The Passionate Heart (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  She said in tearless calm: ‘I will leave you yourself, George; that ought to suffice …’ And she went.

  X

  A deed was drawn up at a solicitor’s at Stansfield, a deed whereby George promised to allow Mary the magnificent sum of one hundred and twenty pounds a year, to be paid in quarterly instalments. To Mary, this discussion in the dreary office before a total stranger was desecration. It was a grey office, full of musty books, and the solicitor was a grey man, with a total lack of imagination. He had never married. ‘He must,’ thought Mary, ‘see so much of other people’s mistakes that he knows better.’ It seemed a logical conclusion at which to arrive. A musty office, smelling of disuse and damp and sunlessness. It stemmed the virility within one, it was a damning atmosphere.

  The deed and the stamp cost nearly sixteen pounds, which horrified George, who was finding his love affairs becoming exceedingly expensive. He was also worried as to the attitude which the bishop might adopt. Even bishops are not habitually blind. Mary had set the story going that Muriel had glands, and the doctor said that the air of Pebbridge was not bracing enough.

  She had taken a small cottage by the sea at Dornsands on the East Coast. Mary had found this cottage with difficulty, for the rents were high, and she thought that a hundred and twenty a year was going to be a difficult matter to apportion.

  She supposed that the sea would perhaps supplement a modest income. One could take lodgers. She did not cloak it by the pseudonym of ‘paying guests’, she was too sincere for that. They would have to work hard, she and Muriel; they could not possibly afford a maid, and the cottage would take much time. She was furnishing it out of the furniture which Mamma had given to her when she married.

  ‘That’s it, take everything. Don’t mind me,’ George had declared.

  It had been difficult explaining it all to Muriel. Her romance in ashes. Years ago on the beach, watching the destroyer creaking and plunging like some puffy old woman, through the hills and valleys of the North Sea, she had been afraid to take, as it were, a mallet and shatter her romance. She had chosen to abide by a mistake rather than admit it.

  Now the romance had been shattered for her.

  She wrote in an icy vein to Mrs. Knight and suggested that she should not burden the rectory with her presence during Mary’s last few days there. She collected her vanload of chattels and prepared to say goodbye.

  George did not matter. After all, he was but the poor husk of what once had been. She found that she loved the place far more than she had supposed; absurd little things, that she had sneered at once, suddenly stabbed her swiftly like sabres. The last Sunday, the sunlight dappling the Agnus Dei on the wall; sitting in church and watching St. John in his ridiculous halo. The field, bleak and wind-ridden; George, who to show his superiority would walk across it and got chased for his pains. The old, odd scramble through the russet thorn and yellowing leaves, with Muriel a little dishevelled.

  ‘Why will Father do it? They’ll kill him one day. I believe that black beast knows him and does it on purpose. Haven’t you noticed it always seems to single him out?’

  And her: ‘I know … I know.’

  The last hymn of all in the twilit afternoon:

  O Strength and Stay Upholding all Creation,

  Who ever doth Thyself unmoved abide …

  She wanted to cry, but she dared not. George at the altar pronouncing the blessing, George who was a martyr, who was sacrificing all for a tremendous love. George, who never had understood anything.

  Later that night, in the anguished silence broken only by the owls hooting in the elm-tree, and the whir of wings beating against the purple of the heavens, Muriel awoke to find her mother crying.

  ‘Darling … darling … you mustn’t cry.’

  ‘It hurts so, Murie, it hurts so.’

  ‘We still have each other.’

  ‘I know … I know.’

  And then Muriel said very gently, very slowly: ‘Who chose my name?’

  ‘Your father, my dearest.’

  ‘I see.’ And, after another silence: ‘As we are starting all over again, couldn’t I have a new name? I like my other one so much better.’

  And Mary, clasping the warm young body to her own and glorying in the comfort of it, said tenderly, ‘Of course, darling, of course; you shall be Jasmine.’

