A Little Treachery

30

Mrs Stewart was a disappointed woman, and she had come to take a contemptuous view of her fellow-creatures.

She had married because she had wanted a son, but she would have done better to have joined a community of working nuns. In the ordinary affairs of life, she had considerable fortitude and expected others to have it. She was thick-skinned and material-minded. She would have made an excellent active, worldly-tempered directress, tough and sardonic, putting down the visionary with a ruthless hand; and would have been particularly successful among those who could not answer her back. Under such conditions, she would have developed a harsh amiability which might have turned her into an almost pleasant character.

That no son had come of her marriage had embittered her. She was always not so much softened as overthrown by the sight of a young mother. It was her one soft spot. The softening had commenced in her youth with the business-like exploitation of motherhood by her church, and so was quite out of touch with rationality. For she could hardly have been called fond of children. If she had a stern passion for boys, it was because she was martial-minded. She had wanted a son so that she might mould him as she wished; she would not even adopt a child for fear of having incomplete influence over him; and she would have driven her son into the priesthood. But he would have had to be a fighter, one of those political priests who have a genuine if underground influence on public affairs; which could hardly have been in England; a fact adding to her bitter scorn of the ‘heathen’ country (where every department of life was ‘mismanaged’ because her church was shut out of its counsels) and increasing her perverse satisfaction in seeing any one of its fair countrysides devastated by her husband’s operations.

Her life was dull, she spent much of her time in a state of angry boredom and therefore indulged petty curiosities. She had not enough to do, she was idle from contempt. Her conviction was that the majority of her fellow-countrymen were not worth bothering about, since they were, anyway, bound for hell. Fierce amusement was all they merited. Still, she could rarely refrain from trying to put people right. She had been the instrument of conversion a number of times in her life, but this had nothing to do with a passion for souls but came of her taste for subduing people. The domineering strain in her had been intensified by a religion with the same characteristic; she had unconsciously borrowed its dictatorial tone.

In Catherine she had seen a subject. She had spoken to Emmy of hating Catherine, but that had been in a spurt of temper. Antagonism she certainly felt to a point of view of which she suspected her; but it could even be said that she had taken a fancy to her, seeing her as a prospective victim or penitent, one over whom she might gain an exhilarating ascendancy.

Moreover, she had a legitimate reason for taking an interest in her – one which had slipped Catherine’s memory.

One day, while in the town, Mrs Stewart felt a sudden inclination to have another look at this woman who both repelled and attracted her.

Although she had doubtless passed the cottage a number of times, she had never taken particular note of it, her interest in a neighbourhood in which she was only temporarily encamped being of the faintest. When she saw how small and humble it looked from the road, she suffered from a kind of impatience, like that of one feeling hampered by an opponent unworthy of his steel, and she banged on the door in such a style that Emmy, who was at work in the room within, made a false line, bounced up and received her indignantly.

Mrs Stewart had not even taken the trouble to think of any reasonable excuse for her appearance.

‘I thought Miss Hare might like to come up to lunch one day –’

‘Why, what on earth made you think that?’

Mrs Stewart did not bother to give any reason, but inquired in her abrupt and restless manner, ‘Is she in?’ In spite of hearing that she was not, the visitor all but pushed her way into the room with a casual, ‘D’you mind if I wait?’ and then, opening the door on the kitchen stairs, she glanced briefly down them, with a preoccupied face, like one refreshing her memory rather than satisfying curiosity for the first time. ‘It looks so different when one approaches it from the road. Of course it isn’t quite as poky as it appears.’ She threw herself into a chair.

‘Where is the little boy?’ she asked next, looking round.

Emmy mumbled indifferently over a pen held in her mouth, ‘Run down the road, or somewhere.’

Mrs Stewart then gave up talking to her for a moment and stared disparagingly about her. She looked out of the window on the road, the sill of which was scarcely as much as eighteen inches above the pavement, and there saw an intermittent procession of passers-by. It was largely a baby-show at that hour. And whirled by in its carriage went the eternal tiny, tip-tilted nose, the pouting upper lip, the fruit-like bulge of the cheek, the feathery spring of the curls from the great head. Then the animated face of an older child was turned up in talk; or a little fair, square countenance in a pointed bonnet pressed close to the pane, with big, shadowy eyes which travelled curiously but could not see through the net curtain; or a plump hand was splayed for an instant upon the glass. The mothers of Ockentree were passing on their way to and from the shops. Everything shot and rattled by, being only a foot or two from the glass, at a great pace, giving an effect of hurry and liveliness. Cries, half-sentences burst on the ear and were cut off.

