No one remarked on her exit. She put on her fur hat, that the village people
knew so well, and the old Norfolk jacket. Louisa was short and plump and plain.
She had her mother’s heavy jaw, her father’s proud brow, and her
own grey, brooding eyes that were very beautiful when she smiled. It was true,
as the people said, that she looked sulky. Her chief attraction was her
glistening, heavy, deep-blond hair, which shone and gleamed with a richness
that was not entirely foreign to her.
“Where am I going?” she said to herself, when she got outside in
the snow. She did not hesitate, however, but by mechanical walking found
herself descending the hill towards Old Aldecross. In the valley that was black
with trees, the colliery breathed in stertorous pants, sending out high conical
columns of steam that remained upright, whiter than the snow on the hills, yet
shadowy, in the dead air. Louisa would not acknowledge to herself whither she
was making her way, till she came to the railway crossing. Then the bunches of
snow in the twigs of the apple tree that leaned towards the fence told her she
must go and see Mrs Durant. The tree was in Mrs Durant’s garden.
Alfred was now at home again, living with his mother in the cottage below the
road. From the highway hedge, by the railway crossing, the snowy garden sheered
down steeply, like the side of a hole, then dropped straight in a wall. In this
depth the house was snug, its chimney just level with the road. Miss Louisa
descended the stone stairs, and stood below in the little backyard, in the
dimness and the semi-secrecy. A big tree leaned overhead, above the paraffin
hut. Louisa felt secure from all the world down there. She knocked at the open
door, then looked round. The tongue of garden narrowing in from the quarry bed
was white with snow: she thought of the thick fringes of snowdrops it would
show beneath the currant bushes in a month’s time. The ragged fringe of
pinks hanging over the garden brim behind her was whitened now with
snow-flakes, that in summer held white blossom to Louisa’s face. It was
pleasant, she thought, to gather flowers that stooped to one’s face from
above.
She knocked again. Peeping in, she saw the scarlet glow of the kitchen, red
firelight falling on the brick floor and on the bright chintz cushions. It was
alive and bright as a peep-show. She crossed the scullery, where still an
almanac hung. There was no one about. “Mrs Durant,” called Louisa
softly, “Mrs Durant.”
She went up the brick step into the front room, that still had its little shop
counter and its bundles of goods, and she called from the stair-foot. Then she
knew Mrs Durant was out.
She went into the yard to follow the old woman’s footsteps up the garden
path.
She emerged from the bushes and raspberry canes. There was the whole quarry
bed, a wide garden white and dimmed, brindled with dark bushes, lying half
submerged. On the left, overhead, the little colliery train rumbled by. Right
away at the back was a mass of trees.
Louisa followed the open path, looking from right to left, and then she gave a
cry of concern. The old woman was sitting rocking slightly among the ragged
snowy cabbages. Louisa ran to her, found her whimpering with little,
involuntary cries.
“Whatever have you done?” cried Louisa, kneeling in the snow.
“I’ve—I’ve—I was pulling a brussel-sprout
stalk—and—oh-h!—something tore inside me. I’ve had a
pain,” the old woman wept from shock and suffering, gasping between her
whimpers—“I’ve had a pain there—a long time—and
now—oh—oh!” She panted, pressed her hand on her side, leaned
as if she would faint, looking yellow against the snow. Louisa supported her.
“Do you think you could walk now?” she asked.
“Yes,” gasped the old woman.
Louisa helped her to her feet.
“Get the cabbage—I want it for Alfred’s dinner,” panted
Mrs Durant. Louisa picked up the stalk of brussel-sprouts, and with difficulty
got the old woman indoors. She gave her brandy, laid her on the couch, saying:
“I’m going to send for a doctor—wait just a minute.”
The young woman ran up the steps to the public-house a few yards away. The
landlady was astonished to see Miss Louisa.
“Will you send for a doctor at once to Mrs Durant,” she said, with
some of her father in her commanding tone.
“Is something the matter?” fluttered the landlady in concern.
Louisa, glancing out up the road, saw the grocer’s cart driving to
Eastwood. She ran and stopped the man, and told him.
Mrs Durant lay on the sofa, her face turned away, when the young woman came
back.
“Let me put you to bed,” Louisa said. Mrs Durant did not resist.
Louisa knew the ways of the working people. In the bottom drawer of the dresser
she found dusters and flannels. With the old pit-flannel she snatched out the
oven shelves, wrapped them up, and put them in the bed. From the son’s
bed she took a blanket, and, running down, set it before the fire. Having
undressed the little old woman, Louisa carried her upstairs.
“You’ll drop me, you’ll drop me!” cried Mrs Durant.
Louisa did not answer, but bore her burden quickly. She could not light a fire,
because there was no fire-place in the bedroom. And the floor was plaster. So
she fetched the lamp, and stood it lighted in one corner.
“It will air the room,” she said.
“Yes,” moaned the old woman.
Louisa ran with more hot flannels, replacing those from the oven shelves. Then
she made a bran-bag and laid it on the woman’s side. There was a big lump
on the side of the abdomen.
“I’ve felt it coming a long time,” moaned the old lady, when
the pain was easier, “but I’ve not said anything; I didn’t
want to upset our Alfred.”
Louisa did not see why “our Alfred” should be spared.
“What time is it?” came the plaintive voice.
“A quarter to four.”
“Oh!” wailed the old lady, “he’ll be here in half an
hour, and no dinner ready for him.”
“Let me do it?” said Louisa, gently.