  PART V: HUBERT

  I

  The cottage by the sea at Dornsands was old and rickety and extremely draughty. It was in a row of ten other cottages, inhabited by ten suitable tenants, and it was built in the era when architecture was at its lowest level. It was red, and the roof was of slate. One opened the ill-fitting door into the main parlour ‒ ‘Our lounge hall, Mummy,’ as Jasmine said. Behind was the kitchen, and a wee scullery; upstairs two lean bedrooms. It was hideous.

  On one side lived Mr. and Mrs. Roberts, a newly-wed postman and his bride. He played the American organ which they had bought on the hire system. On the other lived an old sailor and his family. It was not propitious.

  Mary and Jasmine did their best to disguise the front room into some semblance of beauty, and because their furniture was old they achieved some measure of success. They disguised the kitchen as a dining-room, using only the scullery for cooking, but fish (and owing to its cheapness at Dornsands it formed their staple dish) had a way of permeating the whole place. When it wasn’t their own fish it was somebody else’s. It actually refused to be kept out; it really was most trying.

  Mary found herself hopelessly unsuited to cope with the household work. She had had servants all her life, and she found it difficult. Jasmine took on the role of housemaid, her mother that of cook, and they tried to manage that way.

  They had been at Dornsands a fortnight when the war ended; it tottered to its close. Mary had supposed that with the great victory she would go mad, but it happened when all England was in the throes of influenza, and Jasmine lay seriously ill. They thought that the girl must die. It seemed that nothing could save her from that unrelenting hold which death had set upon her. It was Mary who won through.

  In those few days she learnt more than she had ever learnt in all her thirty-nine years of life. Her mother-love went forth to fight for the adored creation of her body. Like a great bird it spread wide wings over the unconscious Jasmine. It would not let her die. During the long hours in which the splendid battle was fought, Mary and Jasmine faced each other, the one predominantly conscious, the other hopelessly unconscious. Mary would not let her go.

  She should not go …

  Mary hovered over the bed where the pathetic little figure lay, while through the room throbbed the terrible stertorous breathing. She stayed there, conscious only of a strongly projected personality, her own. She was amazed to find the closer proximity with God. Here, by her side, He also fought. Not the Omnipotent Being of the Church’s teaching, but a God Who, powerless to stay all evil, lent His aid eternally to the support of right. He fought with her; He aided her, but she knew that the most depended on her own strength, on the power of that personality which she projected. Jasmine should live; she would make her live.

  Inch by inch Mary fought for her child; she refused to give way. She did not sleep herself, nor eat, but, spent and weary, she fought on with the fierce desperation of eternal motherhood.

  She won!

  The temperature started to drop just when it seemed that the end was in sight. It fell point by point, but still Mary did not relax. Only when the unconsciousness ended, and the child, stirring restlessly, opened vague eyes and asked wearily what had happened, then did Mary stay. She had, she felt, given re-birth to Jasmine. In bitter labour-pains she had fought for the birth of this new child; she had put forth a warm and virile self, and struggling and exhausted had dragged Jasmine back to life. It had been a physical combat as much as a mental one, and she had conquered. It had all happened in this room with its hideous squareness, and the deep pink curtains drawn between them and the sea; with the big white bed and the girl lying in
it like a corpse, save that her face was still uncovered. Time had not been but had passed with a swift merging of days into nights and again into days. And the place was etched with the memory. Square, hideously square; pink curtains that waved; Mamma’s austere furniture set primly round and the bed in the middle, the arena of the fray.

  Muriel had died here, but Jasmine had lived.

  With a whimsical delight Mary began a delicious game with herself. Muriel had been George’s child; Jasmine, the new-born delight of her heart, she tried to think of as Peter’s.

  It seemed very hard that, though she had not sinned, she had been blamed so harshly. It might be all wrong, but she would have gloried in Peter’s baby. If only Jasmine had been his, if only! A woman hates procreation by a man whom she does not love, and the child of that procreation has but half the chances of its more blessed brothers and sisters.

  Mary played this ridiculous game with herself, and she knew that no one in the world would ever grasp it. She had had two children: Muriel, who had been George’s daughter and who had died of pneumonic influenza in nineteen-eighteen; Jasmine, who had been Peter’s child, and who had suffered the same illness, but had lived. She supposed that if she ever mentioned a word of it to anybody else he would adjudge her mad, or prematurely senile. But she was neither.

