The Passionate Heart (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  ‘Oh, George!’ she said huskily.

  George, who had hidden away upstairs for her a neat little work-basket which would aid her the better to darn the undergarments which his ample size wore so threadbare, sighed. He felt a little ashamed.

  ‘Who is it from?’ he asked.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Better go and ask Hannah who brought it.’

  She went, glad to hide her colour. The kitchen door was ajar and the back of Hannah’s dress and one hand appeared round it. From outside there was giggling and chatter.

  ‘Hannah!’ she called.

  Hannah came in quickly, and very red indeed; she shut the door hurriedly. ‘A gentleman,’ said Hannah vaguely. ‘A gentleman brought it, and he … he kissed me under the mistletoe, mum … a sailor gentleman he was … with Jass-a-mine on his cap.’

  ‘I see,’ she said. Because it might be wrong, yet why should not the sailor kiss Hannah? And somehow she had already guessed that he would have Jasmine on his cap.

  She stood for a moment leaning against the kitchen door trying to still the beatings of her heart, with the shawl dripping from her hands in its silken loveliness. She would be buried in it, she told herself passionately; it should go down into the red clay grave with her ‒ his gift for eternity.

  ‘Well, did you find out?’ asked George when she returned.

  ‘No, dear, it seemed to be a very ordinary sort of man. One of the tradespeople, I suppose, trying to ingratiate himself.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Next morning when a naval officer marched the church party past the house, he looked up at the window. It was Hussarenritt all over again! She knew that he would look. She had been waiting with the shawl draped about her, standing there and thinking how gay the beautiful thing made her; the flowers, the humming-birds, the butterflies, all the beautiful prizes he offered her in life. She saw his sharp glance upwards and the sudden approval. She smiled down at him.

  That was all.

  XI

  Spring came late that year, and, try as she would, the thoughts within her grew more and more wicked. She was so desolate. She was so lonely. She could now only see the George she had married, and never the man she had loved. The one had entirely submerged the other; she could only see him as husband, and never as lover, whereas she could not visualise Peter as anything else than lover.

  Once she met him, stumbling on him unexpectedly round a street corner. He was in uniform, walking briskly towards the harbour, and they nearly cannoned into each other. She felt the colour flushing to her cheeks, and leaving the mouth, that Wally had thought so like the Shulamite’s, quite pale. She was laden with parcels, and a great cabbage rolled out of her basket on to the pavement. Gravely he picked it up and stood looking at her.

  ‘We don’t meet often,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not often enough.’ He laid the cabbage back in the basket. ‘Mary, are you afraid of me?’

  ‘Perhaps I am afraid of myself.’

  ‘Little goose, why should you be? Little love, we can’t go on like this much longer.’

  The two Miss Dawkins passed them by, queer old maids who smiled incuriously. And yet here was Peter saying beautiful things in spite of the fact that the ordinary world went by.

  She tried not to see him again, she purposely avoided any meeting, and she felt that he did the same. But beneath it all there lay the fierce undercurrent, and sometimes her thoughts were whirled along in it; then she dreamt of the impossible; then she suffused herself in adorable sweetnesses; then she suffered. She suffered in a deeper way because there was no chance of confiding in a single soul, and she was only too shamedly conscious of the guilt of her emotion for Peter. She would bury her face in the shawl, the unutterably beautiful shawl which he had sent her, and try to picture him; she tried to drown her emotion in a perfect orgy of church work, but her heart would not go with her into it. She wondered why church work attracted George. He never seemed to weary of it, he loved every moment spent in the Y.M.C.A., or at the sewing party, or the choir practice. And Agnes Spencer was helping him. Once Mary paused to wonder whether there was anything in it; then, ashamed at so guilty a thought, she flushed and banished it. Because Agnes was a limp young woman, and had eyes like March skies, and hair like pale straw.

  ‘The true Saxon type,’ George termed it very kindly.

  ‘But she’s so pale.’

  ‘They all were. She has the proper colouring. Soft hair. Blue eyes.’

