South Riding (6 page)

But Mr. Dickson had climbed stiffly from the back of the float, let Dolly go loose, and clumped to the back door where Elsie had greeted him.

“Is Maister in?”

Then he had not found the body.

“He’s at Flintonbridge, getting hisself made alderman.”

Like most of her generation and locality, Elsie was trilingual. She talked B.B.C. English to her employer, Cinema American to her companions, and Yorkshire dialect to old milkmen like Eli Dickson.

“He’s not then. Astell’s alderman.”

“Go on.”

“I’ve just’ heard from Mrs. Tadman, who’s been to Kingsport by bus, and got it from a chap in Flintonbridge.”

“Get away with you. Our Maggie saw Mr. Tubbs in Kingsport, Wednesday week, and he said it was sure as death. An’
he’s
a councillor.”

“I tell you, Astell’s alderman. Socialist chap. They put it about that Carne’s failing, and no one likes to county-court an alderman.”

“Failing? Mr. Carne? You’re crazy.”

“Then why don’t he do up my cow-house? That’s what I say. He promised to do it a twelve-month back and now muck from yard’s running right through to dairy. I’ll be having government chaps on me. . . .”

They went into the house. The back door clapped to.

It didn’t mean anything. Nasty old man, with his little fringe of beard and greasy hat. He smelled.

Midge crumbled flakes of paint between thin, dirty fingers.

What right had people to prevent her father, father, father from getting what he wanted? What did it mean—to county-court an alderman?

Oh, she had failed him. She had not prayed enough, not thought enough. If she counted to a million, that would be inadequate to propitiate destiny.

The stern inimicable force of fate brooded over the house.

Daddy was not an alderman.

Midge, Lord Sedgmire’s granddaughter, knew what she must do.

With lips compressed and fire burning in her sallow cheeks, she went out of cook’s bedroom and set off downstairs, leaving the window open so that the rains blew in and seeped through the crack in the oil-cloth and moistened the rotting boards until a brown patch spread across the North Room ceiling.

She went, like a victim to the sacrifice, into her Mother’s Room.

It was a big southward facing bedroom on the first floor, overlooking the lawn and the rose garden, and the willows and the duck pond. Ever since Mrs. Carne had been carried out, dazed and unresisting, her rebellion quenched, the room had lain ready awaiting her return. The curtains were drawn; their green taffeta, faded and rotting at the folds, left only a whispering light, shifting in the great mirror the reflections of silver and glass and walnut wood. On the dressing-table, the creams cracked in their jars, and the nail polish crumbled to powder, the scents evaporated from cut-glass bottles among the rusting files and pins and scissors. In the wardrobes hung Mrs. Carne’s deserted dresses, her thirty pairs of shoes on their wooden trees, her three riding habits, her cloak of mink and velvet.

When Midge had nothing better to do, she came up here, exploring. No one had ever told her not to, nor scolded her for it as they scolded her when she was found reading Elsie’s love letters from the blue biscuit box on the maids’ dressing-table. No one had ever found her at it. She opened drawers filled with embroidered cambric, smelling of lavender and camphor moth balls. She tried on gloves and scarves and evening dresses, stuffing the bodices with tissue paper or rolled silk stockings. She paraded up and down in front of the swinging mirror. She was her mother. She was Lord Sedgmire’s daughter. She fell in love with Father, Carne of Maythorpe, in the hunting field. He carried her off and her relations cursed her. They hung out of castle windows, shaking fists, cutting her off with a shilling. Their curses doomed her. She was ill, imprisoned. Midge could never see her. Curses could be lifted by spells. Midge was always trying them, inventing her own runes and incantations.

From time to time the obligation came to her, challenging her to perform terrific devoirs. It might be to catch at a bough as the trap span under it, to lean far out from a window to touch a sprig of ivy, to climb across the central rafter in the high barn, dizzily straddling far above the stone-paved floor. But for three years now a central challenge confronted her— reserved for some crisis when all other resources failed.

She had had a dream.

In her dream she was playing with her mother’s things, dressed up in a black velvet coat and a great plumed hat, parading, when suddenly terror had come upon her.

