by Ursula Bloom
‘Just because I said I must have bookshelves. Of course, if you really wish it, I’ll stack the books up and use them as chairs and tables. Anything for peace.’
‘George, that isn’t fair …’ If only Peter would write, if only Peter would write, and she could go to him. Because after this she meant to go to him. Nothing could stay her now. George had married her for money, and that was the stark truth.
Just then they heard the rumble of approaching carriage wheels.
V
Peter did write …
It was in the middle of the move, too, with a furniture van standing at the rectory door, and all the precious bits of furniture being carried in by three men, directed by a foreman called ‘Fred’.
George was in the library superintending the carpenter, who had chosen this inappropriate moment to come and put up the shelves, and who was hammering madly. There seemed to be no one left to do anything, save the two maids, who had completely lost their heads and succumbed to the charms of Fred. Mary, standing limply in the hall, telling each bearer of furniture where to put his load, flagged. She had tried to think it all out beforehand, but there seemed to be all manner of odd bits appearing for which she had not accounted in her inventory. They bewildered her, the alien chairs and tables, and she finally adopted the plan of consigning them all to a box-room till she could sort them out.
That was when the letters came. Three for George, one for herself, a fat one with the ship’s crest upon it. She held it crushed in her hand, this, the passport to her freedom, and she felt it burning deep into her imagination. The men passing to and fro little knew what she was experiencing, what delicious agony, what assailing doubt. She could not leave the movers. She was as a sentry who is sternly chained to his post of duty. She did call to George, asking him to release her and take her place for a moment, but he was concerned with his shelves. He must be there to see that they went up properly; it was most important that they should be exactly as he wanted them. She stayed on and on until she felt quite faint, then she suggested to Fred that the men should have some tea in the kitchen. Fred, who had already done well with the maids, especially Laura, the yellow-haired cook, agreed readily enough.
Mary went upstairs to her room. She must be far from George, she must get away from the sound of the hammering, and the room seemed to her to be furthest. A desultory room, the carpet strewn with pieces of straw and packing; the very new wardrobe in satinwood, piles of pictures standing in the corners. She sat down on the creaking wicker sofa (they had bought a real Chesterfield now, and so they could spare the old drawing-room one for their bedroom), and she took out the letter. She took it out slowly, because it would be so beautiful, she touched it sacredly as she touched his shawl, for, after all, being his it must be sacred; she could feel her heart beating from the very contact with the paper.
It seemed an eternity to that day when she had watched the destroyer nosing her way out to the open sea, her ensign fluttering astern. She ripped the envelope open; elation and suffocation seemed to be very akin. It was her own letter which dropped out. She touched it as though it were something leprous, an unclean thing of evil import, which she could not understand. She opened the short typewritten letter that had enclosed it.
H.M.S. Jasmine, Hong Kong.
Madam,
I regret to inform you that Lieutenant Peter Lloyd, R.N., died of typhoid fever at the Royal Naval Hospital, Hong Kong, three weeks ago. Under the circumstances I am returning your letter to you.
Yours faithfully,
D. S. Browning,
(Captain).
The paper slipped out of her fingers. She did not understand. It was all right ‒ it wasn’t really dreadful, only she didn’t understand. A great coldness enfolded her as though her passionate heart had turned to ice. She heard a thudding; her heart beating, perhaps, or feet marching. Of course it was feet marching. It was the Death’s Head Hussars coming down Wilhelm Strasse again … A naval officer with the church party … but they marched so loudly! It almost hurt her how loudly they marched. She wanted to scream to them to go more quietly. Echoing vibration of the band, steady thundering of feet. They were pounding now, pounding right into her.
Was it feet, or her heart?
She collapsed on to the floor in a dead faint.
VI
A year later the baby was born.
It seemed inconceivable that they had been there a whole year.