“There’s that cabbage—and you’ll find the meat in the
pantry—and there’s an apple pie you can hot up. But don’t
you do it——!”
“Who will, then?” asked Louisa.
“I don’t know,” moaned the sick woman, unable to consider.
Louisa did it. The doctor came and gave serious examination. He looked very
grave.
“What is it, doctor?” asked the old lady, looking up at him with
old, pathetic eyes in which already hope was dead.
“I think you’ve torn the skin in which a tumour hangs,” he
replied.
“Ay!” she murmured, and she turned away.
“You see, she may die any minute—and it may be swaled
away,” said the old doctor to Louisa.
The young woman went upstairs again.
“He says the lump may be swaled away, and you may get quite well
again,” she said.
“Ay!” murmured the old lady. It did not deceive her. Presently she
asked:
“Is there a good fire?”
“I think so,” answered Louisa.
“He’ll want a good fire,” the mother said. Louisa attended to
it.
Since the death of Durant, the widow had come to church occasionally, and
Louisa had been friendly to her. In the girl’s heart the purpose was
fixed. No man had affected her as Alfred Durant had done, and to that she kept.
In her heart, she adhered to him. A natural sympathy existed between her and
his rather hard, materialistic mother.
Alfred was the most lovable of the old woman’s sons. He had grown up like
the rest, however, headstrong and blind to everything but his own will. Like
the other boys, he had insisted on going into the pit as soon as he left
school, because that was the only way speedily to become a man, level with all
the other men. This was a great chagrin to his mother, who would have liked to
have this last of her sons a gentleman.
But still he remained constant to her. His feeling for her was deep and
unexpressed. He noticed when she was tired, or when she had a new cap. And he
bought little things for her occasionally. She was not wise enough to see how
much he lived by her.
At the bottom he did not satisfy her, he did not seem manly enough. He liked to
read books occasionally, and better still he liked to play the piccolo. It
amused her to see his head nod over the instrument as he made an effort to get
the right note. It made her fond of him, with tenderness, almost pity, but not
with respect. She wanted a man to be fixed, going his own way without knowledge
of women. Whereas she knew Alfred depended on her. He sang in the choir because
he liked singing. In the summer he worked in the garden, attended to the fowls
and pigs. He kept pigeons. He played on Saturday in the cricket or football
team. But to her he did not seem the man, the independent man her other boys
had been. He was her baby—and whilst she loved him for it, she was a
little bit contemptuous of him.
There grew up a little hostility between them. Then he began to drink, as the
others had done; but not in their blind, oblivious way. He was a little
self-conscious over it. She saw this, and she pitied it in him. She loved him
most, but she was not satisfied with him because he was not free of her. He
could not quite go his own way.
Then at twenty he ran away and served his time in the Navy. This made a man of
him. He had hated it bitterly, the service, the subordination. For years he
fought with himself under the military discipline, for his own self-respect,
struggling through blind anger and shame and a cramping sense of inferiority.
Out of humiliation and self-hatred, he rose into a sort of inner freedom. And
his love for his mother, whom he idealised, remained the fact of hope and of
belief.
He came home again, nearly thirty years old, but naïve and inexperienced as a
boy, only with a silence about him that was new: a sort of dumb humility before
life, a fear of living. He was almost quite chaste. A strong sensitiveness had
kept him from women. Sexual talk was all very well among men, but somehow it
had no application to living women. There were two things for him, the
idea of women, with which he sometimes debauched himself, and real
women, before whom he felt a deep uneasiness, and a need to draw away. He
shrank and defended himself from the approach of any woman. And then he felt
ashamed. In his innermost soul he felt he was not a man, he was less than the
normal man. In Genoa he went with an under officer to a drinking house where
the cheaper sort of girl came in to look for lovers. He sat there with his
glass, the girls looked at him, but they never came to him. He knew that if
they did come he could only pay for food and drink for them, because he felt a
pity for them, and was anxious lest they lacked good necessities. He could not
have gone with one of them: he knew it, and was ashamed, looking with curious
envy at the swaggering, easy-passionate Italian whose body went to a woman by
instinctive impersonal attraction. They were men, he was not a man. He sat
feeling short, feeling like a leper. And he went away imagining sexual scenes
between himself and a woman, walking wrapt in this indulgence. But when the
ready woman presented herself, the very fact that she was a palpable woman made
it impossible for him to touch her. And this incapacity was like a core of
rottenness in him.
So several times he went, drunk, with his companions, to the licensed
prostitute houses abroad. But the sordid insignificance of the experience
appalled him. It had not been anything really: it meant nothing. He felt as if
he were, not physically, but spiritually impotent: not actually impotent, but
intrinsically so.
He came home with this secret, never changing burden of his unknown, unbestowed
self torturing him. His navy training left him in perfect physical condition.
He was sensible of, and proud of his body. He bathed and used dumb-bells, and
kept himself fit. He played cricket and football. He read books and began to
hold fixed ideas which he got from the Fabians. He played his piccolo, and was
considered an expert. But at the bottom of his soul was always this canker of
shame and incompleteness: he was miserable beneath all his healthy
cheerfulness, he was uneasy and felt despicable among all his confidence and
superiority of ideas. He would have changed with any mere brute, just to be
free of himself, to be free of this shame of self-consciousness. He saw some
collier lurching straight forward without misgiving, pursuing his own
satisfactions, and he envied him. Anything, he would have given anything for
this spontaneity and this blind stupidity which went to its own satisfaction
direct.
