by Ursula Bloom
‘He has been saying the most shocking things; however any decent man dare think such things …’
‘About me?’ she interrupted breathlessly.
‘No, of course not. Don’t be silly. About me.’
‘About you?’
‘And that poor little innocent Agnes Spencer.’
The girl experienced a throbbing within her; she sat down opposite George, whose face was blotchy with tears. ‘Well?’ she said.
‘Naturally, running the choir-practice with Agnes, I have seen quite a lot of her. One does. We’ve had to be together. Now Clarridge declares … oh, Mary, I cannot think how to tell you … he declares that there has been something wrong in it.’
‘Outrageous!’ She was genuinely shocked.
‘It is almost worse than that. It has absolutely knocked me out. To think people should go about with such vile minds.’
‘What shall you do?’
‘I’m leaving.’
‘You’re what?’
‘Oh, I told him I couldn’t dream of staying; I should think not. Not after that.’
She groped for the arms of her chair as the dying grope, picking furtively at a sheet, trying to find some stable wherewithal with which to cling to life. But there comes a time when you can cling no longer. His next remark was unnerving.
‘I knew you’d stick by me. I knew. You’re a magnificent wife, Mary, a magnificent wife. Where should I be without you?’
‘Don’t,’ she choked.
She saw the haze of distance enveloping the dream; she remembered hideous, poignant words in her marriage service: ‘and, forsaking all others …’ They were drumming in her ears, and the piers of China were receding. It was fading away with the irises and the magnolias; it was becoming merely a picture, a thing embroidered on a shawl, but never real.
‘We’ll start afresh in a new place,’ burbled George, ‘when we can find a parson with a decent mind, who doesn’t go jumping at horrible conclusions. You’re a brick, my dear, you’re splendid.’
But he did not know how splendid she really was.
XIII
She told Peter on the beach. It was a tempest-flogged beach with queer pebbles smoothed by long sojourn with the sea, and darkly pencilled lines of breakwaters stabbing out into the low tide. She had written first and had told him of her decision, so that he should come to the tryst prepared. But she had not supposed that he would look so old and haggard. He was fierce with resentment, badly hurt, and, although he came determined to talk her round, he fell far short of the proper spirit. Peter had supposed the battle won, had dreamt of her as his own, and had suddenly been torn from his pinnacle of happiness, and flung down.
The sea was grey and chilly, and it moaned as it broke on the shore. Sometimes the sea can laugh, but now it moaned. Seeing him like that, she felt her own face going grey too.
‘You see, he needs me,’ she said.
‘I need you too.’
‘Yes, but George and I are married.’
‘I am glad you treat it as the barbaric fetter which it is. I would not marry you unless I loved you. Mary, I want you.’
‘I’ve promised George I’d stay. Mr. Clarridge has been making a scene and George is fearfully upset. I couldn’t even tell him that I had … that I had thought of this.’
‘This what?’
‘This … this wickedness.’ She whispered it in a shocked voice and the sea caught the echo and flung it moaning back to them.
‘It isn’t wickedness, my love, it is what the gods offer. We were made for each other.’
She said ‘Yes,’ but her voice was almost inaudible. He put a finger under her chin and lifted the face, chalky white, with the solemn dark eyes.
‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘Look at me! You cannot refuse me. It is all so easy; no leave-takings, nothing, if you will only trust me.’
She shook her head.
‘You think I should not marry you?’
‘No, Peter, I have never thought that. I am sure that you would marry me. It ‒ it isn’t that.’
‘It is a stupid and hideous convention, part of the patrimony handed down to you by your people. Victorianism at its vilest, and you are torturing me with it.’
‘Oh, Peter, don’t make it harder.’
‘If you loved me you’d come.’
‘I do love you.’ In a sudden rapture she flung her arms about him and laid her cold mouth to his warm one.
‘Love, my love,’ he said, and his hands held her, lying down her ribs in firm support. ‘Come with me. I’ll be good to you, and it shan’t be wicked. God couldn’t let our love be wicked, not our precious, precious love. You mustn’t stay here, my sweet, you can’t stay here.’
