A Little Treachery

7

There was nothing to do but to make the best of their bargain. At least their surroundings were lovely. Catherine began to draw in strength; her resistance stiffened. She looked for enjoyment where it was to be had.

She was never tired of gazing at the view from the back windows of the cottage – that view which had such a vivid, marked character, in all lights and weathers such a colourful, populated look. This peculiar animation no doubt derived from the host of little details which the broad valley contained. The trees, of many varieties, the large, wild trees, were not so numerous that one lost the sense of their individuality. Set in their midst and rush-embedded to the edge of its basins was the bright, rippling expanse of the two great mill-ponds, fed by the tributary stream with its flickering willow borders. Then the eye marked the tended plots of dark earth, the grassy spaces patched with colonies of wild flowers, the little isolated huts and sheds standing far off in the open, the numerous magpies with their jester’s plumage, the hunting cats in the grass, the women in bright aprons, diminutive in the distance, hastening down long paths to the flying washing streaming among the many ancient and spreading fruit trees, the sharp flares of the bonfires and their plumes of smoke, then the winding lanes on the hills, a chimney-stack or so in the heights of the woods, horses galloping in a stretch of meadow so steeply tilted that it appeared like a field in a primitive landscape, innocent of perspective, and the broad, restless sky so often filled with the great flights of rooks. Sometimes the fabulous figure of a flying swan passed leisurely over the course of the stream. And if trains ran through the valley, too, it was at a distance which makes a train look toy-like.

This was the scene, so fair to the distant eye, which had tempted them at the beginning, and shamed consciousness of the folly of having been influenced inordinately by a mere view perhaps touched her feeling for it now.

Or was there actually something of ugly suggestion about it?

One curious feature of the landscape by which they had been struck on first coming there was the grass balks which everywhere separated the plots in the valley, in the place of hedge or fence, as in a medieval landscape; and this was only one of the many small touches which combined to give the impression of a scene out of an older world, older and yet childish. For there was something childish about this artless packing in of small, fascinating detail. Herein might be the secret of a slightly oppressive effect on one pondering over it with mind already sensitized by trouble. For to the conception of the medieval is always joined the thought of torture, of black darkness of spirit, of force, of force wielded by evil and ruthless authority.

Catherine was disturbed to find that Clem no longer took pleasure in their view. Gradually she came to realize that here she had a source of strength her sister did not possess. Their predicament, the cottage and the swindle which had been put upon them now appeared to herself all matters of high imaginative interest; she saw their dramatic effect, it was like the beginning of an exciting tale; and thus, the first shock over, she was able to take themselves and their plight less tragically. She had got to the point of shrugging over Hungerford’s shabby conduct and viewing it with detachment.

But with Clem things were otherwise.

Catherine was at last forced to stand back and fearfully, secretly, with rising dismay, take stock of her sister.

A febrile, anxious-looking woman with a strained forehead, curious spasmodic frown and a terribly enthusiastic manner; the bright, persuasive, conciliatory manner of one who had had too much to bear and relationships too difficult to deal with, and had borne up under it all by embracing a foolishly optimistic religion which enjoined upon her to take the bright view, brighter and brighter, the darker reality became; with a cheerful, running tongue which at last had gained an almost hysterical volubility (and with this Catherine was apt to be cruelly impatient).

So the tall, fair, gracious girl, not quite pretty except in her early youth, whose manner had charm because her wits were bright, her nature was kind, good and sensible and she was unaffected, the benign darling, the equable one, the tower of strength, had come to this!

Clearly such a change could not have happened suddenly, and Catherine had of course seen there was change; seen it and not seen it as it was. For she was the nervous one, the melancholy one. She was the weak one. (And this was true.) This sense of her own weakness, growing fierce with fright through the years as the weakness increased through Clem’s tender fostering, had terribly contaminated her love for Clem; her harsh, cruelly critical, childishly trustful, passionately grateful love. Love like that was not of a kind to overcome fear. Now she was angry, bewildered.

But she could still say to herself, ‘Clem is unwell – she has had this severe shock – and then this unpleasantness with the neighbours is wearing her down’; for indeed that was the point where the change suddenly blazed wide.

These neighbours were all of a humble class. The row of tiny cottages next to their own, but smaller, built of the same glowing, centuries-old brick, were tenanted by country people of the old style, most of them old, poor and ignorant. Oh, but Clem didn’t in the least mind that their neighbours were humble. She hastened to make friends with them, to be helpful and kind. She had always needed a climate of good opinion, approval and friendliness – she had always enjoyed it in the ranks of that vast business community to which she had belonged since girlhood, and from which she had suddenly been transplanted to this distant spot, to be isolated among strangers. That ready-made society, in which she had been like the member of a great family, sharing and protected, that ever-shifting crowd and its transient contacts, had come to suit her so well. Of the surface and undemanding, such contacts had really given her, in her increasingly debilitated state, all she needed. They had kept her alive like some artificial nourishment sustaining life in an organism grown too delicate to absorb natural food. Feverishly now, like one clutching desperately at a makeshift, she turned to her neighbours.

But if she did not mind that small social gap, perhaps the neighbours did.

