I Shall Not Want (7 page)

At seven-twenty-five with the body of the Tabernacle already over three-quarters full, the Kent family had still not arrived; there was no Mary. John Marco became impatient. Then the impatience cleared away and was succeeded by a strange sense of punishment. Perhaps he wasn't going to be
allowed
to see her after all, perhaps to be denied the sight of her was the first step in the retribution that he now no longer doubted was somewhere already being prepared for him. And then at seven-thirty, just as the black figure of Mr. Shuttleworth appeared in front the white screen and his assistant began fiddling with the acetylene flare inside the lantern, Mary Kent came in. She was alone. John Marco's spirits rose at the first glimpse of her. But there was no time even to catch her eye. She went quickly up the aisle—he caught a swift impression of the pale, lovely face, and the gleaming coil of her hair as she passed—and sat down in the Kents' family pew. Then the lights were lowered and Mr. Shuttleworth's experienced voice began.

“My first,” he said, “shows the most famous city in the world—Jerusalem. Note the Temple area, now occupied by the Dome of the Rock”—here he seized hold of a long pointer, like a billiard cue, and began stroking the screen with it—“and at the back, on the left, the Mount of Olives itself....” He paused and banged twice on the platform with the butt of his pointer: the assistant dexterously inserted another slide, and the show proceeded. “We are now looking,” said Mr. Shuttleworth, “at the Sea of Galilee, with the summit of Mount Hermon in the distance. I want you to observe on the left the feathery branches of the date-palm. In case any of you should not be clear which is your left and which is your right
I should explain that
this
is the date palm and that
this
is your lecturer in native dress.”

Mr. Shuttleworth dropped his voice impishly for a moment and then passed on to the next slide. “Here,” he said, “we have the Salt, or Dead, Sea and away in the distance we see the peaks of the Mountains of Moab. ...”

To-night, however, John Marco was a bad listener. His thoughts wandered. He felt a contempt for the stale, familiar stuff of Mr. Shuttleworth's address; if Mary Kent had not been there, he would have found an excuse to slide from his pew and leave while the lights were still down. But as it was, he sat on, waiting for it all to be over. He saw the site of Nineveh, and the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, the Golden Calf and a portion of a Roman Road in Syria. But it was of none of these that he was thinking. He was wondering how he should approach Mary Kent and ask if he might walk home with her.

It proved to be quite easy, astonishingly easy in fact. As she passed through the porch, there was John Marco waiting for her. He held his hat in one hand and a mission appeal that he had just been given in the other.

“If you're alone,” he said with a little bow, “might I have the pleasure of walking home with you?”

The question amused him as he asked it, and this amusement gave him confidence. After what he had done already for her sake, it seemed so slight and innocent, this new thing that he was asking.

And Mary Kent seemed pleased by his attention.

“Thank you,” she said. And after a pause as they walked along together, she added by way of making conversation: “My father isn't well to-night. My mother is looking after him.”

“Nothing serious, I trust,” John Marco replied with proper formality.

“It's a carbuncle,” Mary Kent answered.

“They can be very painful,” John Marco replied seriously. And for the moment as he spoke he almost felt concerned about it.

They walked on side by side through the shadowy, gas-lit streets. John Marco was most punctilious and attentive. He took up a position gallantly on the outside, changing over rather ostentatiously when they turned the corner, and allowed himself to take Mary Kent lightly by the arm when they crossed the road. Even so he was careful to drop her arm again as soon as she had safely reached the pavement. It could not possibly have been said of him, he reflected, that he was being cheap or familiar; so far as Mary Kent was concerned, he wished his conduct to be entirely and gracefully beyond reproach.

The little family business was closed when they got there; closed and shuttered. The only evidence of its nature was a round hole in the shutter through which a solitary clock face, inscribed with the words “Alexander Kent, Clock-Maker and Jeweller,” was visible. Mary Kent stood aside and did not attempt to hold out her hand. Instead she spoke the words that he had always hoped he would hear.

“Won't you come inside for a moment, Mr. Marco?” she asked. “It's really quite early.”

