The Four Roads

by Sheila Kaye-Smith

Thyrza pondered this in her heart. She was used to much indefinite courtship, most of it just before lamp-time in her own little shop, with the prelude of a “penn’orth of bull’s-eyes for the children” or “a packet of Player’s, please.” She had also been definitely courted once or twice in her short widowhood—by Bourner of the Forge, a widower with five sturdy children, and Hearsfield of Mystole. She was a type of girl who, while appealing little to her fellow-women, who “never cud see naun in Thyrza Honey,” yet had a definite attraction for men, by reason of that same softness and slowness for which her own sex despised her. She had no particular wish to marry again, and at the same time no particular objection. Her first marriage had not been so happy as to make her anxious to repeat it, but it had also lacked those elements of degradation which make a woman shrink from trusting herself a second time to a master. There was too much business and too much gossip in her life for her to feel her loneliness as a widow, and yet she sometimes craved for the little child which had died at birth two years ago—she “cud do wud a child,” she sometimes said.

Tom Beatup attracted her strongly. He was much her own type—slow, ruminative and patient as the beasts he tended—yet she saw him as a being altogether more helpless than herself, one less able to think and plan, one whom she could “manage” tenderly. He was not so practical as she, and more in need of affection, of which he got less. Thyrza sometimes pictured his round dark head upon her breast, her arm about him, holding him there in the crook of it, both lover and child....

From the material point of view, the match was not a good one; but Thyrza was comfortably off, and her miniature trade was brisk. They were both too unsophisticated to make a barrier of her little stock of worldly goods—he had his pay, so his independence would not suffer, and she would have a separation allowance into the bargain. He was a slow wooer, and the tides of his boldness had never risen again to the level of that sticky kiss he had given her hand as she served the bull’s-eyes—but she was sure of him, and, being Thyrza, “slow as a cow,” had no objection to waiting.

6

Another woman in Sunday Street was being courted from the Waterheel Y.M.C.A., but she did not fill her part as comfortably as Thyrza. Not that Ivy Beatup had much real concern for Jerry Sumption’s passion, beating against her indifference as a wave beats and breaks against a rock. Her chief trouble was that Jerry now threw out hints of an approaching leave, and though she had no objection to his mingling rage and tenderness on paper, she disliked the thought of having to confront them mingled in his gipsy face.

The minister’s son was one of Ivy’s mistakes—she made mistakes occasionally, as she would herself acknowledge with a good-humoured grin. But they were never very serious. And, as the saying is, she knew how to take care of herself. Unfortunately, Jerry had given her more than ordinary trouble. After some years of standoffishness and suspicion—for Mrs. Beatup had never liked her children to play with the gipsy woman’s son—Ivy and Jerry had somehow been thrown together during his last holiday from Erith, and she had good-naturedly allowed him to kiss her and take her to Senlac Fair, as she would have allowed any decent lad on leave. It was unlucky that what had been to her no more than a bit of fun should be for Jerry the tinder to set his body and soul alight. Ivy, more buxom than beautiful, and, with her apple-face and her barley-straw hair, typical of those gaujos his mother’s people had always distrusted, somehow became his earth and sky. He loved her, and went after her as the tide after the moon.

Ivy tried to detach him by the various means known to her experience. For a long time she ignored his letters and postcards. Then when these continued to pour upon her, she sent a cold, careless reply, which had the contrary effect of making his furnace seven times hotter; so that her next letter was warmed unconsciously by the flame of his, and she saw that instead of having shaken him off, she had gone a step further in his company.

No doubt the best thing to do was to tell him to his face that she would not have him. He would not be the first chap she had told this, but Ivy had an unaccountable shrinking from repeating the process with Jerry. There was in him a subtle essence, a mystifying quality—perhaps it was no more than the power of a sharper life and death—which made him different from the other lads she knew, and struck terror into her country soul. He was the first man she had been ever so little afraid of. Ivy had the least imagination of all the Beatups. That spark which sent Nell to the church, and Harry to the woods, which made Tom feel more than roots and clay in the earth on which he trod, and Zacky sometimes almost think himself a British army corps, even that little spark had never flickered up in Ivy’s honest heart. Her world was made of things she could taste and see and hear and smell and handle, and very good things she found them. She resented the presence in her life of something which responded to none of these tests. Jerry’s love for her was “queer,” just as Jerry himself was “queer,” and Ivy did not like “queer” things.

When the long-dreaded leave came at last, it took her by surprise. She had not heard from Jerry for a week, and one morning, having run to the pillar-box at the throws, with some letters for her soldier friends, on her return she met Mr. Sumption, waving his arms and cracking his joints and shouting to her even from beyond earshot, that Jerry was coming home that evening.

“A letter came this morning. Maybe you’ve got one too?”