XXII
Robert Corder’s work took him out of the house for a great part of the day, but it also brought him back at times when a business man is in his office and knows nothing of domestic affairs until he returns to find a meal awaiting him and the work of the day apparently done. Robert Corder was conscious perforce of the doings of the household. He would swing down the garden path in the morning and meet the butcher’s boy carrying a recognisable joint, and if the joint did not appear in a cooked condition that evening, he would wonder where it was and why Miss Mole had ordered it a day before it was needed, or he would come back and see half the drawing-room furniture in the hall and get a glimpse of Miss Mole doing something with a duster or a feather broom. His study was never disturbed in this manner. The fire was lighted before breakfast, and the room, presumably, dusted and swept, and when he was in the house he chose to sit there, but, even in that sanctuary, he could not be unaware of sounds and movements. He could hear the front door and the back door bells when they were rung and the thumping feet of Doris as she ran up the three stairs from the kitchen, and if she did not introduce a visitor into the study, he would, as likely as not, hear her voice, with its Radstowe burr, calling Miss Mole to settle some question with which she could not deal herself. He could distinguish Ethel’s prancing step from Miss Mole’s quick, even one, and sometimes, when he heard the front door shut, he would stroll to his window to see whether it was his housekeeper or his daughter who had gone out. When it was his daughter, he would have a slight feeling of discomfort: when it was Miss Mole he felt an active irritation. There was something wrong with Ethel’s appearance and he could not give it a name, but he knew she did not look definitely feminine, like Miss Patsy Withers, in spite of her bright colours, or completely unconscious of herself, as her mother had been, and she certainly was not pretty. That, perhaps, was a good thing. It would have been a great and highly distasteful anxiety to have had a daughter who attracted young men, and Ethel had given her heart to her work and seemed to be content. People spoke very well of her in the chapel and told him he should be as proud of such a daughter as she should be of such a father. This praise of her seemed to him somewhat exaggerated, but there was no doubt she was a good girl and her fits of passion seemed to be less frequent, but it was difficult to be patient with her nervousness and secretly he resented, while he benefited from, her protective plainness.
When he watched Miss Mole it was with definitely antagonistic feelings. The alert bearing of her head, her quick step, seemed to him unsuitable in a housekeeper, and arrogant in a woman who had no pretensions to good looks. If she had to be plain and thin, she should also have been meek, and he supposed it was possible to be domestically intelligent without looking as though she had some secret source of satisfaction in herself. That look had been growing on her lately and he could not but connect it with the visit and the letter of Mr. Blenkinsop. He had seen her as an unfortunate woman, undesired by any man, and he had despised her accordingly, and with the suspicion that Samuel Blenkinsop had found something in her which he had missed himself, he immediately set about searching for it and felt uneasy. He remembered, too, his discovery of Wilfrid, sitting on the floor and talking to her, not dutifully, but with enjoyment sparkling in his dark eyes, and it was increasingly evident that Ruth liked her.
