Читать книгу South Riding - Winifred Holtby - Страница 8

Table of Contents

The June day spread itself round Maythorpe Hall, endless, amorphous, ominous. It had no shape—not even a dinner hour, for Elsie was baking and had given Midge ham cake and apples to eat whenever she felt like it, and those had disappeared hours and hours ago.

If only it would stop raining, she could go out into the horse pasture and try that game of throwing a tennis ball over her shoulder and then turning back to find where it had fallen; or she could burrow deeper into the tunnel she was making in the thrashed oat stack, or she could climb the medlar tree in the low orchard—dull occupations, but better than sitting here with her nose against the pane of her bedroom window, watching the dun grey cup of the sky pressed down over the mottled green of the landscape.

Acre beyond acre from her bedroom window, Midge could see the broad swelling sea of rain-rinsed green, the wet bluish green of wheat in blade, the dry tawny green of unploughed stubble, the ruffled billowing green of uncut meadow grasses, the dark clumps of trees, elm and ash and sycamore. There was not a hill, not a church, not a village. From Maythorpe southward to Lincolnshire lay only fields and dykes and scattered farms and the unseen barrier of the Leame Estuary, the plain rising and dimpling in gentle undulations as though a giant potter had pressed his thumb now more lightly, now more heavily, on the yet malleable clay of the spinning globe.

A dull landscape, thought Midge Carne. Nothing happens in it.

If only she had brothers and sisters to play with.

If only the books in the house were not so dull—sporting novels, stable compendiums, Debrett, the complete works of Sir Walter Scott, bound volumes of the Ladies' Realm——

If only she liked reading——

If only Daddy had not told her that she was too old now to play with the little Beachalls and Appleton children——

If only Miss Malt had not gone home to look after a sick father. Miss Malt had grumbled at the house and scolded Elsie. She didn't like cold joints for lunch and called Midge backward. She was always praising her former pupils, who must have been hateful little prigs, thought Midge. But even so, lessons and ex-governesses were preferable to this loneliness and monotony of leisure.

If only Midge had not been afraid of horses, ever since that time Black Beauty fell on to her, and she woke up at night screaming and shuddering, and Dr. Campbell said she was never to ride again. Midge was immeasurably relieved. People had told her that riding and hunting were superb, unrivalled pleasures. She believed them. But they were pleasures which she, herself, could do without.

But Daddy had been disappointed. She was always disappointing him. He had wanted his daughter to be beautiful and proud and fearless like her mother, and Midge was ugly and thin and delicate and afraid and wore spectacles and a gold bar across her teeth. And she flew into horrible passions that made her lie on the floor and kick and scream. A fiend entered into her. She knew all about the man in the Bible who had an evil spirit. One moment she would feel nothing but good and gentle and polite and then these storms would seize her for no purpose, lashing her into fury. And afterwards she would feel ill and sick all over. It was no fun having an evil spirit.

If only Daddy would come home and be pleased and talk to her, and tell her what it was like to be an alderman.

The afternoon had lasted for ever and ever already.

It seemed to Midge that more than half her life had been spent shut up in the house with rain on the window waiting for some one to come home and talk to her. Yet often enough when Daddy came, he would sit silent drinking whisky and soda, companioned only by the dark oil paintings of ancestors in the dining-room and by Mother's lovely terrifying portrait; or he would work, bent over his desk adding columns of figures that never came out right, because there was a slump, because the Labour Bill was double what it used to be and because men worked for half the time and prices stayed the same. Midge knew all about the agricultural crisis.

The Carnes, she knew, were not Poor People. Poor people lived in cottages; the Carnes lived in a Hall, which was the biggest house for miles round, with a smoking-room and a breakfast-room and three sets of staircases and a top floor nobody ever used now, and a drive nearly half a mile long. Uncle William, Father's youngest brother, was an architect and lived near Harrogate and had two motor-cars; and Grandfather, Lord Sedgmire, whom she had never seen, was a Baron on the Welsh Border and lived in a castle. These splendours were part of Midge's heritage. No matter how torn her frocks, how broad her accent, how wild her conduct, screaming and laughing through barns and cowsheds with the village children, she remained conscious of this foundation of grandeur sustaining her. When a tramp saw her perched on the wall spitting cherry stones into the water-butt with the Beachall children, and asked, "What would the lady of the house say if she could see you, little girls?" Midge had replied, "I am the lady of the house."