She gave a sob, and she looked up. The sea behind him, grey with white fringes of foam, the sea which would take him from her. Peter, Peter, with his disc of a face, the spoon of a chin, and the mouth with its promise. She felt something salty on her cheeks, and it was not spume or spray.
‘I can’t let you go,’ she protested vehemently. ‘And yet George needs me; it is a rotten wife who accepts for better and not for worse.’
‘You can’t love me, or you wouldn’t hurt me so.’
‘I do love you.’
‘You can’t.’ The male in him was passionately dominant. ‘You can’t send me away. You know we shall never meet again. You know?’
‘But I do love you. It is duty.’
‘Duty be damned! Duty doesn’t count. To Hell with duty.’
‘Peter … Peter.’
‘If you loved me you’d make me happy, and you’d be happy yourself. You don’t love George, you have told me so.’
‘I was disloyal.’
‘That may be as you think. You were truthful, that is all that counts. Are you going to hold that trumpery loveless marriage of yours as binding?’
‘Don’t put it like that, Peter, don’t put it like that. It isn’t that I don’t care, dearest. I do love you. I shall never care for anybody as I care for you, do believe me. Oh, my dear, do believe me.’
‘How can I, when you won’t come to me?’
For one insane moment she felt the longing to sacrifice all and go with him. Then she remembered George snivelling, George whom she had taken for better or worse, George inexorably, eternally hers.
‘You shall come,’ said Peter. ‘Do you hear me? You shall come.’
A gull screamed. The sea was still moaning; it moaned like a human being, in a frightening and helpless way. She thought of the men marching to church, of the clean pink necks above the blue jeans, and she clung to him. ‘I want to come, I want to come,’ she begged, and then wretchedly: ‘I must come.’
He kissed her; hand in hand they stepped up the beach. ‘You shall come. I’ll send Hoskings round to-night for the final word. I will get the ticket for the Queen of the East. For God’s sake don’t delay any longer. This “yes” is to be final.’
‘Quite final,’ she agreed.
At home she found George. He had had another scene with Mr. Clarridge. He described it briefly as having been a painful one. ‘I’ve been offered a curacy in Cumberland,’ he said. ‘It is wonderful scenery. We’ll forget there, Mary, and start again.’
She was very quiet. George looked up from the paper which he was reading by the fireside. ‘What’s the matter?’ he enquired.
‘I ‒ I feel sickish.’
‘Oh, Lord, I do hope you are not going to be ill. I need you so much through all this fuss. It’s pretty sickening for me, Mary, the Clarridges saying such terrible things.’
‘What kind of terrible things?’ Her eyes had passed to the clock. At seven Hoskings would be here. Hoskings with his little fat puffed-out face peering from under his round cap; Hoskings with his sleeves so tight that one wondered however he dared to bend his arms; and his trousers so tight that one wondered how he ever had the temerity to sit down; and yet so full round the feet that they acted as fans. Hoskings more like a pincushion than a man, rotund,
with serge stretched tight across his rotundity, smiling and serene in the face of any difficulty. Hoskings with his quiff pulled forward from under his cap when he thought that he was safely away from his ship, and his doltish, staring eyes. ‘Tell your master I shall be ready if he will make the arrangements.’ That is what she would say … ‘Tell your master I shall be ready.’ … Twenty minutes more and Hoskings would be here.
George was staring ahead of him with suspiciously moist eyes. ‘It is all so horrible. They make out I was discovered in the organ-loft with Agnes.’
‘What were you doing?’
‘I was … how can I explain? It’s so horrible, but most old parsons are a pack of old ladies, and Clarridge is no exception. Nasty scandalmongering lot. But I’ve got you, thank God I’ve got you ‒ my anchor in it all.’
She thought poignantly of another anchor soon to be dragged from its rocky bed, of a ship veering out to the great grey sea, with China beyond.
‘Yes,’ she said half-heartedly.
‘Mary, you do love me?’ He came closer; he knelt at her feet, his arms wrapped round her fragile body. ‘You do care for me? You’re cold, and sometimes I wonder.’ In a quarter of an hour Hoskings would be here. She would hear his rolling step and the cheery bang on the kitchen door. She became intensely still. ‘Because you are everything to me, Mary. Why don’t you talk? Why are you so quiet? Surely you don’t think there was anything in it with me and Agnes?’
