The Passionate Heart (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  Mrs. Finch ran the local laundry, and George had been in the habit of having rows with her; either his handkerchiefs were not folded correctly, or his shirts weren’t done properly. Mary, smiling a little to herself, went on. Under the yellow glare Mrs. Finch halted.

  ‘I want a word with you,’ she said, and her voice was indicative of battle. ‘What’s all this about my Emily?’

  Instantly the cinema of memory was set in motion before Mary’s dazzled eyes. The eight little books where there should have been nine, and Emily one of the candidates of the afternoon. She tried to shut it out, but it stabbed into her inexorably.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said dully.

  ‘All this kissing and cuddling and skylarking, and a-calling it preparing for confirmation; that never happened when I was confirmed. I want to know what Mr. Carew means by it.’

  ‘I am sure you are greatly mistaken,’ Mary lied, smitten by the assailing knowledge that Mrs. Finch was entirely right. ‘Emily is only a child; Mr. Carew is very fond of children, and I am sure that she has mistaken his meaning.’

  ‘Right’s right,’ declared Mrs. Finch. ‘And I’ll go to the vicar. He ought to know. It’s shameful, and I’ll get to the bottom of it.’

  ‘Supposing you see Mr. Carew first?’

  ‘I might have guessed you’d shelter him.’

  ‘Indeed, I am doing no such thing. I am deeply concerned. It’s dreadful, but I think Emily has jumped to a conclusion.’

  ‘If that dear old gentleman, the blessed bishop, had known, he’d have had a fit. He ought to be wrote to, that he ought.’

  Mary had become genuinely alarmed. Standing here in the dusky street, with the arcs of street-lamps like great gold suns on the pavements, she felt dismally alone. ‘It’s only fair to see Mr. Carew first,’ she begged. It was so horrible standing like this with the night swinging up from the east and the stars peering down. The gas bubbled hideously and the ugly bright light was glaring in their faces. ‘It’s only fair,’ she persisted. ‘Bring Emily to my house, let us enquire into it. Come to-night.’

  ‘That I will. I’ve got no bone to pick with you, but when I catch Mr. Carew ‒ if he dare see me ‒ I’ll tell him what I think of him, that I will.’ She moved away muttering.

  Mary steadied herself to walk out of sight. She felt as though someone had hit her full between the eyes; the horrible foreboding of something hideous hammered within her. She turned down the side street, conscious of a nauseating emotion that defeated her. She hurried, yet her knees were wobbling, and she felt old and lined, and knew that she went with a terrible slowness. On their own doorstep stood George, his grandfather’s watch in his hand.

  ‘You’ve been time enough,’ he grumbled.

  ‘That woman!’ She had meant to be tactful and wise, and yet the words blurted out. ‘George, you’ve been playing the fool with Emily.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ He was stung from his usual calm. ‘Just because I complained about the abominable way she did up my shirts, to dare say that. I’ll have the law on her.’

  ‘I feel ill ... let me in …’

  They went inside and he lit the gas in the sitting-room; she heard the little plop, and it seemed like a cannon fired into the pregnant stillness of her mind. He faced her across the plush-clad table.

  ‘I hope you told her she was labouring under a delusion. I hope you stood up to her.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She was very rude. She is coming here with the child to-night.’

  ‘I won’t see her.’

  ‘George, you’ll have to see her. She is going to the bishop about it. If there is nothing in it ‒’ her voice trailed away. ‘If there is nothing ‒’

  For she had seen his face, his sickly, greenish face, with a gaping mouth and goggling eyes. ‘Oh, God!’ she said, and put up her hands to shut out the vision, pushing the fingers hard into the sockets so that she should feel the hurt, the physical hurt, above the terrible mental bruising.

  He told her then, grovelling at her feet and imploring her aid. He had done nothing actually wrong, he would swear that in any court; he had kissed the child and had sat her on his knee; nothing more, he declared solemnly, nothing more. He had bought her a special little book, but nobody could say that there was anything in that. All the same, he could not possibly see Mrs. Finch when she came; Mary would help him out of it. Mary must do something, like the splendid wife she always was. ‘Because since you told me you nearly ran away from me, it drove me wrong,’ he said. ‘So it really is your fault.’

