by Ursula Bloom
III
Seaport, black, old, and time-smudged, with the brown Essex marshes stretching behind it, and Suffolk beyond. A huddle of little houses in narrow, dirty streets, a suggestion of squalor, and the greyness of the North Sea reaching deeply up the wide estuary and pounding on the Gunfleet sands far out at sea. A thin peninsula of land, with the marshes and the mud-flats on one side, and on the other the great channel, speckled by buoys, where ironclads rode at anchor. There were no hills to back the straggling town, only the wide marshes, which struck Mary as being impossibly ugly; they always strike the stranger so, but they have in time a certain individual appeal of their own, an appeal of sea-pinks and spikes of mauvely-grey sea-lavender spearing up through the wet mud wherein would be mirrored the radiant splendour of many a drowned sunset. There were islands in the mud-flats, islands where wild duck and teal and ptarmigan winged their way homewards.
When Mary first arrived at Seaport she felt that she could never bear the time there. Its bleak austerity appalled her, and the house was small and wretchedly dark, and built over great cellars which, so report said, ran down to the sea. For centuries Seaport had been the smugglers’ haven, and the place was riddled with caves and cellars and subterranean passages. In all her time there Mary never discovered the limits of that enormous cellar of theirs.
Their small house was hemmed in on either side by other houses; they were tall, and gave one the impression of balancing each other; there were Georgian windows, long and slender and primly similar. They were built of red brick, a pale and ugly red with none of the warmth of Dutch bricks, and there was too much yellow in their composition. One entered by a severe door, with a fanlight above it, and followed the too narrow passage, with the dining-room on the left and the stairs before one. The wallpaper was varnished and a dingy shade of yellowish brown; the dining-room behind was a square and ugly room, but comfortable. It had possibilities. Its one window stared out upon an insufficient garden, overlooked by all the other houses on their side of West Street, and tenanted by innumerable cats. The late tenants seemed to have eaten only of tinned goods, for that bare stretch of garden was massed with old tins of every type.
The men had arranged the very new furniture as they had supposed would be correct. It all struck Mary as being rather banal. The furniture was cheap. She supposed that taste must be at a bad ebb; sated by the ponderous outline of Victorian mahogany, people had flown to fragile and trumpery little bits of furniture, thin-legged, inlaid, and veneered. Lately there had been articles in the papers on the beauties of old furniture, the very old Elizabethan oak, the art of Chippendale and Sheraton. Mary had thought vaguely of a certain restfulness which one might conceive with pewter and blue china, but Mamma had been horrified.
‘Only fit for servants,’ Mamma had declared. ‘I can not think where you get your ideas. They are shocking.’
And now here they were in a tall, lean house on the dark side of the street, with a gloomy hall and small, forbiddingly square rooms. She hated to think that she was disappointed with the place, and more disappointed with the furniture, and that the future seemed suddenly to be sinister. The first loneliness of marriage assailed her, as it assails all young brides, the first realisation that it is ‘for ever’.
George went at once to see the new vicar, Mr. Clarridge. He came back full of enthusiasm; he was sure that they would get on very well together. Mary was not so sure! At this stage she could be sure of nothing. Hannah, the very young new maid, was willing but hopeless. She was small, and she wore too long an apron, and her cap perched on the back of her head. Her hair, too, newly put up, was continually in the process of coming down, and seemed to necessitate innumerable pins, sticking out at all angles. Hannah, who seemed to need instructing on every point at once, and several times, reduced Mary to tears. She ached to see the stiff but efficient Harriet come in at the door. Hannah had a vacuous but pleasant smile, and one could not cure her of taking an intense interest in any conversation carried on before her, or bursting into it with a vivacious: ‘Well, I thinks …’ whenever she thought fit. The strain seemed to be coming all at once. The new place and the dark and gloomy house, and Hannah in her smiling incompetence. Mary felt that she was going to hate everybody and everything.
While George was visiting Mr. Clarridge she took out her writing paper. She must write to someone about it. Mamma? Impossible thought! Johnny? No, never! She found the letters shaping themselves: ‘My dear Wally‒’ and then, appalled at what she felt to be her gross disloyalty to George, she crushed the letter into a ball.
