V
Friendships at Heathcroft should usually be registered, like births, deaths, and marriages, with all due publicity and certitude. It was just like Muriel that, right up to the moment of leaving school, she should never know whether she could really call herself Clare's friend.
She stood on the platform, waiting for the arrival of the York train that was to carry Clare off to London, Leipzig, singing lessons and Fame. Clare, radiant, blossoming already into a young lady in a hat sent by her mamma from Paris, smiled serenely from the carriage window down at Muriel.
"Au revoir," she laughed. Her rich voice lightly dropped the words for Muriel to take up or to leave as she would. Clare did not care.
"Good-bye, Clare," Muriel replied solemnly. She made no fuss about it, for that would have been cheek, as though she had some right to mind saying good-bye. "I hope that you will have a good time in Germany. I expect that when I see you again you will be a famous singer. But don't forget that if ever you should want to stay in Yorkshire we should love to have you at Miller's Rise."
"Oh, thank you, chérie, I shall not forget."
She smiled and waved her hand, tossing back to Muriel, like a fallen flower, the invitation that had cost such terrific courage to propose. But Muriel rushed away to her own carriage on the local line to Kingsport with a sense of desolation that ached sullenly beneath the excitement of being grown-up at last.
Because Muriel did not much care for babies, they pursued her in railway trains and buses with relentless faithfulness. The carriage into which she hurled herself after Connie's vanishing figure was hot and overcrowded, and directly opposite to Muriel sat a baby, wriggling on its mother's knee, its mouth smeared with chocolate and crumbs of biscuits.
"Disgusting," thought Muriel. "How like Connie to choose a carriage full of babies." For Connie was at this time indiscriminately friendly, always scraping acquaintance with babies, all crumbs and chocolate, or puppies, all smells and fleas. And now, because of her lack of sensitiveness, Muriel at this crisis in her life had to endure a slow train, where at every station people with baskets crowded in upon her, even more hurriedly than her own overwhelming emotions. Connie would come by this train, because it arrived at Marshington half an hour before the express, and Muriel always tried to be unselfish. She might have guessed what it would be like, for circumstances never had much reverence for her feelings. Perhaps that was why she had come to think that they did not much matter herself.
The world was all right. It was she who was wrong, caring for all the wrong things. She could not, however hard she tried, stop herself from loving Clare, though passionate friendships between girls had been firmly discouraged by the sensible Mrs. Hancock. Their intimacy, she considered, was usually silly and frequently disastrous. If carried too far, it even wrecked all hope of matrimony without offering any satisfaction in return. Love was a useful emotion ordained by God and regulated by society for the propagation of the species; or else it inspired sometimes the devotion of a daughter to a mother, or a parent to a child. It could even be extended to a relative, such as a cousin or an aunt. Or in a somewhat diluted form it might embrace Humanity, engendering a vague Joan-of-Arc-Florence-Nightingale-Mrs.-Beecher-Stowish philanthropy, to which Muriel aspired faintly, but without much hope of realization. But Love between two girls was silly sentiment. By loving Clare, Muriel knew that she had been guilty of extreme foolishness. And she wanted so much to be good.
The words of Mrs. Hancock's farewell interview returned to her through the smoke-laden atmosphere of the train. "My dear, to-morrow you are going to take your place in the world outside your school, and there are one or two things that I want you to remember. I believe that sometimes you girls laugh at those words of Kingsley's, 'Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever,' but they contain a great truth, Muriel. Character, my dear, to be a fine womanly woman, that matters so much more than intellectual achievement. To serve first your parents, then, I hope, your husband and your children, to be pure, unselfish and devoted, that is my prayer for each one of my girls." Mrs. Hancock coughed. She had repeated this little homily so often that she did not hesitate for words, and yet now and then, unguessed by her hearers, would come a moment of wistful doubting whether this message contained the final expression of her wisdom. Below her worldly wisdom, Mrs. Hancock, like Muriel, wanted to be good. "I want you to remember the school motto, dear, 'Læta sorte mea,' Happy in my lot. God will, I hope, give you happiness, but if He chooses to send you disappointment and sorrow you will, I hope, resign yourself to His dear will."