‘No,’ she said harshly. ‘I know there wasn’t.’
‘Your faith in me helps me so. Do you know, Mary, if I hadn’t had you I’d have done something terrible?’
She asked him quickly, in a jerky sort of way: ‘Supposing I left you, what would you do then?’
‘Left me? My dear, there’d be nothing remaining. My career would be dust, it couldn’t go on. I couldn’t go on. I’d kill myself. It may sound wicked, but it is true.’
Ten minutes more. ‘Supposing I ran away with somebody else?’ she asked haltingly.
‘You wouldn’t. You’d never do a thing like that. You’d know that I should suffer, and all I should feel. You’d … never hurt me’; he laid his head in her lap. ‘And I think our wedding meant something more to you than that, a thing to be idly flung aside. You remember the smell of the orange-blossom I bought you? And the hymns? They were rather lovely, weren’t they? ‒
‘Yet possessing every blessing,
If our God our Father be.’
‘Don’t,’ she said sharply. ‘Don’t.’
‘Why not? I rather like that hymn, and since our marriage I have loved it.’
She was seeing again the little girl peering over the prim pew, and sharing the hymn-book with Mamma. She was thinking of herself making those compelling vows to George, those splendid troths. Five more minutes. Five more minutes for the momentous decision whether she should abide by her faith, by her pledge, by her upbringing, or, flinging them all to the winds, sacrifice everything for her love.
George was singing contentedly to himself:
‘Thus provided, pardoned, guided,
Nothing can our peace destroy.’
She felt herself as flotsam in a great sea; she was reaching out for guidance, and finding none. She heard Hannah’s step in the hall without, her furtive tap. Hannah would knock on sitting-room doors, although expressly forbidden to do so. She knew what was coming. She galvanised all her strength for the effort.
‘Please, mum, Mr. Hoskings.’ Hannah would!
‘I’ll come.’
She went into the cheap hall. What a place for a momentous decision: the varnished paper, the stairs with the thready carpet, the gas in its peeling hoop. It gurgled, that gas, it gurgled and bubbled, and on the hat-stand hung George’s inverness cape. She went and removed it, with her love of orderliness, and put it on the proper peg. She went down the passage, across the kitchen. There stood Mr. Hoskings, bursting from his too-tight clothes, his cherubic face with its silly little smile beneath the cap.
‘You came for a message?’
‘Yes, mum.’
She put out a cold hand to the lintel of the door for support. She must not be sinful; she must not be ashamed. ‘I meant to write,’ she said. ‘I haven’t had time. Tell him … I can’t.’
XIV
A grey destroyer nosing her way out of the harbour, with her ensign fluttering in the wind, the only patch of colour upon her. A cruel grey North Sea, and the greyness of the sky above.
Mary had come down to the sedgy grasses that sloped from sand dunes to mud flats. She was very cold and numb, and she felt as though she were tense. ‘This is how people feel when they are dead,’ she told herself.
Nothing could stay the destroyer now. She was a slim neutral-tinted line on the water, with a shadow beneath her, dark and sinister. She was moving quickly, too, for the sea churned up white from her stern, in a long frothy trail behind her. So it would be all the way ... all the way to China.
Standing there, staring out to sea, her eyes stung by the salty tang, her heart like lead, she wondered if, after all, she had not made a terrible mistake. Which would have been the greater sin, going or staying? And could one standardise sin? George clinging to her, and Peter to whom she might have clung. It assailed her in her sudden loneliness, the thought that perhaps she had done the wrong thing. She had abided by the prudish conventions of her youth, she had been true to herself, but she wanted Peter, she wanted him more than all else. It seemed that the sea whispered, ‘He will come back to you ‒ he will come back to you,’ but her common sense denied the waves. If only she could have the chance again. A great dry sob rose within her, and every moment the gap between them widened; every moment he was going further away. The desolate sea-washed shore, with the faint smell of weed and shell, and never a human soul in sight. She went to a breakwater and clung to it.