  She was an idealist, and her ideals had fallen short, very short, that was all. There is so much beauty in our own imaginations that it is marvellous that more of us do not foster it. She realised now that in her Victorian horror of sinning she had done wrong. She should have sinned. Strange, that! How shocked Johnny and Mamma would have been, and smug, respectable Wally, grown into a round little gentleman, with a conventional mind, exactly like hundreds of other round little gentlemen in a round little world. She should have sinned and gained everything; as it was, she had not sinned and had lost everything. Just her poor little game of pretence; that was all that was left to her.

  The people in the row of cottages were really very nice, though of the sort that would have horrified Mamma. They meant so very well. The postman played the American organ whenever he was at home; he did not play scales, he was much too clever for that. He played ‘Pleasant are Thy Courts above’ and ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’ as a pleasing little diversion the one from the other. The fisherman who ran the Dora Bella was genial, and not offensive, save when he ran to a surfeit of bad fish and deposited it as refuse in the back garden. Then he was unbearable. But, having got over their primary idea that Mary was ‘wishful to be grand, a-calling the front room the drorin’-room, and the kitchen the dining-room’, they accepted her and were cordial enough in a rough and ready way.

  For two years a great peace settled upon them. She with Peter’s child, this babe born of her mentality, product of a whimsical game which she played with herself. Then Hubert came.

  Jasmine was seventeen and provocatively sweet. Of course Mary knew that she would marry, and, although she dreaded the subsequent loneliness, she craved the girl’s ultimate happiness.

  During the two years George paid up the specified amounts on the specified dates; and twice a year, as desired by the bishop, who evidently believed in covering up infidelity as nicely and properly as he could, George spent the inside of a week at Dornsands as a happy father and a virtuous husband.

  These bi-annual visits of George had been small trials disguised as great joys. One had to seem pleased to see him, for the sake of appearances. Every time that George came Mary was more and more appalled by the thought of what she had ever seen in him. The marriage could only have been the product of propinquity, nothing more.

  George was proud of Jasmine. It hurt that George should feel like that about her, for Mary had played the beautiful game of ‘Let’s Pretend’ to such a degree with herself that she almost believed it. Then George would lumber in and spoil it all. George was running to fat these days, and getting rather frowsty with it; he had clung to Mrs. Knight, whose husband had conveniently died, or rather Mrs. Knight had clung to him. She was now instated at the rectory as housekeeper, and Mrs. Grundy was propitiated by the presence of a young maid. George said that he was blissfully happy, and the bishop’s moral objections were nicely smarmed over, and apparently he was satisfied that nothing could be wrong.

  In her cottage, despite the endless toiling and weekly accounts feverishly followed, Mary was happy. The money was little, menacingly little, and Jasmine, goaded by the urge of youth, craved for entertainments and dances and fun. Mary could not give them to her, there was literally not a farthing to spare. Only by the most rigorous care did they manage to live at all, but they were happy, deeply and sincerely happy in each other; and into all this joy came Hubert.

  Hubert was the only son of an old couple in the little town who kept a dilapidated library and news agency. Hubert had been the good boy, and had won a scholarship, and, having gone on from one glory to another, had managed to achieve dental honours with the financial aid of the Government on quitting the Army. Having qualified, he had made the colossal mistake of returning to his native town to start a practice. Hubert was small and very slight; he was fair-skinned and had pale blue eyes and fairish hair, and, most unfortunately of all, he still showed obvious signs of that whence he had sprung.

  Hubert practised in two little rooms in the main street over the local tea-shop. He had had the sense not to take his mother’s rather fearful drawing-room, which she had urged.

  The affair started with Jasmine having a tooth stopped. Mary went with her; they sat in the small and hideous waiting-room, reading stale papers, and criticising the too-heavy frieze and the firescreen with poppies splashed in paint upon it. Hubert saw Jasmine; he put in a dressing and she was to call again on Wednesday. On leaving, Jasmine said:

  ‘I think he is rather nice, don’t you, Mummy?’

  And Mary said, without thinking: ‘Oh, nice enough!’

