MISS LETTICE
NEEDING some stakes for my new fruit trees, I called on Saunders, who knows everything, to ask him where they could be obtained. Saunders is something more than a rector: he is a shepherd of souls. He has an extraordinary capacity for listening, and listening, he tells me (without any irony), is the most important of his duties—far more important than preaching church doctrine Sunday by Sunday. This is fortunate, for in my belief Saunders’s orthodoxy would not survive a very minute scrutiny. The villagers go to him with their most secret troubles, their most lurid sins, and come away with hearts eased, comforted by a platitude or two or by wordless sympathy. His mind must be quite a filing-cabinet of what are called human documents. With so much silent listening to do, perhaps he finds me as useful as I find him interesting; for I am always willing, when he is with me, to keep my ears open and my mouth shut. He is a good talker but not agarrulous one: it is the things he leaves unsaid, or half-unsaid, that interest me most in his discourse.
As I had expected, he put me at once in the way of getting my stakes. ‘Bowers, of Yew Tree Farm, is the best man. He’s a good fellow, Bowers. For your own soul’s sake you’ll have to keep an eye on his charges: they’re generally much too low. Yew Tree Farm—you know the place? It’s not really a farm at all: it’s a ramshackle wooden house standing by the side of a timber-yard. Near poor Miss Lettice’s cottage.’
‘Why do you call her poor?’ I asked. For Saunders was not in the habit of using that epithet without cause.
‘Ah, haven’t you heard? She has been taken away, you know. You spend too much time among those books of yours, my friend. Why, it happened over a week ago. Pitiful affair. She lapsed suddenly into a kind of grotesque babyhood.’
I can never hear of such an event without shuddering. ‘But she wasn’t an aged woman!’ Already one spoke of her in the past tense as of the dead.
‘She was fifty-eight,’ said Saunders; and though genuinely shocked by the disaster I couldn’t help being amused for a momentby the exactness of his information—it was so characteristic of him that he knew the woman’s age to a year. ‘No,’ he added, ‘it wasn’t the sort of thing that should happen in the ordinary course of nature.’
‘She had some shock,’ I suggested.
Saunders nodded. ‘The most cruel shock.’
‘And you no doubt were in her confidence,’ I insinuated.
Observing the curiosity that I tried politely to dissemble, he looked at me for one silent moment and smiled. ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. You’re a discreet fellow, and if you weren’t such a misguided heretic I could find it in my heart to like you. Well, the cause of Miss Lettice’s collapse was a psychological phenomenon that has a very old-fashioned name.’
I waited for him to go on.
‘A broken heart,’ said Saunders. ‘Miss Lettice is the victim of a hopeless passion.’
‘A hopeless passion,’ I protested, ‘at fifty-eight!’
Saunders drew his left hand from his jacket pocket and with it a pouchful of tobacco, which he tossed into my lap. ‘You’re not in a hurry for ten minutes?’
I am never in a hurry when Saunders settles down into his chair with that air of pensivereminiscence; so, when we had both got our pipes going, he told me the story.
You are surprised (said Saunders) at being asked to associate Miss Lettice with the idea of passion, requited or unrequited. And, if you recall her small plump figure, and the nun-like pallor of the face that peered placidly from under her black bonnet, you will readily believe that hers was no ordinary passion. But it was passion: let there be no mistake about that; I’m not going to fob off some remote mystical ecstasy upon you under that name. It’s hard enough to credit that the heart of that staid, quaint, curtseying old spinster was aflame with a hunger that ultimately destroyed her, but the evidence is overwhelming. It is twofold, that evidence: there is the evidence of her words and the evidence of my own eyes.
My interest in Miss Lettice was first roused by a disquieting rumour that reached me, by a devious route, from a neighbour’s wife who was employed by Miss Lettice to come in and do the rough housework for her. According to this rumour Miss Lettice was, for no stated reason, afraid of me. This puzzled me, as well it might, because at that time I didn’teven know who she was: if we had met in the street I could not have recognized her. But it was more than puzzling: it was distressing. I knew that if I were to be of any use to the parish at all, fear was the very last emotion I must inspire. I examined the few sermons I had preached, for there, I thought, since they were the only communications I had had with the lady, the solution of my problem must lie. I looked for unsound doctrine, or for traces of hell-fire, or for anything else that could have alarmed a timid soul; and I found nothing. You must remember that I was new to the job, and totally without experience, and altogether too disposed to take trifles seriously. To-day I should soon find a summary method of dealing with such a situation, but at that time it baffled me. I accepted it for a while as a permanent minor discomfort.
I had promised myself to make friends, if I could, with every member of my congregation, and with as many others as I could contrive to visit—no small undertaking in this wilderness of scattered dwellings. Miss Lettice had to wait her turn, of course, but it was a point of honour with me that she should not have to wait beyond it. Nervous, but also curious, I knocked at her front door.
