The Passionate Heart (Timeless Classics Collection) Page 4

  She interrupted him with a surprising fierceness. ‘I don’t want to play cards. I don’t want to angle for him. The husband I want to marry I must marry because I love him and because he loves me, not because I’ve got to land my fish. You’re horrid, Johnny, and I hate you.’

  ‘Damn it all, I’m trying to help you. I am, honestly I am; it’s important you should marry and get out of all this mess-up.’

  ‘Mamma would thank you for saying that.’

  ‘Well, it is a mess-up. Here’s Jones, who is a positive pariah; she married him because she thought he came of a good family. I don’t believe he had any family at all ‒ not what she thought, anyway. She knows that now; that’s what is making her so savage.’

  ‘I tell you I can’t marry.’

  ‘Poor Papa left you some money. You’ll get that when you are twenty-one, with accumulated interest. Hang that out as a bait.’

  ‘Johnny!’ She went pale with anger, and was shocked through and through.

  ‘Well, business is business any day. The Carews have not got much. They’re like the Joneses ‒ all family. The money dodge is worth trying.’

  She felt so bitterly ashamed. She supposed that Johnny meant well, but it did not help her much. She managed to persuade him to go to bed, and after he had gone she lay and thought. Lying there in the quiet night, with the soft wind stirring the ivy and the creeper at the window, she wept. It seemed dreadful that life could be so sad when one was only twenty, that marriage could be so imperative, and the whole of the world so dreadful. Because it was dreadful. She sobbed until she was afraid that somebody would hear, then she checked herself, and she thought of what life might have been, and built herself an adorable and wonderful little castle in Spain. So sweet were her thoughts that, though her cheeks were still wet with their washing of tears, she managed to go to sleep smiling.

  Such is youth!

  VI

  The war was drifting to its close. Ladysmith was over, Mafeking was relieved. There seemed very little ahead now save the actual signing of peace. Johnny had apparently come home to stay, and he did not mention anything about future employment. He was living very comfortably on Mamma.

  George Carew called, as in duty bound, and was always nice and polite, but he did not seek Mary out. In late September his mother had come to stay at the Welcome Hotel for a few days, and Mamma had called upon her. After she had boasted to Mr. Nason of their previous friendship, it would never do for Mamma not to carry it on. Mrs. Carew did not return the call, and only bowed very coldly after church, in full view of both Mr. and Mrs. Nason, which sent Mamma home in a flaring temper.

  And then Johnny, who managed to know everything, came home with the tit-bit of news that Mrs. Carew had been a great nuisance at the Welcome, had had her breakfast in bed, and a hot-water bottle, and had run people about unmercifully. Mamma had been so intrigued by this that she had forgotten to ask Johnny how he had gleaned such news; she was glad that Mrs. Carew had proved herself a nuisance.

  ‘A nasty, stuck-up woman,’ said Mamma. ‘And what has she got to be stuck-up about, I should like to know?’

  Johnny was always bringing back tittle-tattle from the Welcome, and always amusing Mamma with it, until one day she challenged him.

  ‘How do you know all this, Johnny?’

  It was in the dining-room, sitting on either side the fire, with the copper curb, and the red vases, and the velvet-hung shelf.

  ‘I know someone there,’ he replied, ‘and I go in for drinks sometimes.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather vulgar?’ asked Mamma. ‘Going in there for drinks?’

  ‘Not at all! Everybody does.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mamma, and then, having turned it over in her mind, ‘Who do you know there?’

  ‘The landlord. He’s a great friend of mine,’ said Johnny languidly, retiring behind a copy of Punch. Mary, looking up from her lace-making, saw that he was very red. (‘That’s not true,’ she told herself. ‘I wonder who it is really.’)

  ‘A nasty, common man,’ said Mamma, ‘and I forbid you to know him. He’s not our sort at all.’

