SHE LEARNS TO KNOW HERSELF
“The Doctor to see you, Ma’am.”
Bran for the cows’ mash. Maize for the poultry— surely they need not have so much? Horley’s cattle cake—is that really needed? The vet to attend the setter—what’s the use of keeping sporting dogs when Dick is away for half the shooting season? More boot polish! More knife powder! More lamp oil!… Gwenllian raised her eyes from the thumbed slips of paper on her desk and saw Powell standing in the doorway. “The Doctor?” she repeated, dazed with fatigue. “I hadn’t an appointment with him, had I?”
“I can’t say, I’m sure, Ma’am.”
“Oh well, one more or less—”
Nathanial Vaughan, the tenant of Dolwern, had left but a few minutes ago. He had been pleading for a new roof to his barn, and the masonry of his ancient house was again in need of repair.
“If you could put us on a cement face,” he had ventured, leaning forward eagerly from the edge of his chair, a gnarled hand on either knee.
“Indeed and indeed, Mrs. Einon-Thomas, Ma’am,” his wife had quavered, “the rain it do be pouring down on to our bed, rough nights. There’s sitting up with an umbrella I am, and these nasty old rheumaticky pains ketching me something dreadful!”
Gwenllian had looked at the old woman, dressed in her unpretentious gown of black. An antique gold watch chain was hung round her neck to show how important an occasion she considered a visit to the Mansion. She and her husband, with his grey side whiskers and his Liberal-Conservatism, were of the old-fashioned, respectful yet independent type that Gwenllian approved. It grieved and shamed her to have to say no to them. How patiently they bore the discomfort she could have relieved but for Dick’s wastefulness! It was his fault that these hard-working people were sent away dis- appointed; his fault that the plumber had called pressing for settlement. She ought never to have yielded to his continued demands for “improvements.” But when Richard was born she had been even more weakened than after the birth of her first child. And Dick had again shown signs of repentance during her pregnancy. If she were always in that condition, she thought with a grim smile, she might keep him in order, for he could pity her body when it suffered. For what he caused her to suffer in mind by his spendthrift ways, his drinking and idling with people she despised, his neglect of his children and his home, he had no care. A year ago, when she was still an invalid, though months had passed since her confinement, he had hung about the house, bored, sulky, but ashamed to leave, and she had hoped that, by making him more comfortable, she might, perhaps, win him to stay. Throughout the past summer her extravagances had in conse- quence been added to his. She had allowed the cream to be eaten at tennis-parties instead of having it turned into butter for market. When Dick invited his hotel acquaintances to Plâs Einon, she had raised no objections, but had wasted her time in playing hostess to them. Against her judgment, in desperate hope that he might settle down and cease to be a drag upon their fortunes, she had yielded to his whims and follies. But in the autumn, in spite of her costly concessions, even his interest in his own alterations of the house had begun to flag and his idle need for society to grow.
“Why not shut up the damned place for a couple of years?” he had suggested. “Do the children good to winter in Switzerland.”
“Dick, will you never learn that where your duty lies there you must stay?”
“Oh, all this harping on duty—” he had begun to grumble.
But she had cut him short. “However much it may bore their father, I intend to bring up my children in the place to which they’re bound. They will inherit, Dick; they must know their own people.”
“Go ahead then,” he had retorted. “Bring ’em up as you like. You never consult me.”
“You haven’t shown much interest in them.”
“How d’you expect any father to, when he hears his wife all day long: ‘My children!’…“My nursery ’ … ‘ My son ’ … My heir’!” And, with a shrug of his shoulders, he had slouched off towards the dower house.
In January, in spite of his new radiators, he had had bronchitis.
“I warned you,” she had said as she gave him his medicine, “that they were dangerous, unhealthy things.”
“Oh, for God’s sake don’t stand gloating over my bed, repeating like a parrot, ‘I told you so! … I told you so!’ ”
He had been as nervous about his health as he was irritable; and, as soon as he could travel, had gone off to the South of France, leaving her to settle the doctor’s and chemist’s bills.
These things she remembered with a resentment that bit into her mind. Her thought was full of them as she went down to the drawing-room to meet the Doctor, but she forced a smile of welcome to her guest. He was standing with his back to the meagre fire she allowed herself when she was alone. To- morrow would be the first of April, and she would give up fires altogether. She took the large hand that looked so uncouth and had so healing a touch. Lucky Dick to have been ill, she thought as she let her palm rest in the Doctor’s, to lie quiet for two or three weeks, to be taken care of!