Her terrors, like her tempers, descended without warning out of calm and safety, sending her screaming, frenzied, towards the kitchen, the dining-room, wherever were lights and fires and grown-up people. But from this dream terror she had not fled. Instead, she had turned to God, kneeling down, dressed as she was in velvet and lace and feathers, beside the ottoman where the furs were kept at the foot of her mother’s bed, and she had prayed while dusk fell and the room grew darker until through her latticed fingers she saw the door from her father’s dressing-room open slowly, slowly, revealing—what?

She never knew. The scream with which she awoke dispelled that knowledge.

But she had been aware, ever since, with relentless certainty, that one day she would have to put herself to the test.

This was the way out. This was what They demanded. Thus alone could she serve her father, restore her mother, and bring back to Maythorpe its legendary happiness, when the silver polo cups on the sideboard winked and glittered, and men drank deep after a long day’s hunting, toasting her mother the bride, the brave, the beautiful, lifting their glasses, tossing them, emptied, to splinter on the wainscot, when the lawns were clipped like velvet below the feet of sauntering silk-shod ladies, and the bedrooms were lit by firelight, and there was hot water in all the muffled cans, and scented soap upon the wash-stands.

Oh, Midge knew, from Cook, and Hicks and Castle, what Maythorpe Hall had been in its glory.

Trembling, her pulses thumping, her eyes brilliant with fear and resolution, she opened the wardrobe, starting at every creak of the door.

There hung the velvet jacket, its swaggering skirts spread like a highwayman’s, its collar high, its cuffs and lacy jabot. She wrapped the skirt around her; she buttoned the jacket above her cotton overall; she arranged the yellowing lace, the braid, the pockets. From its tissue paper she took the immense black picture hat and set it sideways on her tumbled elf-locks. Her mouse-coloured hair hung each side of her pointed, resolute face.

She must do this thing. She must face her destiny. To this hour had pointed the nods, the nudges, the sentences broken off, the stories curtailed at her appearance. All the fragmentary enlightenment about doom and flight and darkness, her “poor,” “ill-fated” or “unfortunate” mother, the Maythorpe tragedy, her father’s “trouble,” led to this awful, inevitable moment.

Her stumbling figure passed the wardrobe mirror. She started from her own grotesque reflection. She fell on her knees beside the ottoman, facing the dressing-room door. Her hat lurched sideways, heavy, weighted with feathers. She pressed her hands against her staring eyeballs.

“Our Father, which art in Heaven . . .”

She began slowly and firmly.

Through her fingers she watched the green unearthly twilight, the bed, the mirror. Her mounting panic urged her on, louder and louder, till at a gallop she took the “Power and the Glory, for Ever and Ever, Amen,” and plunged straight into, “Please God bless Father and Mother and make Mother well and bring her back again. . . .”

Her eyes were still open, yet she saw no longer anything but the slanting mirror. Her voice rang out, shrill and frantic, drowning all other noises. She was no longer conscious of what she said, “and bring her back again, for Christ’s sake, for Christ’s sake, for Christ’s sake.”

The door was opening. Like doom it swung towards her. In the mirror she saw what in her dreams she had not seen—the tall black figure, the blazing ball of a face.

“For Christ’s sake! For Christ’s sake! For Christ’s sake!” she screamed, on her feet, beating away from her in maniacal horror her father who stood, seeing his wife, in 1918, frenzied, in her gallant highwayman’s costume, beating him off in the outburst of hysteria with which she accompanied her announcement that she was going to bear his child.

T
HE
G
OVERNORS
of Kiplington Girls’ High School had already interviewed Miss Torrence, Miss Slaker, Miss Hammond and Miss Dry, from out of five short-listed applicants for the post of head mistress; and they liked none of them.

