I Shall Not Want (15 page)

“You blackguard,” he screamed in a voice like no voice that John Marco had ever heard before. “You seducer.”

John Marco raised his hand to his mouth. It came away wet and sticky. Mr. Kent's blow had cut his lip and the blood was running down onto his chin. And as he stood there he saw that the little man was preparing to attack him again. He did not attempt to defend himself.

“Let me explain,” he said. “I've come to explain everything.”

The second blow fell across his shoulders: it was harmless. But Mr. Kent had lost all control of himself by now.

“Don't you dare to speak to me,” he was shouting, still in the same terrible voice. “Don't come near this house again.”

As he said it, he raised his stick above his head for the third time and made a fresh run at John Marco. But John
Marco was ready for him. He caught the stick as it fell, and snatched it away. Then he broke it across his knee. It snapped like firewood. The silver band made a silly tinkle as he threw the broken stick into the gutter.

“You fool,” he said. “You fool. Why wouldn't you listen?”

Mr. Kent stood for a moment looking at his stick, his beautiful stick, being broken in front of his eyes and then tried to throw himself on John Marco. It was a pathetic attempt. Mr. Kent was sixty and an invalid. When John Marco caught him by the arms he could do nothing: he struggled vainly like a pickpocket in the grip of a policeman. But he made one last helpless heroic effort; he spat in John Marco's face. And when John Marco thrust him angrily from him in disgust he simply collapsed against the railings and remained there supported by the ornamental scroll work of the balustrades.

John Marco turned and walked away. He felt sick and faint. He did not even pause when he heard a voice-it was Mrs. Kent's by this time—shout something after him. The words themselves were lost, but their meaning was clear enough; they came through the air like so many wasps. John Marco walked straight on in a kind of icy trance. He was trembling, trembling so violently that his foot-steps were jerky and unsure. A sweet, sickly taste filled his mouth and he found that he was still bleeding. Mr. Kent's malacca cane had cut his lip clean open.

He pushed open the squeaking gate and turned up the sedate tiled pathway of his house. It was quiet, very quiet there; it was somewhere where he could lie down and forget. He was still trembling and had to steady his hand before he could insert the key; but, as the door swung open and he stepped into the hall, he felt suddenly at rest again. There was a single high-chair beside the hat-stand and he sat down upon it exhausted, utterly exhausted.

As he did so, the door of the sitting-room opened and a woman came out. But it was a younger woman than his mother, dark-eyed, and bathed in a deep, musky scent.

“You're hurt,” she said. “You're bleeding.”

She took out her handkerchief, a small lacy one, and, gently, lovingly, it seemed, applied it to the wound.

John Marco and Hesther Croome were married three months later in the Tabernacle.

But it was not like a real wedding at all; and the half-crown which Mr. Morgan gave to the verger seemed more in the nature of hush-money than a tip. Mr. Morgan in fact was the only guest. He turned up wearing a wide butterfly collar, and a large white buttonhole. His pink face behind the bright pebble spectacles glowed until he saw the rows of empty pews stretching all round him like the streets of a deserted city; then the geniality vanished and he consoled himself with memories of the happy day nearly half-a-century ago when half Merthyr had turned out to see him and Mrs. Morgan get married. He would have liked something of that same atmosphere of jostling and excitement here. A trace of paganism did not seem out of place at a wedding, and he relished a bride who blushed whenever anyone caught her eye. Miss Croome whom he had only met once before struck him as a singularly cold young woman.

Old Mrs. Marco's presence did nothing to enliven the occasion. Her rheumatism had knotted her up fearfully and she had to be carried into the Tabernacle. They dumped her down in the front pew and left her there, an isolated figure in a complicated assortment of black.

She had ransacked her cupboards for finery; and, when the lights above her head were put on, the jet on the garments glittered, like a scuttleful of coals. She cared nothing for her appearance, however. She was still too much dazed and bewildered by everything that had happened: her son, her dutiful son, had suddenly been snatched away from her and she was expected to be radiant about it. Less than two months before she had never even seen this
adventuress and now she was going back to share her home with her. She felt in no mood for celebration: she was simply a poor widow woman who had been robbed. Burying her face in her gloved hands she wept.

