South Riding (11 page)

Her theories were, she felt, founded upon experience. She had known poverty; she had known hardship; she had watched her mother struggle triumphantly under the double burden of wage-earning and maternity; she had seen her sister, Pattie, crippled by a fall from her drunken father’s arms in childhood, wring from life beauty and love and assurance and the marriage which she had always declared to be an essential condition of her happiness. She had herself abandoned a joyous expedition to Australia to make a home in England for her mother whose health had finally broken down. She had thought then her adventures over; she disapproved on principle of sacrifice; but she loved her mother, and had found at the South London School work which satisfied her and abundant friendships. Courage conquered circumstance. She thought that it could conquer everything.

Her turbulent strenuous vivid life had not been without vicissitudes. She had a habit, inconvenient in head mistresses, of falling in love misguidedly and often. She had been engaged to marry three different men. The first, a college friend, was killed on the Somme in 1916; the second, a South African farmer, irritated her with his political dogmatism until they quarrelled furiously and irreparably; the third, an English Socialist member of Parliament, withdrew in alarm when he found her feminism to be not merely academic but insistent. That affair had shaken her badly, for she loved him. When he demanded that she should abandon, in his political interests, her profession gained at such considerable public cost and private effort, she offered to be his mistress instead of his wife and found that he was even more shocked by this suggestion than by her previous one that she should continue her teaching after marriage. She parted from him with an anguish which amazed her, for she still thought of herself as a cold woman. Yet nothing that had happened to her had broken her self-confidence. She knew herself to be desirable and desired, withheld only from marriage by the bars of death or of principle. She had never loved without first receiving courtship; her person and her pride remained, she considered, under her own suzerainty. She had even the successful woman’s slight and half-conscious contempt for those less attractive than herself, only she felt that on her heart were tender places like bruises on an apple, which could not bear rough handling.

Well, I’ve done with all that, she thought, as the red and grey huddle of Kiplington spread itself into a fair-sized watering-place. No chance of a love-affair here in the South Riding and a good thing too. I was born to be a spinster, and by God, I’m going to spin.

I shall enjoy this. I shall build up a great school here. No one yet knows it except myself. I know it. I’ll make the South Riding famous.

Four wretched houses. A sticky board of governors. A moribund local authority. A dead end of nowhere. That’s my material. I shall do it.

The bus turned a corner into the square containing the Municipal Gardens and Bowling Green—an oblong of weary turf surrounded by asphalt paths and iron railings.

“All change!” shouted the conductor.

Sarah climbed down and retrieved her suitcase.

“Can you tell me my way to the Cliff Hotel?” she asked.

“It’s a good walk.”

“I’m a good walker.”

“You’ll find that case heavy.”

“That’s my business.”

“If I were a single man and out of a job, I’d carry it for you.”

“I’ll take the will for the deed,” Sarah twinkled, still, in spite of her heroic resolutions, pleased by opportunities for flirtatious back-chat.

She extracted directions from the man and set off walking briskly through her new domain.

Kiplington was taking its evening pleasures.

Along the esplanade strolled couples chewing spearmint, smoking gaspers, sucking oranges. All forms of absorption, mastication and inhalation augmented the beneficent effect of sea air, slanting sun and holiday leisure. Mothers with laden paper carriers and aching varicose veins pushed prams back to hot crowded lodgings; elderly gentlemen in nautical blue jackets leaned on iron railings and turned telescopes intended for less personal objects upon the charms of Kingsport nymphs emerging from their final bathe. The tide was coming in, a lid of opaque grey glass sliding quietly over littered shingle. Sarah felt suddenly aware of the heat and grime of her long journey.

She ran down the steps and hired a bathing tent.

Five minutes later she was wading out into the agreeable salty chill of the North Sea.

It did not worry her that her fellow bathers were spotted youths from Kingsport back streets and little girls with rat-tailed hair from the Catholic Holiday Home. It did not worry her that the narrowing sands were dense with sweating, jostling, sucking, shouting humanity, that the sea-wall was scrawled with ugly chalk-marks, that the town beyond the wall was frankly hideous. This was her own place. These were her own people.

She swam with blissful leisurely strokes out to sea, then turned and floated, looking back with satisfaction at the flat ugly face of the town, the apartment houses, the dust-blown unfinished car-park, the pretentious desolation of the barn-like Floral Hall.

Away to her right she could see the red crumbling road of the higher North Cliff, and the group of houses among which was her new school—“Until I get something better,” she promised herself, lying back and kicking the water happily.

Then she remembered that she wore no bathing cap, cursed the tangled profusion of her springing hair which took so long to dry, and swam reluctantly, slowly, back to shore.

A breakwater of soft satiny wood polished by a thousand tides ran down to the sea. Taking the hired towel, Sarah perched herself on one of its weed-grown stumps and sat in her brief green bathing dress, one foot in the water, drying her hair and whistling, not quite unaware that Mr. Councillor Alfred Ezekiel Huggins, haulage contractor, Wesleyan Methodist lay preacher, found in her pretty figure a matter for contemplation. He propped his plump stomach against the sun-warmed paling, and remained there, enjoying the pose of her slim muscular body, her lifted arms, her hair like a flaming cresset. From that distance he could not see her physical defects, her hands and head too big, her nose too aggressive, her eyes too light, her mouth too obstinate. Nor did he dream that here was the head mistress whose appointment he, as a member of the Higher Education Sub-Committee, had recently sanctioned.

Sarah, her hair dry enough, the tide within ten yards of her tent, slid off the breakwater and went in to dress. Aware of approving eyes upon her, she increased, unconsciously and almost imperceptibly, the slight swagger of her walk. She was her father’s daughter.

