South Riding (36 page)

The starched maid with pimples said, “Mrs. Sawdon, please.”

Lily followed her into a small square consulting-room.

Dr. Stretton disappointed her.

He was a small pale man in the early fifties with a long cold dispeptic-looking nose gripped by pince-nez; a ragged moustache frilled his damp restless mouth, and scurf powdered the collar of his greenish morning coat.

An unimpressive little man, thought Lily, and his breath was bad. Yet she knew him to be an authority on his subject. At Leeds they spoke highly of him. He had written books.

A file of letters lay on his desk, including that which she had sent on from Sir Wilson Hemingway.

“What I can’t understand, Mrs. Sawdon, is why you didn’t come to me before.”

Lily smiled, a proud withdrawn little smile. Of course he wouldn’t understand. How could he? What did he know of the secret pacts made by wives to guard their husband’s pride? She disliked and despised him. She despised his fussy ineffective manner; yet she realised that his examination was most thorough and his questions showed her that he knew all that there was to be known about her body.

She paid her fee with a sense of quiet triumph. She did not know that out of the pity and anger which hopeless cases seen too late always evoked in him, he had charged her less than a fifth of his usual demand.

She had her reassurance. Her pain, her pride, the transformation of her gentle spirit, had not been caused by an illusion of the mind. An operation, he said, would not help her. She could eat what she liked, do what she liked, as long as she liked. He had ordered her a prescription to take if the pain grew very bad. He warned her to be careful. Well, that was all right. She had good reason to be careful.

Walking up Willoughby Place she realised that she was very tired. At the end of the road she found a super-cinema. It blazed with lights and rippled with palms; a commissionaire in a gold and scarlet uniform paraded the entrance. Up on the first floor Lily could see ladies in green arm-chairs eating muffins behind great sheets of plate glass. The thought of tea and toast suddenly tempted her. She went in and dragged herself up the shallow carpeted staircase.

The tea-room was palatial. Marble pillars swelled into branching archways. Painted cupids billowed across the ceiling. Waitresses in green taffeta tripped between the tables; from some hidden source a fountain of music throbbed and quivered, “Tum tum tum
tum
, ter-um, ter-um, Tum turn tum
tum
, ter-um, ter-um.” The beautiful Blue Danube. She used to waltz to that with Tom when he was courting. A lovely waltz. Their bodies melted together. One will, one impulse, moved them.

She lay back in her chair. It was richly padded. The tea was good. The toast was hot, dripping with butter. Three months, the doctor told her. She would never have to face another winter in the country. She could let herself acknowledge now how much she had hated it, the puddled yard, the mud, the men’s mucked boots upon the fresh scrubbed floor, the primitive sanitation of the rural inn. When Maimie’s child was born she need not go there. She need not drag herself across the country. She need not pretend that there never were such babies as her grandchildren. She need not pretend that the Nag’s Head was her ideal environment. She need not pretend about anything, any longer. After three months.

The waitress looked sulky and tired. A love affair, I expect, thought Lily. She’ll get over it. Pride upheld her, because what threatened her would never be got over. She tipped a cautious threepence and walked down the corridor.

She took a one-and-threepenny ticket, sat in comfort, and watched a Mickey Mouse film, a slapstick comedy, and the tragedy of Greta Garbo acting Mata Hari.

Mata too was condemned to death, thought Lily. And what a lot of fuss they made about it.

Her pride rose and enfolded her. It wrapped her away from contact with the other watchers of the screen, the shoppers in the street.

She sat through the film and left the cinema. She walked down the crowded pavement to the bus stop. She had carried out her intention, had fulfilled herself. The long day was done, and now she could go home.

Then, crossing the road, she saw a fairy palace. It glowed before her, in softly flowering illumination, its turrets outlined in milky radiance against the pallid sky. Wondering, she stared, then saw the enormous notice, its black lettering illuminated by the floodlight: “Kingsport Hospital. Support your own Charities. £30,000 wanted.”

