love you. Isn’t that sentiment enough?’
But George sulked. ‘I want kisses and romance,’ he said.
‘George, it’s dreadful of me, but my horrible sense of humour comes in, and there is something funny about a parson at the best of times, but a parson who sits reading poetry all through his honeymoon ‒’
‘You have never loved me properly,’ he declared sullenly.
‘I did. I do.’
‘You used me as a means of leaving home and that awful Mamma of yours.’
‘No, George.’ She was a little frightened, and she sank back to the floor, kneeling there, staring up at him with reproach in her wide dark eyes. ‘We’ve got each other, dear. I do love you. I would not have married you if I hadn’t done; there were other chances.’
‘Yes, Wally. He hadn’t any money, nor a job. You couldn’t have married Wally.’
How true it was. The truth came hurtling at her, and in the swift moment when it stabbed through her like a sword-thrust she remembered the cloud slender-shaped like a scimitar, and she recoiled. ‘I could have married Wally,’ she said; ‘I have money of my own. I married you because I wanted to marry you, George.
’
He looked at her doubtfully, and then suddenly he stretched out his arms and gathered her to his heart. ‘Say it again, darling, darling little one, say it again.’
And they kissed and clung in the ineffable beauty of the new-made marriage. She felt the compelling comfort of his arms and marvelled that she could ever have supposed that she might be lonely and wretched again. With the amethyst twilight drifting about the room, and his arms, and his lips, and his love, what else could matter? He released her.
‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘For one moment I almost thought you believed it,’ and he reached for the little bound book, which had slipped to the floor.
There they sat, he with her head pillowed on his knee, and the objects in the room becoming dim and undefined in the greyness. And George’s voice droning on …
‘I have been wild and wayward, but you’ll forgive me now;
You’ll kiss me, my own mother, and forgive me ere I go;
Nay, nay, you must not weep, nor let your grief be wild.
You should not fret for me, Mother, you have another child.
‘If I can I’ll come again, Mother, from out my resting-place;
Tho’ you’ll not see me, Mother, I shall look upon your face;
Tho’ I cannot speak a word, I shall harken what you say.
And be often, often with you when you think I’m far away.
‘Good-night, sweet mother; call me before the day is born;
All night I lie awake, but I fall asleep at morn.
But I would see the sun rise, upon the glad New-year,
So, if you’re waking, call me, call me early, Mother dear.’
II
The last two days of the honeymoon brought them up with a jarring note. George, who had rather fancied himself as a man of business, had set himself to work to look into Mary’s affairs; he had made deductions and calculations on paper, and it seemed that a certain amount of interest would be falling due shortly. George had had his solicitor on the job, and the solicitor had set enquiries afoot, and the purport of them came to Bournemouth within two days of the honeymoon’s end. They were extremely unsatisfactory.
It seemed that Mamma and Johnny, as trustees, had had several times to reinforce their own financial status. The same post brought a positively vile letter from Mamma. Here was a lawyer, wrote Mamma, poking and prying into her business, and wanting to know this and that, and making a pest of himself. She and Johnny had managed very happily until now. There had been times when, to further Johnny’s interests, Mamma had been obliged to borrow from Mary. She had supposed that any devoted sister would be glad to lend a little to such a good, kind brother, but goodness only knew what girls were coming to.
Across the breakfast table George’s eyes met Mary’s.
‘I’m afraid ‒’ she stammered.
‘I know. I don’t believe the pair of them have left a farthing.’
‘Oh, probably a little, but not as much as we supposed.’ Her voice faltered, a sudden and devastating thought had stabbed her through. ‘George, you didn’t … you didn’t reckon on that? You didn’t marry me for that ‒?’
‘Oh, my dear,’ said George in a shocked tone, ‘how could you suppose such a thing?’
She sat very still, every detail of the prim little sitting-room suddenly photographed upon her mind. Lace curtains, in a heavy pattern, looped over blue crochet sashes, a stuffed fox, a portrait of the dear Queen with a suitable black bow draped over it. Slowly a tear trickled down her cheek.
‘What is it? What is it, little Pollie?’
‘I’m so miserable. Nothing ever goes right with me. Why, I feel I have married you under false pretences.’
‘But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter a bit. I’ve got you, and that is what I want.’
‘It’s so wonderful hearing you say that.’
‘I mean it. Of course it means we shall have to retrench. We shall have to be careful, but we’ll do it together and it won’t be very difficult, dear, as long as we have each other.’
She loved him in this mood. She stroked his hair and pressed his head to her breast. She felt passionately that she wanted him to lie there like that always. A wave of tremendously maternal emotion seemed to flow through her; she wanted to protect him; to precipitate her own frail body between him and any crude happening. He was her George, her husband, her darling! ‘I’ll be so economical,’ she said. ‘You shan’t suffer, truly, truly, you shan’t. Oh, George, I will try so hard.’
‘We both will,’ he said.