She received me, rather sternly, I thought,but without discomposure. I was shewn into a tiny mottled room, which she called, I believe, the parlour. It was rather crowded by furniture, but the furniture itself was good and old and the mantelpiece was laden with less than the usual cottage assortment of bric-à-brac, though, of course, there was the inevitable lustreware glittering on each side of a marble clock, and, equally inevitable, a pair of china dogs. The pink beflowered walls were hung with very bad pictures, in the Marcus Stone tradition, most of them from Christmas annuals; but there was not a photograph to be seen anywhere. I remembered having heard Miss Lettice described as ‘a real lady in reduced circumstances,’ and I knew that she supplemented a tiny inherited income by giving music lessons.
For half an hour we talked of indifferent things, and I began to fear that I should never succeed in breaking through her armour of frigid politeness. But in those days I was an obstinate young mule and determined to get at the truth behind that rumour. At last she gave me my chance.
‘You have been in the parish three months, have you not, Mr. Saunders?’
I chose to regard the remark as a challenge. ‘Three very busy months,’ I answered, loadingmy words with all the weight they would carry.
‘Too busy, I’m sure, to visit middle-aged nobodies,’ she retorted. And then, taking sudden pity on my youthful confusion—I was nearly twenty years her junior—she smiled in a way that seemed to betoken forgiveness.
It was a smile almost maternal, and it emboldened me. ‘Miss Lettice,’ I said, smiling in return, ‘why do you dislike me?’ Placidly she shook her head. ‘Then whydidyou dislike me? Oh, never mind how I know. Things soon get about in a little community like ours.’
She seemed startled. ‘What do you know?’ Her eyes narrowed to gimlet points. The abrupt change in her manner disconcerted me. ‘What do you know?’ she repeated defiantly, and, finding me silent, she flung another question at me, this time a veritable challenge: ‘Do you know about my son?’
Her son! So that was the cause of all the misunderstanding. ‘Nothing at all,’ I assured her. ‘Upon my word this is the first I’ve heard of him. Did you think....’
‘Yes, I did. I thought you disapproved of me, as your predecessor did, or maybehis wife. I thought you were never going to call.’
‘But why,’ I protested, ‘why should I or anyone presume to disapprove of you?’ And I wondered what travesty of religion had been current in this parish before my coming.
She looked unaccountably severe. ‘I think you don’t understand.’
‘I think I do,’ said I, with cheerful arrogance.
‘Mr. Saunders, I am an unmarried woman, and I have a son.’
‘Yes?’ I said, simulating polite interest when in truth I was burning with curiosity. But if I hoped to win her sympathy by this unconventional attitude I was to be woefully disappointed. ‘You don’t seem to realize the gravity of what I tell you,’ Miss Lettice rebuked me. ‘It is mistaken kindness to treat a sin so lightly.’
‘I want to be a friend to the parish, not a judge.’ Priggish remarks rise readily to the lips of a young man such as I was then. ‘Besides,’ I added, ‘if your son was a child of true love there was no worse a sin than indiscretion.’
But the confessed sinner would not hear of such wickedness. ‘You, the vicar, to say a thing like that! That’s not the kind of teaching we want in this parish. Why, I’vedone penance all my life for that indiscretion, as you dare to call it. I forfeited marriage and sent my lover away. Not even for the child’s sake would I condone our sin by marrying. And do you tell me that all my bitter repentance was unnecessary?’
What could I say? It would have been cruel to convince her that she had thrown away her happiness in sheer waste, sacrificed her life on the altar of a false god. I hadn’t the heart to attempt it, so I fell back, I’m afraid, on Scriptural quotations, and left it at that. The familiar words seemed to comfort her and to reinstate me in her eyes as a moralist. None the less she was sufficiently assured of my sympathy to speak of her love, and as she spoke I began to wonder whether after all my pity had not been misplaced. Sin or no sin, the memory of her golden youth was dear to her. She was repentant enough, no doubt, when she remembered to be; but she did not live by morality alone. The woman in her still exulted, the woman’s eyes still shone, in the knowledge that she had, however long ago, been found beautiful. ‘We were very young,’ she said, with disarming simplicity, ‘and we loved each other very much. He was all the world to me.’ Her cheeks flushed; her meagre bosom rose and fell tremulously—andin that moment I saw her as she had been, young, fresh, adorable, alight with limitless ecstasy, the incarnation of a man’s desire. The transfigurement endured only for a flash, and flickered away, leaving me desolated with the stabbing poignancy of life. From that to this, I thought, we must all pass. To hide my emotion I led the talk back to her son. ‘And where is he now?’ I asked. ‘Does he often come to see you?’