  ‘I shall run away from you after this,’ she answered, with white lips and staring eyes.

  ‘What did you expect? I had always thought of you as so pure, and then ‒ then … it drove me to it.’

  ‘With a child of fifteen.’

  ‘I tell you there was nothing wrong. We’ve got to patch it up. If I get turned out we shall be penniless.’

  ‘You can’t be turned out if there was nothing wrong.’ She was facing him haggardly across what seemed to her tired senses to be an enormous vista of room.

  ‘I can’t define wrong.’

  ‘George! You’re married, grown-up, sane; what do you mean?’

  ‘You call kissing wrong. You ought to have been a Puritan. I have no such nice definitions.’

  ‘Kissing that child would be wrong.’

  ‘Well, I did kiss her.’

  She felt the tears coming; they came in a rushing, storm-like torrent. In the first break in her grief she heard the sound of the bell shrilling through the house. It meant that the Finch family had arrived. She saw George whiten.

  ‘They’re here,’ she said.

  ‘Mary, you’re going to help me?’

  ‘If I know the truth.’ Her eyes, already swollen, stared at him. ‘It wasn’t only kissing?’

  Again the bell shrilled, and, as it ended, he spoke. ‘There was ‒ there was one day … you won’t understand,’ he ended lamely.

  She felt the whole of her inside turn over in one volcanic revolt. She swallowed hard the lump rising in her throat.

  ‘I’m going to be sick,’ she said.

  III

  She never consciously remembered the scene with the Finch family. She only recalled that interminable night wondering what to do next, wondering if she could find Peter and go to him; cleaving to hope, as drowning men cling to straws, and losing hold. And George, who had howled, and who had declared that he was cruelly maligned, and could not sleep a wink, snored beside her in that shuddering manner of which only George was capable. Supposing that she left in the morning, it would declare the sordid truth to the world. Besides, where could she go? She had no money. Mamma would receive her and would eternally remind her of the occurrence. Johnny’s wife was not the sort of person to whom one could turn in moments of stress, and nowadays Johnny had three children and was sore put to it to support them; he wouldn’t want Mary on his hands. She thought in a desperate and detached way of going to Wally. The Congo Imperials had turned out successfully, and she wondered if he would refuse her. To go to Wally as his mistress would be a horrible thing, and more especially as she did not love him. She only loved Peter.

  And China was so far away, so terribly far; if it had only been Scotland, France, or even Germany, she could have managed it. But China! Why, if she sold everything that she possessed in the world she could not get enough for the fare to China. She wept in her desolation while George snored. But she must leave him. What a mistake she had made before; of course she must leave him.

  Peter! She thrilled with the idea. If only she could go to Peter, lay her hands in his dear clasp, and say simply: ‘Peter, dearest, here I am ‒ if you’ll have me.’ After all, her love for him, and his for her, were beautiful emotions; she had no love left for George. She had to admit it, lying here in the silent hours, with the night crying out in her need beyond the window. She was tied by the indissoluble fetter, marriage, not by love at al
l. She wanted to go to Peter, more than she could say she wanted it, and yet her fierce cleaving to God stared her in the face. Mamma would be so shocked; it was intensely shocking, really. And yet ‒ and yet …

  Morning left her little choice. The postman brought a letter; a letter arrived by the strange coincidence of life: a living in the Midlands had become vacant, a living with three hundred a year, and they were offering it to George.

  Three hundred a year looked something like a fortune. Suddenly in the vast of her poor little tear-sodden world a haven offered itself, a haven other than the sinful, glorious haven with Peter. A home, peace, if only George would behave himself. It seemed to her imagination, somewhat distorted by the happenings of the last few hours, that this was the hand of Providence, that God was offering guidance to her, that this was the way out.

