XXIII
Meanwhile Muriel and Connie sat luxuriously on the two-shilling red plush seats at the Palace Picture Theatre in Kingsport. Muriel had paid for the tickets and for the blue paper bag of chocolates on Connie's knee. This was to be Connie's evening out, because Thraile was a remote place, dull and far away from cinemas or railway stations. Even if you have found your vocation, reflected Muriel, it must be queer to live eight miles from a railway station.
That was a rhyme. Station, vocation. "Dear Connie has found her vocation, eight miles from a railway station." "Dear Muriel has found her vocation in no particular occupation." So nice, you know. That was the kind of thing that Mrs. Hammond was always saying.
Well, perhaps it was true, regarding Connie at any rate. Somehow the calves and sheep-folds described in her uncommunicative letters had smoothed the lines of discontent from her full lips, had deepened the glow of her rich hair, and lit in her eyes a light of happiness. Connie talked so much that she never explained anything, but all day long her jolly laugh filled the house. When she was silent, Muriel could hear its echo. Yet it was difficult to believe, although Mrs. Hammond said that it was so, although her common sense told her that it must be so, that these changes were only due to sheep and calves.
The film which Connie had chosen to see was called, "The World Heart of Woman, a Story of Deep Human Interest, of the Triumph of the Mating Instinct. For Adults Only." According to the Cinema authorities there was only one thing in which adults took any interest. But Muriel found that this bored her rather terribly.
She turned from the triumph of the "Mating Instinct" on the screen to its manifestation among the audience. She could watch that little girl nestling cosily against the soldier's tunic just in front of her. She could watch the couple on her right, while they groped for each other's hands before the warm darkness shut them in together. She watched the couple on the screen, grimacing through a thousand flickering emotions, until they faded into each other's arms and out of the picture, to the long drawn wail of violins from the Ladies' Orchestra. Why did everything always conspire to mock and hurt her? To show her how she sat alone, shut out from the complete and happy world?
The man on the screen wore his hat like Godfrey's, a little to one side; but he lacked Godfrey's solemnly unconscious realization of his own importance. There was a moment during the picture when he stooped above the heroine and brushed with his lips her hair, her forehead, her upturned face. The heroine appeared to respond in the correct and satisfactory manner. Why could some women do these things, and others simply throw away their chances? Muriel hated this competent cinema heroine.
"I wish that they'd put on Charlie Chaplin, or some one really funny," she said crossly. "I'm so sick of all this sentiment."
She disliked the couple in front of her so much that she wanted to hurt them. Their smug, self-satisfied faces munched chocolates so stupidly. The girl lifted her lashes just as Clare lifted hers, heavily as though they were weighted.
"I adore Angela Tharrap, don't you?" mumbled Connie, her mouth full of chocolate cream. "I saw her once at the camp cinema at Hurlescar. They get some jolly good films there. This was called 'Midnight Passion,' and was simply great."
"I thought that she was much too fat for the part and was rather vulgar," said Muriel.
"Oh, Mu, she's ripping. And the fellows at Hurlescar all go crazy over her. Have another choc? You're so terrified of anything with a bit of go in it. You ought to let yourself go a bit more. Be jollier. I wish that you could meet Poppy Saddler, one of the girls at Thraile. Now she is a sharp little customer, vulgar as you make 'em, but clever. By Jove, she can beat Violet Lorraine on her own ground any day. We have some ripping sing-songs after work."
Muriel did not reflect that the life at Thraile sounded less desolate than they had all imagined. She was thinking, "Let myself go?" and feeling again the gloom of the passage closing round her, and the numbness of her will as she lay in Godfrey's arms, and the shock as her mother's voice dropped into the emptiness of her mind. She had broken away because she always had run when her mother called; but Godfrey would never understand.
The thought that she too had known romance came to her from the scented darkness of the cinema. For the first time she felt pride in the episode at Scarborough. She began to hug the thought that, if they all knew what had happened to her then, they would feel greater interest in her. "I am like Mariana in the Moated Grange. I am like Elaine the Lily Maid of Astolot. I loved him, and he left me. He would have loved me if Clare had not come." She told herself that Clare had wooed him away; Clare, La Belle Dame sans Merci, the enchantress who had cast a spell upon his heart long, long ago, so that when she called him he must go to her, though it were half across the world. And he had followed, lured by her strange wild beauty, and she would lead him through perils and dark places, hungry and thirsty for her presence. But now and then in the hot evenings, he would remember a grey northern town, and the crashing tumult of those nightmare guns, and the face of a girl who smiled at him below the lifting fog. Surely he would remember her as a cool, gracious presence. Perhaps, even, long afterwards, when Clare had wearied of him and left him sad and old and disillusioned, he would return to where Muriel awaited him, faithful and tender still across the years.
The Ladies' Orchestra played slowly, the long notes dropping one after the other into the close atmosphere.
"The winter has gone and the spring is here,
The spring is here."
They played Solveig's song, and Muriel followed to herself the wistful words, building a charmingly sentimental dream out of her relationship to Godfrey.
When the Pictures were over, she walked with Connie to the station.
"Jolly good?" said Connie.
"Not bad at all. I liked the funny one at the end," replied Muriel, still in her softened mood.
But they missed the 9.45 train, and had to wait for the 10.20, and Muriel, as she walked up and down the platform, began to remember that all this was nonsense, that Godfrey Neale had never thought about her any more than he thought of Phyllis Marshall Gurney or Gladys Seton, that every man kissed a girl these days before he went off to the front, and that she really had not even loved him, and never would be loved, and that the world was a grey place where nothing ever happened.
The station seemed to be perfectly enormous and nearly empty, except for some porters playing about with milk cans that they clashed together like giant cymbals. The London train slid silently along the platform, its doors falling open and the passengers tumbling untidily out on to the platform.
"Why," said Connie, "isn't that Delia?"
Turning, Muriel found her hurrying along the platform, a suit-case in her hand.
"Good evening, is the 10.20 still running? Good. I did not want to spend a night in the hotel. Hullo, Connie. You having a holiday? How goes the land work?" As usual, Delia went straight to her point.
"Great, thanks; I'm chief shepherd, head cook and bottle washer to the pet lambs." Incredible good humour! Muriel, accustomed to Connie's sulky antagonism to the vicar's daughter watched them with amazement. Connie continued, "And how are you getting on? Got leave?"
"Yes, ten days. I've come home to be married." Delia's fine lips twisted comically. "A fearful indiscretion, but Martin bought a special licence, and Father insisted on doing the thing himself. We had not intended to ask the blessing of the Church upon the union of two sceptics, but it appears that Father hardly thinks a registry office legal."
The solemn round face of the illuminated clock stared down at them. Muriel expected Connie to say something nasty, but she disappointed her. With a shock, Muriel realized that she was disappointed, that she would have taken satisfaction in her sister's sarcasms, though she herself felt incapable of showing the unaccountable resentment that she felt against Delia's drooping slenderness, and the ironic delicacy of her pale face.
"'The Triumph of the Mating Instinct,'" whispered a horrid little voice in Muriel's mind. "She's just like all of them, fearfully proud of herself."
Connie merely said:
"Oh, how exciting. Which day? When are you expecting Mr. Elliott? Shall we be allowed to the wedding? What are you going to wear?"
It was all very curious, and not a bit like Connie.
As they jolted back to Marshington in the hot, stuffy train, Muriel looked at Connie and Delia sitting opposite her, side by side. And on Delia's thin brown face, and on Connie's plump jolly one, brooded the same expression of serene expectancy.
It was very curious indeed.