“Thank you,” said John Marco simply. “I'd like to.”

Mary Kent had her own key; it had been given to her so that she should not disturb her mother in the process of attending to the suffering Mr. Kent. She opened the door that gave onto a steep flight of stairs, and John Marco followed her up. A feeling of excitement came over him as he did so. It was his moment of victory. He was in her home at last. But there was something deeper than the mere sensation of victory, something deeper and far sweeter: she had asked him herself.

Mrs. Kent, however, did not seem at all pleased to see him; she made it clear that in her opinion Mary Kent had acted gauchely and impetuously in admitting him at all.

“You shouldn't have brought Mr. Marco up like this, dear,” she said quite frankly. “It isn't fair. If we'd known he was coming we'd have been prepared.”

She began making little swooping excursions round the room as she was speaking, snatching up a work basket, a pile of mending, a plate with a knife across it.

“Please don't trouble on my account,” John Marco began. “I shan't be stopping. It was only that I showed Miss Kent home.”

But Mrs. Kent was now equally emphatic that he should stay. It was evident that she felt that somehow her daughter had contrived to bring the hospitality of the Kents into disrepute, and she wanted to restore their reputation in Mr. Marco's eyes.

“You can't go until you've had a cup of tea,” she said. “You can't really.”

As she said it she went over to the corner cabinet where the best china was kept and began removing the milk-jug with the fancy crinkled edge, the square pedestal tea-cups, the urn-like sugar bowl. John Marco remained politely standing. He was rather amused by her agitation. It was the first acknowledgement that he had ever received that he was someone of importance. It gratified him, too, to find so obviously that he was the first man whom Mary Kent had ever invited into her house. He looked across at her where she was sitting—she had just taken her hat off and the brightness of her hair was showing—and they smiled at each other.

Mrs. Kent asked if he would move while she got the biscuit barrel. . . .

It remained a tense and rather difficult interlude. Mr. Kent lay in the next room, too ill to join them, too well-bred to cry out. But John Marco had forgotten about him: his eyes were fixed on Mary. She was pouring out tea for her mother and, as he looked at her, he realised that never before had he seen anyone cock her finger so enchantingly as she poured.

As the minutes passed, Mrs. Kent's agitation increased. She glanced from the clock—there were four clocks in that room alone—to John Marco, and back at the clock again. Finally, she put two more lumps of sugar into her tea
and sat stirring them, trying to appear as though she were a woman without a duty or a worry in the world.

But Mary Kent was not to be deceived.

“If you want to go and do anything for father,” she said, “I'll look after Mr. Marco.”

“No, please,” said John Marco. “Please don't let me stop you. I was just going.”

He half-rose as she said it. But Mary motioned him down again.

“You don't have to go,” she said, “just because Mother's got something she wants to do.”

The firmness of her tone surprised both of them. Mrs. Kent looked from one to the other, debated with herself the propriety of leaving them alone together, and finally decided that her daughter had meant what she said. She got up in a tangle of apologies about how the doctor had said that she ought to attend to Mr. Kent at nine o'clock for certain, and went out into the kitchen, leaving the door open after her. John Marco regarded Mary Kent with fresh admiration. To-night was the turning point in her career—he could see that. He was savouring the glorious sensation of the lover who for the first time finds himself being preferred to the family.

There was a long awkward pause during which John Marco did not take his eyes off Mary Kent. He just sat there gazing. She could feel his eyes on her, passing all over her. It was a new sensation for her to be looked at by a man in this way; and she found, to her surprise, that she liked it. But she had to say something, something to break the silence.

“Did you enjoy the lecture?” she asked.

John Marco was bold. In this, the intimacy of her own home, he felt that he could tell her that he loved her.

“I wasn't thinking of the lecture,” he said.

Mary Kent dropped her gaze.

“I wish,” she said, “that we could have that lantern for the Sunday School. It would make the Scriptures so much more interesting for the children.”

But John Marco was not to be put off so easily.

“I told you I wasn't thinking about the lecture,” he repeated. “I was thinking about ...”

