Chapter V
THE TREES OF THE VALLEY
It was a dreary winter. All day in the garden shrubbery Mary could hear the drop, drop of water from the trees. Christmas came and went in a sorrowful vapour of drifting rain.
Mary hated it all. She hated the long drives in to market down a fog muffled road. She hated the cold clammy feeling of curtains and sheets in the farm-house. She hated the loosened tile that allowed a slow yellow stain to creep across the ceiling of the best bedroom. Besides, she had a persistent cold in her head. It was all very trying.
She lay awake in bed in the chill half-light, awaiting for the church clock to strike seven. The curtains, drawn almost to the centre of the window, flapped and swayed, while the strip of luminous grey that must be the sky outside contracted and expanded with their wanton motion.
Below the bed-clothes at her side she could see John's humped outline. That fringe of soft darkness against the pillow was his beard. The sheet rose and fell with his even breathing.
The heaviness of his sleep annoyed Mary intensely. She might toss and turn and ruckle up the bed-clothes as she would, on sleepless nights when the harvest was bad, or there was a case of anthrax at Littledale, but the only sign of responsibility John ever gave was an occasional snore.
After all, it was her farm. Why should he worry?
Last night she had slept badly, dreaming that John hit her because she would not put a new cake of soap on his wash-stand. Just now she wished her dream were true. Life with John would be so much more tolerable if he would only just sometimes assert his personality. Strike her? Why, he'd go for days without soap rather than make the effort of asking her for it, and as for helping himself—why, he'd sooner get drunk at the Flying Fox though the soap box was only in the wardrobe by their bed.
She clasped her hands round her bent knees and looked down at him. The Robson relatives said she bullied him. They did not realize that John's total inability ever to disagree with anyone about anything transformed even an attitude of consideration to one of tyranny. If Mary always knew exactly what men she wanted to keep after Martinmas, and what date she wanted the pig to be killed, must she refrain from expressing her desires because John's agreement was assured? What was one to do with a man who said, "Well, honey, you know best," whenever one asked his opinion on any subject from chicken food to Fire Insurance?
The mountain of clothes beside her stirred and heaved. John raised his head from the pillow, then sighed himself to sleep again.
Mary could just see his profile now in the dim light. Really, he was quite good-looking. People always called him "a good-looking man." And he was very patient and kind and unselfish—and had all the irritating negative virtues of the oppressed.
Oh, but one wanted some one young and swift and romantic! Some one who would laugh and quarrel and argue and make friends again. Some one who might occasionally utter an unanticipated remark.
The door opened and Violet came in with a can of hot water.
"Good morning, Violet; what's the time?"
"Quarter to seven, m'm. Shall I light the candle, and do you want the wall oven on this morning?"
"Yes, please. I'm going to bake for the Wesleyan tea."
John was waking up. He rolled over drowsily and stuck his head above the clothes, blinking at Mary with blue sleepy eyes.
His customary formula greeted her:
"What's the time, honey?"
Mary believed he had made the same inquiry every morning of their married life.... Ten years and five weeks.... Three hundred and sixty-five days in a year....
"Quarter to seven and a cold morning."
"Oh. All right, is it time we were stirring?"
"I think so. Violet has brought the water."
That was what they always said—the same things every morning. And there were so many remarks he might make. He might, for instance, tell her she looked rather nice, sitting there with her two heavy plaits falling across her shoulders, and the strong cream column of her throat rising above the frills of her flannel nightgown. It was a pretty throat, not reddened by exposure like Ursula's; because Mary nearly always wore high collars.
He might tell her she was pretty. That would give colour and excitement to the whole day. Perhaps if she said something pleasant to him he might be induced to return the compliment.
She watched him rear himself slowly from the bed, his great shoulders straining at the pyjama jacket. Clumsily his bare feet groped for his slippers on the floor.
"Eh, John, you great thing!" She laughed up at him softly. "What a giant you are! No wonder they call you 'Big John of Littledale'!"
He had found his slippers, and gathered round his body the dressing-gown from the foot of the bed. Without comment he turned and slouched across the room.
Mary felt as though he had slammed the door in her face. "Fool!" she cried to herself. "Fool! Wasn't I asking for it?"
Two hours later she stood in the red-tiled kitchen busy with her flour dredgers and baking boards and great jars of sugar and currants. She liked the warm buttery smell of baking and the mastery of familiar instruments and quick confident movements over tins and oven and wooden spoons. She enjoyed the blast of warm air that struck her cheeks when she opened the oven door, and the greetings of men who passed the kitchen window on their way from one stackyard to another.
When Violet came from the "front way" to make an eleven o'clock cup of tea, Mary was in a thoroughly good humour, her early-morning depression forgotten.
