The trumpet in the dust

by Constance Holme

She met nobody else while she was crossing the fields, and presently even the young soldier who was so like Stephen became fused with him in her mind, so that she thought of him by the end as no more than a photograph or a ghost. The sense of poverty and humiliation which had so oppressed her in Emma’s left her completely now she was in the open. Indeed, she seemed to herself to grow bigger and more important with every step, and as if the very cattle grazing on either side were there merely to pay her tribute. The birds sang for her, the flowers grew for her, the long slopes of grass were green. She was the fortunate being whom the gods had decided to bless, and as such she loomed large as the broad universe and high as the tall sky.

Both consciously and unconsciously she was drinking it all in, knowing that never again would she feel like this. Never again would the earth seem so wholly hers, set as a background for her personal joy. Never again would she loom so large, or tread so buoyantly with royal feet. This was the perfect day of her whole life, and she could not expect to have it repeated. Perhaps on some fine September evening a touch of the ecstasy might return, but though it would always be thrilling, it could never be quite the same. It would be looking back on the beautiful moment instead of living it, breathing it in. No power on earth could bring her the actual moment back. By that time it would have receded among those memories of life which lie bathed in a golden light, but which, lovely and comforting though they be, lack the magic grip of the great hour.

Yet, just ever so small a twist of Fate’s easily-twirled wheel, and all the wonder and beauty might have fallen to Martha Jane! Things did happen like that, as she knew very well, impossible as it seemed to her at the present moment. The crown did fall on the wrong head, the sceptre thrust itself obstinately into the wrong hand. Now that she realised the supreme greatness of the occasion, Mrs. Clapham could not help feeling innocently thankful that it had not been wasted on Martha Jane. Not that it could have been, of course—not by her newly proved rightness of things—she recognised that. What seemed more than a little strange, looking back, was that Martha Jane should not have recognised it too.

Not that Martha Jane, if for some reason the gods had chanced to see crooked for once, would not have recognised the occasion as an occasion. The trouble would have lain in her method of dealing with it. She would have been pleased, of course, and even grateful after her fashion; but it would not have been a very delicate fashion. Martha Jane, to put it vulgarly, would have made a beano of it. She would have had a crowd about her at once, not only outside the house but also within, a slatternly, noisy crowd, as loose and degenerate as herself. Men would have looked in to drop her a ribald word of congratulation; grinning boys and inquisitive girls hung with cocked ears about the sill. And when finally she had set out to look at the house she would not have been alone, as Mrs. Clapham was alone; so much alone that even a passing soldier had turned to a photograph or a ghost. Some of her own sort would have been with her, without doubt, slovenly, down-at-heel, loose-moraled, loose-tongued. Their loud laughter over the fields would have startled the grazing cattle and fluttered the tranquil birds. Meeting the young soldier, they would have stopped to tell him the news, so that the current of beano-mirth would have caught and gathered him in. Would he still have been made happy, the charwoman wondered, by the blatant happiness of Martha Jane? Would he still have whistled his little tune when he had left them and gone on?

As for the house itself, awakened from sleep by the noisy crew, she hardly dared bring herself even to think of it. Suddenly it would have heard them passing from room to room, those still-sacred rooms from which death had so recently gone out. Gradually the neighbours would have run to listen and look; passers-by pause in the road or come to lean on the little gate; until presently, by the end of the day which should have been all beauty and peace, Martha Jane would have made a cheap-jack booth of Ann Clapham’s House of Dreams....

The wedding-bells came to a lingering close as she got to the last stile, sliding, after a last, almost subdued peal, into a cadence of three notes, as if neither ringers nor ringing were able to stop; and followed, just when the ear had become perfectly sure of the end, by the single note that had frightened Emma. The tiny pause gave it both a purposeful and an accidental sound, and in both cases seemed to set it apart in meaning. It seemed somehow to leave the whole peal hanging in mid-air, and yet it had nothing to do with the peal at all. It was like a word spoken at a song’s end, that had nothing to do with the finished song, but was quickly and firmly beginning a new....

Presently, however, the long stream of vibrations had shredded itself away, and into the air came that sense of completion and rest which the single bell had seemed to deny. Mrs. Clapham paused at the stile under the same rush of feeling at the cessation of the bells as had seized upon her when they first started. “Over ... it’s all over ... it’s all over....” The silence seemed to say that even more poignantly than the sound.... The ringers would be paid for their work to-day, but when they had rung for Tibbie, they had rung for love. Tibbie’s mother had wept for Tibbie as well when she heard the bells, because for her, as for Miss Marigold, it was “all over.” It came to her suddenly that, in all probability, there would never be any bells either for Tibbie or Miss Marigold again, until that last slow-speaking bell of all which loved and unloved share alike....

CHAPTER II

There was no young soldier to tug her through the last stile, but she would have got the better of it even if she had had to climb it, for on the far side lay the long, white hill which was topped by the House of Dreams. Nearly topped, that is, for the almshouses, in point of fact, although close to the summit, were also under the slope. No really lovable house is ever set precisely on the top of a hill, for the winds to jostle on every side. The true house nestles a little against the arm of the land, high enough to look out, and yet low enough to be warm and safe.

The four houses, indeed, were sheltered on three sides, for north and west ran a spur of hill rimmed by ranks of larch; while on the far side of the road raised fields protected them on the east. But south and south-west the land dropped away before them until it reached the village, so that, looking across the roofs, you could see the park with its wooded hill, the long lines of the marsh, the sands, and the distant sea.