XV
That night, Ethel left the Girls’ Club in the charge of Miss Patsy Withers and another helper and went home earlier than usual. She had a headache and felt miserable. It was cold in the tramcar, after the heat of the Mission Room, and she wanted to be in bed with a hot-water bottle and something warm to drink, and she wished, as she wished more often than anyone suspected, that she could find her mother at home. Ethel’s loss was of a different nature from Ruth’s. For Ethel, her mother had been a quiet voice and a kind hand, a voice never raised in expostulation and a hand that knew how to put a pillow under an aching head. When she was overwrought and her mother applied physical remedies, it did not occur to Ethel that in this refusal to reprove or advise, this assumption that her child was ill, her mother was doing all she could to treat her mentally. Ethel’s life was so fiercely subjective that her mother, for her, had hardly existed objectively. Perhaps no one and nothing existed for her in that sense and inevitably she became the prey of every misadventure. Now she sat huddled in her corner, trying to keep her eyes shut to ease her headache, but each time the tramcar stopped she had to open them to see who was boarding it or alighting: she had to make a quick comparison of each woman’s clothes with her own, to wonder if she could twist her hat into the shape of the one opposite, or train her hair to fall over her ears like that of the girl who had just come in, and under this eagerness to be doing something, this restlessness which had its value, there was a weariness of the Girls’ Club and a sense of futility.
Doris had not been there, Doris, her favourite, who had been elevated to service in the Corder’s household, and was supposed to adore Miss Ethel. There had been laughter of a familiar kind when her absence was mentioned and Ethel had felt sharp tears spring into her eyes, as though she had been struck. They were laughing because they knew more about Doris than she did, and they were glad because the favourite was proved disloyal.
Ethel told herself she was too sensitive, but that was her nature. She was hurt and she was anxious and her head throbbed more violently as she pictured Doris wandering in the darkness with a young man and imagined, with the inaccuracy of theoretical knowledge, the probably disastrous progress of that courtship. She would have to speak to Doris, and she knew that, in such matters, Doris would see her as a child in arms and feed her with appropriate sops. She had felt sure of her influence over the girl and her certainty was taken from her. Life, for Ethel, was something like walking across a bog, leaping from what looked like a solid tuft to another and finding many of them shaking and some sinking under her, and she lost her nerve, and then her judgment, at each mistake. Doris’s absence and the girls’ laughter had made the friendliness of Patsy Withers the more welcome and, in a gust of grateful confidence, Ethel had talked about Miss Mole and detected a gleam of pleasure in Patsy’s eyes when she told the puzzling story about the mattresses. It had been rather silly to tell her, Ethel thought, but then, she was so impulsive; she was sensitive and impulsive, and no one understood her now except Howard—and Wilfrid, when he was not teasing her. She had an unbounded admiration for her father, but she wished he had more time and patience to spare her. He had a way of making her difficulties seem very small in comparison with his own and of suggesting that he had cares enough already. There was Miss Mole—Ethel felt guilty again at the thought of her—who always listened with interest, but how could anyone be sure she was not another of those tufts? And there was God, she remembered hurriedly, and she looked askance at her neighbours, as though they had divined her forgetfulness. No one was looking at her and she shut her eyes again, saying she would pray, she must have more faith, and with that thought, or because the tramcar stopped at the place where she intended to get out, her troubles became less pressing.
She could have gone on to the halt at the end of Beresford Road, but this one was at the end of University Walk and once, as she walked back from the club, Wilfrid had overtaken her there and they had gone home together, by way of Prince’s Road, because Wilfrid had said it was more romantic, and then he had spoilt her happiness by asking why she walked so slowly.
Wilfrid was one of Ethel’s tufts, but so bright, so alluring, that she could not believe it would betray her, and she had found her own way of explaining its instability. It was not altogether satisfactory and she knew it, but it served for consolation when her faith in herself and in the charms she hoped she possessed, was tottering. Wilfrid and she were cousins and when he was unkind to her it was when he remembered that relationship. He had to repress her feelings and hide his own under his banter. It was noble of him, but Ethel would have been happier if there could have been one passionate scene which would have become a sacred memory, casting its pale light over the rest of their barren lives, and thinking of Wilfrid thus, hoping to hear his gay voice behind her and trying to walk as she would like him to see her walking, she followed the route they had taken together, up Prince’s Road, dim and wide and quiet, with the shadows of bare branches outlined on the pavement in the lamplight.
The drizzling rain of the afternoon had stopped, there was a starry sky above her, and though she was not moved by beauty, the influence of the place and hour was soothing and she went slowly, forgetting her troubles, hardly thinking, but letting little plans and hopes—her dress for the Spenser-Smiths’ party, the altering of her hat, a cup of cocoa beside the fire and a few words with Wilfrid before she went to bed—flit in pictures across her mind, and then, at the angle made by the junction of Prince’s and Beresford Roads, she stopped for a dreadful moment before she turned and ran.
Like Ruth, earlier in the day, she was strangling her sobs—and she was happier than Ruth, because she was not pursued by her own disloyalty, but she was also more miserable, because, with what she called Wilfrid’s faithlessness, her world was darkened. The stars had gone out when she saw him a few yards ahead of her, beyond the turning, holding a girl’s hand as though, when she offered it in farewell, he could not let it go. There was no mistaking Wilfrid’s bare head and his slim figure leaning backwards as he held the girl’s hand at arm’s length, to see her better, perhaps, or to draw her to him, and as Ethel ran, she was caught by a greater pain than that of seeing Wilfrid’s alliance with another, though the two were mingled; it was the primitive pain of being undesired by any man and the conviction—acknowledged in the moment’s misery—that no one would ever hold her hand in that half-playful, lingering grasp.
