IT might very well have occurred to Sam to retort that he and Effle had not “their silly heads in the clouds” any more fantastically than had Anne her self when she retreated to Madge’s and watched her loved son only through the eyes of Kate Earwalker. But it did not occur to him and, if it had, Effie at least would have disproved the retort. Effle outstripped them all.
The truth was that as soon as Effle knew what was the matter with her she was not appalled, dismayed, ashamed, or any of the things appropriate to a young lady in her situation, but simply and purely exultant. Unhappiness fell from her like a cloak, and left her radiant with joy. And she had called herself a realist!
She was a realist; she was engrossed with fact, not with the circumstantial detail of her fact. She hardly wanted Sam now, she had him, she was miles and leagues from care, alone in a shining world with her transcendant fact. Courage returned in full flood to her and she brimmed with bravery and pride.
She was out of work and must find work quickly which would pay her well. She was going to suffer, she was going (to put it mildly) to be misunderstood. What did it matter, what did anything matter in comparison with her exultant fact? She was going to be the mother of his child. Marbeck was not a dream; Marbeck was coming true, and the truth and the glory of it swept her to a heaven which only women know.
Perhaps she was a trespasser within the gates, but they had opened to her and they would not close. She might be prosecuted for her trespass. Let them try! You cannot hurt invulnerability. She was a world within a world, self-satisfying, self-complete, not so much derisive of the other world as utterly forgetful of it. Her cloud of glory hid it from her eyes, and if she peeped at all through breaches in the cloud she saw people as one sees them on the road beneath a mountain-top, like crawling ants.
A knock came at her door, and she looked bemused through a gap in the clouds into the eyes of Dubby Stewart, but it was not to look at the world which did not understand. It was to look at Dubby, who loved her.
And Dubby knew. It had not been difficult to know. She had refused him, she had let him see why, and Sam and Effie had been away from Manchester at the same time. It was not precise evidence, but he had written leaderettes on evidence not more exact and did not doubt the facts. They had kept him from her till now, but he could keep away no longer. And before he went into her room he knew all there was to know.
“Effie,” he said, “I’m not sure if I’m welcome.”
“Oh, but you are,” she said. “I ought to have written to you long ago. I’ve been home weeks from my holiday.” It was no use trying to see Dubby as a crawling ant, and she gave her hand in friendship.
“That breaks the ice,” he said.
“If there was ice to break.”
“Well,” he reminded her, “I said I didn’t love and run away, and I did more or less run away. I came one Sunday because I said I would, but I couldn’t do it again. The trouble with me is that I ought to be a journalist, and after about twelve years of it I’m still human.”
“Dubby! I’m sorry!”
“All right, Effie; I didn’t come to bleat. That’s only an apology for not coming before. And now I’m here——”
“You’ll have tea,” she said quickly, going to the bell, but he caught her hand before she pulled.
“Do you want to put a table between us? Do, if you must”—he released her hand—“but I’d hoped it would not come to that. Shall I ring the bell, Miss Mannering?”
“You needn’t punish me by calling names. Don’t ring.” She armed herself with courage, and turned to face him.
“Thanks. Really thanks, Effie. I know I’m a bore, but if the old song has a good tune to it I don’t see why I shouldn’t sing twice. It is a good tune,” he went on with a passion which belied his surface flippancy. “It’s the best I have in me, which mayn’t be saying much, because I’ve a rotten ear for music, but this tune’s got me badly, like the diseases they play on the barrel-organs, and I can’t lose it. I get up to it in the morning, and I go to bed to it at night, and it’s ringing in my ears all day. Effie, I’m not much of a cove and I’ve flattered myself that sincerity departed from me when I cut my wisdom teeth. I tried to live up to that belief and it’s only half come off. I’ve tried to make a raree-show of life, to sit outside and watch the puppets play, and life’s won. Life’s got me down, and I’m inside now. I’m where you’ve put me, and a good place too: I’m near the radiator and it warms the cockles of my heart. But I never liked radiators. Mind you, I can do with them and I can be grateful for them. If a season ticket for life for a seat near the radiator is all that you can give me, I can keep a stiff upper lip and thank you for what I’ve got. But I never had a passion for radiators, and I do like fires. There’s life in a fire Must it be just the radiator, or can you make it hearth and home for us?”
“Dubby,” she said, “I told you before.”
“I know. Nothing doing in second thoughts?” She shook her head.
“All right. I only got drunk last time. This time it will need the binge of my life. I’d cherished hopes of this.”
“Drunk,” she said reproachfully. “With a stiff upper lip?”
“Oh, I dunno,” he said. “It takes a stiff upper lip to get me to the dentist’s, but I make him use an anæsthetic all the same. Still, if you’d rather I didn’t——”
“I think it would be braver.”
“Right. But I’d like to hit something. There’s nobody you’d like me to hit, is there?”
“Of course not.”
“Sure?” he said. He had it well in mind that somebody ought to hit Sam. “Let’s get back to where we were before I made a stump oration—to when I came in and you looked at me like a friend.”
“I hope I always shall.”
“All right. It’s the privilege of a friend to be impertinent, and I’m rather good at impertinence. You see, Effie old thing, you’re supposed to be one of the world’s workers, and you’re not at the office to-day. You haven’t been at the office for weeks. I know, because I gave Florrie half a crown.” Florrie was the maid. “And it isn’t that you’ve come into money, because Florrie tells me you’ve been starving yourself.”
“I’ve not.” Effie was indignant. She had not starved herself. While all was dreary, food had certainly not attracted her, but neither had anything else; and she expected to take a lively interest in it now. “Really I’ve not.”
“What you say goes,” he said. “And Florrie imagined it, but she didn’t imagine the part about your not going to the office, and if anything’s wrong there, don’t forget that I know Branstone pretty well. I can talk to him like a father.”
“There’s nothing wrong, anywhere,” she said, and, indeed, things were not only not wrong but exuberantly right, only she could not tell him why.
“You’re sure of that?” he persisted. “There’s nothing you can tell a pal? Nothing you can tell me, when you know I’d walk through fire for you? Damn it, I can’t pretend. I’m not a friend. I’m a man in love, and I ask you to be fair.”
“Dubby,” she pleaded, “don’t make things too hard for me.”