"I don't think," she said, rubbing the flour off her hands, "that you ever told me if you found your aunt better, when you went to see her in Hardrascliffe on Saturday."
"I didn't go. Please, m'm, are you ready for me to mash the tea?"
"Yes please—the brown pot. Why didn't you go?"
"I went to the pictures with Percy Deane."
"With Percy Deane? Why, what's happened to Fred Stephens?"
Violet flung the tea into the cups with more generosity than discretion. Mary's table suffered a little during the process.
"Oh. I'm off with Fred. Will you have a bit of cheese-cake, m'm?"
"Violet, why are you off with Fred? He's an awfully nice boy. I can't say I ever did think much of Percy. He drinks too much and he's not a steady worker. I'm sure he's not the man for you. Now Fred——"
"Oh, I'm sick of Fred. He's so rough in his talk."
Mary leaned back against the table and sipped her tea, conscious that, in spite of her easy patronage, she was bitterly jealous of Violet, of her youth and unconscious egoism. She was jealous of the suitors who rang their bicycle bells in the road on Saturday evenings as they waited, posy in cap, to ride with Violet to Hardrascliffe.
"What do you mean by that?" she asked.
"Oh, you know. When we go to the pictures and there isn't much room, Fred just says 'Shuve up, lass,' right loud so as every one can hear we're common folk like; while Perce, he always says polite 'Will you be so kind as to pass a little further up the seat, please?' I have myself to think of."
Violet tossed an independent head.
"But that's so silly," said Mary with common sense, "if you really like Fred best. He's devoted to you. You used to tell me you liked him last autumn."
"Well, I've learnt a thing or two since then. Anyway, I'd much rather walk out with a tailor's assistant than a common labourer."
"But it matters so much more whether you love him. It does really. It's not a bit of use marrying some one just because it seems a sensible thing to do." Mary's earnestness was quite remarkable.
"Oh—love!" sneered Violet.
And there was an end of it.
But all the time she was changing her clothes and driving into Market Burton with her husband, Mary was haunted by Violet's final exclamation. Possibly she was wrong. Her obstinacy about the water-paddock in the village, her advice to Violet, her wistfulness in the morning, were all part of a sentimental legend, invented by people to hide the emptiness of their lives. "Oh—love!"
Well, anyway, there was the farm and the village, and plenty of useful and important things to do. Really at her age, it was time she stopped being so stupid. John was a good husband, and at least he never said "Shuve up, lass!" There were compensations even in marrying an older cousin.
Her destination that afternoon was the drawing-room of Petunia Villa, whither Uncle Dickie and Aunt Jane had retired after their farming days were over. Anne and Louisa lived with them, and on Wednesday afternoons, while the men attended the Cattle Market, all the ladies of the family congregated there among the woolwork and antimacassars.
Mary had brought her sewing and sat a little apart, listening to her sisters-in-law run through their conversational répertoire—servants, ailments, the Medical Mission's sale of work. Among her husband's relatives she had gained an unmerited reputation for silence. But she was aware that every remark she made in Market Burton was repeated and criticized from house to house, and passed on continually, with the brief prelude, "Mary Robson says so and so," and the probable qualification, "Isn't she queer?"
Janet Holmes was concluding a long narrative.
"... And so I said, 'Mr. Jefferson, I've bought silk from your establishment for five and thirty years; but, after this, never again!' And I walked out of the shop."
There followed a murmur of approbation from the sisters-in-law. Then the conversation, having for so long dwindled into a monologue, ceased entirely, while a new topic was sought. Mary, who had formed a habit of trying to give people what they wanted, provided one for them.
"Did you know that Toby had bought a new car?" she asked.
They fell upon it with avidity.
"He'd better by half have kept the money to pay his doctor's bills. Molly tells me they weren't paid for last time, and now, with the new one coming, I'm sure I don't know how he'll manage." Sarah Bannister poked her knitting-needles sharply into the sock.
"Really? Another? Really? I didn't know," murmured Anne.
"You never do," Louisa commented severely. "Will he drive it himself, Mary?"
For a moment Mary wondered whether the inquiry related to the prospective infant or the car; but Sarah answered for her.
"He'll drive it himself for a couple o' months, and then he'll have a nasty accident one of these fine days and smash the whole concern, and start a new craze. That's what he'll do."
"I thought carpentering was the last fad?" Louisa transferred a pin from her mouth to the hem of the shirt she was stitching.
"He tried carpentering until their maid fell over his newfangled draught screen at the head of the stairs and broke her leg. Then he really had to stop turning his drawing-room into a joiner's shop. Louisa, hand me that other ball of wool, please." Mrs. Bannister made a practice of exacting occasional small services from her sisters, to impress upon them her seniority.
