South Riding (52 page)

And on His shoulder gently laid,

And home, rejoicing, brought me.”

His big hand strayed along her angular shoulders. Slowly, slowly, her anger disappeared. After all, he was her husband. Perverse and foolish, perhaps, but kindly too, and a preacher, a very good preacher, which was something.

She had enjoyed the prestige of Drew’s Austin saloon standing outside her front-door all the evening.

Did Alfred mean what he said about a maid? Perhaps— perhaps . . .

The prospect of the future became less narrow. The voices of husband and wife mingled and fused.

“And so through all the length of days,

Thy goodness faileth never:

Good Shepherd, may I sing Thy praise

Within Thy house for e-e-ver.”

She plunged her head down to meet the final chord, but the buttons from his cuff had caught her hair net. She gave a little cry, but he had swept it off. Her fading mousy hair, soft as a child’s, that he had once loved to touch, fell about her face.

“Oh—Alf! my net!” she protested. But she was too late.

With a gesture of ineffable triumph he disentangled the hateful object from his button and tossed it into the fire.

“There!” he said. “I’ve been wanting to do that for close on fifteen years! You’ve got pretty hair, you know.”

His big, bearded face went down to the soft curls, his hands caressed them. Shaken by the music, by surprise, by his once familiar gesture, she did not turn away.

Next morning Alfred Ezekiel Huggins thanked the Lord for having restored to him his lost home comforts.

F
ROM
a high window in the Administration Block Mrs. Beddows looked down upon the South Riding Mental Hospital near Yarrold.

She looked with love.

What she saw was a colony of stark red buildings. Some had tall chimneys like factories, some were like Nonconformist chapels with gables and small high windows; some were like warehouses. Between them lay cinder paths and asphalt yards. To the west a large kitchen garden displayed draggled greens and wintry apple-trees as offerings to beauty.

To the refined residents on the outskirts of Yarrold, these structures were an eyesore. To Mrs. Beddows they were a great achievement.

With her physical eyes she could see red brick and corrugated iron, dug soil and trodden grass; but with her imagination she saw splendours accomplished by co-operative effort—the new boilers for the dining block, in which enormous puddings, rolling oceans of soup and acres of cabbage could be cooked at need. She saw the chintz-covered chairs in the staff sitting-room, the new linen cupboards adequately stocked at last, craft rooms where hands undirected by normal intelligence could learn extraordinary cleverness of bone and muscle.

Her judgments were not aesthetic; they were social, and they informed her that this place was good. She had known homes desolated by the ugliness of one helpless, beloved, unbiddable idiot child. She had seen the agony of spirit in men and women doomed to watch the slow dwindling of reason in those they loved. She had witnessed the tragedy of Maythorpe, and her heart was sore for that irremediable defeat. In her youth every village had its familiar “Fondie,” its witless youth, gentle or dangerous.

And her gratitude for the relief of these afflictions steeled her to make her statutory visits. She could look without flinching at the padded rooms where frenzied creatures tore wildly at the leather which at once protected and imprisoned them. She could pass from bed to bed where bodies lay, like houses tenantless, bereft of all but a strange physical survival. She could even face the more harrowing experience of refusing the pleas of the intermittently sane.

They came to her with trust in her honest kindliness.

“Oh, Mrs. Beddows! You know who I am. You know I am as sane as you are. Please, get me out of here. I’m not mad. I’m not mad.”

There were others who had accepted their defeat. They greeted her as a familiar friend with touching dignity. She knew now the eccentricities of the patients. She was prepared to collaborate in their life-long dreams. She asked after Kate Theresa, the lively kitten now growing into a fat spoiled playful cat, the darling of the bedridden old women. She paid the requisite compliments to the farmer’s wife, who tied up her hair with artificial flowers and thought that all the doctors were in love with her. She comforted Miss Tremaine, the saintly deaconess, who wept all day at the thought of Mortal Sin. She stroked the cheek of the “baby” held by Mother Maisie, who had killed her own child eighteen years ago in the basement scullery where it was born, and who ever since had crooned and hungered over a roll of towels cuddled in her arms. She played the pitiful games of make-believe, doing it for Carne’s sake. Because of her friend she must, she felt, help those who shared his suffering.