George had found her that day; he had also found the letter. He had not had the slightest compunction in reading it, and he had been wounded sorely. George’s chief bone of contention was that she should have dared to quibble at his morals. She, who was no better herself. In vain did Mary reiterate that she had done nothing wrong, in vain did she protest her innocence; George had twisted a pretty little story about the whole affair. He was wounded, he was mortified; he wasn’t at all sure whether he ought to forgive her! But he had forgiven her, of course, because George could no more get along without Mary than he could forget his own needs. He did not choose to forget the episode, but allowed it to crop up at convenient moments. That was George all over.
The living was comfortable, and he was popular in the parish, consisting of a mere handful of decent working people, who were delightfully unsophisticated.
Mamma and Mr. Jones had come together again. Mr. Jones had found the world a stony place, and was fond of comfort. His choice lay between semi-starvation in a garret with nobody to nag him, and comfort combined with Mamma who always nagged. He had held out for a long while, but a hard and cold winter and a considerable rise in food prices had sent him scurrying to beg pardon of Mamma like a naughty schoolboy. Mamma had received him with hysterics, had declared that she couldn’t and wouldn’t have him in the house, and, when he took her at her word and tried to walk out, had had hysterics and said that he was cruel to her.
Johnny had had another baby during the winter, to his chagrin, and had come down and spent a week-end with his sister. Mary had considered this to be safe, as there was no licensed house nearer than the Bell, which was situated three miles distant. She had not reckoned on Johnny. He had nosed it out in some miraculous manner, had managed to borrow the housemaid’s bicycle, and had disappeared. At midnight he had reappeared, without the housemaid’s bicycle, and entirely intoxicated. George had been very good about it. He had got Johnny up to bed, and tried to find out a little about the bicycle, which was subsequently discovered detrimentally entangled with a wheelbarrow at the drive gates. After that they decided that they could not ask Johnny again.
When Mary knew that the baby was coming she felt as though a weighty burden had been lifted from her shoulders at last. She loved the little village; she was intensely proud of the large house in its big garden; she was trying hard to be proud of George. The baby meant a new era, it might very possibly be the turning-point in a drab life.
She had put Peter away from her; it seemed that a door had been shut in her face, flung to, swung by a tumultuous force, the iron door of death. It was the invulnerable barrier between this world and the next. She knew now the hour when he had died, and that in his death he had reached out a hand, already chilling, to her warm live one. She ought to have known before; of course she ought to have known. But now she must forget. For George’s sake, for the child’s sake, she must put Peter out of her life and forget him. They would never meet again, never again.
The child came with the late Easter. George desired a daughter. Mary, contemplating it with the wise calm of her mentality, recalled the old rhyme:
My son’s my son till he gets him a wife.
My daughter’s my daughter all my life.
She felt that perhaps on the whole a daughter would be more satisfactory. The baby was a girl. When the doctor told George that he had a daughter, George, with that habitual perversity of his, said:
‘There, now, and I did so want a son.’
Apparently he was one of those people who are impossible to please. The ch
ild, a lusty little maiden of some seven pounds, had George’s fairish hair and her mother’s deeply purple eyes. Ten days after the baby’s birth, Mamma, bent upon her duty and entirely unexpected, appeared on a visit.
‘Just to see you are properly looked after,’ wrote Mamma in the letter that arrived by the preceding post. Nobody had ever supposed that Mamma would take it into her head to do this. The spare room was hastily divested of its dust-sheets and made all spick and span. George, thoroughly disgruntled, was pushed into his best suit and sent with a cab to meet Mamma at the station, four miles away. When they returned, sitting side by side in the ‘fly’, it was apparent to the whole world that they had already got wrong. They got more wrong as the visit progressed.
Everybody thought the baby very pretty, save Mamma. Mamma would have it that she squinted.
‘As if anyone can tell!’ said the enraged nurse; ‘all babies look squidged up and funny. She ought to know that.’
Mary, feeling weak and ill, would have stipulated for peace at any price; as long as the baby did not squint, she could not see that it mattered very much. Why argue with Mamma? Why not let her say what she chose, and leave it at that?