“Is it I who make them hard?” he asked, “oris it Sam?”
She looked at him amazed, and certainly Effie was stupid then, or, at least, too wrapped up in her great preoccupation to be alert. “Oh, don’t be petty,” she said. “I didn’t debit you with jealousy.”
“No? No? And yet I have a certain right to be jealous of him. I think you won’t deny it.”
It wasn’t what he said or even the deep bitterness of his tone, it was something in his eyes, like a hurt animal’s, which made her quite suddenly, and as a thing apart from his words, see what had happened. But she did not see even now the whole of Dubby’s love and the beauty of his knightly move.
“You know!” she said. “Dubby, you knew when you spoke just now. You knew that Sam and I——”
“I told you I had a word with Florrie.”
“Florrie?” she asked. “What could Florrie tell you?”
“Nothing,” he said, “that she knew she told. Guessing is another of the things I’m good at.”
She saw it then, to what perceptiveness his love had brought him, to what high action. It had sped her cloud and she saw, clear-eyed as he, his fine, impeccable fidelity.
“Oh! And I called you petty! I told you you were jealous. Dubby, I didn’t know. You’d have done that for me!”
“Well, you see,” he apologized, “I’m in love with you.”
“Why can’t we order love? Why does it come all wrong?” she cried.
“It hasn’t come so wrong but I can put it right for you,” he said, making his offer again.
“I? I didn’t mean myself,” she said, wondering. “Love’s not come wrong to me. It’s you I’m thinking of.”
“But is it right for you?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” she smiled. “Terrifically.”
“Is it? When Sam has not been near you in weeks?” It was wedged in his mind that Sam was playing the villain. “When you are here alone, do you see him, Effie?”
“No. That’s why it’s all so right.”
He shook his head, perplexed. “It may be good metaphysics, but it sounds bad sense. I’ll be quite honest with you. I’m suffering pretty badly from suppressed desire to horsewhip Sam Branstone. I think he deserves it, I know I’d enjoy it and I think you’re trying to head me off it. I daresay it’s primitive of me, but it will do me good and I don’t mind telling you I need good doing to me. Effie, mayn’t I go and horsewhip Sam?”
“If anybody’s going to horsewhip Sam,” said a voice, “it’s me. I’m in charge of this job, not you, my lad.”
They had not seen Anne come in. They saw her now, a little old woman of the working class in her best clothes, with a bugled cape and cotton gloves, elastic-sided boots and a quaint bonnet tied with ribbon beneath her chin, and, unaccountably, she filled the room. They would have passed her in the street without a second glance as one of the throng, at face value insignificant; but this was not Anne in the street. It was Anne in arms for Sam, and when Effie and Stewart compared notes afterwards they each confessed to having had the same thought: that their eyes were traitors and that what they saw was fantasy and what they felt was real.
“I’m Sam’s mother,” she introduced herself, “and it’s like enough I were overfond of him when he was a lad and didn’t thrash enough, but I’m not too old to start again. You’ll be Effie? Aye, I’ve come round here to put things in their places. They’ve got a bit askew amongst the lot of you, and what I heard when I came in won’t help.” She looked accusingly at Dubby. “You’ll be her brother, I reckon?”
It seemed to him the best way out. Anne had come to “put things in their places,” and she reckoned he was Effie’s brother, which, now he thought of it, was exactly his place. Brotherhood was thrust upon him, but he thought he had achieved it. Plainly, for all Effie’s enigmas, there was nothing else for him, and he let Anne put him in his place.
“Yes,” he said, without a glance at Effie, “her brother.”
“You’re a clean-limbed family,” she complimented them, and Dubby stole a look at Effie, half humorous and half defying her to contradict his brotherhood. “Well, I came to see Effie, but I’ll none gainsay that her brother has a right to stay and listen, if he’ll listen quiet.”
“Yes,” said Dubby, still challenging Effie, “her brother has a right.” And Effie did not deny him. She had her courage, but the unexpectedness of Anne and the force of her, as if for all these years she had been winding up her will, which now came into play like a spring immensely braced in super-tightened coils, caused her to want an ally and she agreed that Dubby had a right if not the one conferred on him by Anne.
“Won’t you sit, Mrs. Branstone?” she said.
“I was wondering when I should hear your voice,” said Anne. “You’re not a talker, lass.”
“No,” said Effie.
“More of a doer.” Effie was wondering whether that was praise or condemnation, when Anne added: “I like you the better for that, though it’s a good voice. I haven’t heard it much, but I’ve heard it. I haven’t seen you much, but I’ve seen enough. I’m on your side, Effie.” She astonished them both by rising as if to go.
“But,” said Dubby, “is that all?”
Anne looked with humorous sympathy at Effie. “That’s men all over, isn’t it?” she said. “They’re fond of calling women talkers, but a man’s not happy till a thing’s been put in words. Me and your sister understand each other now.”
“I’m not quite certain that I do,” said Effie.
“Well, maybe you’re right,” conceded Anne. “It’s a fact that I told Sam last night I was coming round here to give you a piece of my mind, and I don’t notice that I’m doing it. The need seemed to go when I set eyes on you, and I’m pretty full of a thing I want to do, only I’ve not quite got the face to ask.”
“What is it, Mrs. Branstone?”
“I want to kiss you, lass,” said Anne.
Dubby Stewart had for the second time that day the impression that women talked, so to speak, in hieroglyphics.... There seemed to be a kind of feminine shorthand to which only women held the key, and he did not understand the sudden softening of Ellie’s face nor her quick response. And he did not know why, when Anne kissed her, Effie said, “No, no,” nor why Anne said, “It isn’t no. It’s yes.” A kiss, it seemed, had various meanings.
Anne in effect had conveyed to Effie that she thanked her and, more, she honoured her. Effie denied that she merited honour and Anne maintained that she did.
“Aye,” said Anne, “he’s had two dips in the lucky-bag and he’s drawn a prize this time. It’s more than any man deserves, but we’ll not grudge it Sam, will we, Effie?” And to Dubby the thing took on a fresh aspect of bewilderment. If that meant anything, it meant that Anne was welcoming a daughter. Didn’t the woman know that Sam was married?
“I’ve grudged him nothing,” Effie said.
