IX
It was a long time since Hannah had lived with a family. After an exhausting experience in which she had battled with half-a-dozen riotous children, an ailing mother and a father who tried to be confidential about the trials and disappointments of marriage, she had taken a post with an old lady in the hope of comparative leisure and, like an actress who makes a success in a particular kind of part and finds it difficult to get another, she had seemed doomed to old, invalid and lonely ladies for the rest of her life. She had naturally been suspected of inability to deal with the young after an existence of picking up dropped stitches, fetching clean pocket handkerchiefs and reading aloud, though Hannah could have been eloquent about the wearing nature of such work. Often, she had looked at a charwoman with envy, desiring healthy labour with brush and bucket, and for her folly in not hiring a bedroom and letting herself out by the day, she blamed what must have been an odd lingering desire for the gentility she affected to despise. She would have made an admirable charwoman: that vulgar strain in her which Lilla justly deplored, so unsuitable in a companion or a housekeeper, would have been a positive recommendation in a charwoman, and she pictured herself, going from house to house, energetic, good-humoured, free of speech, the perfect charwoman of fiction, with a home which was all her own and none of these tangled personalities to deal with. Well, she would tell herself with a sniff, she might come to it yet, but women in that walk of life were not liable to be made the heirs of rich old gentlemen, and towards that pleasant prospect Hannah still pretended to be gazing. She had seen no one in the chapel who answered to the description, and though she had waved a duster out of every window, she had not met No. 16’s roguish leer. A sparkling October had given place to a damp November and the weather, she supposed, was bad for parrots and for gardening. She sometimes saw No. 16 trundling towards the back gate, she heard him calling in the cats at night, but she had no time to plan encounters, for she worked as hard as any charwoman and had to adapt herself to new and difficult conditions.
In her other situations where there was a man of the house, he had left it at a reasonable hour in the morning and could be trusted not to reappear until the evening: there was no such regularity in the movements of Mr. Corder. The absence or presence of his hat and coat was the only surety that he was out or in, and it became a habit with Hannah to glance at the pegs as she went through the hall and to feel her spirits rising or falling with what she saw there, another unwilling confession that his personality was not negligible. Hannah’s somewhat toneless singing, which contrasted so strangely with the quality of her speaking voice, was generally silenced when he was in the house; he damped down the tempers of his daughters and Hannah wondered if he knew they had them; he stifled conversation, for he was ready with information on all subjects, and opinions which differed from his own either amused or angered him, yet hardly a day passed without a caller, someone needing help or advice, an ardent chapel worker with some difficulty to be solved, a deacon on a mission of importance, and the voice which came from the study was not always Robert Corder’s, and though he might lead the laughter, there was response to it, and people went away looking happier than they had come. Nevertheless, Hannah would make a grimace at the study door as she passed. She was sure Mrs. Corder, from her place on the great man’s desk, was listening gravely to what he said and making her acute, silent comments, balancing the counsels he gave against what she knew of him and yet, more tolerant than Hannah, refusing to judge him harshly.
She had made of Mrs. Corder a person like herself, with more wisdom, more kindness and more patience, qualities she must have needed in excess, Hannah thought grimly, for she who prided herself on her willingness to accept the good and bad in men and women as easily as she accepted their physical and mental parts, was deliberately antagonistic to Robert Corder. The swing of his coat tails vexed her as probably the swing of her skirts vexed him; she would not believe in the boasted broad-mindedness of a man who sneered at opposing views or waved them aside, and whose small, tight mouth she could discern under the moustache which masked it. Like most childless women, she exaggerated the joys and privileges of possessing offspring and Robert Corder seemed unaware of them. He was not an unkind father; he was amiable enough and ready to expand under the affection he had made it impossible for them to show him, but he seemed to Hannah to treat his daughters as an audience for his sentiments and the record of his doings and to forget that these girls had characters, unless they happened to annoy him. While Hannah chafed under his bland assumptions, she enjoyed watching for corroborative evidence of the estimate she had made of him and he rarely disappointed her, for, when things went well with him, he had to talk, and it was then that Wilfrid’s eyes sought hers and with the tiniest droop of an eyelid, lift of an eyebrow or face of unnatural solemnity, sent his message to her across the table.