Mamma had come down with very definite opinions as to the baby’s name. The child would naturally be called after herself. Mamma looked upon the fact of her name being Eliza Agnes as no deterrent. ‘Eliza I’ll admit is not beautiful,’ she said, ‘but what’s wrong with Agnes, I should like to know?’
There was a good deal wrong with Agnes, if she had only known it. It was an ironical fact that Mamma’s name should signify a lamb.
‘We aren’t calling Baby after anybody,’ said Mary. ‘Something quite distinctive, quite apart.’
George had very beautiful ideas on the subject. He first suggested that she should be named after the saint on whose anniversary she happened to be born. George was getting more ritualistic than ever these days, and kept all manner of unheard-of saints. Only, when it was looked up it was found to be Alphage, which rather quenched his ardour. His next idea was a flower name, which he thought would be extremely romantic ‒ Daffodil, or Lilac, or something like that.
‘Lobelia,’ suggested Mary, ‘or Gyphsophila elegans; why not?’
‘You’re laughing at me.’
‘George, I should never dream of laughing at you.’
‘If Mary did not think herself so clever,’ remarked Mamma, ‘it would be so much easier! It is only the very ignorant person who poses as knowing everything. One of these days Mary will be sorry she has been so positive. Fancy making so much fuss about a baby’s name; why, it is ridiculous! I should like to know what you have against Agnes.’
Mary avoided George’s eye. ‘Why not a precious stone?’ she suggested: ‘aquamarine, bloodstone, amethyst ‒’
‘You are laughing at me. I’ve thought of a name I want it to be, but I don’t suppose either of you will listen to me.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’d like it to be Muriel. I like the name so much.’
Mary sighed a sigh of relief. If he had suggested Emily it would have been so difficult. It was the first wise suggestion that he had made, and although she did not care about the name she was so sick of the argument that she said languidly: ‘It shall be Muriel.’
Then Mamma fired up. ‘A horrible name,’ Mamma said. ‘A nasty modern name. I thoroughly dislike it, but of course you intend to choose entirely for yourselves. I’m not going to be asked a thing. I’m glad I didn’t behave like that when I had babies to name. Now Agnes is what that child ought to be called, and what your sense of duty should insist upon your calling her. It is a nice name, it goes in well with her surname. I can’t see why you don’t like it.’
Mary, left to herself, wondered what she would have called the baby. Joy, hackneyed but very pregnant with meaning. She wondered what the feminine of Peter would have been, and then she hit upon the name: it was Jasmine. She had supposed that George would tumble to the real meaning behind it at once, but George had a certain stolid stupidity which never fathomed very much.
‘You chose Muriel,’ she said, ‘and it is only fair that I should choose a name too. It’s a flower name.’
‘What I wanted all along.’
‘It’s Jasmine.’ Her eyes scrutinised his face in anguish.
‘I think it is rather a pretty name,’ was all he said.
VII
They went to the church for the baby’s christening, Mary and Mamma driving in the hired ‘fly’, and the baby on the nurse’s knee opposite to them. Mamma and the nurse had got heatedly and distressingly wrong. It was quite painful to share the same cab with them, so hostile were their looks. As the church was most inconveniently situated in a particularly bleak meadow, they had to drive round and approach it by a long-disused avenue, now green with grass. There were many gates to open, and the coachman grumbled more at each one, for the spring had been a wet one and the mud was deep. It was trodden by the animals, and they had to pick their way carefully when finally they disembarked at the church gate itself.
‘What a horrible place,’ Mamma said. ‘Just the sort of living George would get. Of course he hasn’t the brains to be given a respectable place. And why isn’t his mother here, I should like to know? She has never behaved properly; I don’t believe she likes you. We used to be good friends, she and I, I am sure, in the old days.’