Anne meditated that, then looked at Effie with a touch of what was, for her, shyness. “You’ve grudged him nothing,” she disagreed, “except your pride in giving up. And you can do it, you can give up, but Sam’s nobbut a man, and they’re a weak flesh, men. He looks the shadow of himself,” she exaggerated resolutely.
“Does he?” said Effie anxiously, and Anne nodded a sombre face. “What do you want me to do, Mrs. Branstone?”
“I want you to give up giving up. Sam said a thing to me last night. He said you’d make him find salvation. Well, happen; but what’s certain sure is that you made him find love. He’s found it, lass, and he mustn’t lose it, and he will if you leave things where they are. He’s trying to do a thing that isn’t, possible. He’s trying to live aside of Ada, loving you. He’ll try to love her for the love of you, and kiss her, telling himself he’s kissing you, and it will not be you; and the love he tries to bring her will turn to loathing in his heart. And what’ll happen then, when love goes sour within him? Eh, lass, you took yon lad to heaven and you’re sending him to hell.”
It was not fair to Stewart. It was hardly bearable: he was not her brother and he hadn’t the feelings of a brother. He saw great happiness in Effie’s face, as if two happinesses mingled there, the one of giving up her dream, the other of awakening to a sweet reality. He saw her put out a hand towards Anne, surrendering, consenting, giving all in one swift, heady leap from cloud to earth, and then he saw her sway, and caught her in time to break her fall.
Anne eyed him sharply. “Have you heard of your sister’s fainting before, lately?” she asked, busy on her knees with Effie.
“Yes. Florrie told me. Twice. Can I do anything?”
“I’ll bring her round,” said Anne. “But you can do something. You can go to Sam at his office and tell him he’s wanted here. Tell him I want him, and there’s news for him. Send Florrie up as you go, and you needn’t take that horsewhip with you, neither.”
“No. I needn’t take it now.”
So Dubby, Effie’s brother, went out on an embassy for Anne. “Feeling it? Feeling?” he thought, “you God-abandoned devil, what right have you to feel? A journalist. A looker-on. There’s a story in this for you. There’s the guts of a story given away to you with a cup of tea... on, no, we didn’t have the tea; given neat, and you can’t be decently grateful. What’s the title? ‘The Charwoman’s Son’? No, damned if it is. Something about brother. Brother! Yes, you blighter, brother... brother, and proud of it. ‘Pride of Kin.’ That’ll do, and God help me to live up to it.” He turned into Sam’s office and delivered his message in a cold, unemotional voice. It seemed that Effie, brave herself, was the cause of bravery in others.
“Effie! My mother! What have you to do with them?” asked Sam, amazed.
“I’ve given you a message,” said the taciturn herald.
“But what’s behind it, Dubby? Is Effie ill?”
Stewart was silent.
“Is she—dead?”
Dubby was tempted to say he didn’t know. It; seemed to him that things went too happily with Branstone, that it was fit, if only for the twenty minutes which it would take for him to reach Busholme, to let Sam think that Effie might be dead, to let him taste the flavour of torture. Dubby suffered and would suffer, not for twenty minutes but, he gloomily anticipated, for a lifetime. Let Sam have his minutes of it! Then he remembered he was Effie’s brother, and before Sam had his hat and coat on, malice had left him. “It’s all right, man,” he said. “She’s neither ill nor dead. They’ve got good news for you.”
IF there was news which Anne must send posthaste to hid him come to hear, and if Effie was neither ill nor dead, he need not overtax his wits to guess it. Yet he had never thought of this very natural sequel to the Marbeck week, and the plain fact is that he did not much want to think of it now.
“I like your Effie,” Anne told him. “I like her very well. She’s going to make a grandmother of me.”
He thought his mother had never been fatuous before: she thought he took the news morosely, and perhaps her expectation had been too high. She assumed that a child was the first consideration of a man’s life; which is not true, even, of all women and true of only a minority of men.
Nor was Sam, in fact, morose. He had never been more intensely and silently alive. In itself, this thing was right with a shining exultant rightness which warmed him to the marrow. It crowned and completed Marbeck and it crowned and completed him. He who was childless was to be a father, and by Effie! He had nothing but a thankful emotion for that, and looked with yearning eyes at Effie, giver of all else, who was now to give him this. He had not known her wonder could increase.
He saw that more was expected of him than that he should look at her adoringly. Anne was on tip-toe with anticipation. Her difficulty, if indeed she had acknowledged to herself that there was any, had been to make these visionaries see that love mattered and that Ada did not; and her success with Effie had been complete. She had never doubted of success with Sam, the weaker vessel, for there was love, sufficient in itself; and there was now the added argument of Effie’s child. She could not see that he had any choice.
He stood there conscious of the expectancy of their regard, and knew that he was failing them. He thought they took a blinkered view, seeing the child and nothing else. To them, apparently, the child came first: they were hypnotized by what was, really, an afterthought, and there was the greater need for him to keep a steadfast eye upon the truth. As he saw it, the truth was that he had put his hand to another plough; on Hartle Pike he had lighted such a candle by Effie’s grace as he trusted would never be put out; and he had gone to Ada. True, Ada had gone from him, but that was temporary and trivial, whereas here was a real distraction and he saw two loyalties before him—to Effie and the idea, and to Effie and her child. It seemed to Sam that the first was the greater of these two.
He had wrestled with an afterthought before, one which hardly yielded in temptation to that which now confronted him, and he had thrown it. He had refused to contest Sandyford because there was not room for politics in a scheme which included Ada, and still less was there room for Effie. He felt faint with discouragement at the thought that Effie, unless appearance belied her, had capitulated to her afterthought, but he stood firmly by their treaty. They had decided that duty came first; he had shouldered duty; and he, at any rate, had no room for afterthoughts.
He was loyal to Effie and the Marbeck pact, duty’s bondsman, Ada’s husband. He made a gesture of decision, which Anne misinterpreted.
“Aye,” she said a little smugly, “this settles it all right. It wasn’t common sense in you to part before, but I reckon there’ll be no parting now.”
“No,” said Effie softly, “not now.” She stole a look of shy, glad confidence at Sam, and he found it extraordinarily difficult to meet her eye, and still more difficult to say what he must, at any cost, get said.
