South Riding (76 page)

Sarah hardly listened.

“If only I could tell him I didn’t mean it. If only I could explain. I was only angry. When I said I didn’t want Midge at school, it was because I loved him so unbearably. I told him to take her away, you know.”

“And now she’s going away. I’m sending her.”

“So I can’t even take that back. I can do nothing.”

“And did you expect to get through life with no word spoken you couldn’t take back, with no failure you couldn’t turn to triumph? Oh, my dear—you haven’t begun to
live
yet.”

“But if this is living, I cannot bear it. I cannot bear myself. Whatever you tell me, I can’t stay here. I can’t do it. Don’t you understand? I cannot bear this body that he did not desire. I wanted his child, don’t you see? I never wanted a child before, but I wanted
his
child.”

“I dare say. And now want must be your master. As it has been to many women. As it will be to many of the girls that you’ll be teaching. It’s no use only having a creed for the successful. Robert wanted what he couldn’t have. He wanted Muriel not to have had the child and lost her reason. He wanted himself not to have forced it on her. Rightly or wrongly, he thought he had sent her mad. He never thought of her without pain or shame. Now you know something of what he felt. Now you can understand him and those who feel like him. Now perhaps you are fit to teach a little.”

“But how can I teach here, when the things I know are right are all the things which he resisted? I cannot work for the world that Robert wanted; I cannot work for the world he did not want. My triumphs would be only defeats for him. My success would only be bought at his expense.”

“Still thinking of triumphs? How do you know that you won’t fail?”

“You’re right. I don’t know. I only know that I cannot bear this pain. There’s no hope. No remedy.”

“Yes. I understand that. And when there’s no hope and no remedy, then you can begin to learn and to teach what you’ve learned. The strongest things in life are without triumph. The costliest things you buy are those for which you can’t even pay yourself. It’s only when you’re in debt and a pauper, when you have nothing, not even the pride of sorrow, that you begin to understand a little.”

Sarah lifted her ravaged face.

“I expect I shall begin to hate you in a few days, because of all the things I have told you. I never meant to expose myself like this. But tell me, tell me, why should I love him like this? I’m not a green girl. I’m not inexperienced. I didn’t even like him. He was everything I dislike most—reactionary, unimaginative, selfish, arrogant, prejudiced. Yet—he had filled the world for me. I can see nothing else now. Oh, why?”

“You’ve got him wrong. He may have been all that you say he was, but he was much more. He was courageous and kind and honest. He was, in dealing with people, the gentlest man I ever knew. He knew all about loving. He let a woman destroy his whole life, yet he never blamed her. To the end he worshipped—yes—and respected Muriel—and was grateful for all she’d given him. He never ran away from failure; he never whined, never deceived himself, never blamed other people when things went wrong. In the end—it’s not politics nor opinions—it’s those fundamental things that count—the things of the spirit.”

“In the end? In what end? In no end I’ve ever heard of.”

“Perhaps not. Perhaps in an end too far away for us to dream of. So you see—you’ve got to stay and work here, Sarah Burton. Because you belong to the South Riding, and he loved it. Maybe his ideals were wrong and his ways old-fashioned. Maybe all that we do here isn’t very splendid. As I see it, when you come to the bottom, all this local government, it’s just working together—us ordinary people, against the troubles that afflict all of us—poverty, ignorance, sickness, isolation—madness. And you can help us. You who belong here, and who were clever, and went out into the world to gain your education.”

“And came back to lose it here,” Sarah smiled wearily.

“Very well then. To lose it. And start again.”

“But—I’ve done so badly. I hate myself so.”

“Well, quite a few of us have to get through life without too good an opinion of ourselves and yet we manage. You’ll learn even that, you know, one day.”

The telephone rang, cutting into the quiet darkness. Outside the window only the faint bar of the afterglow lay along the eastward horizon above the silent sea.

Sarah rose and moved clumsily across the room. Mrs. Beddows heard her fumbling blindly for the receiver.

“Yes? Hallo? This is Miss Burton.”

All tone had left her dead weary voice. “All right. Very well. I may be a little late, I have a governor with me. Tell them I’m coming.”

“What’s that?”

“Only a staff meeting. I’d forgotten.”

“You must go.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll come to the funeral to-morrow.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll stay on and work here.”

“I don’t know. I must think.”

“You will stay. I don’t think you’re a coward either. Well. Ugh! my knees. They’re stiff if I sit long. I’ll leave you. Have you any whisky in the house?”

“Why? I—yes—I’ll see——”

“No hurry. Take a strong one before you face that meeting. I don’t hold with it. But there are times. Good-bye, my dear— and brave—girl. God bless and comfort you—and thank you.”

“Oh—for what?” breathed Sarah.

The little woman paused at the door. She was buttoning her coat round her. Her weather-beaten face was broken with grief and tenderness.

“For loving my dear boy—and wanting to comfort him,” whispered Mrs. Beddows, and went off into the darkening town.

Sarah went to her staff meeting. She heard nothing. She made mechanical replies. She congratulated the women on Miss Teasdale’s favourable report. Nothing that any one said made any impression on her.

When it was over she took her little car and drove out, under a small horned moon, to Maythorpe.

The gate was still off its hinges, the drive lay open. She drove down below the budding limes and sycamores.

The house lay bare and blank in the faint moonlight. She climbed from her car and sat on the cold stone step, trying to feel near the man whom she had tried to hate, believing that he despised her, and who had not despised her, and whom she could not help but love.

All her life she would love him, and all through her life she would fight against him. His ways were not her ways, his values were not her values. She had followed her reason, until her passion crossed it, and now she sought, beyond reason and beyond passion, some further meeting-place.

She had lost her faith in herself and her opinions. She was certain of nothing. The solid earth beneath her feet had melted, and she had fallen into a gulf of grief and shame. Take what you want, she had cried in arrogance. Take it and pay for it.