She felt that there was something very lovely about marriage. She viewed it with a new appreciation, even though it did bring with it vague disillusionments and qualms at times; for, after all, any big change, any adventure, was sure to have qualms attached to it. There was a delicious intimacy which enthralled one. So they sat, she clutching him to herself, cradling his head on her breast and looking out to the ebb and flow of sea beyond the windows, with the age-old Madonna in her eyes.
Infinite but splendid mystery of marriage, it held her in its spell. Life before her, unfolding itself butterfly-wise from a shaggy chrysalis. All the dull routine done with, all the littleness dispensed with, all the new loveliness flooding before her. It was magnificent. From the shore beneath the windows came the purr of the surf. It seemed like a glorious accompaniment to the vivid beauty of her thoughts. The broad white untrodden road of life which lay ahead ready for her footsteps, so full of promise. She must not let little stupid things upset her happiness, little darts which pricked her sense of humour, such as the poetry and George’s ridiculous saucer hat. George was Victorian in some ways; his longing for romance and his love of moss-rosebuds and forget-me-nots were a little something left over from the ’sixties. Yet they did not really matter. There was so much in life that was wide and did matter, that it was utterly futile to boggle at the unimportant trifles.
She had wanted all her life to set her man upon a pedestal, to make him a hero and worship dumbly at his shrine. In Bonn she had watched the Death’s Head Hussars marching past in their glory, with the glint of sun on steel, swing of sword, and the puffs of dust upchurned under the rasp of horse-hoof. She had watched them through the latched windows of the Musike Salle, her hands blue with the cold, for it had been a bitter winter, and the Fräuleins were notoriously mean in their inadequate distribution of firing. She had watched the soldiers as her stiff fingers raced up and down the old yellowed keys; she had had one eye on the cheap clock atop the piano denoting the hour dedicated to practice, and one eye on the brave regiment marching down the street. She had fancifully imagined the lover who would one day come to her to be like the splendid young officer, and she had placed him on a pinnacle high above her head. High, high up, over the piano, above the cheap clock, and the metronome ticking so dully; that was where she had placed the young Black Brunswicker with his pale face beneath his busby, and his collar close-buttoned under a spoon of a chin. The cadence of the scales had died down as the brassy sweetness of their band blared forth the triumphant Hussarenritt, and the stiff childish fingers had come to a halt. Then in would burst Fräulein Teitz, with her hair all fuzzy, and her glasses awry. “Gott in Himmel, meine madchen,’ she would demand. ‘Warum so?’ And Mary had invariably faltered and tried to pretend that it was not the soldiers at all, only the cold, the intense biting cold of the Musike Salle.
That was the pinnacle on which she had wanted to put George. Enshrined above the cheap clock and the metronome, a burnished Teuton figure, with a busby capping his beautiful blonde head, and spurs jangling at his heels. But George, although he was a fine-looking man, did not wear a busby and spurs; he wore a clergyman’s hat and grey suits, and he was not drilled. She supposed that it was very childish to want her hero to wear a uniform and look lovely; just the sort of dream that all love-sick girls dreamed; and, after all, George’s was a sort of uniform, and she was always proud of him in his stiffly starched surplice, only it wasn’t quite the same. ‘Hearts m
atter most,’ she told herself. ‘And George has a perfectly lovely disposition.’
Only it wasn’t the same.
The last day of the honeymoon was a harbinger of spring. It was a mellow day, soft and warm, and the pines smelt wonderful and the murmur of the surf was as exquisite music. They sat on the beach for a long while, near Branksome Chine, watching the gulls dipping white wings in the shallow water, and the green tangle of weed delivered by the receding tide in vivid contrast to the hyacinth of the sea.
‘If only honeymoons lasted for ever,’ she said, troubled by a vague doubt as to the future.
‘To-morrow we step out upon a new life,’ said George. ‘I’m satisfied; are you?’
‘Will Seaport be like this?’
‘I expect so, except that there will be lots of naval officers running about. I never care much for naval men. I know an old retired commander who used to beat his donkey shamefully and use the most appalling language to it; that put me off them.’
She was ashamed that in her heart she was back in the Musike Salle listening to the tramp of trained feet, watching the light gleaming on steel, quiver of spurs, flashing of sword-hilts.
‘You’re not listening,’ said George petulantly. ‘That’s a bad habit of yours, not paying attention to what I say. A wife should just dwell on every word her husband utters.’
Here he was romancing again. ‘Who says so?’ she challenged.
‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? When my mother had her honeymoon she told me she just sat and looked at father all the time.’
‘It must have been very embarrassing for him.’
‘There you are! You’re laughing. One can never be serious for two minutes with you. Life is serious, it’s very serious.’
‘I’m sure it is.’
‘There you go again.’
‘Yes, but I didn’t mean that in a laughing way, I meant it sensibly.’
George stared at her with the sullen resentment of the only child who finds its particular piece of territory invaded by a stranger. ‘I don’t believe you know when you are being sensible,’ he said gravely.