And here was Mamma, as she picked her way through the mud with her bonnet getting more and more awry, drawing largely on her imagination, and trying to convince herself that once she and the Carews were on the friendliest footing. And it was a little hard, considering that Mamma was the chief bone of contention. They went across the wide dry path to the little iron gate between two straight yews like black-gowned sentinels; beyond lay the asphalt path. There were graves in prim rows, with mouldering stones sunk deep into the earth. Mary knew their pitiful little epitaphs by heart. ‘To the memory of Julia, wife of Walter Handsell.’ Poor Julia, who died at a paltry forty-two years, having had so little out of life. A great fir-tree with a lime beyond; a holly-tree on the right with a little baby’s grave lying in its pathetic roundness beneath it. So men come … so they go … A mere handful of years, a hundred at most, and they lie forgotten, lost in that yawning chasm of eternity, which may be so much, or just nothingness.
They entered the porch; it was a Norman archway with a sundial above it, and an Agnus Dei carved in stone. ‘What’s that?’ demanded Mamma, pointing at it with her umbrella.
‘An Agnus Dei.’
‘Oh, I suppose she lived here! Other people liked the name apparently; funny you and George should have such queer fancies about it.’
They passed within, across a wide oakum mat, with the square font beyond, and the deep red curtains of the vestry behind it. The nurse and the baby were in the back pew of all; shiny yellow pews they were, smelling of varnish and newness. George had collected the money and had had them installed. He had always done his best for the place.
Mary and Mamma sat up in the long pew behind the choir-stalls near the harmonium. Opposite was a stained window with a figure of St. John ‒ a small window of deliciously vivid reds and blues, and St. John wearing his halo much as ordinary people wear bowlers. All the village had come to the service; it was their idea of a delicate compliment, and they would not have stayed away at any price. The service progressed and the moment came. George, drawing on a gold and white stole, swept magnificently to the font. The harmonium brayed the preliminary bars of: ‘There’s a Friend for little children.’ Mary sank to her knees. She did not know why, but she wanted to cry. That mighty Friend for little helpless children. She heard the raucous tune pealing about her (the harmonium had not been tuned for years, and since the mice had nested there last autumn it had never been quite the same); she felt a flood of prayer outpoured from her soul to that of her Maker. He who had stood as Friend to all mankind. The blind and up-grasping faith penetrated the dark clouds, and seemed to reach the radiance of H
is light. He would guard her baby, her little baby, her own baby. He would guard her too.
She was conscious of Mamma prodding her shoulders violently with her lorgnettes. ‘You don’t kneel down here, you stand up,’ instructed Mamma, armed with her stupendous prayer-book, her purse and her umbrella, just as she had been armed years before at George’s first sermon.
Mary rose. She wanted to say, ‘Cannot we even pray in peace?’ but she dare not. The service proceeded with little squeaks and gurgles from Baby, and Mamma’s fervent responses, despite the fact that she was not a godmother, and was at the opposite end of the church and therefore attracted everyone’s attention with her stupendous ‘I will’s.
Mary could not conceal the fact that she was overjoyed because soon Mamma would get a shock. Mamma had no idea of Baby’s second name, for the simple reason that no one had dared to explain it to her. Mamma thought that it was to be just Muriel. One moment more … It came … Muriel Jasmine! Mamma dropped her lorgnettes and stared before her in infuriated amazement. Muriel Jasmine, and no Agnes! They’d better wait, that was all! Mamma’s mouth shut with a snap.
Driving home in the cab they caught it. Mary and her enraged Mamma sat side by side, and opposite to them George and the nurse.
‘A stupid name, a hideous name,’ said Mamma. ‘Upon my soul, I thought Muriel a bad enough one, but you don’t expect George to think of anything better. I thought that dreadful, but‒’
‘Muriel is a very good name,’ objected George, who had had enough of Mamma. ‘And, anyway, Mary chose Jasmine.’
‘I can’t think where she got it from.’
‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ George said crossly.
And then Mamma remembered. George might flounder about in his stolid stupidity, but not Mamma. Mamma could scent out anything. ‘Why, of course,’ said she. ‘Wasn’t that the name of that ship at Seaport where you all went to tea? You made fuss enough about it, goodness only knows, and it was only a stupid little ship, nothing like they build these days. That was where she got it from, I’ll be bound. It was that ship, wasn’t it?’