She knew now that the costliest things are not the ones for which those who take can pay. Carne had paid. He would continue to pay—for all she bought now, for all impersonal triumph, for all that she might achieve in the South Riding. She would remain his debtor.

She knelt on his threshold, her arms round the crumbling pillar, her cheek on the cold stone.

“Oh, my love, my love,” she cried to the unresponding darkness.

Bushes stirred. A bat fluttered silently. Far away in the pit beyond Minton Riggs a fox was barking.

I cannot touch you, she thought. I cannot reach you. There is no comfort or thanks now that I can bring you. All my life I can do nothing but destroy where you have builded and build where you destroyed. Forgive me. Forgive me. I have nothing for you—nothing, nothing, nothing.

But even as she cried out that there was nothing, beating her hand against the pillar which soon itself would stand no longer there, she became aware that perhaps there was something. It was no visible or audible presence, no ghost of the man she had loved, no reassurance that in his darkest hour he had indeed turned to her and found comfort in the thought of her. It was no more than the faintest fading of her isolation.

Something had happened. Quite simply she knew that she was not entirely alone, not arrayed against him; for he was within her. She had become part of him and he of her, because she loved him. He had entered into her as part of the composition of her nature, so that they no longer stood in hostile camps. She could no longer hate herself, for that would be hating him too. He would not hate her for what she was doing, even if she stayed and fought against all that he had stood for.

This sense had nothing to do with what he felt for her, for that was little; nothing with what she felt for him, for that was, perhaps, too much. It was as though, each of them having known love so intensely even though not for each other, they had entered into some element greater than themselves, and, being part of it, existed eternally within it, and, being thus transformed, become part of each other.

It was not a sense of comfort—of pain, rather—but these were the intense creative pangs of birth, not death. Her rational, decisive, rather crude personality seemed to enlarge itself, with desperate travail of the imagination, until it could comprehend also his slow rectitude, his courage in resignation, his simplicity of belief.

For she knew now not only her failure but his sorrow. She entered at last into part of his experience, and understanding him, felt isolated no longer. She could endure what lay before her because he had endured and she had loved him.

She rose slowly, and began to move forward, groping silently round the dark eyeless house, bidding farewell to it, not for herself, but for him. She, who would help to destroy it, as she had helped to destroy all that Maythorpe stood for, she blessed the cold stone, touched the black scentless ivy.

She crossed the empty yard, and stood by the stable windows. She put her hand on the mounting block, and felt the hollow step worn by his foot and those of his forefathers.

Every creature was asleep; each stall was empty. The house was a shell of memory. Only the ducks had been left upon the horse-pond. They were awake and stirring.

Sarah could hear their soft and drowsy gabble and the liquid sound of their rootling for insects in the mud.

Then she saw them, white as swans in the moonlight, swimming away across the dark smooth water.

T
HE AEROPLANE
ran lightly across the turf, drawing dark wheelmarks along the sheen of dew. Then it danced, brushing the daisies, cleared the low hawthorn-sprinkled hedge, and was away up into the clear sweet air.

It was half-past six on the morning of May 6th, 1935, the day of the Silver Jubilee. The aeroplane carried a pilot and three passengers—Lovell Brown, engaged to write a descriptive article on the South Riding decorations, a staff photographer from the
Kingsport Chronicle,
and Sarah Burton. She alone was there for her own entertainment. Hearing, the previous week, of Lovell Brown’s intended flight, she had pleaded with his editor for the fourth seat in the aeroplane, and he, who thought well of her and valued her friendship, had been willing to gratify her curiosity.

For Sarah had only flown earlier by Imperial Airways across the channel. She had never before this been in a small open monoplane, looking down on to the familiar country.

They swept north first, up the coast to Hardrascliffe. On the wolds the small dark villages dotted the green landscape. Over each the plane swooped low, so that the photographer might make pictures of the garlanded streets, the bannered steeples, the white marquees and tents in the open fields, prepared for Jubilee teas.

It was a green and white carpet, green pastures, gardens and plantations, white tents, white daisies, and white hawthorn hedges. Long morning shadows striped the living green.

Sarah carried a letter in her handbag. She had received it the previous Saturday, read and re-read it, and knew it now almost by heart. She was thinking of it as she bounced and swayed over the South Riding. It was from her friend Joe Astell.

“M
Y
D
EAR
S
ARAH
,” he had written—“No, I do not propose to come and join your Jubilee ballyhoo. Except for unavoidable circumstances I should have been travelling to London for Sunday’s demonstration against it. Don’t you know me better? I had enough of being a good citizen when I was on your county council. I’m a militant again, thank God, quit of the shame of compromise.

“Of course I see your point. One could regard it as an opportunity for a general beano, a moment of sunlight between storms. Or even, as you say, a demonstration of national unity—of common fortune. But my dear silly girl, this mass hysteria and empty shouting do not represent that classless commonwealth of equals which I want, and which you say you want. Don’t delude yourself.

“They’ve chalked on a wall opposite my office—‘Flags today, gas-masks to-morrow.’ Well, Sarah, is that so much off the point. Anyway, I can’t rejoice here. We have miles of docks with grass growing between the truck lines. Men I used to know as the finest workmen in the world, skilled artisans, riveters, engineers, are rotting on the dole. Oh, no, they don’t starve; but they suffer from heart disease, T.B. and, worst of all, perhaps, hopelessness. And the tragic sickening fact is that their only chance of re-employment lies in this arms race. They can return to life only by preparing for death. It’s a mad farce, and I don’t like myself any better for enjoying the incidents of the battle. Of course I do enjoy them. I’ve loved the fight, though my heart sickens for the defeated, and I don’t like the flavour of the future.