"If we don't take care," remarked Louisa, "we shall find the Tobys will be another lot of poor relations." Being dependent herself, she naturally objected to anyone else occupying a similar position.
"There's one thing I will say for Toby"—Sarah so rarely said things in favour of her relatives that the company looked up attentively—"I don't think he ever would be a poor relation."
"I'm sure he'll ruin himself one day," sighed Aunt Jane.
"Being a poor relation has nothing to do with how much money you've got. It's just a state of mind."
"What an idea, Sarah! You do say some th'ngs! I'm sure it all comes of his being a solicitor. My husband always said lawyers were no good." Janet Holmes shook a melancholy head.
"Solicitor? I wouldn't mind his being a solicitor," snapped Sarah. "It's when he's a carpenter and chicken farmer and amateur photographer that I've no patience with him. He'll be standing for Parliament one day just to try something new, you see if he doesn't. I've no patience with a man who makes a profession of his hobbies."
"I don't mind so long as he makes a hobby of his profession," laughed Mary. "John and I have put most of our affairs into his hands."
"Oh. Indeed. Have you? Well, it's your own fault then if you come to grief. Did you advise John to go to Toby?"
"I did," said Mary. "He's our cousin. I'm sure I don't know who else there is."
"I advised John to do nothing of the kind."
Mary raised her eyebrows. This, from Sarah, was a confession of defeat. If Mary had advised John to do one thing when Sarah had asked him to do something else, and he had followed Mary's guidance, then it was strange that Sarah should acknowledge it. Sarah was strange, though.... Always had been rather clever and certainly odd. "Odd" for Market Burton meant any digression from the straight and narrow path of conventionality. You never knew what Sarah would say next.
Callers drifted in. At Market Burton a lady's social success could be measured by the number of teas she attended on Wednesday afternoons. Nearly all the ladies of Market Burton were the wives of retired farmers.
Mary continued to sew and to be depressed by the new-comers. Their hats were depressing; their shoes were depressing; their similarity was the most depressing of all. This was what life in Market Burton did to you. Once these people had risen early and worked hard, and wrestled with the soil that gave them livelihood, as she rose and worked and wrestled. Now, if they moved at all from their chairs by the fire-side, they rose and turned round and round, through the garden-bound streets and chattering parlours of the valley town and then sat down again. It almost seemed as though the rolling hills and open country had proved too much for them. Each generation was born, brought up amongst the scattered farms, worked for a while, and reared a new generation to follow after them, then slipped back into the sheltered valley to wither and die.
Snatches of their conversation drifted towards her across the room—maids, their sisters, the price of butter.
Mary shivered. They were as lifeless as the uprooted trees, carried from the wold side and laid in the back garden of the farm, awaiting destruction for firewood. Their talk was as meaningless as the rustle of dry leaves on brittle twigs.
Mrs. Holmes gasped her way across the room, and sat down beside Mary.
"Yes, you know," she began without further prelude, "I've just come back from Harrogate, and it hasn't done me a bit of good. Ethel, my cook you know, has given notice, and my nerves are all to pieces. You don't know a nice girl, do you? You're so lucky with maids, I know—always keep them. Then, of course, having a village like that to choose from...."
In the other corner Anne and Mrs. Toby, who had just arrived, were discussing the price of wool for socks. Aunt Jane's head was nodding in the arm-chair near the fire. Only Sarah sat alert and grim. "I won't grow like them. I won't!" thought Mary. "I won't ever leave the farm and come here to grow all withered and dry. I won't even stay alive like Sarah, and hate everything that alters because I can't grow along with it."
She hardly listened to Janet's tale of woe.
Then there was a sudden rustle and clatter and Ursula Robson entered the room. She came in as usual unannounced, and Mary wondered if anyone could be more unlike the ladies round the fire. From her scarlet toque to her high-heeled shoes, she looked about as appropriate in that Victorian gathering as Dodo in a Cranford parlour.
"Yes, I've just dropped in for a moment," she announced, greeting her relatives with breathless energy. Ursula had cultivated a manner that might convey to her acquaintances something of the reckless pace of that society to which she aspired. "Foster would go down to the market—such a bore when I wanted to get home in time to dinner. The Lesters were coming in afterwards to play bridge."
She peeled a long suede glove from her slim arm, rolled it into a ball and tossed it on to the sofa before she sat down by Mary and asked cheerfully:
"Well, and how's John?"
Mary with amused interest followed Sarah's disapproving glance across the room to Ursula's ankles. When Mrs. Foster Robson sat down the sheath-like skirt below her fur coat slid almost up to her knees. Ursula, looking up too, caught Sarah's critical glance. With an impish gesture she thrust forward a little both her disgraceful legs and turned to Mary vivaciously.