Forget? How could Muriel forget? It had been so sweetly solemn. A vast desire seized upon her then to serve, to be devoted, to be faithful. Sometimes at the early service she had knelt in the dim chancel, and thought the fluttering candle flames above the altar to be stirred by the soft breathing of the Holy Ghost. Then, too, she had prayed with passionate ardour for self-abnegation and for service. But last night the desire had swept upon her with rushing, mighty wings, and she had stood gazing into Mrs. Hancock's face with eloquent eyes, and murmuring, "I will try. I will try."
Connie's strident voice swung Muriel back from the dream of life to its business:
"Did you say that his name was Tommie? That's a nice name, isn't it? Tommie, Tom! No, my sister isn't fond of babies."
"Oh, I am," protested Muriel, always ready to sacrifice her tastes to other people's feelings. "Sometimes," she added, respectful to the truth. Her appealing eye sought those of the baby's mother, who nodded understandingly.
"Lor, bless you! I know. A bit scared of 'em, eh? You wait till you've had eight on 'em like me. Then a bairn's neither here nor there as the saying goes. Ah've got six an' buried two, dearie me, but Ivy's in service now, so I'm not complaining. The Lord's will be done, as I says to Mrs. Dalton, who's had fourteen. The Lord's will be done so long as He don't overdo it."
"Of course," smiled Muriel shyly, feeling somehow that the answer was inadequate.
Was that really the end of it all? Six alive and two buried, and the Lord's will being done, while one's face grew florid and coarse, with a network of purplish veins across the cheek, and days and nights passed in an endless race to keep abreast with small domestic duties?
Life's not like that. Life's not like that, vowed Muriel. Fiercely she fought this sense of inexorable doom for the salvation of her dreams. Surely God made the world most beautiful, and set within it to delight man's heart music, and lingering scents, and the clear light of dawn through leafless trees. To teach man the holiness of law, He set the stars to ride their courses; for patience, He showed the slow fertility of earth; for wisdom, He granted an eternal hunger that would snatch its secret from the lightning, and their riddle from the tombs of ancient men. He gave man beauty of body, and delight in swift, free, movement. He gave him friendship, and the joy of service. And, lest these things should be too sweet, and cloy with sweetness, He gave him danger, that man might know the glory of adventure. And, lest man should grow weary in his wandering, God gave the last and deepest mercy, Death.
Not quite in definite words, Muriel thought this, but somehow her heart told her that Life was this joyous, regal journey. She was grown up. The whole world lay before her. The great adventure, which just must end right, was about to begin.
She raised her hand to feel the long plait falling between her narrow shoulders. Soon there would be a cold feeling at the back of her neck. Her hair would be twisted up below her hat. Did being grown up really make such a difference?
The train jerked on. Beyond the window the flat, dun country slid past wearily. Hot July fields, ripening into dusty yellow for the harvest, paddocks dried to rusted fawn, hundreds and hundreds of allotments, variegated as a patchwork quilt, speckled with crazy tool sheds, seamed with straight dykes, splashed here and there with the silver-green of cabbages, or the faded motley of a wilted border of July flowers—this was the country that surrounded Marshington. After the ringing splendor of the wind-swept wolds, the stale flatness of the plain seemed doubly depressing.
But Muriel was not depressed. Marshington to her was not a select residential suburb of Kingsport, compensating for its ugliness by its respectability. It was the threshold of life, the gateway to a brimming, lovely world, whence she might start upon a thousand strange adventures. Its raw, red villas were transfigured. Its gardens glowed to meet her. When she could see from the right-hand window the elm-crowned hill of Miller's Rise, her excitement almost choked her.
She leaned back in her seat, half wishing that she need never rise, but Connie darted to the window.
"I say, Mu, hadn't we better pull the bags down? Look out! There's your tennis racket. Where's my book box? My book box, Mu? Good-bye, Tommie, bye-bye! See, Muriel, he's ta-ing his little hand at us! Isn't he an angel? Oh, there's Father! Cooee, father, cooee! We're here! We're here!"