At once, as soon as ever they had come in contact with these neighbours, they had received a disconcerting impression of being surrounded by a buzz of malicious curiosity, had had an impression of old men wagging their heads and saying among themselves, ‘They’ve bitten off more than they can chew, them London women’; an impression that there was a gleeful satisfaction at their plight. One might call in a friendly way over the plots, ‘I wonder if you can tell me of a man who will do rough digging?’ And back promptly would come the answer in a tone of sly relish, ‘Oh, miss, you won’t get a man to work that gray-ound.’ A kind of pride in the difficult nature of their region seemed to animate these old people. A chuckling amusement spread abroad among them because old Flytton’s cottage had fooled the London women and beaten them – they would soon find ‘he’ was not to be tackled so flightily, not ‘he’! A lively hope was obviously felt that old Flytton’s would be one too many for them, as it had been one too many for the young Ransoms. References to the young Ransoms were frequent. Remarks were dropped casually. ‘Ah, but they got it for a song, you know!’ There was always some dig at their folly, or an ugly, scaring tale about the peculiarities of their property. Bad news of the cottage, it always was.

And the garden! When it was realized that there was to be a lawn, a burst of sour humour seethed about them like irritant smoke. For a lawn was the crowning absurdity. It was a ludicrous affectation, sheer pretentiousness, in a place where nobody had ever aspired to anything but vegetable-plots. There were references to Wimbledon.

Yet why all this malice? Perhaps it was a malice not so far off good-nature, after all, merely a kind of rough teasing? And of course they had smiled at it at first, if a little sorely.

But now – Why, when one was shocked and ill, when one’s nerves were all wrong?

Clem’s odd frown became more marked. There were days when she kept her eyes lowered in the street, passed by acquaintances, pretending not to see them, or shrank into the house as if to hide there. She who had always liked and trusted her fellow-beings, even to the point of artlessness, now seemed to have fallen into a dark dislike of them, a strange, shrinking misanthropy.

Her physical illness, which had not seemed very much, suddenly took a graver turn. ‘Very well, you must rest,’ said Catherine in exasperation, for this of course threw a great load upon her and she herself was very tired and she could not help feeling that an illness the worst drawback of which appeared to be nothing but a requirement for rest was somewhat enviable. So insidious was this fearful disease.

Then one evening, when the room had grown almost dark without their noticing it, Clem leaned forward from the big armchair in which she had been resting and began to speak fast in a curiously low, furtive voice, as if afraid of being overheard.

Everyone cheated them, she said, everyone was laughing at their plight.

‘For mercy’s sake, Clem, who d’you suppose gives us a thought?’ Catherine said, amazed. But it was useless. In careless, good-humoured inquiries Clem saw something wrong. Wasn’t it a singular thing that there was no one in all that neighbourhood with whom they had had dealings who had not victimized them in some way? She went over the list of them, checking Catherine’s protest. Hungerford – the house-agent – the builder who had persuaded them to spend money on ‘improvements’ he must have known were useless – the nurseryman who was dealing so unavailingly with the garden – a dozen more. And the neighbours, so hostile, ‘not only because we’re socially above them – Oh, but we are!’ For Catherine had laughed. But Clem went on to lay queer stress on this superiority, in a way totally foreign to her simple, unassuming nature – and yet Catherine did not see it as an attempt to buttress a morbidly, ominously sinking self-respect. Even the new doctor – she had a peculiar manner, surely? Clem felt the doctor was getting angry – well, then, impatient. ‘But I thought you liked her so much?’ ‘Oh, yes, I’ve been fooled – fooled all round.’

The very children who spat on the windows and kicked the paint off the front door four times a day on their way to and from school – did Catherine think they were merely children, merely noisome brats? No, they were sinister. But indeed these attacks, like all children’s crimes, without redress for the victims, had been a genuine persecution and had kept up an evil excitement in the shaken nerves of both of them. So Catherine, knowing only too well that this was not imaginary, at least, was silenced; while Clem added she believed they were put up to it. But she smiled weakly, staring at her sister, so that it was possible to say, ‘Oh, Clem, don’t be absurd.’

Clem said hurriedly, Catherine must understand – they were getting angry! Well, she meant she had seen with her own eyes someone shake a fist at her in the street.

‘That old chap is crazy,’ Catherine replied, again with fear somewhat lulled by a background of fact. ‘You know it – he does that to everyone when he’s in the mood. He has done it to me, too.’ The effect was not quite what it should have been. Clem nodded. ‘You, too.’

‘We mustn’t trust anyone but each other!’ she said in agitation, in that same dry whisper; and then, with a sort of weak return to her own quietly affectionate, protective manner, ‘My dear – my little sister – what we have been through together!’

Catherine sprang up, but Clem thrust her off with a sudden harshness, breathing uneasily, put away the consoling arm. ‘You won’t do that when I have told you it all,’ she said in a stern, heavy voice which was quelling.

Again she whispered. What had gone wrong? She could not reproach her God and so she turned dumbly under His lash and sought the reason in herself. What had she done? What wicked thing had she done? She saw now and confessed htat she had always treated Catherine with the most wicked selfishness.

This was the discovery she finally whispered to Catherine in the darkening room.

Struck almost dumb by what she knew, with such shamed certainty, to be a monstrous reversal of the facts, Catherine wept, so much appalled that she could only stammer, no one, no one, could have been kinder!

But it would not do.

Clem was silent. Yet after a little while she brightened again and, most strangely, seemed to have forgotten the whole incident.

So all went on as before, for many weeks.