Well, thought Lily, that’s what we all come to at last. That is our final home. That is the end of all our hope and effort Men could defeat darkness, but not death—yet.

This was the goal to which all flesh must come. She felt the evening traffic, surging round her, hurrying home to the long final rest.

But the beauty, the radiance of the floodlights pleased her. At last she had seen death and disease illuminated, honoured like health and life with brilliance and with dignity. It was right, she felt, that these should be given glory. She was tired of the discomforts and humiliations and squalor of her illness. Her weary body had weighed upon her pride.

But now she had done with the unequal contest. She had surrendered. Henceforward she was beyond all fear and sorrow. The floodlit hospital was lovelier to her than the bright gorgeousness of the new cinema. She had served those whom she loved, Tom, Maimie, and Adela. Now she had done with them. She need honour only one companion, the growth within her leading her on to death. She had only one care now, to propitiate it, as one propitiates a jealous god. To-day she had offered Rex, an unwilling sacrifice, in all his silly mindless physical perfection. She had confirmed her faith in the consulting-room. She had seen the illuminated temple of her worship. She had refreshed and rededicated herself. Henceforward till death she was a votaress of the dread, the doom, the power which men call cancer. She was an initiate. Where others guessed in panic, she knew, and knowing, feared no longer, and being redeemed from fear, she was invincible.

Nothing could touch her now. She was as far removed from the world as a consecrated nun, locked in her convent.

She mounted the bus and rode home, bent over herself, soothing her pain as though it were a sleeping child.

Tom opened the door for her.

“Well, did you buy up Kingsport?”

“No, but I had a lovely tea, and I went to the pictures. I saw Greta Garbo in Mata Hari. Ooh, she’s lovely. In the big super-cinema. But it’s not so good as the Regal at Leeds, Tom.”

“Didn’t you get a hat?”

“No. Couldn’t find one grand enough.” She laughed, shaking her head.

Tom, noticing her pale face and drooping figure, drew her in gently.

“Come in. You’re tired. I’ll make you a cup of tea. Come in, old lady.”

I
N THE
dark congested living-room behind their shop Madame Hubbard and her husband sat making paper flowers. Above their heads six pupils were practising steps before their dancing lesson. One, two, three,
thump!
One, two, three,
thump!
Their pirouettes banged the bare boarded floor. If Madame Hubbard thought them out of time, she lifted a stick propped against her chair and tapped on the ceiling, beating out a tune hummed between closed lips that bristled with pins.

At intervals the bell of the shop door tinkled and Mr. Hubbard rose, shedding from his tremulous knees circles of green and cerise and pink crinkled paper, wool and twigs, and shambled across the room and through the door to the space behind the counter, from whence he could serve customers with tape, dress preservers, buttons and cards of press-hooks. But if they loitered and hesitated, asking for Mrs. Hubbard, sure prelude to more intimately feminine demands, he would poke round the door his head on its long stringy neck like a tortoise’s, and shout, “Ma! You’re wanted!” and yield precedence to his wife’s desired authority.

After one absence Mr. Hubbard returned, slumped gloomily into his chair, rose abruptly to extract a pin from his grease-stained trousers, and observed, “That was Pratt.”

“Well?”

“He won’t.”

“Won’t?”

“No.”

“I’ll settle him!”

“He’s gone.”

“You——!”

What Mrs. Hubbard could have called her husband remained unsaid. He quailed before her bright boot-button eyes and tossed mane of grizzled hair.

“Well, we’re not the only ones who can’t get credit,” he grumbled. “It’s these buses. Since they’ve had day tickets, every one goes to Kingsport. How can we compete, when we’ve got to risk choosing the stock and having it brought out here?” He seized a branch of imitation almond blossom, and began to twist green wool round it with shaking fingers. “Well, we’ve got the lessons, haven’t we?”

Above their heads the thumping pirouettes changed to the patt-patt-patter-tap of a step-dance.

