South Riding (78 page)

They marched before her, a little subdued, these schoolgirls in their brown tunics, Lydia, Nancy, Jennifer, Gwynneth, the citizens of the future, she thought, with a grimace for all inadequacy, hers as well as theirs.

Lydia was going to college in the autumn. She had passed her matriculation, she was sure of a major county scholarship; she would probably win the Snaith Bursary for distinction in mathematics. The Holly family was safely settled in one of the new bungalows near the Skerrow road. Yet something was lost, Sarah knew. Some spring of confidence, some ease of temper, had been stolen for ever by premature adversity from that big, heavy, sullen, gifted girl who had encountered too early the irony and bitterness of fate.

Still, she was saved from complete disappointment. If we have done nothing else, thought Sarah, falling into line in the procession behind the girls, we have saved Lydia Holly.

But we shall do more, she thought, as she followed them to the esplanade, her eyes blurred by the dizziness of headache, but her mind alert with the activity following shock. She was still a little exalted, lifted out of herself by the excitements of that morning.

The Esplanade Gardens were thick with the crowd assembled for the United Service. The white surplices of clergy and choir boys fluttered. Uniforms glittered; the massed ranks of school children outlined a hollow square. Before the bandstand stood the Mayor of Kiplington, surrounded by the members of the corporation, the county council and other officials. Loud-speakers had been erected along the garden; through them emerged the bland informal voice of Commander Stephen King-Hall describing the scene as he saw it from St. Paul’s Cathedral.

The Reverend Milward Peckover, nervous and excited, stood awaiting his cue, coming all the way from London. He was dazed by the miracle; but Dr. Dale beside him looked capable of sustaining responsibility for all the modern world of science on his broad shoulders. In the crowd Alfred Ezekiel Huggins, no longer councillor (his financial failures had deprived him of office), but still glowing with patriotic fervour, cleared his throat, and squeezed his wife’s arm.

Sarah took her place and looked at her neighbours. The low roar outside St. Paul’s reached them, accompanied by the scream of the sea against the pebbles and the cry of swooping gulls. But it was not of the King and Queen that Sarah was thinking. Her mind, like her eyes, rested on the people near her—the colonists of Cold Harbour who had run out to help her earlier that morning, heedless of the possible danger from a burning plane, Bob Heyer, crippled, disappointed but unconquerable, taking his disability as a kind of sport; George Hicks and Tom Sawdon, drawn together by bereavement, yet making the Nag’s Head a place of social gaiety; Grandpa Sellars, very old and gentle, looking forward to his treat that day at the Old People’s Tea.

They were not very fine nor very intelligent. Their interests were narrow, their understanding dull; yet they were her people, and how she knew she loved them.

She saw the bright bold eyes of Madame Hubbard; Madame was fearfully and wonderfully arrayed in purple satin. That night she was to produce a cabaret show in the Floral Hall as part of the festivities.

Sarah still banned the Hubbard tuition for her pupils, but though she opposed, she admired, she even envied. She was aware of the debt owed by the South Riding to that rich vitality and undaunted spirit.

There stood Bert Holly beside his girl Vi Alcock. Tadman’s was closed; they had the day together. Sarah remembered that scene in the twilit field and wondered, without bitterness, how many such scenes ended in happy courtship and successful marriage, instead of the tragedies which are always prophesied.

Suddenly from the loud-speakers crashed the National Anthem, and the townspeople and bandsmen, school children and corporation, took it up, a trifle belatedly but with spirit, and in time to pass on to the familiar “All people that on earth do dwell.” They were singing with the whole kingdom, perhaps the empire. They were banded in the unity of mass emotion,

Sarah could not remain immune. Question everything, she had urged, and was guarded against acceptance. This morning service was not even for her the pinnacle of the day. That afternoon Sir Ronald Tarkington was to lay the foundation of the new High School buildings as part of the ceremonial of a Jubilee dedicated, by instruction of the Prince of Wales, to youth.