  Johnny said nothing. It would all have been passed over had it not been for the unfortunate affair of the case of stout. Mamma drank stout; it had been ordered for her by the doctor, and it was brought in a dozen at a time from the Welcome. One week two of the bottles were empty. Mamma was naturally indignant, and she would have sent Mr. Jones to complain, had it not been that experience had taught her that he was much too weak to complain forcefully about anything. As it happened, she herself observed Mr. Brett, the landlord, going past her gate, within the very hour of the discovery of the empty bottles. Out went Mamma and called to him. It was a blowy day, and she was all dressed for shopping, with her bonnet blown awry, and her gloves half buttoned. She told him quite straightly what she thought of such conduct; she gave him no time to suggest an excuse; finally she announced that she considered it to be all the more disgusting for the fact that he was such a friend of her son.

  ‘Me what?’ asked Mr. Brett, amazed.

  ‘Such a friend of Mr. Johnny,’ said Mamma impressively.

  ‘Me? I’m nothing of the sort.’ Mr. Brett began to wax hot. ‘He’s always hanging round after that black-eyed barmaid of mine, and many’s the time he and me’s had words about it.’

  That was distinctly one for Mamma! She returned to the house, she entered the dining-room, and sinking into a chair clashed the bell for hot brandy.

  Mary rushed in. ‘What is it?’

  ‘That man!’ gasped Mamma, now purple with fury. ‘He’s a liar! You don’t know what he said to me; I was never so shocked in my life; the impertinence! However he dared! You can’t imagine what he suggested …’

  Mary, glancing through the window, could see Mr. Brett disappearing up the road, and she wondered whether he could possibly have attempted to assault Mamma. She believed that these things happened, because she read assiduously a certain Sunday paper which Harriet took, entirely unbeknown to the powers that be, and shared with Mary. But that anyone should have dared (or desired) with Mamma!

  ‘What did he do?’ she demanded curiously.

  ‘It’s about Johnny.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mary, because that was very dull indeed. She had had a very shrewd idea about the affair with Isabel the barmaid, for he had dropped a hint or two. (‘A splendid filly,’ Johnny had termed her in a racy manner; ‘such form.’) And now here was the horrid man giving Johnny away. She looked desperately round the neat dining-room with the Landseer pictures of dogs and stags with lovely soulless eyes, and the nice red paper and the good green carpet. There was little help to be gained from the dining-room.

  Into this charged atmosphere came Johnny. He had been out to buy his copy of the Pink’ Un, which Mamma declared she would not have in the house at any price.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘what’s all this?’

  Mary felt it only honest to warn him. From behind Mamma’s chair she pulled faces; she jerked her head in the direction of the Welcome, while Mamma sobbed profusely into a handkerchief.

  ‘What on earth are you driving at?’ Johnny went on, in one of his and-I-don’t-care moods, ‘standing there pulling faces at me. What the devil’s up with Mary?’

  ‘That horrid man,’ Mamma sobbed, ‘and you and a barmaid. It isn’t true, Johnny, say it isn’t true?’

  ‘Oh, you’ve found that out, have you?’ Johnny settled himself thoroughly comfortably in the armchair and appeared to be not in the least disturbed.

  ‘But it can’t be true. I won’t allow it.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you will,’ he agreed; ‘she’s a damned fine girl and her name is Isabel.’

  Then Mamma screamed. She screamed long and violently, and it was left to Mary and Harriet to bathe her head and push smelling-salts under her nose. Johnny, complaining of the noise, took himself and the paper elsewhere.

  ‘You can let me know when she shuts up,’ he said, above the din. ‘Then I’ll c
ome back, because I like that chair.’

  It was the typically manlike attitude. But Mamma did not shut up. Mamma went to bed, and Mary attended to Mamma, and George called to enquire. Johnny came upstairs and told Mary that George was waiting.

  ‘Better not mention the little argument,’ said he. ‘George rather fancied the filly too.’

  ‘But surely not?’

  ‘Oh, he’s quite partial to a pretty face. You needn’t think he is an angel Gabriel, for all his dog-collar.’ They went down the stairs together and across the hall. ‘Try and bring it off with George, my girl,’ Johnny advised; ‘you’d be well out of all this.’

  ‘Don’t, Johnny.’

  ‘I’m saying it for your good.’

  ‘I daresay; and then you say he was after that horrid Isabel too.’