“
We’ve
got the lessons!
We.
I like your
we
,” cried Madame Hubbard. She flounced across the room, collected an armful of paper tulips, cleared the table and slapped a kettle on to the stove all in one effort. “
We!
These modern husbands. Live on my sweat and blood! Take all the credit. Where’s manhood? Where’s chivalry?”

Her passionate eyes asked heaven, her gesticulations challenged the whole race of man. But even her anger rippled into rhythm and her courage surging up through seas of worry about wholesale travellers, credit, bad debts, the falling custom and her husband’s habits, found instinctive expression in the song that she had been teaching an hour ago at her dramatic choir.

“I hate you, I loathe you,

I despise and detest you!

Oh, why don’t you kiss me again?”

Wiping her hands, blackened by the kettle, on her apron, and untying the strings before mounting to her pupils, she found her arms imprisoned by her husband and her lips smothered in his beer-flavoured kisses.

“Oh,
get
away!” she cried, smacking his face, but her anger was no longer cold and bitter.

“You asked for it,” he grinned.

She capitulated.

The truth was that though he infuriated her, endangering her prestige, squandering her money, he shared enough of her ruling passion to respond effectively to her changeful moods. He capped her quotations, he whistled her songs; when he could hardly stand upright he could waltz amazingly. Even when she gave him a black eye—which was not seldom—or he threatened to lay her head open with the coal-shovel, they were somehow in harmony. He was her fool, but he was still her lover. Though she responded to his caresses with a cuff, she went upstairs with raised spirits and heightened colour.

The walls dividing the first floor of the house into separate rooms had been knocked down, leaving one bleak but useful apartment, unfurnished except for a piano, a row of chairs, and a dozen or so pegs stuck into the wall to accommodate the hats, coats and handbags of the talented pupils. In the middle of the floor, polished by countless glides, pirouettes and patters, five girls, in odd varieties of undress, now stamped and twirled. The sixth, a plump, precociously developed adolescent blonde, drooped limply against the wall on a wooden chair.

Madame Hubbard’s snapping eyes observed her flushed face and listless languor.

“Well. Jeanette? Resting? Word perfect and step perfect, I presume! Come and show us.”

Stung to action by that merciless vigour, the girl rose and took her place. A bar of sunlight, slanting through the back window, gilded her tousled mop of hair, her rounded limbs and her young body, partially covered by pink brassiere, trunks, slippers and white ankle-socks.

Madame Hubbard sat down at the piano and beat out, with metallic accuracy, the tune:

“I hate you, I loathe you,

I despise and detest you!”

conscious of her husband listening in the dark room below, yet alert for imperfections in Jeanette’s performance.

“
Lift
your feet! Lift them. Swing the legs. Looser! Looser!
Bend
, girl. You’re not a clothes-horse. You’re a woman, in love and furious. I
detest
and
despise
you! Go on. Detest him. Now melt, melt. Smile backwards. Think of your lover’s arms. ‘Oh, why don’t you kiss me again?’ No, no, no, no! You’re not asking for a yard of calico! Show her—Prue! You girls have got no
temperament.
What I have to endure from you! Who’s going to act the boy friend? Come on, Vi. You try then. No, no.
Not
like that. Come forward boldly. Remember you’re a young fellow in love. Catch hold of her. Don’t be afraid. I
hate
you. I
loathe
you. This isn’t a whist drive at the Y.M.C.A. It’s a scene of passion. Have none of you seen passion on the films?”

The girl called Violet, self-conscious and feminine, repeated again and again the prescribed gestures. Jeanette drooped sullenly. The other four watched with intent concentration, crouched against the wall, their coats huddled round their young bodies. With complete seriousness they set themselves to study this mime of amorous hostility as the short, stout noisy woman at the piano directed it. In the soul of each pupil glowed a dream that one day she might thus pose and beckon in a real studio, under the barked directions of a great producer.