But it is the first struggle that is inevitably the worst. Mrs. Clarridge came to see her later, a large lady with an eternal ailment. They had a daughter Alma, like neither of them, of whom Mary hoped that it might be possible to make a friend. Alma, with her straw-coloured hair, and palish blue eyes set in a florid face; Alma, two years Mary’s senior, who did not look too invitingly companionable.
On the Saturday evening, over the small dining-room fire (they dared not be too extravagant until the financial situation shaped itself more definitely), Mary stretched out her hands to George.
‘It’s all so lonely and desolate, I’m frightened, George.’
‘It’s just as lonely and desolate for me, dearest. Anyway, we’ve got each other.’
‘Yes.’ She shivered a little. ‘The Clarridges don’t seem very homely people. They’re rather offhand. I feel they say about us: “Yes, all right for a curate.” You know.’
‘I do know.’
Hannah, knocking loudly on the door, as she had been expressly forbidden, lurched in with two cups of cocoa wobbling on a tray. She set it down on the table.
‘Let’s hope,’ said Mary, ‘it won’t be a very terrifying congregation to-morrow. We’re both, as it were, on approval.’
‘Please, mum,’ said Hannah, ‘I knows lots of folks what is going to see what you and Master looks like ‒’
‘Hannah, you must not enter into our conversation like that,’ reproved Mary. Crestfallen, Hannah retired. ‘I feel horrid having to tell her, but what am I to do?’
‘She obviously must be told.’
Mary, kneeling on the rug, leant forward and touched George with furtive, slender fingers. ‘Are you frightened too, George?’
‘I am. Horribly frightened.’ He smiled wanly at the great wide eyes raised to him in the paper-whiteness of her face. ‘I was just as frightened that day when I came to Stapleton, that Sunday when you all came in late, Mamma looking like the lion’s den, and you and Mr. Jones about as wretched as Daniel.’
‘Mamma had been positively fierce that morning. It is one mercy we haven’t got her accompanying us to-morrow. Oh, George, I do pray the sermon may go well.’
‘I do pray, too … literally.’
‘So do I.’
He held her to his heart. ‘Let’s pray together now, darling.’ So they prayed, and there was nothing ludicrous about it. Two lonely young people clinging together by their fireside, and beseeching the Creator to help them in their new project. The cocoa cooled on the table; most of it had been slopped into the saucers by the clumsy Hannah. But, after all, what did food matter?
Presently Mary opened her eyes. Yes, the room was still there, and George holding her closely and looking at her fondly. She was carried away by the sublimity of it. Suddenly, with a passionate gesture, she put up her mouth to be kissed.
‘George, I do love you,’ she said.
IV
She heard the tramp of feet up West Street at half past ten. She peered out curiously. Oddly, it reminded her of Bonn in the icy Musike Salle, and the Hussars marching by. She saw instead that these men were sailors marching to church from one of the ships. Men in blue, swinging jauntily, with an officer beside them in frock-coat and sword. She stood there at the slim window, hidden by the Madras muslin curtain, and she felt as though she were standing on the edge of a precipice. ‘It’s all funny,’ she told herself. ‘Marriage has made a fiasco of me. I don�
�t know myself any longer. What is the matter with me?’
It was then that George called to tell her that he was ready and she had to go. She crept into a back pew. She did not want people to associate her with being the new curate’s wife; she wanted them to centre their attention on George, he was all that mattered.
George in his stiff white surplice held a certain enchantment for her; she watched him with the moist eyes of a proud bride; she wanted their marriage to be a success; she wanted it to stand as the biggest thing in her life, and George the statue triumphant on a plinth of gold, enshrined in her heart. She listened to his sermon; there was one joy, he always preached well. She felt that the people round her must approve, and a certain sense of warm satisfaction suffused her being. She tried to read Mrs. Clarridge’s thoughts from her fretful round face, Alma’s too, but it was a difficult task. One could not analyse what their feelings might be.