But the day tired her. Standing here with Matron on the top corridor of the Administration Block—she had been brought here to see the site for the new cisterns—she sighed as she looked down into the November garden. So much sorrow seemed to lie below her. Her ankles ached with tramping the stone corridors; her heart ached with the thought of work unfinished. The matron was telling her about the children’s wing. It was overcrowded. There were thirty children at least who did not need such close confinement.

“When will you give us a country home for them? There are several who are really almost normal.”

“Oh, one day. Soon, I hope. Ask Alderman Snaith.”

The consciousness of her three-score-years-and-ten arose and smote her. There was so much to do that she must leave undone.

She fought her lassitude, summoning her resources of valiant optimism.

“I hope you’ve got a nice cup of tea for me when we’re through this? Any lemon buns?”

“If Mr. Tubbs hasn’t eaten them all.”

“Come on, then. Let’s see. Just the voluntary patients’ ward now, haven’t we?”

“That’s all. Yes—do go there. There’s a Mrs. Ford of Cold Harbour who’s always asking for you—a sad case—intermittent melancholia and attempted suicide. She tried to hang herself two months ago. Such a nice woman.”

They descended the stairs and traversed a covered bridge into another block. Here on the third floor a wide glass-roofed gallery was surrounded by the small cubicle bedrooms of the women paying patients. It was comfortably furnished with easy-chairs, bright pictures, plants in pots and magazines on the table. Here women sat knitting, reading, writing; one played patience; at a corner table a bridge game was in progress. As Mrs. Beddows entered, she heard “Three hearts.”

“Double three hearts.”

The place might have been a women’s club, except that by the table an attendant was showing a small girl how to knit. When the door opened the child turned her head and her face was the face of a woman of sixty-five.

From her game of patience rose a tall handsome woman. Her black dress was neat, her dark grey hair was coiled in a dozen plaits round her stately head. Dignity and authority moved with her. She walked like a queen.

“Alderman Mrs. Beddows?” she asked gravely. “You don’t remember me?”

“Mrs. Ford?” Prompted by the matron Mrs. Beddows smiled. An over-brilliant pleasure lit the woman’s sombre beauty. “You remember me?”

“You lived at Cold Harbour?”

“Twenty years ago. In the house by the Willows. Your boys used to come and play with mine.”

“Of course. I do remember. Dick and Eddie Ford. They used to go spiking for flaties in the mud.”

“Aye, and what a mess they got their boots in. There was your Dick.”

“He’s in Australia.”

“We called them the two Dicky birds. And Willie . . .”

“He’s a widower. He lives with me now.”

“And Bertie, the best of the family. He stayed on with my boys.”

“He—what?”

Bertie was Emma Beddows’ favourite!—the boy who might have been brilliant as Chloe, if he had not coughed his life away with gas poison in a military hospital at Etaples. He had not been nineteen.

“Yes,” Mrs. Ford said eagerly. “They all went to France— your boy and mine, and liked it so much they decided to stay there. Mine have come to see me two or three times, but they always go back again. And Bobbie Carne. He went too, but then, he came back. A pity he left poor Mrs. Carne behind. Do you remember her? Such a pretty creature. It didn’t suit her to be left behind. He should have taken her.” She sighed deeply. “You know, I’ll tell you something. She couldn’t stand it. She went off her head. Lovely she was—and brave, afraid of nothing—a great rider to hounds. Now she’s hunted herself. They say the mad are happy. Don’t believe it. I’ve seen—I’ve seen some things in my life. She’ll never be better. No more use to her husband. What’s a woman for if she’s no use to her husband? Better be dead, I say. Better be dead.”

“Yes, we know you feel like that,” the matron began soothingly, but Mrs. Ford silenced her with a queenly gesture.