“I’m not so sure,” he said at last, wishing the earth would swallow him.
At that moment he would cheerfully have given a hand to escape having to differ from them. They were Effie and his mother: they were his mother and Effie: the two women to whom he owed everything: more, he loved Effie so that every fibre in him yearned for her, and, even more than that, he was delicately sensitive to Effie in her present case. But it couldn’t change him. His loyalty was engaged, to fanaticism, to another Effie, high Effie of the hills, of the crusade and the idea; and this seemed to him somehow, a lower Effie, an Effie who had dipped the flag of her ideal to a coming baby, whilst he was faithful to the old unbending Effie who had thrown an imitation wedding ring away. It almost seemed as if she wanted that ring back, base metal though it was.
A case, perhaps, of splitting hairs, but, at any rate, the case of a man with a faith at one extreme and at the other his miserable conviction that happiness was not for him. He had abandoned happiness when he left Marbeck, and lived now in a place where happiness was barred by Ada.
“I’m not so sure,” he repeated drearily. “You see, there’s Ada and I have to be fair to her.”
“Ada’s left you,” snapped Anne. A contentious Sam was not going to find her amiable.
He chose to put it in another way. “My wife,” he said, “is staying at present with her father. Yes, mother,” he went on firmly, “I’m going to be fair to Ada and I’ve to guard against unfairness all the more because you won’t be fair. You won’t be ordinarily just. You always hated Ada.”
“Yes,” she agreed viciously. “I’m a clean woman. I always hated vermin.”
Sam turned to Effle immensely heartened by this virulence. “You see!” he appealed, calling to witness the hopeless bias of his mother. It was, he wished to imply, this blind hatred of Anne for Ada which accounted for his mother’s attitude, her exalting of—well—the mistress over the wife, her flagrant unmorality. He tried to put all this into his gesture. “And you,” he reinforced it, “you sent me to her, Effie.”
She bowed her head, admitting it, but Anne was not prepared to let it go at that. “Even Effie,” she said “can make a mistake. She would not send you now.”
And, looking at Effie, he saw that it was true. He had seen it from the first and it bothered him profoundly. Effie had changed: there was, in all they said, this noticeable stressing of the “now,” to differentiate them from the “then.” What was it? Anne’s arguments, or the baby, or had Effie, uninfluenced by either, really changed her mind about the Marbeck treaty? he couldn’t believe that last. Marbeck was infallible and he was dogged in the faith. He responded to the Marbeck creed like the needle of a compass to the meridian, and if with this needle also there was deflection it was corrected by his racial stubbornness. He had his people’s queer, infatuated pride in the contemplation of their own tenacity, even when, perhaps mostly when, it hurts to be tenacious.
Whereas Effie had known ever since Dubby Stewart brought her back from cloud-land that Marbeck was very fallible indeed, or, rather, Marbeck was one thing and living up to Marbeck was another. If he had said, instead of only thinking, that she was a lower Effie now, she would not have contradicted him, though she did not want a wedding ring of either metal. She wanted Sam. She was changed from the idealist who thought she could be happy as a sign-post and a spiritual guide. She had come down to Mother Earth where men and women live. At Marbeck they were on an altitude where the air was too rarefied for human lungs, and she wanted to fall with Sam from selflessness to mere humanity.
“No,” she agreed again with Anne, “I should not send you now.”
“I shall have to think this out,” he said. Effie admitted to being earthly, and he was horribly dismayed! “Effie,” he cried in pain, “don’t you see?” he wanted desperately to be understood by her, if not by Anne.
“I see,” she said, and not without pride either. Whatever was fine in him, whatever reacted from an Eflie come to earth, was due to her, and she was proud of him even when, as now, he used her tempered steel against her.
Anne watched with a grim appreciation his anxiety to make a pikestaff plain. “We all see,” she said. “You’re none so deep and we’re none so daft as all that. You’ve got a maggot in your brain, and I know the shape of it. I’ve had the same in mine, and if you’ll think back ten years, you’ll know what I mean. We’re the same breed, Sam, and we can both do silly things and stand by then and suffer for them. I flitted from you to Madge, and I didn’t set eyes on you from that day till last night. That’s what I mean by suffering.”
And there, in those few words, the tragedy of ten years stood confessed. Parted from Sam, she lived in exile, suffering, and, of course, he had known it and deliberately forgot it, so that the point of her revelation was not its truth, but the amazing fact that she should speak of it at all. Anne had the pride which suffers silently.
“Mother!” he said, distressed for her.
“Nay, none of that,” she bade him harshly. “If I were soft enough to let it hurt me, that’s my look out. But here’s the point, Sam. There’s another woman soft about you, too, and she’s not the same as me. I’d had you since I bore you, and I were not young when you and me came to a parting; but she’s young, and you’ll none make Eflie suffer the road I suffered while there’s strength in me to say you nay. I’d have gone to my grave without your knowing this if it hadn’t been for Effie. It’s not good for a man to know too much. They’re easy stuffed with pride.”
She pretended, with deep magnanimity, to think that he had not known until she told him, but they both knew very well that he had always known. She dwelt deliberately on it now to inform him, not of her suffering, but of the intensity of her feeling for Effie. It was so intense that she could speak of her own suffering: for Effie’s sake she had unveiled, thrown off her stoicism, and flung the spoken truth as a challenge and a revelation at him.
He knew what speaking in this manner cost her, but he was stubborn still in relating all she said to her ungovernable hate of Ada; whereas Anne did not hate Ada ungovernably, but only when Ada hurt Sam.
Again he said “Mother!” and got no further with it.
“I know I’m your mother,” she said, “and you can stop thinking of me now and think of Effie.”
“I’m trying to,” he said.
“Well?” said Anne impatiently. She hadn’t imagined an obstinacy which would not yield to what she had said. Surely he knew the sacrifice of pride she made in saying it! And there was Effie, too, who said little and looked the more.
“I don’t know,” he despaired.
“Then others must know for you,” said Anne, and when his lips only tightened at that, “Sam,” she pleaded, “surely you’ll never go against the pair of us.”
But there were two Effies, and he wasn’t “going against” them both, while he held Anne to be mesmerized by hate of Ada. For all that, it desolated him to be in opposition to them now, to Anne and Effie, the women who counted, the women who gave. “Still,” he had to say, “there’s Ada.”