The service over, they stood grouped in the grey old porch, Mr. Clarridge, with his silvery hair, introducing George to people as they passed through. Mrs. Clarridge and Alma stood a little behind them; Mary, overcome by acute shyness, held back. Across the people’s heads she caught George’s eye, hoping for a reassuring smile, but he was much too busy. He was shaking hands with all manner of dreadful old women and smug old men! As she stood there in the stream of a shaft of sunlight, which speared through a window of blues and reds, the verger eyed her. She disliked his look. She felt cold; she felt out of it; a ridiculous, homesick longing for Mamma welled up within her ‒ so absurd!
After everyone had gone, and George and his vicar had retired to the vestry, she found herself patronised by Mrs. Clarridge. ‘Quite a nice sermon ‒ for a first,’ said Mrs. Clarridge. ‘Not too deep, just what we want.’
‘George has preached before,’ Mary suggested timidly.
‘Of course … of course … I’m forgetting. Usually this is a first curacy. I thought he was nervous.’
‘George is never nervous.’
‘I see.’ A dreadful silence, during which Mary’s hands grew clammy, as side by side she and the Clarridge family surveyed the barren churchyard. What can be more depressing to the living than the citadel of the dead? Wet, decaying grasses, irregular, suggestive mounds, the rain dripping from mouldering trees, the terrible imminence of death in its most hideous aspect. And then, when she felt that the futile longing for home was rising again volcanically within her, George and Mr. Clarridge came out. They had been all the time counting the offertory. They walked to the street, all parting courteously at the lych gate. Mary took George’s arm.
‘Well?’ demanded George.
‘Well?’
‘How did you think I preached? I thought everyone seemed very pleased. One or two of them were most outspoken. I didn’t think old Clarridge cared about that. What did you think?’
‘Oh, George, I don’t like them.’
‘Now don’t you start making matters difficult. I can’t help your personal feelings. I want to know what you thought of my sermon?’
‘I didn’t think it was your best.’
‘Goodness me! It was one of my very best, only it required wit to see it. You do depress me so. Just when I want a little encouragement.’
He was pouting like a spoilt child.
‘But, George, you asked me. I had to say what I thought.’
‘But it was my best.’
‘Very well, if you say so, dear.’
‘I think I shall do very well here. People seem to like me already.’
They turned a bend and came in sight of the sea, and she saw a mast from a little lonely boat, a solitary spar jutting up from the greatness of the ocean, very isolated, aloof; it struck her as being significant of the loneliness of her own life, in the vast sea of the world.
‘I’m lonely,’ she said suddenly. ‘I’m lonely and miserable. I hate the place.’
‘Oh dear, oh dear! You don’t seem as if you could talk of anything but yourself. It is too bad. If you’re going to start taking dislikes, of course you will hate the place. You don’t seem to think of me at all. Now about that sermon of mine ‒’
She gave a sob. ‘Yes, George?’
‘It was so very important that I should make a good impression, so very urgent that I should please people. I’ve got to make my way in the world; what a sell it would be for everyone if I became a bishop.’
She said again: ‘Yes, George.’
‘I can’t think why you don’t like the place, unless it is that you have made up your mind not to like it; then, of course, you won’t. It is so annoying, and so like a woman.’
Wretchedly she repeated: ‘Yes, George,’ because she could think of nothing else to say.
‘Can’t you give me any idea of how my sermon sounded down there? The elocution ‒ it carried?’
‘Oh yes, it sounded beautiful.’
‘Splendid. I’m always so glad I am not one of those little squat fellows who peer over the top of a pulpit. I look well, don’t I?’
‘You look sp ‒ splendid,’ she gulped.
Mercifully they reached the house. She murmured something about taking off her hat and sped upstairs. She sank down before the dressing-table, burying her face in her two hands. This was marriage stripped to starkness. This was George as he really was, as she had never seen him before. What chance has the average engaged couple really to know each other? Mamma had chaperoned them assiduously. Mr. Jones had been ever present. George, an angelic figure in a surplice, had enshrined himself as a Gabriel within her being. But Gabriel was changing to George, and George to a mere egoist.