“Oh Lord, open Thou our lips.”

“And our mouth shall show forth Thy praise.”

Kiplington, with London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and a thousand scattered hamlets, responded, chanting:

“O God, make speed to save us,

O Lord, make haste to help us.”

Only if we help ourselves, thought Sarah, wary and critical And even then?

She recalled her earlier certainties. Take what you want, said God: take it and pay for it. She remembered Mrs. Beddows’ caveat: Yes, but who pays? And suddenly she felt that she had found the answer. We all pay, she thought; we all take; we are members one of another. We cannot escape this partnership. This is what it means—to belong to a community; this is what it means, to be a people.

And now she was reconciled to failure, glad of sorrow. She was one with the people round her, who had suffered shame, illness, bereavement, grief and fear. She belonged to them. Those things which were done for them—that battle against poverty, madness, sickness and old age, the battle which Mrs. Beddows had called local government—was fought for her as well. She was not outside it. What she had taken from life, they all had paid for. What she had still to give, was not her gift alone. She was in debt, to life and to these people; and she knew that she could repay no loan unaided.

“Have I not commanded thee?” came the grave voice through the loud-speaker. “Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed.”

Oh, but she was afraid, afraid of failure, of weariness, of the lassitude which comes of hope defeated. How could she endure the years when the ecstasy never happened, the great moment never arrived?

“And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine in it.”

Oh, but I need the sun, moon and stars; I need glory, thought Sarah.

She saw in front of her the young faces of the children, round, fresh and eager, unscarred by experience. She saw the lined faces of the women, their swollen hands reddened by work, the wedding rings embedded deep in the rheumatic flesh. She saw the bent shoulders of the men. She knew that these, the companions of her pilgrimage, faced life without the consolations of triumph, the stimulus of success. Their sturdy endurance in obscurity made her ashamed.

“And the nations of them that are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour with it.”

Well, what if the glory never came then? If the honour was hidden?

Sarah thought of Mrs. Holly, dying in the railway coach, reluctant, because her death must mean failure for her daughter. She thought of Mr. Huggins, bawdy and pious, spreading scandal and enthusiasm—”a bit like David the Psalmist, when you come to think of it,” Mrs. Beddows had said of him; of Anthony Snaith, sad, subtle, frustrated, but working off his neurosis in the service of his locality. Sir Anthony Snaith, perhaps he would be, in the Jubilee Honours; she thought with love and gratitude of Joe Astell; she dared at last to think of Robert Carne.

No; there was little glory; yet she had learned a little. Take what you want, she had said in her crude assurance. She understood better now the real terms of that spiritual bargain. She knew who took and who paid; she was less sure of what she wanted, what they all wanted.

The service had passed over her dreaming head. The loudspeaker had croaked and failed a little. It was Mr. Peckover who took up the prayer, when the dim archiepiscopal voice a hundred miles away faded to silence.

“Almighty God,” he intoned bravely and clearly, “the fountain of all wisdom, who knowest our necessities before we ask and our unworthiness in asking; we beseech thee to have compassion upon our infirmities, and those things which for our unworthiness we dare not and for our blindness we cannot ask, vouchsafe to give us, for the worthiness of Thy Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”

On that humility, upon that nescience, perhaps the more lasting wisdom and certainty might be founded. Humbled, healed, softened, Sarah raised her eyes and looked upon her fellows.

They were no more beautiful, noble or intelligent than they had been before, but in the official group of local authorities, she saw the red wrinkled face of Alderman Mrs. Beddows, and Mrs. Beddows caught her glance, looked at her, shook her head, and smiled. In Mrs. Beddows’ smile was encouragement, gentle reproof, and a half-teasing affectionate admiration. Sarah, smiling back, felt all her new-found understanding of and love for the South Riding gathered up in her feeling for that small sturdy figure. She knew at last that she had found what she had been seeking. She saw that gaiety, that kindliness, that valour of the spirit, beckoning her on from a serene old age.