Robert Corder did not understand that he was always jealous of those who gave to someone who was not himself and of those who received: what he did realise was that Miss Mole had some mysterious power to make certain people like her and that she did not like him, and as it was impossible for him to like a person first, he remained in his state of irritated interest and curiosity. Mrs. Spenser-Smith had been wise in her choice of a housekeeper: his house was well kept, his food was well cooked, and Ruth looked healthier, but Mrs. Spenser-Smith probably had no experience of Miss Mole as an inmate of her house, of this personality which gave every promise of being properly negative and then developed signs of positive character. Not once, since her arrival, had Miss Mole asked Robert Corder’s advice. The kitchen range, the gas, the hot water, might go wrong, and Miss Mole was equal to them or found someone else to manage them; she had no difficulty in keeping her accounts; she brought him no tales of dilatory or dishonest tradesmen. This peace from domestic care was what he wanted, what Mrs. Spenser-Smith had told him he ought to have and what Ethel had not been able to give him, but he would have been better pleased if he could have believed that Miss Mole was making determined efforts and overcoming her natural disabilities for his sake, instead of taking everything in her easy stride. He knew nothing of Miss Mole’s real difficulties, of the constant caution necessary to prevent Ethel’s jealousy when any two members of the family paid more attention to each other than they did to her, to give her encouragement without raising false hopes, to damp down her threatened returns to sentimentality about Wilfrid, to give her the position of mistress of the house while she did nothing to sustain it. Miss Mole had to intervene in the quarrels which sprang up so quickly between the sisters, to avoid giving evidence of the sympathy between Wilfrid and herself, to steer conversations into safe waters and, above all, to conceal the control she really exercised. It was exhausting work but it did not exist for Robert Corder. The family of the minister of Beresford Road Chapel should be, and therefore was, a happy one, and his own griefs, his consciousness of the different treatment he received in the chapel from what he received at home, were not allowed to mar the concord, but it seemed strange to him that while Mrs. Spenser-Smith should be ready, almost too ready at times, to help him and Miss Patsy Withers brought her rather touchingly simple little problems for him to solve, his own children should give him little and ask for less. There were no signs of Howard’s improvement in this or any other direction. He showed no affection and no enthusiasm, and Robert Corder was confirmed in his opinion that it was a mistake to make things too easy for a young man: his father had fought for his position and kept it; Howard accepted his advantages and did not use them. Robert Corder could speak of these dissatisfactions to no one, now that his wife had gone, and while she lived he had hardly noticed them, and there had been no Miss Mole to add to them. To discuss Miss Mole with Mrs. Spenser-Smith would be to criticize her judgment; to deplore the faults of his children might be to admit failures of his own, and when Miss Withers referred to them in terms of praise he could not buy her sympathy at the cost of her envy of a life in which work of eminent importance was combined with the amenities of the happy home he had made, yet it comforted him that she knew of the little rift in the lute for which he could not possibly be blamed. She seemed to have an intuitive distrust of Miss Mole which agreed with his own, and it was increased, no doubt, by Ethel’s story of the mattresses. It was wrong of Ethel not to have told him. It was a small matter, but it was indicative, and it was necessary for him to keep an eye on the stranger in the house. If it had not been Wilfrid’s mattress, he would have taken action, but he could not pamper the boy, even in the cause of discipline.
Such thoughts as these underlay his life when he was in the house; outside it, they were forgotten if no one jogged his memory, and he strode about the streets, visited the sick, attended his committee meetings, with an energy and liveliness which gave him a reputation as a man of action. His actions were generally those of his committees, but his enjoyment of an authority which never presented itself to his mind as being safely diluted, his look of vitality, his handsome head, his conviction that he was of importance in the religious and civic life of Radstowe, had a suggestive value for others as well as for himself. To those who were sad or sick, his entrance was reanimating; knowing this, he was able to help them as he sincerely desired to do, and it was inevitable that he should suffer from a feeling of neglect and of misvaluation when he returned to his home where his importance and his usefulness were diminished by the dullness, or the wilfulness of its inmates.
He had no great power for concentration and no desire for peace in which to meditate or to read and, unless he had callers to interview, he had little to do in the house when his letters were written and his sermons prepared, and he had time and willingness to listen to the sounds of voices, feet, bells and doors, to conjecture or to criticise. He would hear a murmuring from the kitchen as he passed through the hall and, sometimes, a burst of laughter, and making some excuse, such as the need for another pair of boots, he would penetrate into the kitchen regions and find Miss Mole and Doris mysteriously busy at the table or the stove, when he had expected to find one or both of them idle.
“The Christmas puddings are ready for stirring,” Hannah said to him on one of these occasions. “Will you have your stir now?”
“My stir?”
“Everybody has to stir, for luck.”