“T
HE
W
ILDERNESS
and the solitary place shall be glad for them,” read Mr. Huggins. “The desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.”

Looking down from the desk of Kiplington Wesleyan Methodist Chapel he devoutly wished that Alderman Snaith had not chosen to attend that service. The consciousness of Snaith’s urbane attention put him off his form. Councillor Alfred Ezekiel Huggins, lay preacher and haulage contractor from Pidsea Buttock, was accustomed to success. He loved the cosy evenings services, the pitch pine pews and scarlet cushions, the congregation rising and bending forward so decorously, the hymns, the lamplight. He knew how to deepen his fine emotional North country voice till it reverberated through their hearts and drew tears to his own eyes. He felt familiar with the Mind of God, and reasoned with Him as with a friend.

But that dapper grey little man was of unknown quality.

“Strengthen ye the weak hands and confirm the feeble knees. Say to them that are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, fear not.’”

That’s me. My knees are weak. I’ve got the wind up proper. His humour rescued him.

“Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped.”

No doubt of it, Isaiah made grand reading. Even the half-moon of choir girls behind him must feel some splendour from that resonant poetry. Sixteen of them, there were—all plain as cod-fish, and thirteen out of the sixteen wearing spectacles. Adenoids, curvature of the spine, anaemia and acne afflicted them—no, they were not afflicted; they simpered like beauty queens and patted soiled puffs against their pinched pink noses, quite complacent; it was Mr. Huggins whom their physical defects afflicted.

“And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water; in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes. . . . No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon, it shall not be found there.”

Be damned to his supercilious high and mightiness in the pew below, with his Benevolent Society and his name upon foundation stones and his Daimler saloon and his invitations to supper. No lion nor any ravenous beast. . . . Councillor Huggins would not be intimidated.

Opening his lungs, breathing deeply from his great diaphragm, stretching the silver watch chain across his stomach, with its seals and mascots and badges and orders tinkling, Mr. Huggins let his big voice triumph above the heads of clerks and coal merchants and shop assistants.

“And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

The congregation was not unduly impressed. It was accustomed to Mr. Huggins’ histrionics. He was a popular but not greatly respected preacher, and to-night Gladys Hubbard, the child vocalist who had won two gold medals though she was still only in form IV lower at the High School, was to sing a solo in the second anthem. Anticipation eagerly awaited her performance.

But the reading had fortified the reader. His weak hands had been strengthened. His feeble knees had been confirmed. Why, after all, should Snaith not ask him out to supper? They were colleagues on the County Council, weren’t they? Snaith was a democrat on principle, wasn’t he? And even if he was a Power now, President of the Kingsport Housing, Self-Help and Mutual Improvement Association, on the Committee of the Kingsport Hospital, certain to be next Vice-Chairman of the Council, director of half a dozen companies with interests in trawling, cod liver oil, local railways, and artificial manures, reputed to be worth five hundred thousand, he had been nothing when he started, hadn’t he? And there was still something a little queer about him, wasn’t there?

Mr. Huggins, who was rarely worth more than his two lorries and the clothes he stood in, took heart of grace.

For it was surely odd that Snaith had never married, nor anything else either, so they said. A bachelor life—now Huggins could understand that. And there were some who happened to be queer and couldn’t help it, like that poor parson fellow who got himself into trouble up Norton Witral way with choir boys. Nothing like that about Snaith, or you’d have heard it. Just—odd. And in more ways than one, for, taking it by and large, it was not quite natural that he should keep himself so closely to the South Riding. Never stood for Parliament, for instance. Now
there
was scope for a man of initiative. Huggins who, as an ardent Liberal, had campaigned through many elections, never quite abandoned his dream that one day he himself would be the candidate, to stride up the room through the applauding audience, to fling hat and top coat on the chair behind him, to crush his hecklers by unanswerable retorts before dashing away by car to another meeting, and perhaps even to stand on the floodlit balcony of the Town Hall acknowledging the cheers that greeted him as elected member for the Kiplington and Cold Harbour Division of Yorkshire. . . . If only business had not gone so badly; if only he had not married; if only Nell were other than what she was. . . .

Parliament was a life for a man. There was triumph worth winning. Queer that Snaith never tried for it—unless, poor chap, there was something a bit wrong with him.

The choir shrilled through the Gloria and sank with relief to its seats.

Mr. Huggins sprang forward, nimbly for one so large, and announced the second lesson:

“The fifth chapter of the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Hebrews. First Verse. ‘For every high priest taken from among men is ordained for men in things pertaining to God.’” He never enjoyed reading the New Testament like the Old. Less body in it . . . “Who can have compassion on the ignorant, and on them that are out of the way; for that he himself is also compassed with infirmity.”

Ah, if that were the only qualification for priesthood, thought Mr. Huggins—being himself all too often compassed with infirmity.

If he hadn’t messed up the insurance policy on that second lorry; if he hadn’t missed the Dollstall U.D.C. contracts; if Freda hadn’t quarrelled with her husband; if Bessy Warbuckle. . . . Now, a man like Snaith would never understand anything like that. Huggins considered himself to be a good-living man; but flesh and blood has limits. And his infirmities made him able to help other people. They were, you might almost call them, a gift from God. It was perhaps because Snaith couldn’t show natural human feelings that he went no further.

Reading mechanically, Huggins ended the second lesson, sat through Gladys Hubbard’s solo and knelt to pray.

For he had reached a solution to his problem. Snaith was not quite all that he ought to be. A good enough chap, but not a proper man. Therefore he could go no further. Some timidity, some limitation of spirit held him. While Huggins, why—if only he could escape from his entanglement of debts and children and responsibility—from Nelly and her querulous hypochondria, from Freda and her matrimonial troubles—there was no knowing what he might not do, where he might not end, a man with his talents . . .”