Читать книгу Iron and Smoke - Sheila Kaye-Smith - Страница 17

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This business of improving one’s mind ... Jenny had never thought it would be so difficult. At school you improved your mind by filling it with knowledge. A girl who knew the exports of Jamaica, the dates of the Kings of England, the Books of the Bible in their order, and half a dozen stanzas of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” could look down on the world from the vantage of a well-stocked mind. But all this information seemed to go for nothing when one left school. A quite different order of knowledge was required. Here at Heathfield people either talked about country affairs—hunting, farming, and such—or about London doings—plays and scandals.

Jenny did not feel at home with either. She knew little about the life of country houses, all the burning topics of land-owning and land-reclaiming, spring and winter sowings, repairs, hedging, road-making and such matters that often held the dinner-table from the soup to the dessert. She knew more about the topics of Northern dinner-tables, and could have talked quite intelligently, she felt, about iron or coal, if anyone else had wanted to talk about them. But here nobody troubled about such things as iron or coal, except in so far as their prices affected life in the South. They were of far less importance than hops and roots and wheat.

However, Jenny hoped that in time, if she listened attentively and learned more of country ways, she would be able to take her share in this type of conversation. The other kind was much more difficult. Out of her whole life she had spent less than a fortnight in London, and in the North nobody troubled about London very much. But here everybody seemed to know its mysteries. Many of the landed gentry had houses in town, and others continually paid short visits—“I was in Bond Street yesterday, and I met ...” “We saw the Queen driving in the Park ...” “Our drawing-room at Clarence Gate ...” were phrases that at first seemed to bring an exotic atmosphere to her dinner table. Still worse were references to plays she had never seen or heard of, or to a man called Oscar Wilde whom everybody was talking about and quoting. “As Oscar says ...” or “according to Oscar’s latest ...” was always a prelude to something that seemed to her quite shocking and untrue. She much preferred the agricultural type of conversation which prevailed in most houses, and could not help feeling relieved when the much-quoted Oscar was suddenly arrested on some mysterious charge, and disappeared forthwith from the dinner table, though she suspected his continued existence in the smoking-room.

The best part of that winter was the hunting. Three times a week the East Sussex Foxhounds met in the district, and the country of the Eastbourne Harriers was close at hand. Jenny had learned to ride at school, and in spite of the counter-attraction of the bicycle, had often followed the hounds at Eden-in-Cleveland. She had a firm and easy seat, a love of hounds and horses, and a complete lack of fear. In the hunting field she could hold her own, however many battles she lost at the dinner table, and awareness of this gave a new confidence to her manner and a brighter glow to her cheek.

Hunting broadened her knowledge of her husband’s country. Such places as Lankhurst and Moorcocks and Cowbeech and Horeham and Hazard’s Green soon became more than mere confusing names. She rode eastward to meets at Penhurst and Mountfield, and westward to meets at Waldron and Framfield and Blackboys. She galloped cross-country from Bucksteep to Bird-in-Eye, she halted at dusk one evening in the yard of Huggett’s Farm, where Huggett’s Forge used to stand, and the first cannon was cast. Even in a winter’s time she came to love this country of huddled, tilted fields, of narrow lanes trodden deep between high hedges, of red-walled, wavy-roofed farms, and white-capped oast-houses that somehow made her think of pigeons. At first it had seemed strange that the distances should be all fields and woods, blue and grey, instead of the purple horizons of the Moors, but even before the sunset had moved northward from the sea she loved them nearly as much.

She could be happy here, if only she could feel that she was pleasing Humphrey, which she couldn’t feel quite confidently at present. There was still the unavailing effort to reach his mind, that hidden journey’s end of lovers’ meeting in a passion of thought. It seemed to her sometimes as if he held deliberately aloof from her, and yet at others she felt his impatience, his striving against the limitations of their marriage. She had moments of bewilderment and oppression. She had moments even of wild, mysterious fear. She said nothing about these moments, for though she could have talked to Timothy had he been with her, she was shy of the written word, and the neighbourhood of the Herringdales had so far failed to produce a friend.

She had seen much less of Isabel Halnaker than she had hoped. The dinner-party at Old Mogador—that queer, temple-shaped Georgian house on the road to Rushlake Green—had not proved the intimate affair she had expected. They had sat down eight to table, and she had not spoken more than half a dozen words alone to her hostess. They had of course asked the Halnakers to dine at Herringdales, and at first it had been planned to have them alone. But suddenly Humphrey had decided that they must also ask the Birketts and the Culpeppers, so the evening had again been formal and repressive. Mrs Halnaker did not ride to hounds that winter, as it appeared she was expecting a baby in the Spring. For the same reason, no doubt, Jenny did not meet her much at the houses of their friends. But every meeting sent her away in a deeper enchantment. She resolved to model her deportment on Isabel Halnaker’s, and as a first step ordered herself a dress of the rich, deep wine-colour that the older woman wore so effectively. But Humphrey for the first time had not been pleased with her choice. He said that they were such different types that it was ridiculous for them to dress in the same colours. He liked Jenny best in white or in blue.

The other affinity she had picked out of local society had proved disappointing too in a different way. Closer acquaintance had revealed Miss Mollet’s mind as by no means in that state of progress and enlightenment she had first imagined it. After all, a thwarted desire to go to Girton in 1875 is not in itself sufficient education. Miss Mollet soon showed that in many important matters her mind might well be improved by Jenny’s instead of Jenny by hers. For instance, her opinion of the male sex seemed, to the wife of three months’ standing, to thrive on a complete ignorance of their character and habits. She spoke of them publicly as masters of selfishness and treachery, and in private as monsters of grossness and moral turpitude. Once or twice she shocked Jenny by her curiosity about the sexual side of marriage. She evidently had only the most rudimentary ideas on the matter, and yet her little sitting-room at Cade Street was littered with pamphlets on Prostitution and the White Slave Traffic published by Feminist Societies. She lived in two little rooms in rather an unclean cottage, and her poverty of means maintained the friendship long after her poverty of mind had ended it. Jenny felt sorry for the poor thing—who after all had suffered at men’s hands, since none would educate her or marry her—and went to see her rather oftener than she would have chosen. Occasionally she invited her to dinner at the Herringdales—not to meet the Squire, but when they had what Humphrey called a charity dinner of Mr Soames the schoolmaster, and the Rector and his wife—the latter without her bosomette, and her neck displayed according to social law.