He said it, as he hoped to say it, finally. He wanted to get away from these two, to escape from their distracting presence to a place where he could think. After all, Hartle Pike had not settled his problem, and he must try somewhere else—Platt Fields, perhaps. They had a sort of space.
But he could not escape—not, at least, till Anne had played her ace. Anne had not finished yet, though she had hoped ten years in the wilderness had been enough. It seemed that they were not, and she must wander still. Well, she could do what she must.
“Oh, aye,” she said dryly, “there’s Ada. There’s your bad ha’penny, and I reckon summat’ll have to be done with her. But if you’ll stop worrying, lad, and if worst comes to the worst, I’ll take Ada on myself.”
Effie started towards her. “No, no,” she cried.
“You hold your hush,” said Anne. This was Anne’s game, not Effie’s.
Sam was still staring at her. “You!” he said. “What can you do?”
“I can see you and Effie happy, and I dunno as owt else matters.” It did not matter what the cost was to Anne. “When you used to come home to your tea from Mr. Travers’ office, what you left was always good enough for me, and I can stomach your leavings still.”
It startled Effie, who had thought herself a specialist in sacrifice. This was the very ferocity of self-denial.
So far, tired and overstrained, Effie had found peace in resigning the leadership to Anne, but here was a lead she could not follow. It was not that she mistook Anne’s purpose or doubted her capacity. Her faith in Anne was young but adamantine, and she knew that if Anne replaced Sam with Ada, and made herself heir to the Marbeck plan, she would unquestionably do for Ada what Sam had undertaken to do. But the thing was simply not good enough.
“No, Mrs. Branstone, no,” she said firmly.
“Get oft’ with you,” said Anne impolitely. “I can tackle Ada with one hand tied behind my back.”
“Of course,” Sam agreed, “you could, but you are not going to. Ada’s my job.”
“I can be pig-headed as well as you, my lad,” Anne menaced him.
“It’s not that, mother.”
“No, it isn’t that,” said Effie, conceiving perhaps that it was time for her to enter into this tragicomedy of rivalry in self-surrender. “Sam’s right. Ada does matter, and it is I who am the failure, I who have broken faith, I who was arrogant. I thought that I could bear a torch, and I can only bear a child. But I know now what I have to do. I can go away. I can disappear.”
It seemed to Anne that this was serious because obviously it was a way out; but she thought it a way much more appalling in prospect than the plan she had proposed for herself of “taking Ada on.” She took alarm. In another than Effie it might have been heroics, but Effie’s was not the stuff that mouths bravado. Anne granted that, and saw a tragic chasm yawn She signalled her alarm to Sam, who answered it with a glance which made appeal to her, whilst yielding nothing of his obstinacy.
“If you go away,” he said, “my mother goes with you. I’ve meant that from the first.”
Anne nodded without enthusiasm. Certainly that was a solution and equally not the solution. It gave Sam to Ada, and Effie, it appeared, was not seeing it as a solution at all. There were strange possibilities, Anne thought, in this young woman, and she did not want them to be tested too far. Effie was not a talker, and when she said a thing she did not overstate. There was danger. Well, Anne was forewarned, and addressed herself in her most humorous, common-sense manner to laugh it out of court. One can deal with danger in worse ways than to apply to it the acid—ridicule.
She put her arms akimbo and surveyed Effie and Sam appraisingly. “I dunno,” she said, “that there’s a pin to choose between the three of us for chuckle-headed foolishness. We’re all fancying ourselves as hard as we can for martyrs and arranging Ada’s life for her. It hasn’t struck any of us yet that Ada’s likely to arrange things for herself.”
And if Sam’s impulse was to say gloomily: “It isn’t likely at all,” he repressed it when Anne’s eye caught his, and said instead, “That’s so,” without knowing why he said it and without believing it.
The flicker of a smile crossed Effie’s face; Sam as conspirator struck her as crudely humorous. Anne saw the smile and understood, but brazened it out. “Of course it’s so,” she said, defying Effie. “Ada’s a poor thing of a woman, but she’s none beyond having a mind and speaking it. I was always one to take the short road out of trouble, so I’ll go along to Peter Struggles’ now.”
“Very well,” consented Effie, and Anne understood her to mean that the crisis, if one had impended, was postponed. “But,” said Effie, “of course, I saw.”
Which was, in its way, a challenge; it was, at any rate, to tell Anne that Effie knew what had been suspected of her.
Anne met it as a challenge. “Well?” she said.
“You were quite wrung, Mrs. Branstone,” said Effie quietly. “I’m not a coward.”
Anne was tying her bonnet-si rings, and found it convenient to look down. She preferred, just then, not to meet Effie’s eye. “I know I’m overanxious,” she mumbled in apology.
“And there’s no need,” said Effie, a little cruel in her victory.
To Sam the conversation seemed to have slipped into another dimension. He hadn’t the faintest idea what they were talking about.
PETER Struggles walked into his tobacconist’s and put his snuff-box on the counter. There was no need to state his requirements; in fact, he had not stated them for many years. Shopman and customer understood each other very well, and business came first; then if there was inclination, as there usually was, talk followed.
To-day, however, the shopman gaped at Peter in surprise, and made a half-turn of his head, so that he could see his calendar Wednesday was Peter’s day for buying snuff with a regularity to which time had given the force of a tradition, and the tobacconist had even the habit of using Peter’s visit as a reminder to a fallible memory that he must wind his clock. The calendar continued him in his belief that to-day was Thursday, and he felt sure that Peter had been in as usual on Wednesday.
Peter had. Snuffing, of course, is a wasteful habit in any case, and a shaking hand misses the target more freely than a steady one; but, for all that, Peter, in his mental anguish, had consumed in one night the better part of his week’s supply of snuff. The box was indubitably empty. He had not come to replenish it without some conscientious qualms—an allowance is an allowance—but he felt that life which comprised Ada in her present mood and did not comprise snuff, was beyond bearing. Ada was, it seemed, inevitable: he must mitigate Ada.
“The usual, if you please, Thomas,” he unusually said.
“Yes, sir,” said Thomas, filling the box. “You’ve had a little accident?”