Hannah took a penitential pleasure in controlling herself. If she asserted her personality before she had established herself firmly, even Lilla’s patronage would not save her. She had to persuade Robert Corder that she was useful before she let him suspect her of a mind quicker than his own, and she behaved discreetly, for she had her compact with Mrs. Corder to keep, she had her own powers to prove and, though she would have laughed at the idea, she had the zeal of a reformer under her thin crust of cynicism. She wanted to fatten Ruth and see an occasional look of happiness on her face, to ease Ethel’s restlessness and get some sort of beauty into the house. She could not change the ugly furniture—and there Mrs. Corder had badly failed—but friendliness and humour and gaiety cost no money; they were, in fact, in the penniless Hannah’s pocket, waiting for these difficult people to take them, and Hannah bided their time and her own.
She found that Ethel’s labours at the Mission were not so arduous as the state of the house implied. She had bursts of feverish activity, she was constant in her attendance at the Girls’ Club and she sometimes helped her father with his correspondence, and then, for a whole day, it would seem she had nothing to do, and she would shadow Hannah about the house, as though she dreaded loneliness, watch her as she worked, without offering to help, and spend the evening turning the pages of a book, making fitful conversation, repairing, or making changes in her rather tawdry clothes. She had a misguided passion for colour and for ornaments, and the jingling of her beads was the constant accompaniment to her restless movements. Ruth, frowning over her lessons, would beg her to be quiet and one night she asked why the drawing-room fire should not be lit, so that Ethel and Miss Mole could sit there and leave her in peace.
“We can’t afford a fire in every room in the house,” Ethel explained.
“Doris has one to herself, Father has another, why should the rest of us have to share one? And anyhow, it’s Miss Mole who manages the money now, so you needn’t interfere!”
Miss Mole said nothing. This remark was probably intended as a jeer at Ethel, but, at least, it recognised her own existence, and a small smile must have come on her lips, for Wilfrid, entering at that moment, gave a clap of his hands and cried, “I’ve been wondering who you were ever since the happy hour when I first saw you and I’ve found out at last! Good evening, Mona Lisa. And don’t pretend you don’t know it’s you I’m talking to!”
Hannah looked up, then down. “It’s the long nose,” she said.
“Not a bit of it! It’s the secret smile. It’s all the wisdom of the world.”
Ethel was at a loss and seemed distressed. Ruth glanced up curiously for an instant and then bowed her head over her books and shielded her face with her hands.
“I can’t remember, for the moment,” Ethel said, “who Mona Lisa is.”
“A plain woman,” Hannah said.
“Then it’s very rude of Wilfrid,” there was relief in Ethel’s voice, “to say you’re like her.”
“On the contrary,” he said, “she may be plain, but she’s the most fascinating woman in the world.”
“Oh!” said Ethel blankly, and, after a moment’s fidgeting, she went out of the room.
Wilfrid nodded towards the door. “She’s gone to look her up in the dictionary!”
“No, she hasn’t,” Ruth spoke drily. “She’s gone up to her room and she’ll be opening and shutting drawers and banging things about for hours and I shan’t be able to go to sleep.” Her voice rose painfully. “Why haven’t you more sense?” she cried. “If you want to say things like that, why can’t you say them when she isn’t here?”
For the first time in weeks, Hannah forgot to be on her guard. A feeling of great mental weariness, of physical sickness, overcame her. The work slipped from her hands and she leaned back in her chair, shutting her eyes for a minute. It seemed to her horrible that Ruth should have so clear an insight into Ethel’s nature, and such bitter experience of it, that Ethel’s nature should be what it was. At Ruth’s age, Hannah had just gone to school in Upper Radstowe, with an intimate, frank knowledge of sexual processes, acquired by living on a farm, and was discovering that matters which her father had not scrupled to discuss in her presence were the subjects of sly whisperings in the school. The shock she suffered was different from the one to which Lilla piously laid claim, for Lilla was disgusted by physical details and Hannah was disgusted that anyone should consider them unclean, and she had been spared Ruth’s irritating contact with a mind subject, no doubt unconsciously, to the dictates of the body.
The crudity of this thought was distasteful to Miss Mole; the truth of it was worse. It was all very well to talk about civilization’s benefits to women and the preservation of their chastity, but what was happening to the minds of countless virgins who would never be anything else if they wished to be thought respectable? And while Ruth, like Ethel, was probably in ignorance of causes, she, too, was the unfortunate victim of effects.
Hannah sighed, and raised her eyes to find Ruth looking at her with a startled interest, and to wonder, under that look, whether her policy of self-effacement was the right one.