Three rows behind her, sat the woman who had been Mr. Trackett's maid. She was still in mourning but she was decked out in tribute to her new mistress. She had run a white piping round her black dress and had stuck a band of blue flowers into the side of her dark velvet hat. Apart from them, the Chapel was entirely uninhabited; and those three figures seated there had about them the air of survivors of a lost world—they seemed so small and desolate amid those polished expanses of cheap polished pine.

There was, of course, no one to give the bride away and no best man; Amosites do not hold with such primitive survivals. Instead the bride and bridegroom-to-be, assemble privately in the vestry with their minister, and there is an interval for silent prayer until, under guidance from above, the spirit moves the two parties. (For it to move only one of them is not enough.) The minister takes no action at all in the matter; he is, after all, merely Jehovah's witness. And Mr. Tuke had known this period of silent prayer, especially when it was mature serious people whom he was marrying, last for as long as twenty minutes. But in the ordinary way he gave the young couple about five minutes by the clock and then coughed. The cough nearly always worked; and the spirit, realising that it was holding up the proceedings, came promptly through.

To-day Mr. Tuke glanced at the two of them and closed his eyes. He was displeased. Miss Croome was not suitably dressed. She had almost discarded her mourning and was wearing a dark tailor-made costume trimmed with fur, and a smart toque with a blue feather. The effect on his mind was almost that of wantonness; a veil and orange blossom would have been easier to condone. Perhaps Mrs. Tuke had been right; perhaps Miss Croome
was
sinful
in her desires. But it seemed surprising: he had never known Mrs. Tuke to be right about anything before.

John Marco was on his knees, his eyes closed. But it was as though by closing his eyes he had opened a window in his mind, and the images that he had wanted to exclude came flooding in. He saw Mary again, saw her in a hundred different ways—clad all in white descending into the Jordan Tank on the evening of her baptism; smiling up at him in the dim light of the staircase as she had kissed him; stroking his hair on that evening when he had told her that she must never leave him.

She was far away at this moment; Mrs. Kent had given it out that she had suffered some kind of breakdown and had sent her away into the country to recover. He did not even know where she was, and the letters that he had written to her had remained unanswered. He doubted, indeed, whether they had ever reached her; and he had posted the last one, the final desperate attempt to explain, with the pre-knowledge that it would probably be the fiery eyes of her parents who perused it.

Mr. Tuke coughed and John Marco started. He was ready, he supposed; as ready as he ever would be. He sat back and caught Mr. Tuke's eye. But there was still no sign of movement from Hesther Croome: she was praying. Mr. Tuke looked hard at her. If there was one thing he was really expert in it was prayer: he knew the difference between mere muttering and the real stuff. And this was real: Hesther Croome was praying in deadly earnest. She was cut off from everything around her and was engaged in some struggle of her own. The knuckles of her clapsed hands showed white and sharp. She was praying half aloud.

“God grant that it may come right,” she was saying. “God grant that he may grow to love me and that I may be a good wife. God grant that this isn't a sin that I'm committing, I need him so.” Mr. Tuke coughed again, but the praying went on. “Forgive me my evil desires. Let my life show the face of innocence and humility. Let
the evil I have done be washed away and let me bear his sin on my shoulders. Be with me, Christ Jesus, now and forever more.”

She sat back and took John Marco by the hand. In front of Mr. Tuke she kissed it.

“Come, John,” she said.

Mr. Tuke opened his Bible at the page where the purple velvet marker hung downwards and led the way.

He had caught only some of the words which Miss Croome had uttered; but he had caught quite enough.

ii

They all went back to what had been Mr. Trackett's stucco mansion in Clarence Gardens.

John Marco handed Hesther into the bridal carriage—the verger encouraged by Mr. Morgan's generosity had put a bunch of white flowers into it—and had climbed in after her in silence. Now that it was over he was calm, quite calm, again: the future held no new terror because there was nothing at all that was worth living in it. They reached the end of Chapel Villas without speaking. Then Hesther drew off her glove and thrust her hand into John Marco's; but it lay there without his fingers closing over it and after a few moments she withdrew it and put on her glove again. They still had not spoken.