“Why does God do it?” she asked. “Mrs. Beddovvs, I’ve asked Him. I’ve talked to Him, as woman to man; I’ve reasoned with Him, asking Him the question. Where’s justice? Where’s mercy? Where’s the everlasting Providence? With him alone in that house and her shut away from him? Who’s to give him his tea when he comes in from a day’s hunting? With her longing for him and crying out to God? Poor thing, poor thing!” She raised her hands above her head and exclaimed with astonishing emphasis and passion. “I curse God for it. I curse Him. Let Him open the earth and let hell swallow me. Let Heaven open and rebuke me. I curse God.”

The other women hardly lifted their heads. They tolerated each other’s eccentricities, absorbed in their own thoughts, patient and indifferent. The fury and drama of Mrs. Ford’s denunciation affected them no more than another’s magpie habit of kleptomania, or the gentle persistent indecency of a third.

And suddenly Mrs. Ford was silent. The tears filled her fine eyes and rolled unchecked down her smooth sallow cheeks. The matron took her and led her to her cubicle. She lay down meekly and let herself be covered.

“She’ll go to sleep now and be all right to-morrow. Every few days she’ll be like this,” said the matron. “Her husband left Cold Harbour after her first attack. They’ve been living in Hardrascliffe. She comes back here every so often, though sometimes she’ll be perfectly normal for months together. We can’t find out why she’s got Mrs. Carne so much on her mind. Curious, isn’t it? Apparently she used to go up to Maythorpe Hall to do sewing for her, and took a great fancy to her. That must be a sad case.”

“It is,” said Emma Beddows.

“Well. It’s always Mrs. Carne now that troubles her. It’s Mrs. Carne that’s shut away. Never herself.”

“Oh, poor thing. Poor thing.”

The sadness of life swirled about Emma Beddows in great engulfing waves.

“Well. I don’t know. She still has her use in life, you know. She’s about the best influence we have here. Gentle, unselfish, wise. Wonderful with the other patients. A rare and fine personality. We don’t choose our way of service in this world,” said the matron.

They were wandering now through the long corridors and across the garden towards her little room where she served tea to visitors. Emma Beddows moved slowly.

“She’s beginning to feel her age,” thought the matron. “I hear Maythorpe Hall’s coming on to the market,” she observed irrelevantly, her mind still busy with the problem of housing defective children.

“Maythorpe?” Mrs. Beddows stopped dead.

“So Dr. Flint heard from Dr. Campbell. He attends the Carne child, you know.”

“Yes—but—Midge isn’t ill now?”

“Well—she’s upset—and no wonder.”

Why hasn’t he told me? What is this? Why haven’t I known? Mrs. Beddows wondered.

“That accident up at school . . .”

“An accident?”

“Oh, nothing serious. One of the mistresses had a bad attack of hysteria. She laid open the child’s cheek with a ruler. Not very good for her. She’s an unstable little thing. Heredity bad, of course. We ought to have her here.”

There was no malice in the matron’s calm voice. She believed in the remedial work done by psychiatrists at her hospital; residence there conveyed to her no sense of stigma.

But Emma Beddows’ heart turned over, and rose, cold, to her throat.

“She’s not bad? It’s not affected her mind?”

“The mistress?”

“Midge?”

“Not yet.”

Not yet. The placid ominous threat of the specialist. She could not forget it. And she could not bear it for Carne.

Walking between the drooping cabbages, the neat raised dykes of celery, all the ordered ugliness of the asylum garden, she protested against her uneasy spirit.

What if Carne had been right? What if this was the wrong school for Midge? What if Sarah Burton’s appointment had been a mistake? Carne had not wanted it. Mistresses in well-conducted schools do not cut children’s cheeks open with rulers. Why hadn’t she heard? Why hadn’t he told her? Because it was she who had persuaded him to send Midge to Kiplington? Anguish racked her.

She followed the matron into her sitting-room and endured the greetings and excuses of Alderman Snaith and Councillor Tubbs, already installed with Dr. Flint and drinking tea.