“An accident? Oh!” Then the fitness of that guess struck him. “Yes, Thomas, a little accident. By the way, do you know anything about divorce?”
“Well, sir, I read the Sunday Judge,” Thomas replied deprecatingly. “Very human subject, sir, divorce.”
“You find it so?”
“I take a lot of satisfaction in reading about my sinful fellow-creatures.”
“Quite, quite,” said Peter vaguely, and went out of the shop, leaving a puzzled salesman behind him. “Forgot to pay, and all,” thought Thomas. “Not that I’d grudge it if he didn’t pay, only it’s not like him. He looks sadly to day. The old boy’s breaking up. Him and divorce! What does he want to worry his head about divorce for?”
Peter did not know that he had mentioned divorce, to his tobacconist. It would have shocked him if he had known. He spoke unconsciously, and listened mechanically to the man’s reply, but he was, harrowingly, “worrying his head” about divorce. He took snuff in the street, an unheard-of occurrence, but it did not clear his aching brain of the fateful word “divorce.”
Ada had put it there too firmly in her stupid and invincible malignity. She had one aim—to do Sam the greatest injury she could. His offence was rank, and she demanded a proportionate revenge.
She had lived as a spinster for marriage and as a wife by marriage. Marriage was not a duty, but a state of beatitude, and she had walked in the faith of her grotesque illusion that her marriage was singularly blessed. It was childless, and the more blessed for that: there were no intruders on the perfect union of man and wife. It was illusion, and a wilder perversion of the truth than the ordinary self-deceiver can attain; but illusion is the breath of life, and she had fed on her deception till, like a drug-taker, she could not live without it. She had blazoned it abroad in a hundred drawing-rooms. If there were low-voiced colloquies of this or that affair, if it was hinted that men were faithless ever, Ada would grow superior and boast the flawless rectitude of Sam. These were things which happened to other people, who very likely deserved them, and could by no manner of means occur to her. She was not so sunk in imbecility as to deny that they did happen, and to people who were, nominally, married; but they were unsound people, insecurely married. There was a fundamental difference between their marriages and hers. She couldn’t explain; it was too obvious for explanation. She was married, and these others, somehow, were married, yet not married. They had, through lack of merit, stopped short of the seventh paradise where nothing could shake consummate bliss. They were not as she was.
And now she had to face the fact that the impossible had happened to her, and not only had it happened, but was known to have happened. That was where the blow struck home. She had publicly elaborated her case of absolute conviction, she had vaunted his faithfulness, the cardinal connubiality of Sam, and Miss Entwistle was spreading the news that she had been a doting fool! And she hadn’t. She had not doted on Sam. She had not been infatuated with her husband, but with the idea of her husband which she had created and maintained. If only she had had the gumption to defy Miss Entwistle! If only she had concealed her belief in the story as successfully as she had hidden the fact that Sam had a separate room! She had been taken by surprise, she had admitted everything by default, and, worse, she had assured Mrs. Grandage that she would never see Sam again. She did not doubt, in spite of Mrs. Grandage’s good-nature, that this little sequel to the story of Miss Entwistle was in rapid circulation.
She was humiliated publicly, and, as she saw it, the one course open to her was to make Sam suffer a humiliation as drastic and as public as her own. Though it hurt her, he must pay for it; though she died, he must be punished and, sincerely, she expected it to kill her. She lived in a garden of lies, and life without the illusion of her marriage would be as impossible as life without the fragrance of her poisonous flowers to Rappaccini’s daughter, but no matter for that. Ada must be revenged, and divorce, though it killed her, would be the greatest injury that she could do a politician and a pietistic publisher. She managed to square the circle, too. She was to die and make a murderer of him; she was to ruin his business and make a bankrupt of him; and at the same time she was to have the compensation of a handsome alimony. But perhaps vengeance is always irrational, and that is why it belongs to God.
She dinned her word into Peter’s ears with the merciless reiteration of a hurt and howling child. It was her first word and her last, and appeals based on religion shattered themselves against it as fruitlessly as the appeal to reason. What she had said she had said: and she had said “Divorce.” Alternatives did not exist.
For Peter, divorce ranged itself with the abominations of the world, a man-made legal subterfuge to evade the law of God. There might, conceivably, be occasions when divorce was to be condoned as the comparatively little wrong which did a great right, and he tried very honestly to see Ada’s as one of those heroic needs. He failed: he could not even see that Ada was hurt in soul, or in anything but pride. She was in a mood, not of spiritual revolt, but of peevish discontent.
Small wonder that he snuffed prodigiously that night. He had his meed of suffering, and overcharged his small account with dreadful self-reproach. He, not Ada, and not Sam, was responsible for her violence and for the cause of it; he and the books upon his shelves; reading, his darling sin. He blamed himself for consenting too readily to their marriage. Sam, he had thought, would lead Ada: on what grounds had he thought it? What had he known of Sam’s leadership—a prolix, fluent boy at the Concentrics? He had exchanged his daughter for peaceful, solitary evenings with his books—“Self-seeker!” he thought—and the exchange was to recoil upon him now. He had abandoned, after one harsh, undaughterly repulse, his attempt to show her that wearing a wedding ring was not the whole duty of woman—“The sin of Pride,” he thought—and had returned to browse amongst his books. Sam seemed a good fellow, too. There were those Classics, and the texts, and the prosperous old age of Mr. Carter, who, but for Sam, would certainly have ended his days in the workhouse. But, failing with Ada, he ought to have appealed to Sam.... Yes, he ought to have taken a strong line with Sam, instead of letting Sam’s worldly success dazzle him. Sam had seemed too big for Peter Struggles to grapple with—the sin of cowardice.
Now it had come to this! Sam had broken the seventh commandment, and Ada wished to forget the words which Peter had read over them when he joined their right hands together, and said, “Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” She commanded a divorce, and it was useless for Peter to insist, out of his small store of worldly wisdom, that divorce was not hers to command. Sam had not been “cruel.”
Her fury only doubled. Gone, vanished like the snows of long ago, was her painted idyll of domestic bliss.
“Cruel?” she said. “He’s never been anything but cruel. I’m black and blue with his atrocities.”