  ‘So he was, and she isn’t horrid. Such ankles! What a waist, too, and eyes ‒’

  Mary opened the dining-room door and went in. George was standing by the high fireplace warming his hands at the little fire which Harriet had lit. He looked very tall and big, and the eyes that he turned to Mary were blue.

  ‘I regret to hear that Mrs. Jones isn’t well,’ he said.

  ‘Mamma has had a little shock. Do sit down.’

  George sat down. ‘Nothing serious, I hope?’

  ‘Oh no, it was Johnny.’

  ‘His wound again?’

  She hadn’t meant to tell, yet somehow the words came. ‘He … he has had an unfortunate love affair. Mamma is terribly upset about it.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Mary had very little idea of what happened then, but she felt her eyes going misty. The drawing-room with the lustre vases and the beautiful cabinet faded into a blur. The day had been so very disturbing, and suddenly she found that she was crying.

  ‘Please … please don’t pay any attention,’ she faltered.

  But he did! He came across to the sofa, which was a curly affair of side-by-side seats with a stupid little rail between; he put a hand over hers.

  ‘Don’t cry, Pollie,’ he said gently.

  And then she cried much more. ‘It … it’s all been so … so …’ she began, and her voice wavered.

  ‘I know. I’ve met Mrs. Jones before, and I know about Johnny. My dear, you’ve got no business here, you ought to be away and out of it all, you …’

  Only the ticking of the ormolu under the glass dome; it ticked its time right into her very being, it seemed.

  ‘You know how I feel,’ he went on very tenderly. ‘A knight ought to ride into your life and rescue you from the dragon. I want to marry you. I’m very poor, and it would be a struggle at first, but if love would be enough …’

  She wanted to say all sorts of things, but somehow they did not come. She felt herself becoming tensely still, bereft of the power of speech, standing there in a ridiculous dismay.

  ‘Please, darling, could you?’

  When she spoke it was only a whisper, an absurd flutter of a whisper. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  He kissed her then, drawing her into his arms, and touching her lips with a gentleness that was disturbing. ‘I’ll make you love me,’ he said. ‘I suppose there is somebody else? Wally?’

  ‘No, it isn’t Wally.’

  Because it wasn’t. There was nobody else in her life; she felt that there never would be anybody else. She knew now that she was George’s, and although she wanted time to decide, as was only right and modest, the decision was already made. She broke from his arms and went to the window, looking out upon the garden yellowing under the hand of autumn. Amber rivers of leaves on the green of the grass where Mamma was wont to swish indignantly at the croquet which she invariably lost. The tall trees above and the thin half-ring of a moon rising in the sky above a cloud shaped slender and sharpened like a scimitar. ‘A scimitar,’ she told herself; ‘not a very propitious omen.’ And then she turned.

  ‘In a week, George. I’ll make up my mind in a week.’ She wanted time ‒ time to enjoy every minute of it to the full, to drink it in, the glorious thrill of it.

  ‘It will be the longest week of my life.’

  ‘I daresay, but I’ve got to decide.’ Then, in the silence, when he clasped her to his breast, she whispered the question which was clawing and tearing at her heart: ‘Did you care for Isabel too?’

  ‘I?’ exclaimed George; ‘What will you ask next? Don’t be silly.’

  She was satisfied.

  VII

  In the sanctity of her own room she turned it over and over in her own mind. She sat back in the one chair weighing the problem within her. Wally or George, George or Wally? She tried to separate them, but ways and means and pros and cons entangled them: Wally, whom she loved in a certain way, a calm, passionless way, but it was love all the same; George, whom she could not dissociate from a certain position, or from a triumph over Mamma. George had attracted her, of course, from the first. In a different way from Wally, a far more thrilling way. She could not forget how their eyes had met that first morning in church; there had been a significant manhood about George, something that was impregnated with sex. She had wondered how he would kiss her, what rapture his caresses would convey to her; she had found herself thinking these things in church when she was supposed to be listening to the prayer for the Queen, and the subsequent prayer for Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, Alexandra, Princess of Wales, and all the royal family. It was very, very wrong, she knew, but she associated it dimly with being in love.