She smiled wanly. ‘He’s all I’ve got. You see there’s a place set for him. You’ll take a cup of tea with us?’
The lid of the kettle that stood on the fire was already palpitating. Miss Lettice made the tea and enclosed the pot in a knitted cosy of green wool. For the next few minutes we exchanged only tea-table talk. But afterwards, when I made gestures of going, she confronted me wistfully, her eyes lit up once again. But this was a new light, and one more consonant with her years.
‘Would you like to see his room?’ she said, almost in a whisper.
I expressed eagerness, and she led me to the threshold of a room so tiny that it made one think of a monastic cell. It was just large enough to contain a small single bed, ready for use, a wash-stand, and a miniature dressing-table.The furniture was all of childish dimensions. In the further corner, under the window, stood a cricket-bat. I glanced round with the vague smile of politeness. ‘So this is Bernard’s room. A snug little place. And I see it’s all ready for his return.’
After a silence Miss Lettice sighed. ‘He would have been eighteen this coming April,’ she murmured.
I stared at her a moment in stupid wonder. ‘He would have been ... do you mean...?’
‘He was stillborn,’ she confessed, and her glance dropped before my stare. ‘It was silly not to tell you at once. But Bernard’s all I’ve got. He’d be a fine big fellow by now.’
To avoid those glistening eyes I turned away, only to encounter a sight but one degree less pitiful: Bernard’s cricket-bat—symbol of lusty young manhood, white flannels, sunlit turf—which no cricketer’s hand had ever grasped. What could I say or do? I was angered as well as touched by the wanton sentimentality of that room, and having murmured words of conventional comfort I hurried back to the vicarage. Not until many hours had passed did I succeed in hustling away my mood of melancholy; and as I entered my own bachelor bedroom I shuddered to hear, in imagination, the Good-night uttered by thatfond impossible woman to the ghost with whom she shared her home.
Saunders got out of his chair, as though the story were finished, and stood with his back to the fire warming the palms of his hands. There was a moment’s silence, which I saw no reason for breaking, and then he began talking again. After that, he said, Miss Lettice and I were quite good friends. I became a constant and welcome visitor at her cottage: constant because her solitude was something of a pain to me, and welcome because she knew that to me she could talk about Bernard to her heart’s content. And that, by Jove, was a privilege she lost no opportunity of exercising. How many times have I piously lied to that woman assuring her that my interest in her Bernard was insatiable! Often, as you’ll readily understand, I was bored beyond expression, though I never lost my sense of the grotesque pathos of her life. But I must be careful not to let you suppose that she was a mere monomaniac. She knew, as well as I did, that she was playing a game of make-believe: she was not the victim of any sort of delusion, and her obsession never became pathological or threatened to become so.
Things went on like this for ten years or so. She lived untroubled among her dreams until some few months ago. During the war Bernard led an existence even more shadowy than usual. Of course he enlisted, and was wounded, and won decorations for his valour; and Miss Lettice, knitting socks for more substantial soldiers, continued to play her secret game by fancying that they would comfort the feet of her son. The change came, as I’ve said, not many months ago, and it shewed itself first of all in our conversations. From those conversations Bernard was painlessly excluded, and his place taken by a young man weighing twelve stone or more. You’ll know the name well enough—Jack Turnbull, the stationmaster’s son. Jack began to loom so large in the hopes and fears of Miss Lettice that I became uneasy, the more so because I had been the instrument of bringing them together. It was this way. During the latter part of the war, and ever since, Miss Lettice had found it increasingly difficult to manage on her extremely modest income, and music pupils were more in request than ever. I did what I could for her by dropping a recommendation here and there, and among others I enlisted the active sympathy of old Turnbull. Together we hatched a little conspiracy, theupshot of which was that Jack, a big hulking fellow approaching thirty years, was fired with a sudden ambition to become an amateur pianist. Jack had done well in the army, and finding himself in mufti again, at a loose end, and with a captain’s gratuity standing to his credit at Cox’s, he lent himself very readily to the amiable fraud. His three hours tuition a week was very useful to Miss Lettice; but it proved her undoing. For now we come to the hopeless passion I spoke of. And I needn’t stop to assure you that there’s nothing scandalous in this tragic affair. Miss Lettice fell in love with Jack, but the love she yearned to lavish on him was maternal love. If you think me perverse in calling that love a hopeless passion I must disagree with you. It was passion, and it was, in part, physical passion, as all human love must be. Why do we shrink from admitting that maternal love is as deeply rooted in the body as any other? Miss Lettice loved Jack Turnbull for his strength, his masculinity, his youth, and because, by a fatal coincidence, he was born in the same month of the same year as her Bernard. In a sense it was the calendar that killed the Miss Lettice we knew and set in her stead a witless child. No doubt Jack seemed to her a gift from God, a wonderful consolation prize, a tokenof the heavenly forgiveness. Indeed she told me as much when, with the air of imparting to me her dearest secret, she said that Jack was coming to lodge with her. She had bought some pretty things for his bedroom, worked ornamental bolster-slips with her own fingers, and replaced the dressing-table by a chest of drawers dragged in from her own room. I hardly dared to hint my misgiving. ‘Are you quite sure he is coming?’ I ventured. ‘I fancied he would soon be looking out for a job. Young men can’t remain idle for long nowadays, you know.’ But she wouldn’t hear of my doubts. Jack would get work at the station under his father. He hadn’t exactly promised to come to her, but she had urged it and she knew he would humour an old woman.