  Jasmine called again on the Wednesday and on several other Wednesdays; the tooth was a difficult one and took a lot of stopping. Mary never knew how Hubert started coming to the house, but it just happened. He would come to tea, sitting uncomfortably on the edge of a chair, and sipping tea from a cup, with his little finger gracefully curled. The curl of the irritating little finger galled Mary; he had, too, trying little mispronunciations such as ‘ingine’ for ‘engine’ and ‘me mother’ for ‘my mother’, and Mary felt herself bridling under a severe dislike. She was genuinely alarmed, because Jasmine showed a marked approval of Hubert, and such an approval was dangerous. Mary never actually spoke about it until the afternoon when he came to tea, and Mr. and Mrs. Baker ‒ the vicar and his wife ‒ were there. Mrs. Baker was angular and had a similarity to cold toast; he was of a simian countenance; and, although they repeatedly teaed with Mary, she was never given the opportunity to sample their meals in return. The cottage was small, and Hubert came in late, and, as far as Mary was concerned, unexpectedly. A certain frigidity settled upon them all; they instinctively remembered the library and the news agency; one could see Hubert also uncomfortably recalling it. And all this in a room twelve feet square, with a window flat with the wall, propping a nice edge for geraniums.

  ‘Pleasant weather,’ said the vicar, who apparently felt that as vicar he should approach the breach.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Hubert, ‘but a bit mild.’

  ‘Still, it cuts the winter short.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mary offered a cake. ‘Will you have some cake?’

  ‘I don’t mind if I do.’

  She winced a little and offered it to him, and he took a piece.

  ‘Prices don’t seem to be coming down much,’ said Mrs. Baker. ‘Everything is still dreadfully dear. I did think with the war over ‒’

  Hubert burst in: ‘Charlie Duggan was only saying ’t ’ome the other day to me mother, it’d be ten years before there’d be much of a change.’ Charlie Duggan was the son of the grocer.

  ‘Quite,’ said everybody without enthusiasm.

&n
bsp; All the while Mary was acutely conscious of Jasmine sitting in her corner, her round blue eyes rounder than ever, staring owlishly at Hubert. Hubert, who didn’t mind if he did have a piece of cake, and who drank with a little finger fancifully curled above the cup-handle. She knew that something had got to be done about it; Jasmine was too good for this, much too good.

  The conversation was patchy and ragged; there were awkward gaps. It was Jasmine who rose. ‘I am going to change a book at the library,’ she stated.

  ‘If you are going along to me mother’s,’ suggested Hubert, ‘I’ll come along too.’

  ‘How nice of you.’

  ‘Oh, not at all, a gentleman must see a lady along the street.’

  ‘A gentleman,’ thought Mary, ‘a gentleman!’ but aloud she only reminded the girl: ‘Don’t be late, darling, it is getting dark already.’

  ‘Days shorten,’ the vicar put in, ‘Advent coming along.’

  Jasmine and Hubert were at the door. ‘I shan’t be long, Mummy. Mr. and Mrs. Baker won’t have left, so I won’t say goodbye.’

  Hubert abridged his adieux; from the very lintels he said, ‘Well, good night all,’ and he and Jasmine disappeared.

  Mary could feel the stern disapproval thumping in her heart. She tried to talk with the Bakers in a natural way, but it was very difficult and she found herself constrained. All the while her heart demanded of her: ‘What would Peter do?’ ‘How would he deal with this situation?’ If only time had not progressed and girls had not become so modern! Mamma would never have permitted this. Jasmine would have ridden in harness, and Mamma would have applied the rein very swiftly. But you could not do that nowadays.

  The Bakers did not stay long.

  After they had gone Mary gathered the tea-cups on to a tray and carried them to the sink. She washed them and put them away, then laying the simple evening meal. Bread and macaroni cheese; they could afford no butter. She sat down wearily beside the table; it would be so easy to adopt the wrong attitude, so hard to seize upon the right one. Jasmine was naturally athirst for love and life; poverty must gall her very deeply. She had a right to the end she sought, but Hubert! … Mary could not help telling herself again and again … Hubert was awful!