Very gently he tried to tell her that he did not believe it. “We must not exaggerate,” he said.
“Exaggerate!” she blazed. “Won’t you believe me till you see it? I’ll go upstairs and strip. Come when I call.”
He soothed her down at that, seeing that she was capable of doing herself some signal injury to call in evidence.
“Well, then,” she said, “I want my divorce: get me a divorce.” That was her simple demand of the priest who married her: it was why Peter took, unrepentantly, as much snuff in a night as he commonly took in a week, and why, with replenished stock, he continued next day to take snuff with a lavish hand.
It irritated Ada, though she had always associated Peter with a snuff-box, and the untidiness of the habit could not offend her, who was never offended by dirt, as any mechanical movement in another will irritate one whose nerves are ill-controlled. They had talked themselves to a standstill, and sat in moody silence, broken only by the deplorable sound of taking snuff.
She looked viciously at him. “If you do that again, I shall leave the room,” she said.
“I’m sorry, my dear,” he said, although, really, it was a pleasant threat; but when he did it again, it was through pure absent-mindedness, and he was terribly distressed at his selfishness when Ada flung out of the room. He had the feelings of a child put in a corner as a punishment, and to relieve them he took snuff again. She heard him from the stair, and heard him immediately afterwards poking the fire; and she thought the loathsome self-absorption of men and their utter callousness to the anguish of sensitive women were proved beyond the possibility of doubt. She threw herself on the bed in her old room, alone in a friendless world.... The bed had a warm eiderdown.
Peter poked the fire because it needed poking. It often did. The grate was one of those labour-making contrivances which must be periodically cleared of ash if the fire is to burn at all, and it was rarely cleared. The woman who “did for” Peter, did for him badly, and he was at the age when a man needs artificial warmth: a gaunt, shrunk figure as neglected as his house. Small wonder that, apart from his attachment to St. Mary’s, he was still a curate. They had considered him for the living when his vicar moved some years ago, they had considered the little circle of rich parishioners who made an oasis of civilization in that savage place, and they had decided that Peter lacked the social graces. They had seen his mittens, his unfinished coat... they had seen him eat an orange: and he remained a curate.
The fire was gone beyond the reach of his unscientific poking. That, too, often happened with a man who had the habit of standing by his bookshelf reading gluttonously, with his austere person frozen into a grotesque attitude, some book which he had not the patience to carry to the fireside: and he was now upon his knees making pathetically clumsy efforts to revitalize the flame when his inefficient housekeeper opened the door and showed Anne into the room.
It eased the situation for them both. Anne indeed, was nervous, so nervous that she had walked three times past the door before she pulled the bell. She had a befitting awe of the priest, and a tremendous respect for the man. At Effie’s, because the circumstances there were tense, it had seemed an easy thing to come to Peter’s, but she had needed to call on her reserves of courage to keep her place on the doorstep after she had rung the bell.
Now, however, when she came into the room and saw what he was at, she pushed him gently aside, and took the poker from his hand. She nursed the fire skilfully; she was with familiar things which gave her back her confidence.
As to the trouble, she diagnosed it in a moment. “That woman of yours is a slut,” she said. “And I’ll talk to her before I go. I reckon I’ve the right, me and you being connections by marriage.”
She looked at him over her shoulder, and saw that he did not recognize her. How, indeed, should he? She had avoided Ada’s wedding, and she was one of a large flock: a face, perhaps, but not a name to him. “I’m Anne Branstone,” she explained. “Sam’s mother; and I’ll not have you blaming Sam for this.”
“For the fire?” asked Peter vaguely, he was rather muddled by her brisk incursion.
“No,” said Anne, almost gaily; “for the fat that’s in the fire.”
She thought she had his measure now—the sort of a man who could live in a dirty room like this, with a choked ash-pan and fire-irons with the rust thick on them. But Peter was greater than that. She judged him by those of his surroundings which had significance for her, and not by books which expressed everything for him and nothing for her.
“Mrs. Branstone!” he said, as if realizing now with whom he had to deal.
“Sam’s mother,” she repeated, rising from a healthy fire; “and I’ve told you where not to put the blame. You can, maybe, think yourself of the right place to put it.”
“Yes,” he surprised her by saying; “on me.”
“You! Oh, if you want to go to the back of behind, you can blame Adam and Eve. But that’s not what I meant.”
“On me,” he said again. “I consented to this marriage. I sanctioned it.”
“Well,” said Anne, “I’ve not come here to crow, but I’ve the advantage of you in that. I did not consent,” and her eye strayed involuntarily to a scar on her hand, memorial of the form of her dissent. “I didn’t consent because I knew they weren’t in love. I told Sam I knew it.”
“Then,” said Peter, “you are worthier than I am, Mrs. Branstone.”
“Because I knew love matters? There’s nowt so wonderful in knowing that, and nowt so crafty in foreseeing that a marriage where there is no love is marred from start to finish.”
“Love matters,” he agreed. “It matters all, for God is love.”
“We’ll come to an agreement, you and me,” she said appreciatively. “We’ve the same mind about the root of things.”
“This is a terrible business, Mrs. Branstone.”
“I’m none denying it. It’s a terrible thing for a man and wife to live together when love’s not a lodger in the house; it’s wrong, and the worst of wrong is that it won’t stay single. Wrong’s got to breed. But, there,” she finished briskly, “I’m telling you what you know, and when all’s said, there’s nowt so bad that it’s past mending.”
“Ada wants a divorce,” said Peter, and a sudden glint of triumph came into Anne’s eye, only to vanish as quickly as it came. She had said, without believing it, that Ada might make arrangements, and this was to arrange indeed. It unmade the hollow marriage, it was a solution which really solved, it was a clean cut; and she wanted to glorify Ada, who was proving at the eleventh hour that she had the saving grace of common sense.
Peter did a curious thing. He rose and took a book haphazard from his shelf, came back to his chair and opened the book. He did not read it, and he was not being rude, but this was an agitation beyond the reach of snuff. He tried to calm himself by resting his eyes on print.
Anne was not practised in the ways of bookish men, but, by strange insight, understood that Peter had gone to a book much as she went to his grate, to be soothed by its familiarity, and her rejoicing at his words came to an abrupt end. His action brought home to her, more than his horror-struck tone, whose significance she almost missed in her joy at Ada’s practical solution, his loathing of divorce: and it seemed to her, quite suddenly, that what mattered most in all this business was that Peter should be happy about it.
