Chapter 3

There were days of desolation for Nell Beatup that November. Her disappointment gripped her as a black frost grips the fields; she felt powerless, bound, and sterile. Even the last month, when bit by bit her happy memories were destroyed, when she learned that all her [217] hopes were built on an exaggeration, a mistake, even that month of slow disillusion had been better than this black month of despair. In October a few crumpled leaves had reddened the trees, a few pale draggled flowers had sweetened the garden, a bird had sometimes perched on the gable end and sung before he flew away. But now the fields were black and the woods were dun, the lanes were a poach of mud, and the smell of mud hung above field-gates and barns—a clammy mist rose from the ponds, making the air substantial with the taste of water ... tears ... they seemed to hang in the rainy clouds, to dribble from the trodden earth, and, mixed with the dead summer’s dust, they made a grey slimy mud that sobbed and sucked under her feet on her daily trudge to school.

The killing of her hope was no mercy. Even that sick thing had been better than this emptiness, this death. Hope had sustained her for years, for years she had had nothing more robust to feed on than her pale infatuation for a man who seldom gave her crumbs. She had become skilled in hoping, long practice made her an experienced artificer of hope, able to build a palace out of a few broken bricks. She had never known any other love than this ghost of one, so there had never been a chance of its dying of comparison. She had no intimate girl friends, and Ivy’s full-blooded affairs struck her only with the grossness of their quality, giving her own by contrast a refinement and poetry that made it doubly precious.

Then had come the wonderland of those harvest days, when hope had almost passed into confidence, when all the wonderful things of love she had never learned yet—glamour, pride, perfection, satisfaction—had shown her their burning shapes. But it had all been false, a mirage of that same hope’s sick intensity, an overreaching of the artificer’s skill; and now her tears had turned to [218] mud the golden dust of harvest, and all her dreams were dead—and stuck to her still, clogging and fouling, like this mud of Slivericks Lane on her boots.

Luckily, her day-long absence made it possible for her to hide her wretchedness from her family. At school her listlessness was commented on—a listlessness alternating with an increased nerviness and a tendency to cry when found fault with—but as Nell had always been a little languid and a little hysterical, these exaggerations of her natural state were put down to her health, and the schoolmistress persuaded her to take a patent medicine containing iron. Her love affair had been conducted on such delicate lines that only a few had noticed it, and no one except Ivy had given it any importance. Ivy was intensely sorry for her sister, and on one Sunday’s visit dared to probe her state. But Nell was like a poor little cat caught by the tail, and could only scratch and spit, so Ivy good-naturedly gave up the effort. She was quite her old self again, judging by the “pals” she brought over to Worge on her Sundays off—Motorman Hodder and Motorman Davis, and Sergeant Staples, and Private La Haye, and Corporal Bunch of the Moose Jaws, and other Canadians quartered at Hastings, who sat in the kitchen, saying, “Sure” and “Yep” and “Nope.”

“Reckon it’s kill or cure wud you,” said Mrs. Beatup, and no one knew precisely what she meant.

Nell thought her worst moment would be when she delivered to Mr. Poullett-Smith the pretty little speech she had been making up ever since she heard of his engagement. It was fairly bad, for Marian Lamb was with him and had already assumed a galliard air of proprietorship.

“Thank you so much, Miss Beatup—it’s awfully kind of you. Yes, I’m awfully happy, and”—coyly—“I hope [219] Harry is too. But we mustn’t stop any more—Harry has still the remains of his cold. Do turn up your collar, you naughty boy.”

Nell walked away rigid with contempt. “She’s silly and she’s vulgar—she’s vulgarer than I, for all I’m only a farmer’s daughter. ‘Naughty boy!’—how common! She’s worse than Ivy.”

Miss Marian gave up her Red Cross work, and was seen going for long walks with her Harry, and accompanying him on his parish rounds. She was a big, ungainly, soapily clean female, with a certain uncouth girlishness which did not endear her to the curate’s flock. Nell could not imagine what he “saw in her”—she certainly did not read the Sermons of St. Gregory. She wondered if he had loved her long—the parish said “years,” but that he had been unable to propose (1) till an expected legacy arrived, (2) till Miss Marian was sure she could get nobody else. At all events, he must have been in love with her during those days of Nell’s mirage—it was another bitter realisation for her to swallow, another choking mouthful of humble-pie.

The poor little teacher crept about forlornly. She had not officially given up her Sunday-school class, but she seized flimsy pretexts to keep away; she even sometimes stayed away from church—then would force herself to go thrice of a Sunday, in case her absence should be put down to its true cause. She dodged the curate and Marian in the lanes, but she seemed to run into them at every corner—they always seemed to be going by the schoolhouse window. One evening, as she passed Mr. Smith’s cottage by the church, she saw the firelight leaping in his uncurtained study, and two dark figures stooping together against the glow. She stopped and stared in, like a beggar watching a feast; the table was laid for tea, and there were his books and his pictures, all ruddy in the firelight, the flickering, shuttled walls of the little room in which she had never set foot—his home. Marian was there; she would pour out his tea and hand him his cup. She would say, “Eat some more, dear; you’ve had [220] a tiring day.” Then she would make him lie back in his armchair and put his feet to the fire, and she would curl up at his feet and read him the Sermons of St. Gregory.... No, she wouldn’t do anything like this. Nell laughed—that woman was Nell, not Marian. She was putting herself where she wanted to be, in the other’s place. Marian would say, “Don’t eat all the cake, naughty boy.” And then she would go and sit on his knee. Ugh!... And Nell, who would have done so differently, stood outside in the November dusk, with tears and rain on her face, and little cold, red hands clenched in impotent longing.