She was too. Her father was a squire even if also a farmer. The house was a hall even if the silver cups on the dining-room sideboard grew tarnished, and of the former servants only Elsie was left to answer the door and roast the mutton and scrub the kitchen floor.

Grandeur remained; but the need for money overshadowed it. Daddy was lord of his estate, but beyond Daddy was the Bank. This, that and the other could not be done because the Bank said so. Carnes could not buy motor-cars, rebuild stables, play polo, train racehorses, visit London or plant new coverts because of the Bank, the Bank, the Bank.

Nor was money the only trouble. Mr. Castle was ill, and Mrs. Castle nursed him, and Dolly Castle, brought home from smart service in Kingsport, sulked and grumbled, and the lads groused, and Hinds' House was not at all what it used to be, and Daddy was lost without Foreman Castle.

And if Daddy was not worried about the Bank and Castle and money and Midge, there was always Mother—Mother, the brilliant and gay and regal, for whom the whole house lay waiting. But she was ill, and away in a nursing home, and did not return. If only Daddy would come home quickly and be happy because he was an alderman.

If only all grown-ups could be less unhappy.

From a window at the top of the house, there was a northward view along the road from Kiplington. Perhaps, thought Midge, if she went there she would be able to see Father driving with Hicks in the dog-cart, and wave to him, and run downstairs and wait for him in the stable yard, and greet him.

She wandered slowly along the first floor passage, delaying mistrustfully to give fate a chance.

If she wanted anything very much, she would count to fifty and then another fifty before she let herself think that it might happen.

She paused at the door of the Big Spare Bedroom and counted fifty. The furniture there was shrouded with holland dust cloths. One brass ball from the foot of the bed was missing. Midge had once unscrewed it too far, playing there last year, dropped it, and let it lie.

She went on to the Bachelor's Room and counted fifty. It smelled of dust and boot polish and tobacco. A man's smell. Yet no man had slept there for years.

She dawdled up the stairs to the second landing that ran from end to end of the long old house. Now she was far away from Elsie singing in the kitchen. Ivy overgrew the windows. Chestnut branches darkened them. Yet in Cook's Room the pink wallpaper had faded to dingy cream, except on the squares where pictures once had hung. The black iron bedsteads were bare; a pair of discarded shoes, bulging to fit cook's bunions, lay against the wall, exposing their battered soles, a home for spiders. In the open drawers of the dressing-table, Midge had already found two big black hairpins, a twist of tape fluffy with dust, and an artificial daisy. But when she had picked up the daisy, last summer, an earwig had run out of it, and she had dropped it in disgust, to lie on the floor with the shoes, an old box lid and a coil of grey hair combings.

The window was hard to open, but Midge knew its tricks, thrusting up the warped frame, showering down white petals of flaking paint. She knelt and looked on to the tops of lilac bushes, the stable roofs, and the red moss-grown bricks of the back yard. Beyond the roofs lay the Kiplington Road, twisting away among the wet green fields.

If I shut my eyes and count to a hundred, thought Midge, I shall see him coming.

She shut her eyes. She counted. But time stood still. Endless, amorphous, ominous, time enfolded the crumbling house.

It can't be That. They can't want That of me, thought Midge with rising terror. She clutched the window-sill on to which rain was dripping.

She shut her eyes and counted, praying silently that no further devoir should be exacted from her. If she prayed, if she counted, surely that was enough to propitiate Them and bring her father home, an alderman.

It must be so. Surely now she could hear the clop of horse-hooves, the sound of wheels splashing through the puddles?

She screwed her eyes tight. Ninety-seven, ninety-eight; he was coming nearer, her darling, her God, her father; ninety-nine. Oh, she would give them due measure; she would not cheat.

"A hundred!"

She shouted it aloud and opened her eyes and saw Mr. Dickson's milk float turning into the stable-yard.

Her prayers had failed her.

Then, with a shock like a blow, she thought, "He's had an accident. They're bringing the body home in the milk float like Mr. Banner from the hunting field." She was almost sick with terror.

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 oilcloth 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 washstands.

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.