It mattered more than Sam and Ada, and even more than Effie, that Peter, who was, so to speak, an old and sleeping partner, should be satisfied by their solution. She did not care if this was to per vert the values: the remnant of Peter Struggles’ life was of more importance than the young lives of the active members of the firm. And because she had a practical mind, and believed that one is happy in soul only when one is first happy in body, she was already thinking past their present problem: she was considering how the slut in Peter’s kitchen could be replaced by her own housewifely self.
She resolutely consigned that thought to the future, and returned to the question of to-day. Ada, wonderfully, wanted a divorce: but Anne required that Peter should be happy about it, and she perceived the incompatibility. She saw that juxtaposition could hardly be more crude. He was a priest, the priest who married them, and she wanted him to acquiesce contentedly in their divorce.
“Wants a divorce, does she?” she said. “Well, there’s more than Ada to be thought of.”
“There is, indeed,” said Peter, thinking of his church.
“There’s you,” said Anne, thinking of him. “If she gets one, does she plant herself on you again?”
He supposed so, unable to disguise his depression at the prospect.
“Aye,” she rubbed it in, “you were well rid of Ada once. It’s not in human nature to want her back again.” She was thinking singly of his comfort.
Peter, on his part, took her to imply that if he opposed a divorce it was for interested motives, that he could continue to be “well rid of Ada.” He saw with dismay that it was an interpretation which could reasonably be put on any opposition from him. He thought, in his humility, that it was a reasonable interpretation, whereas, Peter being Peter, it was a ludicrously unjust interpretation, and, of course, Anne did not make it. She had only stated as a fact that Ada at home prejudiced her father’s comfort: and the comfort of Ada’s father had become a matter which touched Anne Bran-stone nearly.
“And there are other people, too. There’s Sam,” she went on, “and he is a desperate bad case. He has no love for Ada. He’s hoisted his notion of his duty higher than a living love. He wants Ada to come back.”
“I’m sorry to say,” mourned Peter, “that the more he wants it, the less likely she is to go.”
She tried not to exult too openly at that. “And then,” she said, “there’s Effie.”
“Effie!” He spoke in scandalized protest.
“Aye, that’s her name, and yon’s just the tone of voice I had myself when I first heard of her. I want you to see Effie.”
“Never!” said Peter, and for a mild man his bitterness was remarkable.
“Then I must show her to you,” said Anne placidly, “and that’ll mean going back a bit and showing you other things as well. It’ll mean,” and she very much regretted it, “showing you this.” She held out her hand and pointed to the scar. “When Sam told me he wanted to marry Ada, I came to see her. I saw what I saw, and I told him she’d be the ruin of him. He didn’t believe me, and I tried to make him see I meant it. I put my hand into the fire, and I thought to keep it there till he agreed with me, but he’s stronger in the arm than me, and he got me away.” She spoke without passion, in simple narrative which Peter found impressed him deeply. “So I left him and earned my living, and all that. Sam married her, and the ruin’s come, but it’s not come suddenly. It’s been coming all the time. I’d date it back,” she reflected, “to the day when he fooled you about the ‘Social Evil’ pamphlet. He did that because he wanted a rich husband for Ada.”
Peter had nothing to say. If he had not known before that Sam had “fooled” him, he did not doubt it now.
“And it grew from that. He’s made money because Ada wanted money, and after that it grew to be a bad habit. He made it then by writing lies about himself in the papers, and I don’t know how he’s done it since then, except that it has been by more lies. He began to fancy himself at politics. He wanted to be a crowing cock, and it didn’t matter if he crowed on a dung-heap so long as he crowed. And Ada didn’t care. He gave her money, and she didn’t care. She didn’t love, and he didn’t love, and there’s a thing you said just now that I’ll remind you of. You said God’s love. I’ll leave it to you to name what it is when there isn’t love.
“And then love came to Sam. Effie came, and you say that God is love. Sam put it to me in another way. He said he’d found salvation. Well, it’s a big word, and I dunno. But I do know he found love and it changed him. He’s done with politics, and he’s done with crowing and with riches, too. Effie did that by the power of love, and there’s another thing she did, that’s marked yon lass for me as the finest, strangest woman in the width of the world. She gave him up and sent him back to Ada. Well, I’ve heard of sacrifice before, and I’ve done a bit that way myself, but give up a man she loved and teach him how to make a woman of his wife, and send him home to do it—it’s more than I can rise to. And that is Effie Mannering.
“He went home and he tried, and Ada laughed at him. She couldn’t understand: there wasn’t the one thing there that could make her understand: there wasn’t love. And he gave up his politics that night she laughed at him, to leave himself free to tackle Ada. Now Ada’s left him, and there’s sum-mat else turned up as well. You can guess.” He looked up sharply. “Aye, that’s it, and the rum thing is that it surprised them both. Their love’s that sort of love, and I reckon there are folk would call it careless of them. I would myself nine cases out of ten, aye, and ninety-nine in a hundred, but not this case. This wasn’t a case for care; it was a case of love. But a baby’s coming to Effie, and you know’ as well as I do that none will ever come to Ada. I’ve finished telling you about Effie now.” There was a long pause and it seemed several times that Peter was about to break it, and each time changed his mind. All that he finally said in comment on Effie was, “A lawless woman,” and it might have been deduced from his tone that he did not condemn, if he could not, confessedly, admire.
“Aye, lawless,” Anne agreed, “but there’s a law of lawless women and she has not obeyed it. She’s not a breaker. She’s a maker.”
Peter bowed his head. Perhaps he did not wish Anne to see what was written in his face. And he lacked conviction when he tried to speak again. “Whom God hath joined—he began.
“But God,” Anne said, “is love.”
He threw up his hands in a despairing gesture of surrender. “I deserve to be unfrocked for this,” he said, but he closed the book on his knee and took snuff violently. It marked the passing of a crisis.
As for Anne, there mingled with her satisfaction at his consent a keen despondency at his unhappiness. She had both lost and won, and Anne took little pleasure in a mixed victory. She had not finished yet with Peter Struggles.