“How are you getting along by yourself?” Dr. Roberts asked. “Don’t you find it a bit lonely? Like to have the wife over to spend a couple of nights here?”
“I should be charmed to see her,” Gwenllian answered, making her smile more bright. “But you’re not to worry about me. I’m far too busy to have a dull or a sad moment.”
He growled like a faithful dog. “How’s that absentee young man of yours?”
And again, pride compelling her, she lied. “Oh, quite recovered, thank you, and looking forward to coming here. He writes me cheerful letters every day.” He had not written for a fortnight. She was surprised at her own glibness, and she thought: I used to despise liars, but Dick has made me one.
Ringing for tea, she urged her old friend to stay, for she longed to cling for a little while to someone who was fond of her. He sat down, watching her from under grey brows that hung over his eyes like the thatch above cottage windows, and, as he explained the reason for his calling, she knew that he also was concealing the truth. He had called often of late, making one excuse or another to have a look at her.
“Evans Cross-eyes is laid up again. That’s what brought me out here,” he declared.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Is there anything needed?”
“Could you lend him a bed-rest?”
“Of course. And shall I have some of our famous chicken jelly made?”
“I never say no to that for any of my patients, do I?”
She took a pocket book out of the leather handbag that held her many keys and made a note. The Doctor’s eyes were still fixed on her when she looked up again. “I know what you’re thinking,” she laughed, “that I’m losing my memory. I’ve such a host of things to remember.”
“I was thinking, my dear,” he said, “that you are working too hard. You did in the war and wore yourself to the bone. It’s a pity. There never was a handsomer girl than you were at nineteen.”
She winced. It was when she was nineteen that she had fallen in love. “You can’t expect youth to last,” she said as lightly as she could.
“No. We’re none of us getting any younger. But that’s another reason why you should slacken off. Something will snap if you keep the tension so tight.”
“Nonsense.” She laughed again, but his words touched her with fear. Something would snap! Not her self-control? Not her ability to do right?
“Yes,” he persisted, “you shouldn’t risk a breakdown. It’s harder for you now even than it was when your poor brother was at the front, for now you’re saddled with—”
A husband, she ejaculated mentally.
But the word he said aloud was “children.”
“I like work,” she assured him. “Sugar? And milk?” How heavy the teapot seemed!
“Yes,” he growled, “both, and plenty of ’em. But you ought not to do more than one person’s work—not two or three.”
She tried to change the subject. “This is the cake I invented in the days of rationing. There are no eggs in it. You put in a teaspoonful of vinegar to make it light.”
“Don’t think I’m trying to poke in my old nose where it’s not wanted,” he persisted, “but can’t you teach your husband to pull his weight in the boat?” At that she was shaken by a blast of fury and despair. “No,” she wanted to scream, “No! No! I can teach him nothing, I tell you, nothing! He’s hopeless, useless, a drag on the estate, a burden, an encumbrance!” She bit her lip, though the hot words seethed within her. After a moment of tense silence she took out her handkerchief and, pressing it into a tight ball, passed it across her mouth. “Doctor, bach,” she said in a small voice, “do you mind if we don’t discuss my husband? He’s been wounded and ill. He’s not strong.”
“My dear girl,” Dr. Roberts exclaimed, setting down his tea-cup in haste and sucking at his moustache, “I didn’t mean for a moment to wound your feelings by implying the least thing against him. I realise, of course, that he’s not robust. But you mustn’t be so anxious about him. There’s no occasion in the world to fret.”
And until he left, half an hour later, he tried to allay her supposed fears for Dick. Men whose hearts were slightly defective often lasted longest. There was no reason why her husband shouldn’t live to be eighty. “Bless your soul,” he declared, “there’s no reason why he shouldn’t see us all out!”
When the Doctor was gone, blustering his sympathy for her well-acted concern, Gwenllian lay back on the sofa and closed her eyes. A laugh came from her lips—a jerk of sound with no mirth in it. Jenny, the Sealyham, scrambled up from her place on the hearth, where she had been roasting her stomach, and began to paw at her mistress’s feet. Something must be wrong, her wrinkled twitching nose seemed to say.
Gwenllian took the comforter on to her lap. Something is wrong, she thought. But the Doctor doesn’t suspect it. None must ever suspect. We’re not the class of people who wash our dirty linen in public. A hot tongue licked away the tear that was beginning to trickle down Gwenllian’s cheek. Dick may live on and on, she said, and outlive me and ruin the children and undo all my work. Sometimes I can’t help wishing that he’d die—that he were already dead.