I was by no means so sure, and I made up my mind to tackle Master Jack at the earliest possible moment. I called at his father’s house and left a message asking him to make a point, if he could, of calling at the vicarage. He came the same evening. ‘Well, Turnbull,’ I said. ‘I hear you’re thinking of changing your quarters?’
He looked as guilty and uncomfortable as though I had surprised him with his hand in somebody’s till. ‘Has it got round already?Why, I’ve told no one outside the family. Why can’t people hold their tongues!’
‘My dear fellow,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve annoyed you. But I really don’t see why you should be so secretive about it. And it wasn’t your father who told me.’
‘Who was it?’ He spoke curtly. Four years as an infantry officer hadn’t improved his manners.
‘It was Miss Lettice herself.’
I have never seen a man more astonished. ‘Miss Lettice! Miss Lettice told you! Damn it, sir, she doesn’t know!’ After a moment’s stupefied silence he added, with an air of apology, ‘But perhaps we’re at cross-purposes. What was it that Miss Lettice told you?’
‘Only that you’re going to lodge in her house. Nothing to get excited about.’
He began striding about the room. ‘We are certainly at cross-purposes all right. I thought you meant Canada. I’m leaving next week for Canada.’
‘For a holiday?’ I ineptly inquired.
‘For keeps,’ said Jack. ‘Mounted Police, with a commission soon, I hope. This country’s gone to the dogs, sir.’
Here was a pretty mess! ‘But look here, Turnbull, Miss Lettice has got it into her headthat you’re going there as a lodger. Have you given her any cause to believe such stuff?’
At that the swagger dropped off him. ‘That woman, I’m sorry for her, but she gets on my nerves. She gushes too much for my taste. She wants to mother me, if you ever heard such rot. And I won’t be mothered.’
‘That’s all very well,’ I cut in. ‘But why say this to me? Miss Lettice is the person you should complain to. Are you content to let her go on living in a fool’s paradise?’
Well, you can pretty well guess how the conversation proceeded. We argued for the best part of three hours. Jack was determined not to yield to her devouring maternal affection, but he hadn’t pluck enough to tell her so outright. He preferred to save his own feelings by equivocation. The coward does it with a kiss, you know, the brave man with the sword. But I must do him the justice to admit that, short of brutal explicitness, he did all he could to disabuse her mind of its fond fiction. I was aghast when I realized that the secret of his departure was being kept solely in order that he might slip out of the country without bidding her good-bye. After long battle I wrung from him a reluctant promise that he would spare her that culminating cruelty.
And that is the end of the story. I too was a coward, for I did not dare to visit Miss Lettice until Jack had gone. In point of fact I watched him off the premises and then stepped in, unwillingly enough but hoping to afford the wretched woman some comfort, if only the comfort of distraction. The front door yielded to my push: it was seldom locked. I tapped at the door of the sitting-room. There was no sound from within. Gently I turned the handle and looked in.
‘Good morning, Miss Lettice,’ I said, with a cheerfulness that was idiotic, I dare say, but what was one to do?
Miss Lettice sat staring at the wall in front of her, staring fixedly, motionless. Whether she heard my voice or not I don’t know, but she neither moved nor spoke. I became very anxious and called to her again, offering such dry crumbs of comfort as came to hand. ‘Don’t grieve, my dear Miss Lettice. There’s still Bernard left to you.’ Something of that sort I said to her, but it made no difference at all. She was struck down, struck worse than dead, by the colossal and cruel power of love. And while I continued to stare at her with pity and horror, she slowly turned towards me, as though on a swivel, a face marred out of recognition by a smile....
Saunders winced. His lips had hesitated in releasing those last words. Lifting one hand to his eyes, he turned away from me towards his bookshelves. There, with a book in his hand, he shrugged his shoulders as if to shake off the grip of a memory.
‘If it’s standard trees you’re having,’ he remarked, ‘you’ll want light six-feet stakes. Bowers is your man.’