PART IIITHE TEMPLE
CHAPTER I
She drew great breaths of relief as she made her way through the fields, treading the little worn paths between the sloping stretches of green. Between the warm fastnesses of the hedges she felt sheltered, but not cramped—those close coverts of life which wore so rich and crowded a look. The bright line of the sky barring the tops to the west told her that very soon she would see the sea. Indeed, the broad, lifted, lightened sense which belongs to a coast was not only in the look of things but in the feel. There was a thrill in the air as of something running towards freedom of breath and limb. The very land itself seemed to rush onwards rejoicing to its escape.
Unpleasant as the experience had been, she could almost have found it in her heart to be glad of the “little chat,†because the walk through the fields seemed so gracious by sheer contrast. Like most country women, she very seldom walked for walking’s sake, merely going mechanically wherever necessity happened to take her. But she appreciated the country well enough when she had time to look at it, and if she did not think of it very often it was because it was always there. To-day, however, there was something almost poignant about coming out of Emma’s cave into this sweet openness and spacious peace. It was almost like leaving a prison to walk direct out of the house that was Emma Catterall’s mind into this wide and wonderful house that was the Mind of God Himself.
As she went along, with the bells clashing and clanging behind her back, she tried to shed all those thoughts of Emma which tugged at her brain like spiked brambles at a skirt. Indeed, it seemed to her, after a while, as she got further away and higher, that she shed not only Emma, but the whole of the village as well. Up here in the clean fields she seemed alone in a new world, with nothing of any importance but the free road to her desire.
But before she reached that desirable point her mind had still a good deal to say about Emma and Emma’s detestable behaviour. There had been times, indeed, when she had felt as if it were Emma’s “day†instead of her own, so completely had Emma contrived to pervade it! Yet there seemed no possible reason why she should have chosen to take a hand in passing events. All her proceedings had been puzzling in the extreme, and none of them more inexplicable than the “little chat.†Neither her natural intuition nor the shrewdness induced by a long and strenuous life had been able to provide Mrs. Clapham with a clue to her neighbour’s purpose. Emma had depressed her, of course, made her feel ill-tempered and ill-behaved, reminded her that she hadn’t a son, and—almost, indeed!—that she hadn’t a daughter! But all that, after all, was only just what she knew to be Emma, that mixture of stabbing and subtle suggestion which represented her queer character. It did not account for the “little chat.†Possibly she had meant nothing more than to make herself thoroughly nasty, to roll a log, as it were, in the way of a march past. But there was more than one point in the recent talk which this explanation did not cover, such as the troublesome letter to the Committee. Mrs. Clapham still felt more than a little heated upon this particular subject. It would be strange indeed if, at her time of life, she had to begin learning manners from Emma!
At one of the stiles she encountered a young soldier, wearing the khaki which was still to be seen about the country, and he stood on one side to let her through. Like most stiles, however, it was meant for the young and slim, and presently, as she struggled and chuckled, he put out his hand and gave her a pull. “You look mighty pleased with yourself, mother,†he commented, as she squeezed past. “That’s a wedding-peal they’re ringing there, isn’t it? Have you been getting wed?â€
The remark struck her in her happy mood as a very jewel of humour. “Better than that!†she chuckled, still panting but full of smiles. “I’ve finished wi’ that a long while back. It’s a deal better than that!â€
“Well, good luck to it, whatever it is!†he wished her, springing over the stile, and as he went on his way again she heard him begin to whistle. He had a thin, dark face that reminded her of Poor Stephen, stamped with that strained, sleepless look which was the legacy of the War. He had not been whistling when they met, but he was whistling now, as if the very sight of a creature so happy had somehow made him feel happy, too. It was not a loud whistle, indeed, not the noisy, almost unconscious whistle of thoughtless youth. It was rather hesitating and wistful, a little doubtful, a little afraid. It was not the full note that almost deafens the ear when the earth is at last the birds’; it was the first ripple of robin’s song when the year is on the turn.
The sight of the haunted face that bore such a likeness to Poor Stephen set her thinking again of the sad photograph in his mother’s room. Absurd as it seemed now, she had felt, at the time, as if it had wished her to take it away. Yet most people going in—people like his lordship, for instance—and seeing it in its silver frame, would never doubt for a moment that Emma had loved her son. They would take off their hats, as it were, to her glory and grief. Even if you had told them the truth, and with an army of witnesses at your back, they would still have averred that at least Emma was sorry now. Yet nobody who had known her as Mrs. Clapham had known her would believe that it was possible for her to be really sorry. It was true that Mrs. Tanner had hinted at some such possibility only that morning, but she herself would be the first to say that she had meant nothing by it. As for the charwoman, whose love for her only child was as crystal-clear as running water, she could see nothing that looked even remotely like love in the sorrowing Emma. She was not the only one, of course, who had been puzzled of late by the queer psychology of war-time love. So much of it seemed to be merely clutching and coarse, as if it was the body that mattered and not the soul. Emma, indeed, seemed to be still clutching at Stephen even after his body was gone, and not only clutching at Stephen but his widow and children as well....
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! Thingsdidhappen like that, as she knew very well, impossible as it seemed to her at the present moment. The crowndidfall 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 itcouldhave 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 occasionasan 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....