  ‘One would think you were attracted.’

  ‘Then one would be wrong,’ said George, violently rustling the paper that he was trying to read.

  For a moment he kept the full burden of his annoyance buried away within him, then he suddenly flared up. ‘It really is most aggravating; I do all I can, I work all I can, I am sure I put up with more than most men, and all you do is harbour vile suspicions about me. You think ‒’

  ‘I don’t,’ she interrupted.

  ‘It seems like it. Here you are nagging at me.’

  ‘George, I wasn’t.’

  ‘Oh, well, it was next best.’ Aggrievedly he unfolded the paper again with a crackle. All the while her soul ached for Peter. This could not go on. The narrow rut would be broken, it would break itself. Soon, she prayed, soon.

  One morning the sailor brought her a note. It must have been the same sailor, judging by the smiling redness of Hannah’s face as she came in with it. The note was brief.

  I must see you. If you are out walking to-morrow afternoon, walk up the hill to the wood at the top. I shall be there and waiting for you. ‒ Peter.

  She could not refuse him. She ought to, of course, she knew that; no good would come of seeing him, it would only make the hurt deeper, yet she could not say no. She nodded to Hannah. ‘Tell him, all right.’

  Later, when she went out to see about the welsh rarebit, she caught the flicker of a bell-bottomed trouser speeding out of the scullery, and Hannah came in very red and very much torn between smiles and tears.

  ‘Awful about the poor Jass-a-mine,’ she said.

  ‘Awful? Why?’

  ‘Being sent away, mum. To China, and all them poor young fellows.’

  But Mary had quietly fainted.

  Some of the decisions in this life are forced upon us; they bear down swiftly, there is only time for yea or nay, and we have to make up our minds. She only prayed that she might be strong.

  She went down on the kitchen floor with that one thought eddying through her poor tortured brain, and in one hand she was clutching the cheese grater, and in the other the old piece of hard red cheese. George came in and carried her into the dining-room, lying her on the wicker sofa there; he felt sure that it would make his lumbago very bad, but he was willing to make a martyr of himself over her.

  Long into the night Mary lay awake thinking dully as though someone had hit her and deadened her senses; she was unsure, she was irresolute. Cold eyes of stars peered down upon her, and she wondered how they looked through the up-pointing masts; she was living, or rather dreaming, a ship’s routine, the bell significantly telling the hours, the clatter of feet eternally on the run, vibration of small-arms, rattle of chains. Then she slept, really and dreamlessly, and awoke with the young spring morning rising pearly in the east. To-day she would see him. To-day would be the solution of it all. The rut was to be broken.

  The dragging morning waned for lunch, and George at the rush ‒ for it was the afternoon of the Badminton Club ‒ and the meal all hurried and scrappy. Then, when he had crashed out again, she went upstairs and dressed.

  She put on her wedding things, because she wanted to look her best. If only she had been born pretty! She was aggrieved with Fate, because she desired now to be pretty for Peter’s sake. If she had been born beautiful as Helen of Troy there would have been no need to marry George to escape from Mamma; men would have flocked to court her, and among them Peter.

  She pinned her hat on carefully with black-kn
obbed pins, spearing through the coils of hair and thereby ensuring its safety. She went out. She told herself that she must not go to see him; it was too much like a servant going to meet her young man on her afternoon out, sneaking up the hill to the wood; of course she would not go. But she found her feet bearing her in that direction. She found her whole physical force united against her mental desires. She went forward mechanically as a clockwork toy wound up by some unknown hand and set in motion. She went up the hill where the ditches were sweet-smelling with the sopping warmth of spring. In the gardens the first primroses were unfolding themselves here or there, and none too readily. The road was wet, for it had rained recently, and every little puddle reflected some of the delectable pallor of the sky. The leafless trees stretched thickening branches, and, as she neared the farm at the summit, she heard the pathetic bleating of the lambs, true harbingers of spring itself. The shrill chirping of young chicks, the

  resonant piping of larks ‒ they all signified something ahead, some radiant to-morrow which would sweep away to-day into the sea of forgetfulness.