  It was difficult to discuss the matter with George; he had two lines of argument. The main line was that he had been bitterly disillusioned in his wife on the subject of Peter. The second, that he had always been a little disappointed that they had had no children. This idea had presented itself to him while shaving in the morning, and he had been very well pleased with it. Until this moment he had maintained that the absence of a baby was a mercy, because their means were insufficient for a family, but now he dwelt upon it with a distressing pathos.

  ‘A child makes all the difference to a man; it steadies him,’ said George.

  White and weary with her want of sleep, Mary stared at him over the coffee-pot with tragic eyes. ‘George, don’t sit there talking bosh. Something has got to be done. You don’t seem to realise that the Finch woman will most certainly take the matter further.’

  ‘I shall deny it.’

  She voiced the alarming thought that had been with her like a ghostly companion through the vigil of the grim night: ‘You know how the law stands on the subject?’

  ‘The law?’

  ‘Emily is what is called “under age”.’

  It was true! It was insistently true. She could see the sick whiteness in his face, and the manner in which he pushed the plate of sausages away from him.

  ‘You’ll help me?’ he said at last.

  ‘I’ve got to help you,’ she answered, and her eyes were hard as stones. ‘I don’t think you deserve help, but I unfortunately have to stand by you.’

  She tackled the business in a systematic manner; it was useless for George to deny his guilt, she was taking that as an accepted fact. Enquiry told her that Emily was an hysterical girl; there had been unkind scandals about her before, and on this basis Mary staked her fortune. She solicited the aid of her doctor, and she herself interviewed the vicar. Afterwards she analysed it as one week of the grimmest Hell: her splendid and brave defence of the husband whom she knew to be guilty, her magnificent stand between him and the world.

  She never wanted to remember that week of torture. Once, in a fit of desperation, when her foes were pressing her hard, and George in the best chair was complaining about the cruelty of it all in regard to himself, she wrote a little note to a certain officer in H.M.S. Jasmine. She said quite simply that she could bear no more. She realised that she had made a hideous mistake, and now she was ready to go to the uttermost ends of the earth for peace and for protection. She pushed it into her pocket, in the determination to think it over; but during the following day, goaded by George’s constant bemoanings, she slipped it into the post.

  The moment when it had gone past recall she ached to get it back. What was the good of behaving heroically if one could not keep one’s stand and conform to the moralities which the world demanded? Yet what was the good of staking all on a rather vague hereafter, of having no happiness in this world, but possibly a good deal of fun in the next? A harp, wings, a crown … and sterility?

  She laughed at the idea, but it was more like a sob. After all, what was the good of anything?

  IV

  She stood on the steps of Pebbridge Rectory in the soaking rain. They had been looking over the empty house to see what extra furniture would be required. A big, bare, stone-flagged hall, with a dining-room on one side and a drawing-room on the other. Behind the dining-room, the tiny sitting-room where George would work. Yes, George should work. She knew that his only salvation lay in using his brain. He should work hard and late, and he should prepare no confirmation candidates save in her presence.

  The kitchen region was shut off by double doors. From the hall rose a wide and imposing staircase to a broad landing, on to which opened a linen cupboard, four large bedrooms, and two dressing-rooms, all very gaunt in their starkness. Now, when they had made their list out, she stood in the rain on the one wide porch step, waiting for the cab to come and fetch them away.

  The stiff Georgian pillars rose on either side of her; there was the half-moon of a gravel drive, and on the further side the big green tennis lawn with the elm and laburnums which boundaried it. Beyond the edge of the garden, slanting down the side of the hill to a wide meadow with the brook at its extremity, lay a pleasant paddock. Still further was set a huge ploughed field, now green with springing grain; an isolated farm, with the grey of old ricks and the ochre of a tiled roof, peering up from the tufted trees. And, last of all, the spire of the time-rotted church.

  Rising all round, as though the village had been flung into a basin, hills wooded and fertile; blue as only the Cotswold hills can be, misty and beautiful. Sentinels of a great peace.