The party on the steps of the Tabernacle watched the cab recede into the distance, and Mr. Tuke announced that he would look after old Mrs. Marco. She was still sitting there in her pew, weeping, and the sight of her vaguely annoyed him. She was another proof of the fact that Mrs. Tuke's reading of the whole situation had been the right one. He comforted himself, however, with the thought that most mothers weep at weddings; and putting his arm under hers, he started to lift her to her feet. As he did so, he was reminded irresistibly of an occasion years ago when he had assisted in carrying a drunk out of what the landlord had called a respectable licensed house and
what Mr. Tuke had called a common gin-palace. The verger, too, had put out the lights and the large chapel was in semi-darkness; a pale, greenish glow was all that filtered in through the tinted windows. As Mr. Tuke stood wrestling with Mrs. Marco he felt suddenly like a diver struggling with something heavy at the bottom of an aquarium.

He got her finally into the last of the carriages, but even inside the carriage old Mrs. Marco went on crying; huddled up in the corner she put a handkerchief across her face and moaned into it. Nor was it better after they had called and picked up Mrs. Tuke. The women, moreover, immediately sided together; they formed a feminine alliance against him. He was forced to give his seat up to his wife and was now sitting on the hard, inadequate tip-up seat opposite. It was not made for a man of his weight and figure. Every time the driver whipped up his horse Mr. Tuke suffered.

But Mrs. Tuke seemed oblivious of her husband's discomfort. She had her arm round old Mrs. Marco's shoulders and was consoling her.

“You poor dear,” she was saying. “I know how you feel. There's one of us who understands.”

The house was empty when John and Hesther got back to it, quite empty. It loomed up like an iceberg, the front broken only by the dark, blind-looking windows. And inside it was silent—an ominous absorbing silence; it was as though the spirit of the departed Mr. Trackett had just recently passed through subduing things. Coming in from the populated streets of Bayswater, it was like entering a pocket in creation.

They closed the door behind them and stood there, man and wife, in what was to be their future home.

“Kiss me,” Hesther said. “Kiss me and say now that you forgive me.”

But he turned away from her still without answering and, as she threw her arms round him and he felt her body draw close to his, he drew back. There was something in the eagerness, the urgency of it, however, that
made him pity her. She was asking for something that he could not give, would never be able to give. She had told him frequently in those last few days before the wedding that she knew he would grow to love her; she was recklessly building her whole life upon that pale hope. And instead of drawing back and saving herself, she had gone blindly on. She had bared herself for all the pain the years could inflict on her.

That she loved him already, had loved him from the moment she saw him in that awful bedroom—he had grown to accept. Every time they had met she had tried vainly and pathetically to disguise from both of them that this was not like other betrothals: she had talked cheerfully, like a child, of the things they would do together when they were married. Throughout it all ran the same hopeless thread of illusion that they were lovers. Sitting back in her chair, her dark eyes fixed on him, she had resolutely imagined for the two of them.

Disengaging his arms, he drew off his gloves and began to undo the buttons of his overcoat.

But she did not remain standing silently before him for long. She was still desperately seeking to make the illusion a reality; her mind was fixed on an image of life that did not yet exist.

Opening the door of the dining-room, she beckoned to John Marco to come forward.

“I've got it all ready,” she said. “It's our wedding-breakfast.”

The room had been arranged for a party, a party three times the size of the one that was coming. As he saw the row of chairs against the wall, John Marco recognised that she had calculated and been wrong. Up to the last moment, up to the very instant when they had left the vestry, she must have thought that some of his friends would be there to see them married. She had never guessed that any wedding could be quite so empty.

On the long table under its white damask there was food for a company. John Marco looked at the dishes
and cakes and dainties and his feeling of pity for her returned; she had prepared all these herself so that the outward appearance of festivity should be there; she had tried hard to make this a happy wedding. And the cake was magnificent. It rose in three sugary tiers to an icing temple on the top. There were bells and horseshoes and lucky shamrocks all cut out of silver paper decked round the sides of it.