Doris turned aside with a giggle. She was embarrassed by the presence of the minister in the kitchen and by Miss Mole’s airy way with him, and Robert Corder, interpreting this sound correctly and reacting to it immediately, took the opportunity to prove his essential homeliness. He stirred manfully, circling the wooden spoon through the unwieldy mixture and an unmistakable scent, very pleasant but forbidden, rose to his nostrils.
“I hope there is no brandy in it,” he said seriously.
Miss Mole looked disappointed. “I know some people prefer beer,” she said, “but I think brandy’s better. I ought to have asked you.”
He dropped the spoon. “But Miss Mole, you must know we never have intoxicants in this house, and I happen to be the president of the Radstowe Temperance Society.”
“Does it count,” she asked meekly, “when it’s cooked and in a pudding? I’m so sorry. What can we do about it? I can’t possibly eat all these puddings by myself.”
“Waste would only be an aggravation of the mistake,” he said sharply, “but, another time, Miss Mole …”
He went away, very much disturbed. Surely the woman could not be as simple as she seemed, and if she was not, what was she? And this was the sort of thing which could be ignored in an ordinary household but was of real importance in one like this. Doris would spread the story; it might have a far-reaching effect on the girl’s attitude towards the drink question, and probably the brandy had been bought through that young man whose relationship to Doris had affected Robert Corder’s own attitude towards the girl, as towards someone not quite unspotted from the world of the flesh, and it would be impossible to offer Christmas pudding to any visitor to the house.
He returned hurriedly to the kitchen.
“And the mincemeat?” he enquired.
“I’m afraid that is contaminated, too,” Miss Mole replied.
No, she was not simple, and he remembered the mattresses. He had an impulse to order the destruction of the savoury mess, to let the family go puddingless at Christmas, but he hesitated and the ardour of his indignation left him, and he did nothing. What he needed in his house was a little committee of people like himself which would frame and pass resolutions and give orders in which responsibility was shared. Alone, he felt that, in some way he would be baffled and his position worsened, but when the pudding appeared on Christmas Day he would quietly refuse to eat it and he hoped Miss Mole would feel ashamed. Then swiftly, with the glibness acquired by answering awkward questions at his class for young men, he arranged such tolerant, humorous comments as might be needed, on domestic accidents and the lenience which must be extended to others in affairs of conscience, but he felt very bitter towards a woman who put him to these shifts and, as the object of his suspicions and dislike, she became oddly fascinating: he liked looking at her and despising her for her lack of beauty, he enjoyed listening to her and silently sneering at her remarks: he was puzzled by the frankness which alternated with her slyness and he did not see how he was to get rid of her without less petty reasons to offer Mrs. Spenser-Smith, a practical woman who would make nothing of the little objections he could name and who would not understand that a mere personality could trouble his peace of mind. He saw himself permanently saddled with Miss Mole and, two days after the pudding incident, he found more causes for mistrustful speculation.
He saw her go down the garden path in what might be taken for her best apparel and, as she went up the road, she waved a hand gaily towards the next door house. It was growing dusk, but he saw her hand plainly in its light glove and the light glove offended him. She was not at the tea table and when he asked where she was Ethel reported that she had gone out. He made a dubious sound and Ethel, tactlessly loyal to Miss Mole, said quickly: “She has to go out sometimes.”
“I am quite aware of that, Ethel. Do you know where she has gone?”
“She said she was going to see Mrs. Gibson first,” Ethel said, and he allowed a sufficient pause to elapse before he made some reference to Mr. Samson. Had anyone seen him lately? Did he still live alone?
Ethel said she had not seen, and was not interested in, the horrid old man, but Ruth said, a little shyly: “He isn’t horrid. It’s just his face and that’s not his fault. Miss Mole says she thinks he’s rather nice, like everybody else when you get to know them.”
“And how has Miss Mole discovered this?”
“Oh, she just knows things like that,” Ruth said contentedly, pretending not to notice her father’s covert sneer.