  She stood there, with the red roses of the porch dripping with rain, as precious diamonds to her feet. Here indeed was a haven. She was thankful that they had accepted the living. It had seemed to her bewildered senses to be the only course to pursue, but now, standing here in the dismal depression of a June rain, she was not so sure whether she had acted rightly. She stood very still, with her mind a vast distance away, fighting a one-sided fight with her Maker. It sounded crude and a little absurd when she actually came to express her mental reasoning, but she was unsure whether this was fulfilling her duty to God!

  She was very serious about God. She had helped George and had managed to get him away from Sussex with some poor shred of a character left. She had declared valiantly that Emily’s assertions were untrue, and she had borne that banner to the end, thus vindicating George before his elders. Now, on the crest of the wave of triumph, she was uncertain whether she had done the right thing. She should have left him then and there. She knew now that she should have left him, but she had clung on. It took such an interminable time for a letter to get through to Peter, and even now she began to doubt whether it would be right to leave George. Just as he was starting afresh too. Poor George! The whole affair had been a stern lesson to him.

  He was measuring up the little back room for shelves; he intended using it as a library, and he came out noisily across the uncarpeted hall. The house was silent with the silence which a complete lack of furniture entails, and George’s feet jarred echoingly. He was counting up the dimensions on a piece of paper.

  ‘What, hasn’t that cab come yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I expect the man stopped to have one. These shelves are going to work out at more than I expected.’

  ‘Yes, and we shall want so much furniture; we haven’t half enough as it is.’

  ‘Well, I can’t do without my shelves. I must have somewhere to put my books. Isn’t there something you can do without?’

  ‘I expect there will have to be,’ she said drily. He noticed the tone.

  ‘I know you think I’m selfish. I’m not really. I go without lots of things, and after all, I should be quite comfortably off if I hadn’t married.’

  She flushed and bit her lip. When she spoke, she said: ‘I didn’t ask you to marry me.’

  ‘No, I thought you had money.’ It slipped out quite naturally. A bitter regret, the tone of a man who has made a bad bargain, and is sorry about it.

  ‘You married me for money?’ she repeated dazedly.

  ‘No ‒ no. Of course not. How you twist t
hings about. I admit I thought there was money; it wasn’t your fault that Johnny and that mother of yours had messed it all up.’

  She said quite calmly: ‘You married me for money?’

  ‘I did not.’ He was beginning to lose his temper. ‘Why will you women argue so? Why, you yourself told me you thought of running away from me. That was a bitter pill all right. Thought of running away from me.’

  She put out a hand and steadied herself against the stone pillar. She noticed for the first time that it was not stone at all, but plaster, and in places it was peeling off and disclosing the inferior substance. Odd how at times one noticed little things like these; symbolical of her life, imitation, sham, peeling, and disclosing a cheap interior.

  ‘At least,’ she said slowly, ‘I have never been dismissed from curacies … That affair with Agnes Spencer ‒’

  ‘Nothing in it, nothing in it; you imagined the whole thing.’

  ‘Emily, a mere child under age.’

  ‘You said it was untrue yourself, let me remind you.’

  ‘Yes, I said it to defend you. If I hadn’t said it, where would you have been now? Prison! Yes, it sounds horrid like that, but that is what happens to men of your calibre.’

  He sneered a little. ‘So easy to be melodramatic when it is all over and done with; no good stirring up the mud, and I had a very excellent defence ready.’

  ‘You had no defence when I asked you. You just grovelled at my feet and begged me to help you.’

  ‘Well, I knew you had made up your mind that it was all my fault. It always is my fault. I don’t pretend to be a plaster saint, but I’m not what you think me.’

  She gave a little choke uncommonly like a groan, and clutched the pillar closer. It was so cheap, so horrible, standing and waiting for the cab in the pouring rain, with the empty house behind them, and this hopeless wrangling.

  ‘It’s no good quarrelling,’ she said faintly.

  ‘Well, you started it.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to.’