  She passed the farm, and instantly, as she had known that she would do, she saw the wood across a redly-ploughed field; it was a little wood fenced round by a thick grey hedge; a green wood, where firs and tamarisks waved, but mostly brown and seared by the ravages of the winter. Sighting it, and no longer afraid, she crossed the stile and set her feet to the narrow old path flanked on either side by the ruddy waves of the ploughed field. Grass was thrusting its spiked blades up through the soggy clay; grass, or corn, she wondered which. Just ahead, the wood in its sweet spring wetness. She knew that she had no right here, and yet she came. She knew that there was yet time to return; still she did not go back. She was drinking in the mild warmth of the air, the soft seductive smells, and her heart throbbed like the wings of the lark who started up from the thorn bush at her side.

  Then she saw him standing before her, cap in hand, watching her with gravely dark eyes, and that sun-tanned, wind-caressed face. She gave a muffled cry, ‘Peter!’

  He drew her closer into the deepness of the wood, where the hedge, red with bramble and lightly sprigged by swelling buds, parted for them. He drew her within, where dappled larches lifted masts like proud ships, and undergrowth and scrub grew tattered and close. Here they were close to the heart-throbs of the trees.

  ‘Darling,’ he said.

  They met as lovers. It had never been so before; two friends fighting against the onslaughts of a swift, wild passion, but now no longer friends. The friendship had submerged itself in this supreme, proud love. She knew that he was going to kiss her. She wanted to stay him and spur him on at one and the same moment, but her mouth was dry, and no words would come. She could not shift her gaze from staring into those deep, dark pools of eyes that were his. Closer and closer, his binding, imprisoning arms, the touch of his lips, and the swift sensation of sinking into some fathomless sea; his mouth cupping hers, drinking her very soul from her. A mouth ripe with the promise of a hundred kisses.

  Wally had not been; George was not; there was only Peter. It was a kiss that shamed her; it burnt into her, scarring, searing, marking her, and in her childish innocence she classified it as making an adulteress of her; yet, when, his lips finally left hers, slowly yielding, she heard her own voice grown husky and far away say tremulously: ‘Again.’

  Afterwards she knew that it could not have been her own voice, because no decent woman would ever ask a man to kiss her, and if it had been her own voice some devil must have possessed her. But instantly, in response to her demand, his mouth compelled her own, only this time more passionately, more fiercely, as though hurting her would satiate his own lust in some obscure manner. And she wanted to be hurt! It could not be herself any longer, it was assuredly a devil. He released her, and by some sudden introversion spoke sanely, hurriedly.

  ‘The ship has been ordered to China; we sail shortly, and it means two and a half years at the least.’

  ‘I ‒ I heard, but I hoped it wasn’t true.’

  ‘It is true.’

  ‘Peter ‒ how can I?’ Her lips would not frame the words. Acutely there seemed cinematographed before her eyes the picture of herself left alone in Bonn for five years, tear-sodden, hopeless, despairing. Yet that was nothing to do with this … nothing at all.

  ‘You are coming too.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘Do you think I’d leave you? To live that rotten monotonous life with that selfish husband of yours? Do you think I’d go without you?’

  China. Another picture flashed through her brain. Hong Kong as she supposed that it would be, Hong Kong as she had read of it. Piers pointing out into a blue bay, tea-houses all the way down gay little streets; there would be heat, a sweltering, sweaty heat, and one would flag and ache for the evening, when the cool winds would come and one walked in delicious gardens waist-high in iris.

  ‘You’ll come, darling?’

  There was Mamma, who would be so ashamed, and Johnny, who would say: ‘That’s rather put my little affiliation order in the shade,’ and George so piously upset, and Wally so amazed. ‘I ‒ I can’t,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll make you. Do you think I’ll go without you? The Queen of the East is sailing two days before we do. I can see you on board there, and we go quickly, we shall meet you the other end. I’ve worked it all out, and you’re coming.’