Centuries of loneliness seemed to pass over her before she reached the garden gate and saw, through her blurred eyes, one bulky figure, standing there, changed into two. She rushed past them. She had left Wilfrid, holding a girl’s hand, to find Doris in a young man’s arms, and they had both betrayed her. She sped up the path and banged the door in the face of Doris who was following behind her; she flung open the door of the dining-room and saw Ruth and Miss Mole smiling at each other across the hearthrug and for an instant she stood there before she turned and went stumblingly, noisily, up the stairs to her room.
The sight of her, distraught and angry, remained like a material object in the doorway, and when Hannah looked at Ruth she saw that her face was white.
“Oh, what can have happened now?” she moaned.
Hannah had no answer ready, and a knock at the front door called her to open it. There stood Doris, her head flung up, her meekly virtuous expression changed to one of defiance.
“He’s a steady, respectable young man,” she said, “and if he wasn’t it would be all the same! I’ve as good a right to walk out as anybody else, and more chance than some I could name, and so I’m willing to tell her at her convenience.”
“Bless my soul!” Hannah said mildly, looking the little maid up and down, and what she left out of her voice, she put into that cool glance. “You trot up to bed and I’ll talk to you in the morning,” she said, and Doris went. Hannah twisted her nose in satisfaction. It was a good thing there was someone capable of command in a house inhabited by one young woman who was distraught, another who was defiant, and a child who looked ready to faint.
“Life in the happy Nonconformist home!” she thought. “This would do Mr. Blenkinsop a power of good,” and she stepped outside the door and a few paces down the path, to taste the freshness of the night before she went back to Ruth. She could still see Ethel’s face clearly against the darkness. It was the face of one who ragingly but helplessly had watched murder done, and almost mechanically, but with a grim smile, Hannah cast her eyes about for the corpse.
Something swift and dark curvetted past her feet and, at the same moment, she heard the thick voice of Mr. Samson in its nightly call of “Puss, Puss, Puss!”
“Your cat’s here,” she cried back, and she crossed the grass plot and looked over the dividing hedge of laurel to see Mr. Samson standing where the parrot’s cage had been. “Your cat’s here, in the garden,” she said again.
“That you, Miss Fitt?” he said in a rumble. “Catch her for me, can you?”
“Catch an eel!” Hannah said, making a dart for the kitten who was amused by the clumsiness of these human beings.
“Gently does it,” Mr. Samson advised. “You’ve got a good voice for calling a cat. I’d come and catch her myself, but I might be caught by the Reverend—Ha, ha! Got her? Good! Hand her over. This’ll bring on my bronchitis again, I shouldn’t wonder. Haven’t been outside the house for a week, but I’ve had my eye on you, out of the window. ’Tisn’t much I miss. I’ve seen you running in and out, looking so perky, and off to the chapel on Sunday! Well, when you feel like it, Miss Fitt, just come in and have a talk and a look at my cats.”
“Shall I? Perhaps I will, but I must go back now and look after my little girl.”
“What, the scared one? Ought to be in bed,” Mr. Samson growled.
“And you’ve got my name wrong,” Hannah said. “My name is Mole.”
“That’s a silly kind of a name,” he said indignantly. “I’ll stick to the one I’ve given you—Miss Fitt! See the joke? That’s what you are and if you don’t know it you’ll soon find out.”
“Oh—I see!” Hannah said, and laughed so clearly that a young man, coming whistling down the street, stopped his own music to listen.
Wilfrid was by her side when she reached the door and he slipped his arm into hers. “What’s the meaning of this, Mona Lisa? I heard sounds of revelry and girlish laughter. Clandestine meetings with our godless neighbour?”
“Catching his cat,” Hannah said.
“Useful things, cats,” said Wilfrid. “And dogs. I suppose the uncle isn’t in yet, but you’ve been running it rather close, you know. And don’t try to look severe, because you can’t, with love’s young dream all over your face.” He shut the door and looked round the hall as though he scented trouble. “Ethel in?” he asked carelessly.
“Yes,” said Hannah, and she gave him a sharp look.
He shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands. “It’s not my fault, Mona Lisa,” he said languidly, but there was dancing laughter in his eyes. “How did I know she’d come home by Prince’s Road?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hannah said, and she went into the dining-room where Ruth was crouching by the fire, her face as sharp as a rat’s.
“You left me alone in the house,” she complained bitterly. “You needn’t have done that, need you? And Ethel might have come down and killed me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Come along to bed.”
“But you don’t know, you don’t know! This is the first bad one she’s had since you came. I can’t go into that room and listen to her banging. She’ll do it for hours and I can hear her.”
“What am I to do with you all?” Hannah asked sadly.
“And we’d had such a happy evening,” Ruth went on. “It’s no good being happy. It’s better to be miserable all the time.”
“And still better to be brave. Think of me and the burglar!”
Ruth was not to be comforted. “That’s only a story. This is a bad dream that keeps coming back.”
“My poor lamb,” Hannah said, “you shall sleep in my room if I have to sleep on the floor.”
“Can I?” It was pitiable to see how the sharp face softened.
“And you’d better be quick about it,” Wilfrid said through the open door. “I can hear the uncle marching up the path.”
Hannah paused to give him a nod of gratitude as she hurried Ruth up the stairs. There was nothing seriously wrong with that boy: he had the kindest heart in the house, but it was not the house he ought to have been in.