Читать книгу Doomsday - Warwick Deeping - Страница 29

It would appear that Mrs. Sarah knew her Mary better than Mary knew herself. The temptress had raised the edge of the curtain, and there was more behind Mary's fall than a natural and irresponsible curiosity. She was a twentieth century Eve. When romance offered itself, she fingered the magic garment, turned up the lining, and tried to estimate its wearing qualities. Such caution may be held to be either wise or foolish, balancing on a knife edge, or trying to teach nature to turn a wheel in a cage. People who wade cautiously into life like a timid girl paddling on a rather bleak foreshore are apt to be too conscious of the existence of crabs and pebbles. Nature prefers the plunger. Or you may more quickly learn to swim by being pushed into the deeps.

She left her bicycle against the gate and returned down the path. The eyes of the house looked at her, and she translated into their stare the varied thoughts and feelings of the moment. They reproached her; they were hostile; they hid things that she had a right to know; they challenged; they were both shy and sad. Surely a woman is justified in exploring that corner of life into which a man is devotedly seeking to inveigle her? Woman's eyes see what a man's might miss, or they see them differently. The house is the woman's workshop. Why should she not inspect it before agreeing to work there?

The key was in the door. She went in and closed the door behind her, finding herself in the living-room, alone with Tibby the black cat somnolent and couchant on a windowsill. The cat did not turn a whisker. Mary was all eyes. Yes, the room looked different, more lived in or less lived in, she did not quite know which, but she thought it had a bare and draughty feeling. Three doors opening into it! She tried the one that Furze had closed when she had come for the milk, and she remembered her own flash of uncomfortable suspicion. Some other girl or woman! She stood in the middle of the little white room with its old Georgian grate and its deep window-seat. The sun poured in. She sat down in the window-seat and looked about her at the furniture Furze had collected, a prim sofa, two rather uncomfortable-looking chairs, a green and blue carpet that was already beginning to fade. And that painted wooden table! Poor man! She was conscious of a feeling of dismay.

Was the whole house like this? Driven from Mrs. Damaris' parlour by a curiosity that was self-conscious and a little ashamed, she found the stairs and went up to explore the rambling bedrooms. Their emptiness astonished her. Not a chair, not a bedstead, nothing but one or two old packing cases! Opening yet another door she discovered herself on the threshold of Furze's room, and though she shrank back almost instantly, she had lingered long enough to realize its makeshifts. A camp bed, a dressing table contrived out of two sugar boxes, a cheap, painted chest of drawers, clothes hanging on pegs.

Mary closed the door. She felt that she had been spying upon his secret poverty. She was swept by a little gust of shame and pity. Poor man—what a house! But her pity could not save her from a feeling of gradual and intense depression. The great, rambling, empty barrack of a place chilled her even though the sun was shining. It would be a tyrannical, heart-breaking house to care for. And her feelings of depression deepened when she explored the kitchen and its belongings. It had a brick floor, an old stone sink with no water laid on, and a vast and rusty range whose bars seemed to snarl at her like unfriendly teeth. What a horror of a place, with one single dark looking cupboard, and a larder that smelt of mice! Even the "Green Shutters" kitchen was a paradise compared to this hole with its peeling walls and damp and chilly floor.

"I couldn't," her heart cried, "oh—I couldn't."

She felt overwhelmed by the thought of the sordid struggle in which a woman would find herself involved. Water to be carried in, water to be heated, that ill-tempered savage old range to be fought or humoured, lamps to be cleaned and trimmed, floors washed down, while the peeling plaster fell into your frying pan. Not a decent cupboard; a plate rack that looked as though it had absorbed the grease of centuries; a sink that made her think of a drain.

She went back to Mrs. Damaris' parlour and stood by the window where the sun poured in. She looked at the garden and the greenness of the hills. Yes, they were dressed and pleasant now, but she pictured them in the deeps of winter, with the windows streaming—and the horizon blotted out.

Buried alive!

It seemed to her to be incomparably worse than Cinder Town, and she felt a choking and a pity. Poor man! But was he to be pitied? Were not men different? That black hole of a kitchen, with the coal shed away across a weedy yard, and the well outside the back door, and the long gloomy dairy where she had seen his long white milking coat, hanging like a poor, pale thing that had committed suicide! He could live here and appear contented. And perhaps he would expect a woman to enter upon an interminable struggle with the cruel crudeness of the house, and think nothing of it? He held that a woman should work, and find her feminine salvation among the scrubbing brushes and the pots and pans.

She fled out of the house, feeling guilty and pitiful; and to justify her coming and those twenty minutes of exploration and of disillusionment Mary Viner went down to Gore Wood. She could see the wild hyacinths as thin sheets of blue under the young foliage of the oaks, and she sat down on the stump of a felled tree and tried to co-ordinate her prejudices and her emotions. So, he could expect a woman to bring herself there, a modern girl? Of course, dozens of women must have lived their lives at Doomsday, and scrubbed those floors, and drawn water on icy mornings from the well, and blundered about in that great cavern of a kitchen by candlelight, but they had been other women, country women, common and strong, born and bred to it. But she, with her fastidious hands, and her sensitiveness, and her passion for movement? She who loathed poverty and its limitations? It was not fair.

She cried out that it was not fair because there was a part of her that wanted to open its arms and leap. She wanted Arnold Furze the man, but not Arnold Furze the farmer.

He was so strong. He could rough it. But she began to be afraid of his very strength.

"He would not understand," she thought. "The man on the land, the woman in the house. Yes, yes—I know. A human partnership. And yet—"

She picked a few bluebells, not because she wanted them, but to show that she had been there, for she might meet Mrs. Sarah in the lane. She disliked that woman, her cap, her nose, her sly and sidelong ways. O,—what a morning! And she thought of him and the wagon and the sale at Melhurst, and her heart hurt her. Why did he happen to be what he was, and why was she her fastidious self?

By the Six Firs she pushed her bicycle against the hedge, and climbing the mound, sat down at the foot of one of the trees. She saw Cinder Town very new and flimsy, and behind her lay the old house like a thing rooted in the soil. Yes, that was permanence, the life of the husbandman, getting up at dawn and going to bed at dusk, looking at the same fields and trees, doing the same things year in and year out. No holidays, no movement, no sunlight on southern seas, one's excitements a new litter of pigs or a record mangel crop.

No, she felt that she simply could not stand it.