It was true that the appointment was not much to offer. The school owed its independent existence to masculine pride rather than to educational necessity. Thirty years earlier the County Council decided that a daily train journey to Kingsport, suitable enough to Grammar School boys, was unsafe for girls. Girls were delicate. Life imperilled them. So four grim tall apartment houses were bought cheap on Kiplington North Cliff, facing the Pidsea Buttock road; walls were knocked down; dining-rooms became classrooms; a separate building housed the thirteen boarders, and there for a quarter of a century the High School mouldered gently into unregretted inefficiency under the lethargic rule of the retiring Miss Holmes. Miss Holmes had done well enough. Miss Holmes was amiable. It was a pity that age and health persuaded her to go now and share a semi-detached villa in Bournemouth with her widowed sister. Another Miss Holmes was what the chairman hoped for.

The Reverend Milward Peckover, however, was financially compelled to send his own daughters to the High School. Three nice, good, clever girls they were; and he cherished ambitions for their future. They might even do what he had never done—win scholarships to Oxford and the Sorbonne, like Chloe Beddows, the one star pupil whom the High School had quite failed to discourage. He had good reason for desiring a more effective successor to Miss Holmes, and until he saw her, he had canvassed his fellow governors avidly in favour of the highly-qualified but personally unprepossessing Miss Dry. But, having seen her, he was out of love with her, and his second choice had been given to the still uninterviewed Miss Sarah Burton, whose testimonials both public and private were almost suspiciously favourable. He sat back restlessly listening to Mr. Tadman’s idiotic remarks about a little more accommodation for the Buttocks.

There were Pidsea Buttock and Ledsea Buttock, and Mr. Peckover recognised the ancient and honourable nomenclature of the villages. He particularly detested the puerile vulgarity of persons who would make jokes about them, suspecting Mr. Tadman of a wish to shock the clergy when, being a Nonconformist, he rolled the words round his tongue and proclaimed with a sort of sensuous relish, “the Buttocks this,” “the Buttocks that,” “with regard, Mr. Chairman, to that bit of unpleasantness about the Buttocks.” And the worst of it was that, whenever Mr. Tadman started, some nervous affection contracted the muscles of Mr. Peckover’s nose and throat; his eyes pricked; before he could collect his defences, he began to giggle.

He turned to the chairman, driven to action.

“Mr. Chairman, I see we have another candidate, Sarah Burton. A good plain name. Let’s hope,” (snigger, snigger, snigger; but the explosion was now respectably justified)—”let us hope a good plain woman.”

Dr. Dale, the Congregational Minister, pulled forward the typed papers containing Miss Burton’s particulars.

“Yes, she is an Oxford woman,” he said, preparing to be impressive. He was a Cambridge man and a Doctor of Divinity —two qualifications which made him a thorn in the side of Mr. Peckover, who was a Manchester B.A. and Lichfield.

“Only a post graduate course. B.Litt, after graduating at Leeds,” corrected Mr. Peckover. “Then she had—ah— Empire experience—South Africa. Well, well. That should broaden the mind a little. Broaden the mind.”

Mr. Peckover had himself spent a year with the Railway Mission in Canada, and was a great believer in the psychological influence of the great open spaces—especially those within the British Empire.

The chairman, a vague though ferocious little man, grunted that, whatever she was, Miss Burton must be seen.

The clerk summoned her.

Miss Sarah Burton, M.A., B.Litt., entered the unwelcoming ugly room.

She was much too small. Though her close-fitting hat was blamelessly discreet, her hair was red—not mildly ginger but vivid, springing, wiry, glowing, almost crimson, red. Astonishing hair. Nothing could have been more sober and business-like than her dark brown clothes; but from her sensible walking shoes rose ankles which were superfluously pretty. Head mistresses, ran the unformed thought in the mind of more than one governor, should not possess ankles as slender as a gazelle’s and flexible arched insteps.

On the other hand, her face was not pretty at all, the nose too large, the mouth too wide; the small, quick, intelligent eyes were light and green.

“But she looks healthy,” thought Alderman Mrs. Beddows. “Good skin. Good teeth. And she wasn’t born yesterday.”

Miss Burton had been born, according to her official papers, thirty-nine years ago.

“Er—er—Miss Burton.” The chairman frowned and stuttered, wrinkling his face. “Won’t you sit down?”