  Yet Wally had never made her feel like that. He had made her feel entirely different, and that feeling tied her to him even more strongly. She hated to think of life without Wally, of hurting him; him she associated with the terribly sweet smell of honeysuckle, and that stolen hour in the garden. Every girl has a sacred niche in her heart for her first love, and Mary could not tear Wally from that niche. She felt by right that she belonged to him, and she wanted to enshrine herself with him, and yet the problem of ways and means reared its head.

  This life with Mamma and Mr. Jones, and the final straw of Johnny’s affair with the barmaid, was unbearable. It could not go on. She had not the courage to seek employment, which entailed breaking the news to Mamma and facing the subsequent storm. Her refuge was the refuge of all such, it had to be matrimony. Only which was it to be, George or Wally? Wally or George? Back to the moot point she came, and really, when one came to think of it, there was no moot point at all, because George was in the position to marry her, and Wally was not. Yet in her heart she wanted to marry Wally, though there would be a thrill with George which Wally could never afford her. She did not know what she wanted.

  She slept heavily and dreamlessly, and awoke with the old argument weighing upon her soul. All day, and it was a troublous day, she was oppressed by it. In the evening she saw Wally. Mamma was mercifully asleep. She had worn herself to a shred by her fury over Isabel; she had stormed at everyone save Johnny, for the simple reason that he had refused to listen.

  ‘Oh, you’re still on about that, are you?’ he would enquire. ‘Right ho! I’ll come back when you’ve finished,’ and out he would go.

  Having raved all day, and sobbed and said that no one understood her harrowed feelings, Mamma had gone to lie down, declaring that she could not sleep a wink, and now she was snoring vilely. Mr. Jones had gone out for air, of which he stood in sore need after the strain of the day; Johnny had come home, and unbeknown to Mamma had ‘tapped’ her best port as bought by poor Papa in a year of affluence. Johnny and the port were in the little morning-room; in the dining-room Mary met Wally.

  ‘I ‒ I wanted to see you,’ she said a little breathlessly.

  ‘What’s the trouble?’

  She was flushed, and her eyes were radiant and bright. It was a momentous decision in her life, and she felt the seriousness of it. ‘I have got something to decide,’ she said; ‘sit down.’

  Wally sat down. ‘I suppose that old lady bow-wow ‒’

  ‘You mustn’t be rude about Mamma.�
��

  ‘I’m not being rude. It was you who were rude. How did you know who I was referring to?’

  ‘I sort of guessed,’ she said, and laughed.

  ‘Odd intuition.’

  ‘There’s been an awful row here. It’s all been discovered.’

  ‘What’s been discovered?’

  ‘Johnny and that girl at the Welcome. Isabel what’s-her-name.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ said Wally disparagingly, ‘that’s stale news. I thought it would come out sooner or later. Is she upset?’

  ‘Dreadfully. She is furious. Johnny has gone out.’

  ‘Wise fellow.’

  ‘Wally, I can’t stand this life any longer. It’s killing.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Wally, and he stroked his moustache thoughtfully.

  ‘Last night George Carew proposed to me.’

  There was a breathless silence; she could hear Wally’s long intake of breath, could feel his tenseness, the prelude to something volcanic. He seemed to be galvanising his resources for one supreme effort, yet when he spoke he only said questioningly, ‘Well?’

  ‘I ‒ I think I’ll have to accept him; I’ve been thinking it over all night, and I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘If only you could marry me,’ Wally sighed, and his voice was little and hoarse. ‘It’s this accursed money business.’

  ‘You see, I can’t go on here.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  ‘And ‒ there isn’t anybody else.’

  ‘Only me, and I’m not any good. It’s hellish, isn’t it? Last week I had a dabble on the Stock Exchange.’

  ‘Oh, Wally!’

  ‘Yes, the war has depreciated everything. I bought Congo Imperials. I took my all and plumped it into them. A chap told me they were the thing. I bought them at nine and five-eighths.’

  ‘Oh, Wally.’ She had not the remotest idea what nine and five-eighths could mean.

  ‘And to-day they’re down to five. It makes me sick.’

  ‘Perhaps they’ll rise again?’