Powell came in to carry out the tea-tray. Her mistress had heard her approach, and was pulling the dog’s ears in seeming good humour when the door opened.
“How the day flies, Powell! Is it really the children’s time already?”
“Yes, Ma’am. Nannie was putting on their drawing-room suits when I looked in.”
As she spoke Illtyd appeared at the door, made the dancing-class bow expected of him, then slid across the polished floor counting very laboriously, “one, two, three-turn! One, two, three-turn! Is that right, Mummy?”
“Quite right, darling. Come and give me a kiss.”
“Mummy, why must the lady start off with the right foot and the gentleman with the left? When horses trot you watch their right shoulder—”
“Their off shoulder,” she corrected.
“Yes. Their off one,” he repeated in his painstaking drawl. “That’s same thing, isn’t it?”
“That is the same thing—try to articulate clearly, darling.”
“You have to watch and rise with it,” he persisted. “Or else you go bumpetty-bump. Do all horses start with the right—the off—foot? Or is it only the lady horses?”
“Mares,” she corrected again. “Come and kiss me.”
“Mares,” he murmured. “Do gentleman horses, start trotting with the left foot, Mummy?”
“Near, not left, when you’re speaking of a horse,” she told him.
She saw a worried look, followed by one of resignation, pass over his pale little face. His big eyes brooded darkly on the mysteries of the universe.
“You haven’t kissed me yet,” she insisted. “Come here, and I’ll try to explain.”
But he had lost heart. He put up his face, but only, she perceived, because he had been trained to obey. Soon he wriggled away from her embrace to make discoveries of his own in a distant part of the room.
“This is a dog that has been very, very naughty,” she heard him whispering as he pushed great-aunt Emily’s beaded footstool into a comer. “He chasted sheep, and chasted and chasted them, ’cos it was fun to see them running and running with their silly tails wagging. And he wouldn’t come when he was called. Now he’s going to be shut up in prison like people who steal jam and tell fibs, and never, never let out again.”
Anxiety about her children gnawed at the root of Gwenllian’s love for them whenever she was more than usually tired. She feared that Illtyd was going to prove imaginative, dreamy. Frances loved him and urged that he should be left alone to develop in his own way. He must not be left alone.
“Fetch your bricks from the toy cupboard,” Gwenllian commanded, “and I’ll shew you how to build a house.”
“I can’t leave this prison door,” he objected, “’cos you see, I’m a shepherd. And I’ve got to punish this naughty dog for doing what he was told not to.”
“That’s a silly game,” Gwenllian said. “Come along and we’ll make something together.”
“I don’t want to make anything. I’m a shepherd like Dan Owen. I order dogs about and drive sheep.”
For once his mother did not insist. She rose wearily and, going over to the French windows, stared out, feeling more than ever forsaken and miserable because her child, like his father, wished to play his own games. Since her husband did not love her and she was too virtuous a woman to have thought of a lover, she craved morbidly for her children’s attention. Often she felt a stab of jealousy when she saw them caress their nurse. They were hers, hers alone; all that she had left in life except the property she was fighting to save.
I deny myself everything for Illtyd’s sake, she told herself as she pressed her forehead against the cooling glass. It’s only for him and in a lesser degree for baby that I struggle on as I do. So often had she said this that she believed it, forgetting that for her the estate had come first and that her children had been called into existence only as heirs to the estate. He ought to be very grateful to me when he’s old enough to understand, she thought But would he be? She knew what men were—what her father had been—and the child did not greatly love her.
She was overwrought tonight. He was a dear, good little boy, though not demonstrative. His love for her, and his ability to show it, would grow. Illtyd shall love me, Gwenllian vowed, clenching her fists. He shall be all in all to me, and I to him. But she knew that there was room in her hungry heart for a lover as well as a son. Her child should have been the fruit of married love, not a substitute for it.
Memories were tormenting her. When she pushed open the windows, there flowed in upon her the melancholy of a chill evening after rain and the restless scent of growth. A blackbird was crying over the past: “Sweet, sweet, sweet.” Somewhere she had read a poem—was it of Mary Magdalene or of some other wanton shut out of Paradise.
She is sorry, sorry, sorry, piped the blackbird. Let her in.