Mrs Stewart jumped up and posted herself before the other window, whence she soon remarked with ill-natured cheerfulness, ‘Well, you’d have had a splendid view of the gibbet from here and the mouldering bones of malefactors – a healthy memento mori on your doorstep. What a pity we’re so soft nowadays! Why, the last syllable of Ockentree, you know, isn’t as pretty as it sounds; it has reference to the gibbet which once stood up there on Ocken Ridge and was a mark for miles round. The woods, I suppose, have grown up since those days. . . . Of course she was severely blamed at the time, and that might account for her refusal to talk of it – partly. . . . Well, I can’t wait any longer. I’ll come in another day. Tell her I called. See if that rings a bell.’

At this point, Simon could be heard charging down the steps and in at the back door, and in another moment had burst into the room, calling upon Emmy to look and holding up some little purchase he had just made. Emmy pushed him off, saying she was busy. But he wanted to get her into the garden to see him try his new glider, and could be brought to think of nothing else; and when Mrs Stewart spoke to him he resorted to his naughty trick of refusing to answer, and when she took him by the shoulders he pulled away from her, with great rudeness. Simon’s manners, like his lisp, now went almost unchecked and were back almost to their natural state. He again went to Emmy’s side – but softly now, subdued. ‘Come on, Emmy. Come out, Emmy. Sweetie-pie!’ For this vulgar, amatory rag among endearments which Emmy sometimes bestowed on him, Simon took to be a serious term of affection, a loving pet-name, so that with head thrown back, he cooed it from pouted lips, cajolingly. Emmy again pushed him off.

Then Simon’s head drooped, and, finding nothing else in the room to be of interest, and viewing the visitor with frank dislike, he escaped and was soon to be seen in the garden.

‘The child seems rather subdued,’ said Mrs Stewart gloomily. ‘No doubt Miss Hare makes him obey her.’

‘We’re ever so crool to him,’ and Emmy suddenly made herself to look as if she had no teeth, a sinister crone. Mrs Stewart gave her a fillip on the cheek.

In fact, everything between these two showed another state of affairs than that portrayed by Emmy to Catherine. Their acquaintanceship had either differed then from Emmy’s report of it or had progressed since.

Seeming to have forgotten that she could not wait, the visitor now began to occupy herself with opening cupboard doors, looking at the fly-leaves of books, and so on.

‘I feel annoyed with you,’ Emmy said, sighing and giving in to sociable feelings. ‘What have you come for, eh?’

‘To invite her – Well, as I said.’

‘You’d do better to scram.’

‘Someone ought to try to bring her to a better frame of mind.’

‘Yes, but you don’t want to let rip like a bull in a china shop.’

‘Hold your tongue, girl,’ said Mrs Stewart with temper. After a pause, she added graciously, ‘You’re being very good to her. But, come, now. isn’t it odd? Unnatural. Does she never discuss it with you?’

‘Never a word. Nor, as I say, do I regard it as tactful to refer to it.’ Emmy gave dignified emphasis to this statement.

‘Back in the spring, you know, she was making a laughingstock of herself, going about all over the place, begging people to help her to move her sister from the hospital. And writing absurd letters –’

‘What? A laughing-stock? Are you sure? A laughingstock?’

‘Well, then, if you prefer it – a spectacle.’

‘That’s better. Just for a moment I felt as if all my simple trust in my fellow-men was beginning to slip.’

‘She is really hardly sane. What a disgraceful thing, to put a child into her hands! How do you get on with her?’

‘We’re real friends!’ Emmy spoke in a tone of quiet gratification. ‘And the other day she did a thing which, really – pleased! I was overcome. Never should I have expected such a mark of affection! I can call it no less. Esteem and affection, as they say. Such a thing as you might expect of a bosom friend, granted. Were I only at liberty to tell you!’

But Emmy, while going on to hint lavishly, did not explain what this thing was, though Mrs Stewart pressed her with impatient curiosity. ‘Come, now, what do you mean, Pussy?’ she said blandly.

Emmy had something else on her mind. Turning round with her arm over the back of the chair, she took a serious tone, reverting rather plaintively to the matter of Catherine’s silence.

‘And it is a shame, because it so happens I’m one who could be sympathetic. For in fact I know plenty about those places, because of Ferdy’s father – he was afflicted –’ (for Emmy was serious) ‘– and dumped in one of those places for years. And they had their bellyful of it, Mumsie and Ferdie did, trouble with money and all – but I don’t remember much about it, of course, only heard it afterwards. No, not my father, he’s my stepbrother – you remember, I told you, Ferdy’s my stepbrother. And he was a good son to his father. But to this day he has a thing about being shut up – it makes him act queer. . . . And meanwhile, you see, Mumsie went and took up with my dad. For what else was she to do, being the live sort she is, but take up with some other man? I reckon it sent her wrong. Rivers is the name I go by, because it happened to be the one that was handy at the time. But it might just as well be Allen. Or anything else.’

Mrs Stewart made a sour face, but was clearly amused; and they went on gossiping easily on these lines, hardly as friends, perhaps, but as familiars of the kind whose pleasure in each other’s company is entirely critical, till Catherine opened the front door.