There was a fire in the drawing-room the next evening and there was a feeling of holiday in the house. Robert Corder was speaking at some meeting outside Radstowe and would not be back that night, and Hannah prepared a supper of surprises, such as they could not often have, for he was a hearty eater and needed solid fare. The family had the grace to recognise her efforts: Ethel pathetically did her best to pretend she had no grudge against Wilfrid or Miss Mole, Ruth openly enjoyed the food, Wilfrid forebore to flatter or to tease, and Hannah told herself that this was a very good imitation of a temporarily happy family.
When the meal was over Ruth was left in the dining-room to do her work, as she had desired, in peace, but Hannah lingered to repair the fire and gather up the mending which was her nightly occupation.
“Now you’ll be all right, won’t you?” she said cheerfully.
Ruth’s small, worried, face became more strained. “I didn’t say I wanted to be alone,” she said, and Hannah realized that her apparent sullenness was embarrassment. “I only wanted to be quiet. You sit so still. You’re not like Ethel. And she’ll be happier, alone, in there with Wilfrid.”
“And I’d rather stay here,” said Hannah, and neither of them spoke again until Ruth pushed her books aside and said she was going to bed.
“Good night,” Hannah said, with a cool nod and smile.
Ruth stooped to the fire and warmed her hands and then, with a little catch of her breath, she went away.
“I shall get her yet!” Hannah said to herself.
At some time during that night, she woke with a start. She had been dreaming a variation of a dream she often had. The scene was always the same. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of her cottage, in one of the low-ceilinged rooms or in the orchard, she was supremely happy, bewildered, or in great distress, and tonight trouble had been predominant. She thought the pain of it must have waked her, or her own cry, but as she lay, trying to compose herself, she heard a sound outside her door and the turning of the handle.
“Who is it?” she said and, under the influence of her dream, her voice was not quite steady.
“It’s only me, Miss Mole. I thought I heard funny noises.”
Hannah fumbled for the matches and lit the candle by her bed. Ruth stood in the doorway, clad only in her nightgown, with her feet bare, and in the uncertain light she looked like a little wraith with frightened eyes.
Hannah swung herself out of bed. “Get in, quick!” she cried. She threw the bedclothes over Ruth and put on her own dressing-gown. “What is it?” she asked briskly. “Burglars?”
“I don’t know.” Ruth’s teeth were chattering. “I’d been dreaming.”
“Ah—so had I,” Hannah said.
“I’d been dreaming—and I expect I’m being silly, but I wish I needn’t sleep in that dressing-room. It’s bad enough when Father’s there, but tonight his room was so empty or so—or so full. And I couldn’t find the matches to light the gas, and I thought I heard someone moving, so I ran up here. I’m sorry, Miss Mole.”
“Don’t mention it!” Hannah said, making a funny face and sitting on the bed. “If it’s burglars, I propose to stay here. No good interfering with them. Might cause bad feeling. We’ll give them a few minutes to help themselves, and when I think they’ve gone I’ll go and look for them.”
Ruth laughed, and it was the first time Hannah had heard her do it naturally. “I don’t suppose it was burglars at all. They wouldn’t come to a house like this, would they? But I don’t want to go back to that room, Miss Mole.”
“You shan’t. I’ll go. We don’t mind each other’s sheets, do we? And you’ll feel happy up here, won’t you, with my little ship on the mantelpiece, and you’ll go to sleep?”
Ruth nodded. “Where did you get your little ship?”
“Off the mantelpiece in my old home in the country. I’ll tell you about it some day.”
“Whereabouts in the country?”
“Over the hills—but not very far away.” She was silent for a minute or two, looking down. “Well,” she said, “I should think they’ve gone by this time. Good night. Promise you’ll go to sleep.”
“Won’t you be frightened yourself?”
“Not a bit. I met a burglar once and liked him. I’ll tell you about that, too, in the daytime. I shall have to put out the candle, you know.”
“I know. I don’t mind. Miss Mole—” darkness made this confession easier—“I don’t believe I really believed there were burglars at all.”
“No. It was a bad dream. I was having one myself. I’m glad you woke me. I’ll buy some night-lights tomorrow. The matches are never where you want them.”
“And they go out when you’re in a hurry. And Miss Mole—” this was still more difficult—“you won’t tell anybody, will you?”
“But, of course I shall!” Hannah said with a mocking seriousness. “The first thing I shall do in the morning is to tell Doris, then your sister, then your cousin, and when your father comes home he shall hear all about it.”
Ruth laughed again, a little ghostly sound, and Hannah, as she went down the dark stairs, said to herself triumphantly, “I’ve got her now!” but with her triumph a little dismay was mixed. She knew the hampering nature of possessions.