She felt a sudden desire to use a theatricalism, to scream, or to have one of Mamma’s attacks. Mamma would have had none of George and his sermon. And what a very ordinary sermon it had been! She fanned her eyes and went down to cold beef and apple pudding, and George.
But George would have put himself first.
V
She always wished that the sound of tramping feet did not send that strange flutter through her being. She liked the clean pink necks of the sailors above their flopping blue jeans; the way they rolled along; the frightful superiority of the marines walking somewhat aloof, as though they could not be seen in company with bluejackets. The officer with the gold lace of the Navy, or the officer with the uniform of the Death’s Head Hussars … it was all very much the same.
As the days sped into weeks, and the weeks totted up into three months, she should have grown used to it. George went out and about a great deal, and was a vast favourite with the old ladies, though rather spurned by the retired naval and military gentlemen. There appeared to be two schools of thought with regard to George: the school that idolised, and the school that derided. Mary always cherished a foreboding that the Clarridges belonged to the latter. The Clarridges always looked at George as though he was something particularly unpleasant; there is a lot in a look of that sort!
People called on Mary; they called not because they wanted to know her, but because they wanted to know what she was like, and to be able to re-discuss her in the officers’ club and to dissect her bit by bit. There were the Spencers: Mamma with a beak like a hawk, and a love of titles that would have rivalled the snobbery of Mamma at home. There were four Miss Spencers, each with the adjective ‘dear’. ‘Dear Ruthie’, as Mrs. Spencer would gush, and ‘Dear Monica’, ‘Dear little Agnes (our little lamb)’, ‘Dear Hilda’. Mary took a dislike to Mrs. Spencer and to the weedy Ruth and Monica whom she brought with her to call. She felt that these people patronised her as the new curate’s wife, and she hated their patronage. She felt the irritation that Mamma must have felt when she had married Mr. Jones, and considered herself to be in the position to patronise, and not to be patronised. It was infuriating.
Mrs. Spencer, who was the widow of a Colonel Spencer, lived in splendour in a large house at the far end of the town, where it began to straggle into marshland. She said that Mary must come one day; George, it appeared, had been there already. Mary re
turned the call when, by the grace of a merciful Providence, Mrs. Spencer was out.
Mary walked along the straggling road with a wettish wind full in her face. A road with trees on one side, straight as young boys, and a pallid sky sweet with the paleness of youthful March. The houses drifted into nothingness; opposite to them there was merely a ditch, grasses and leaves knotted together and tangled underfoot. A mud-splashed farm-cart lumbering out of a side lane lurched on rickety wheels up the white riband of the hill. Far away, where on its summit fir-trees pointed inimitable fingers to God, she could see the grey of old ricks nestling round the red of a roof. And the fields ran down the hill in sleek beauty, ragged at the long line of hedgerows: fields dotted white with the rounded hulks of sheep, or gleaming redly where plushy cows lumbered among sedgy grasses.
Here was the last of all the Seaport houses ‒ a largish house where the Spencers lived. Mary rang, was told by a smart maid that her mistress was not at home, and returned thankfully to the gate. ‘We praise Thee, O God,’ sang Mary’s heart, and she dared to laugh at what George would have termed her profanity.
The farm-cart had lurched on up the hill, and the little dotted figure of a man who was swinging along with the jaunty strength of youth had come rapidly nearer. She looked up as he approached. Tall and bronzed, with dark eyes and an apple-red glow from the exercise. It was a mouth of delicious and austere promises; she was ashamed that it should make her think of kisses. The sweater was pulled high about his throat, and he wore an old cap, stuck on at an odd angle. In an instant he had passed. He walked rapidly on and down the hill to the dreary town lit by the early dusk. Beyond there was the opal mist filming the harbour with amethyst, where lights, slung yellowly from destroyers at anchor, were like stars.
Mary had forgotten Mamma and George, and everything save man, and this particular one as representative man. She shambled as she walked, because her thoughts were multitudinous, they were too mighty for her. They were welling into her brain like water into a jug, too much water, more than she could bear. A new self had flooded into her ‒ the great self of a passionate heart.