She did not cry. Some emotions are too deep, some pains too cruel. She stood watching, until the ship had passed out into the engulfing mists beyond. She was a mere speck; she might have been a lighthouse, or a trawler, one could not tell. The mist had had its way with her. Mary was wondering whether anything else mattered. Religion, faith, eternity ‒ it all seemed so shallow, it was very difficult. ‘But I have done the right thing,’ she told herself, trying to convince the rebel within her. ‘I can never forget that I have behaved very rightly, I have played the straight game.’
The mists were denser, or was it that her eyes were wet? She moved with stiff limbs as an old body moves. George would be home. The destroyer would be heading for the channel beyond, there would be the straining of the masts, the sighing of wood confronted by the wind, the clatter of men’s feet. There would be Peter with a heart like lead, growling out orders, his eyes sunken into pits, his red mouth set …
‘Yet possessing every blessing’ … She was not sure!
XV
Mrs. Spencer called. It was a week later, but a hundred weeks would never relax the tension within Mary. She was sitting in the dreary dining-room, sewing. George was ample and he wore his under-garments into desperate holes. He was really shocking with them. When Mrs. Spencer was announced by Hannah (who had forgotten to turn down her sleeves) Mary looked up wanly. Mrs. Spencer was all patchy in the face, pink and violet, her eyes bright with the shine of battle. She started almost before she got into the room.
‘I’ve come to see you about this disgraceful business.’
‘Oh?’ said Mary amazedly, and then, ‘Please sit down.’
Mrs. Spencer sat down heavily. ‘I understand you are leaving?’
‘Yes, quite soon. The week after next.’
‘You realise why?’
‘Mr. Clarridge and my husband have had a difference of opinion.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs. Spencer, and then more loudly, ‘nonsense; of course you know, and, what is more, you know I know. It is abominable.’
Mary looked up aghast. ‘Really, Mrs. Spencer, if you have come here to be violent ‒’
‘W
ell, who wouldn’t be violent? You know what has happened to Agnes?’
‘I know that people have been very unkind, and very unjust, in what they have said. There is nothing more than that.’
Mrs. Spencer sniffed; it was an exceedingly unpleasant sniff, and it said a good deal. ‘I don’t know so much about it being nothing,’ she declared. ‘I have taken Agnes to a doctor.’
A horrible dread seemed to beat within Mary. ‘You ‒ have ‒ taken ‒ Agnes to a ‒ a ‒ doctor?’ she said chokingly.
‘Someone has been behaving wrongly. The church cleaner saw them in the organ-loft. Agnes has admitted it. You won’t admit it because you are afraid of giving him away, but you know.’
‘I know nothing.’ A riot of feeling flooded her. Memory pictures, one after the other; a grey destroyer gliding slowly yet remorselessly out of her life; Bonn, in the wintry coldness of the sunshine; Wally and the honeysuckle; George! If it were true she must defend him; if it were untrue she must refute it. ‘My husband had better see you,’ she said.
‘Yes, but I don’t suppose he has the nerve.’
‘Mrs. Spencer, you are wrong; you are very wrong. I am quite sure that George can give you a satisfactory explanation.’
She heard him come into the house and she went to the door. ‘I will fetch him,’ she said. In the narrow hall George was unwinding a long muffler from his throat. She motioned to him and went towards the kitchen; that would be empty, for Hannah was going out. She put her fingers to her lips.
‘George! That woman is here; she is saying the most dreadful things.’
‘What woman?’
‘Mrs. Spencer.’
George backed. ‘Mrs. Spencer! Have I got to see her? I believe she is rather dreadful. What had I better do?’
She had a hurried glimpse of the kitchen, the lino on the floor, well trodden before the shining grate, and the dresser with its blue china, the dripping tap above the sink. ‘And I forgot to get a new washer,’ she reminded herself. It is always the little menial tasks that strike one at such a time. ‘George, you’ve got to vindicate yourself.’
‘But surely you don’t believe there was anything in it?’
‘No, no, of course not, but she mustn’t be allowed to go about saying these things. She sounds so horribly convincing.’