The lines might have been written of herself. She, too, had let the gates of Paradise close against her long ago. “Let her in,” sang the blackbird. But though God might pardon all the repentant harlots, and heaven be full of them, a good woman, who had denied her love for the sake of a house and a posi- tion, would never enter into her bliss. Never in this life. “Never, never, never,” mourned the blackbird. And in the next life there would be neither marrying nor giving in marriage. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” cried the blackbird. And once his song had been a song of gladness! Once, such a spring twilight as this had seemed lovely, peaceful, full of promise. Now she felt only the weariness of the day’s close, of the grey sky washed pale by rain and the approach of night. The air was laden with the fragrance of wallflower and hyacinth, drowsy as that of lilies on a coffin. Beneath the shelter of the house, daffodils hung fragile and pale on their slender stalks, and primroses looked up, glistening. The blackbird sang no longer “Sweet, sweet, sweet,” for a spring that was over twenty-five years ago, but “Sad, sad, sad,” for the present and the future.
With a deep sigh, Gwenllian shut out the haunted evening and turned to meet the nurse who was carrying in Richard. She criticised the new smock he was wearing and stroked the fair fluff on his head, telling herself that she need not fear he would grow up like Dick.
“Children’s colouring changes so,” she said. “He may be quite dark when he’s a man.”
“Oh no,” Nannie protested with the truthfulness that had won her testimonials and lost her situations, “he’s the living image of his father.”
Gwenllian was glad when an hour later the children had been kissed and were gone. It was hard to do a man’s and woman’s work as well, and she was tired. Lying on the sofa she closed her eyes, hoping that it might be long before the solicitor came. She was almost asleep when Powell’s voice disturbed her:
“Mr. Price to see you, Ma’am.”
Once more Gwenllian put on her smile and extended her hand. “How kind of you to come all this way! You ought to have sent for me to your office.”
“Not at all,” he protested, fidgeting with a dispatch-case. “It’s a pleasure. I so rarely have the privilege of meeting you now. In the old days we often had a chat out otter hunting. Now nobody seems to have the time or the heart. I don’t know what’s come over the countryside.”
She saw that he was nervous and distressed. More worries, she thought. But not until the curtains were drawn cosily, the gentle lamps glowing within their pink silk shades, and Powell gone from the room, did she cease to make polite conversation. Then she asked wearily: “What was it you wished to consult me about?”
He cleared his throat and gave his high collar a jerk. What a lean neck the man had: “This business of your husband having to raise five hundred pounds immediately,” he said. “It comes at a most unfortunate time.”
She tried to swallow and almost choked.
The lawyer’s voice continued. “He’s written to you about it, of course? You transact the business while he’s away, so I assume—”
“Oh yes,” she managed to gasp out. “But tell me what he said exactly—to you, I mean.”
While he was explaining in his dusty tones, she rose and paced about the room. They will fetch something at Christie’s, she thought, staring at the Bow and Chelsea figures on the mantelshelf. How she had admired them as a child! Now their bland complacence would be imprisoned in the glass case of a museum for the mob to gape at. She imagined this dear room stripped of all that made it lovable and lovely. The paper was so faded that there would be staring patches on the walls where pictures had hung, portraits of their ancestors whom now her children would forget.
“But I use the cob for driving produce into Llanon,” she heard her own voice saying. “Oh yes. I keep detailed accounts. That pays its way . . We’ll advertise the fishing at once then, and the shooting for next autumn… No, I should doubt whether he’ll winter here. He was very much knocked about in the war, you know.”
Why, oh why, had he not been killed outright? But, if he had, she would never have been mistress of Plâs Einon and mother of its heir. It was now that he ought to die—now, now, before he did irreparable harm. She wanted her husband to die. With the whole force and fury of her nature she desired it, as she dug her nails into the palms of her hands in an effort to keep her voice calm. Somehow she managed to give her orders to the family solicitor. Afterwards, she could not recall exactly what she had said, but knew that she had spoken with creditable discretion. When he rose and pressed her hand in his bony fingers, she had held her head high.
“There’s been a mortgage on the estate before,” he had ventured with a look of sympathy.
She had managed to smile. “Oh yes. We all have ups and downs.”
He should not think that her spirit was broken, this man of inferior station who, years ago, if he had dared, would have asked her to marry him. He was said to have thousands. She would have done better to marry him than the suburban governess’s son. He was no whit more common; she could not have loved him less. And he had the merit of being much older than herself. He would have died and left her his wealth. In another year or two she might have been sitting in her widow’s weeds, smiling to see her cousin Dick squander his fortune. And when he was bankrupt, she would have bought back Plâs Einon for her own—her own.
She watched Mr. Price take his leave. His skin was wrinkled and yellow. They said he had cancer. Widowhood was the only estate fit for a proud and able woman.
She rang the bell and told Powell: “I won’t have dinner to-night. I shall lie down here quietly until it’s time to go to bed.”