  Odd how she was thinking of singing hymns in the old-fashioned pew at home; standing there, so small that she had to climb a hassock to see over the top of the pew. Mamma had shared a book with her, and they had sung:

  ‘Cast care aside, lean on thy Guide;

  His boundless mercy will provide …’

  Was Peter God or Devil? She could not tell. She sat down on a log grey with lichen, which she peeled off mechanically; he sat by her side.

  ‘I want to think, Peter; it is a very big decision to make. You know I want to come, as you know I love you, but to leave George … what would happen afterwards?’

  ‘There would be a divorce, dear. You’d be away, there wouldn’t be any unpleasantness for you to face. Then we’d be married.’

  ‘Would that put it right?’

  ‘Put what right, darling?’

  ‘The sin,’ she said slowly.

  ‘If you call it sin, yes, my sweet. I think it was the greater sin marrying George. You never loved him.’

  ‘I thought I did.’

  ‘No more! If you stay with him there are long and miserable years before you. If you only come with me ‒’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There is love.’

  ‘I want to come with you,’ she sighed. ‘I want to come. But, Peter, I feel that it is the wickedness within me. It would be so wrong, so very wrong.’

  ‘More wrong to stay.’

  She hesitated before she spoke, then she said slowly and in a shocked voice: ‘It would be living in sin.’

  He shook his head. ‘Oh, my dear, the Victorian era has stamped you with its brand. It is living in sin if you do not love a man, whether he is your husband or no. Do you love George?’

  ‘In a way, yes.’

  ‘In what way?’

  She said wretchedly: ‘I don’t know.’

  She was acutely conscious of the inadequacy of the argument, but the fact remained that she did in a sense love George, and in another sense she did not love him. She could not explain it more than that.

  ‘I do know. You are used to him. You know his little habits and you cannot think of life without him. That isn’t the right love, you know. It isn’t the way I want you to love me.’

  ‘I don’t love you that way.’

  ‘Thank God.’ And he kissed her again, deep, yearning kisses with nothing tender or trivial about them, but commanding, possessive kisses which held her.

  ‘Must I decide now?’ she asked, because here, with his hand holding hers, it was a foregone decision.

  ‘I give you three days; but you’ll come to me,’ he added.


  The wind rippled in the frail branches of the larch-trees, and swayed the tamarisks like so many nodding plumes. Breathlessly she said: ‘Yes, I’ll come to you.’

  XII

  She went home with the spring evening dying in a trail of saffron in the west. She would never forget to-day, because it was a milestone in her life. Her joy seemed to uplift her and transplant her into a new and theurgic world. Surely the little town had never looked so pleasant; why, the streets were quite pretty. Peter had said that she must not be swayed by silly suppositions as to what Mamma would think, and what Johnny would say. She must only think of her love, and the new land where she would seek a new life.

  She passed the old church with its pretty lych gate, and she thought that the gargoyles grinned sardonically at her. She was naturally superstitious, and their sinister leers disturbed her. She went on swiftly. She entered the dark house. Really, Hannah had been told to draw the blinds and light the gas when it grew dark; Mary was always telling her, she ought to remember by now. Never mind, she would soon be with Chinese servants; an amah would attend her. Her colour came and went as she searched ahead in the new world.

  She went into the dining-room, having bruised herself by falling against the hateful and abutting hat-stand, which they had bought in a rash moment. In the dark she could see George. He was sitting bowed over the table, and he was crying. It gave her a horrible sensation that George should be crying; he looked too big and strong to cry; it literally nauseated her.

  ‘What is the matter?’ she demanded. She drew the blinds and lit the gas with one of the spills out of the blue vase on the mantelpiece and then she repeated the question: ‘What is the matter?’

  He raised a wretched face. ‘Thank Heaven you have come back. There has been a terrible scene. Mr. Clarridge ‒’

  ‘Mr. Clarridge?’