"You haven't answered my question. How's John?" she asked.
"John's all right. I won't ask after Foster as I met him in the market."
"Then if you saw him in the market you saw the most disreputable hat in the East Riding. Mary, what do you do to your husband when he will dress himself up as an 'old clo' man? I've hidden that hat. I've danced on it. I've even put it in the rubbish bin, but up it comes again and goes to market on Wednesdays, as though he'd just bought it from Henry Heath's. What am I to do?"
"I should burn it," suggested Mary calmly.
Ursula at least was alive. She was not in any way a tree of the valley. It was a relief to know that there still were some people with vitality left.
Louisa's soft voice cooed disapproval:
"Wouldn't that be rather wasteful?"
"Wasteful? Good Lord, if you could see it you wouldn't talk about waste! Aunt Jane, you ought to be used to dealing with this sort of thing. What do you do with Dickie when he's obstinate?"
"Dickie!" Mary looked up with apprehension to see if the roof would fall on such astounding levity. But Ursula fully realized the extent of her privilege. She knew the awe-struck pride with which her relatives watched her prowess on the golf links. Her airy impertinences and elusive skirts were forgiven because Anne and Louisa loved to impress strangers with "Mrs. Foster Robson, the Golf Champion." And even Mrs. Tilly would talk confusedly of mashies and niblicks, though she had never been on the links in her life.
"Foster's going to Scotland for a fortnight next week," she announced suddenly.
"You'll go too, I suppose?" Mary asked.
"No. I don't feel up to knocking about much just now."
Mary flashed a discerning glance at her cousin's face.
Ursula smiled, a subtle, triumphant smile. A dimple, never long in hiding, flickered on her rounded cheek.
"Oh, Ursula!" cried Mary softly. "You don't mean?"
Ursula nodded, still smiling.
The sisters were all discussing an approaching sale of work, and the two women on the sofa seemed isolated. They spoke quietly. "Do the others know?"
"Not yet. I'll feel such a fool telling them. They always make such an ungodly fuss about these kind of things, and because I've been South for so long they forget there's any such possibility."
"When?"
"April."
"Well, anyhow you are doing your duty." Mary laughed a little, but her fingers, tightly holding the linen she sewed, were trembling. She felt a little breathless, as though she had just found in the possession of another something she had sought a long time. Then the instinct that made her respond to an expressed need came to her aid.
"Look here, Ursula, if you feel rather bored at the idea of being alone when Foster goes away, why not come to Anderby for a fortnight? We haven't had any visitors—anyway, young ones—for ages."
"Do you mean that? I'd love it. It's so dull when I can't play golf. Are you sure I shan't be a nuisance?"
"Of course you won't. I'd love to have you."
She would. Because Ursula was young. Anything was better than this dreary monotony of middle age—when one was only twenty-eight.
"Righto. I'll come. And, Mary, I wonder if you'd tell the others after I've gone. I should feel such an ass and they're bound to know soon."
"Of course I will."
Ursula nodded and smiled and left her, to pay her compliments to Aunt Jane.
Mary sat and watched her. Why, she wondered, had she asked her to stay? Why had she promised to tell the family that Ursula, and not she, was going to have a baby? Why did one ever tell those faded women anything? Her news would stir them lightly, as a breeze stirs withered leaves to a rustling chatter, but that would subside too, and they would forget until the next breeze blew.
Besides, why Ursula's news, when she wanted so much to give them tidings of her own? Ursula had all the luck. It wasn't as if she cared for Mary. She only looked upon her as someone useful, and staid, and a little dull.
Mary pulled herself together. After all she had her work. She had Anderby. Her needle flew in and out of her material as she nursed this thought. All that one really wanted was that things should stay as they were. What did it matter if Ursula had a private income and clothes from London and an exasperating air of importance?
She could have a thousand babies for all Mary cared! One day she would retire too, and grow old, and come to wither among the trees of the valley.
Mary never would. Never, never!
Aunt Jane beckoned her.
"Come and talk to me, love. I haven't seen you for long enough."
Mary crossed the room and sat down by the big arm-chair. Aunt Jane sat, her bird-like head on one side, waiting for Mary to tell her something. She always sat like this, waiting for people to tell her something. It was her one interest in life, though she always forgot what they told her.
Mary knew she was waiting, but there seemed to be nothing to say. Ursula was still in the room, so she must not yet talk about the baby, but besides that she could think of nothing but dried leaves rattling on rotten twigs in a valley garden.
"Well, love?" prompted Aunt Jane.
"Have you been cutting down any trees lately?" asked Mary wildly.
Her sisters-in-law looked up in mild surprise, but Aunt Jane only shook her head.
"No, love," she replied. "You see since we gave up farming we haven't had any wood of our own."