It was Mrs. Kent who interrupted him. She emerged from the kitchen wearing the air of self-conscious importance that descends on all amateurs about to execute a professional operation for which they are not qualified. In her hand she was holding a massive quart bottle—she had been forced very humiliatingly to borrow it: being Amosites, the Kents were not a drinking family—wrapped up in a bath towel. She had just been boiling the bottle, and it was now so hot that it could not be held. In a few minutes the bottle was going to be applied by Mrs. Kent, neck downwards, onto the unfortunate man's carbuncle. It was the doctor's idea that the bottle should then be held there until, as it cooled, the vacuum inside it had sucked out the core of the inflammation. The whole scheme hinted somewhat of the torture chamber; it was medical practice at its most simple, most painful and most effective.

The peculiar nature of the operation appeared to embarrass Mrs. Kent.

“Whatever will Mr. Marco think?” she said, “me coming through like this?”

She covered up the neck of the bottle with the corner of the bath towel as she spoke, making the whole bundle appear like a swathed and probably smothered baby, and passed through into the bedroom. A few minutes later a groan indicated that she had interrupted the sufferer in a doze into which he had just dropped off.

John Marco turned to Mary Kent again. He was blushing.

“I was thinking about you,” he said.

“Were you?” said Mary Kent.

She was looking straight at him now, a smile half timid, half happy, playing across her face.

“Do ... do you mind?” John Marco asked.

“I'm glad,” she said.

She spoke so softly that John Marco scarcely heard the words. He got up and came over to her. He was trembling: his knees felt so weak that they might let him down.

“May I . . . may I call you Mary?” he asked.

She held out her hand and took hold of his. She could feel then how nervous, how frightened of her, he was; and it moved her far more than any show of strength, of self-possession, could have done. She felt happy and excited to think that she could reduce this hard, fine man, with his black, piercing eyes, to such a pass. She had an idiotic fear that he—not she—might be going to cry.

“Do you want to?” she asked.

He came closer to her until he was touching her; he was gripping her hand by now so hard that it hurt. Her head with its bright sweep of hair was against him. He could trust himself no longer and closed his eyes in the sheer happiness of the moment.

“Mary, I love you,” he said. “I loved you from the first moment I saw you.”

She did not answer for a moment, and he could feel that she was trembling.

“I like you too,” she answered.

“That's not enough,” he said quietly. “You've got to love me. Say that you love me.”

“I . . . think I do,” she replied. “But I hadn't expected anything like this to happen.”

“Then you do love me!” John Marco repeated. “You do!”

He went down on his knees beside her and his face was now close to hers.

“Kiss me,” he said.

Her lips were parted, and he could see that her eyes were smiling; smiling and still a little startled. Putting his arm round her he pulled her to him. She began stroking his hair; it was the first time that she had ever touched a man's hair and it felt firm and crisp beneath her fingers. She kissed him, conscious of a strange new excitement within her. Then when they had kissed, John
Marco began speaking to her; his voice was now low and rapid.

“Promise to marry me,” he said. “Swear that no matter what happens you'll marry me. Don't let anything stop us.”

She was frightened now and drew back from him, but he raised himself on his knees until his face was close to hers again. Those black, intense eyes of his were staring into her.

“Whatever happens—do you hear me?” he was saying. “You've got to marry me. You're never to leave me.”

“Stop,” she said. “Please stop.”

John Marco paused and passed his hand across her forehead. He spoke gently now as though apologising.

“It's only because I love you so,” he said, “that I can't bear ...”

But he was never able to finish the sentence. At that moment there was a sudden scream from the adjoining room, a scream followed by the sound, confused but unmistakable, of bare, running feet.

It was Mr. Kent. Never spartan in the endurance of pain, and with the reserves of his courage sapped by the shootings of the carbuncle, he had found Mrs. Kent's hot bottle too much for him. At one moment, he was lying on his face with his handkerchief stuffed into his mouth, ready for anything that his wife might do to him; and, at the next, as he felt the white hot pain go plunging into him, he had let out a shriek and was scrambling out of bed and across the bedroom.