But when she was alone she did not rest. Swiftly she went to the door and locked it, took a wax candle from its silver stick and set it on the hob of the old-fashioned fender to melt. What she was about to do was so fantastic that it made her flush and laugh in stealthy excitement like a cruel child planning a forbidden jest. It had been “Martha the wise’oman” who had taught her how to cast a spell. As a little girl she had taken a Christmas pudding to the witch’s tumbledown cottage with greenish thatch overhanging its two tiny windows. Martha wore her grey rags of hair loose upon her shoulders and had the flashing eyes of a kestrel. Her features were aquiline, sharp cut like Gwenllian’s own. She must have been handsome as a girl. Even in age and squalor, she was of commanding appearance. The servants whispered that her mother had been a gentleman’s light o’ love, but they never would tell whose—Gwenllian’s own great-grandfather’s, she had imagined sometimes, prompted by a study of his portrait. The neighbours paid Martha in kind, butter and eggs and milk, to keep her evil eye from them and their cattle. They feared her. But Gwenllian had not been afraid of anything except her father’s displeasure. Martha seemed to her to have stepped out of a picture in a fairy-tale book. She laughed and clapped her hands, and Martha had praised her boldness.
“If ever you should have a mortal enemy, my dear,” she had said when they were grown friends, “this is how to bring about his death, see?”
Gwenllian took the wax as the witch had done, and twisted it and crushed it in her hands until it had the semblance of a little man. Her pinching fingers gave him a long thin neck and a small head without any chin. They made his chest narrow, his shoulders sloping like a girl’s, his hands large and foolishly adangle. Knock knees they fashioned him and a slight body that leant to one side, seeking for a wall to lean up against, she thought. When her puppet of wax was finished, she held him out at arm’s length and surveyed him with scorn. “Dick,” she said, and, taking an old garnet brooch from her breast, she wrenched off the pin and stuck it through her mannikin’s heart. Now melt, she said within her, melt and die. On the hob she set him, close to the flames and watched his slender little body list yet further to one side. Tears of wax began to trickle down him. You’re sorry now, are you, that you made an enemy of me? With a ridiculous pathetic gesture he wilted and sank lower and lower into the pool of grease at his feet. Then he dropped on his knees, and slipped right down into it, and became a dripping candle end. Now you’re in your winding sheet, she thought, ready for your coffin. At last he fell away to extinction in the fire and only the pin that had transfixed him remained. She stared at it, sick and fascinated, as at a knife with which she had done murder. Shuddering violently, she seized the poker and scraped both pin and grease off the hob into the consuming flames. Their heat scorched her face as she crouched over the grate. She was burning with shame for this act of folly and peasant witch-craft to which she had stooped, and because he had brought her to it, she hated Dick the more.
The turning of the door-handle made her start up, flushed with guilt.
“Who’s there?” she cried out.
Powell’s voice answered with its accustomed deference. “The vicar, Ma’am. Shall I say you’ve too bad a head to see him?”
“No no,” exclaimed Gwenllian hurrying to the door. It must not get about the parish that she locked herself into the drawing-room or it would be said she drank.
“Come in, Mr. Evans,” she called. “I’ve been overdoing it and had to take a rest. But I’m never too tired to hear if there’s anything I can do for you or your wife.”
Smiling obsequiously, he shambled towards her, apologising in his bland Carmarthenshire accents. It was of no importance, no indeed! He ought not to have called after dinner at night. But, really, one did not know when to catch so busy a lady at home and at leisure. There was a saying of Jeremy Taylor’s— She lost the thread of his discourse.
My hands smell of blood—of grease, I mean, she thought, rubbing them hard together. Would the old fool never have done and go? At length he came to the point—something towards the sale of work in aid of the Church Lads’ Brigade. She tried to smile and wondered whether she had made an awkward grimace. Rubbing her hands still harder, she hurt them, and became aware that they clutched the brooch without a pin. She held it out to the vicar.
“I’m afraid I’ve no time to spare for making things, and no money either, these days, but will you accept this? Mrs. Roberts always admired it so much. I think she might give you two or three pounds—”
She saw it shining darkly, like a drop of blood, in the palm of his plump white hand. With the pin torn from that brooch she had sought by incantation to murder her own husband. She could never endure to look upon the thing again. The vicar’s thanks flowed over her, soft as warmed honey. He was praising her generosity, protesting that she was too good, much too good. She caught at the word good and repeated it in her mind. She was not evil. She was not evil but good. The virtue of her actions must guard her against her secret thought.