PART IVTHE TRUMPET

PART IVTHE TRUMPET

CHAPTER I

It was the same cottage, and yet not the same; her old home, and yet a place that she hardly knew; but indeed for the first few moments she scarcely so much as saw it. All that it seemed to her just then was a shelter gathered around her in her oncoming grief. The grief had not reached her yet, but it was coming, and coming fast, feeling for her where she stood waiting in the path of its passionate sweep. She was like those who, caught on the sands by the tidal wave, found themselves fixed to the spot by the first sounds of its approach. Sooner or later, however, they always began to run, racing hither and thither, without hope and without goal. It was only she who could not begin to run. All she could do was to stand there, helpless and bound, until that deepest of tides had swung itself over her head.

The cottage was small enough, as she knew, far smaller than the House of Dreams, but it did not seem small enough to her now. It fretted her that she could not draw the walls close enough to her on every side. She wanted a place smaller still, darker and closer—more like the grave into which they would put Tibbie. From her post just inside the door she lifted her eyes for the first time, looking around her on all hands for that narrower, darker place....

But even after she had begun to search, it was some time before she could find it. Her mind which, unknown to herself, she had left behind her in the House of Dreams, refused at first to visualise any other. Already it had imprinted upon itself every inch of the rooms, so that she might have inhabited them for many years. Now her eyes, resting again upon objects which, only that morning, had been more familiar to her than her face, roamed over and round them with a puzzled expression. She had seen them so long that she had learned not to see them, and now out of them beheld fresh colours suddenly springing, new contours suddenly taking shape. There was a cupboard somewhere, said her unwillingly shifted mind, anxious to hurry away again to its happy place. She could almost feel it straining away from her like a separate thing, leaning and tugging against its leash. The cupboard was in the passage, said the impatient mind, and was firmly brought back to admit that there was no passage. It was up at the House of Dreams that there was a passage, a little hall; here there was only a cupboard under the stairs. Her eyes, focussing themselves at last, found the door to the narrow hole where coal was kept, and the broom, a broken hamper, a broken chair....

Her mind gave up the struggle when she remembered the chair, bringing itself back definitely from the House of Dreams. The wrench was so fierce that for the moment it seemed almost physical; an actual body seemed to be torn away. But as soon as it was done she saw the cottage as usual, knowing it to be hers, and letting it slide back into that place where she neither consciously saw nor thought of it at all. Limping, she went direct to the dark cupboard, and, groping with accustomed hands, found and brought forth the little chair. Lifting it in her arms as if it had been the child to whom it had once belonged, she set it upon the hearth; and from that far place where the great wave of it had been held back until the signal was given, her grief broke over her, swamping her, stamping her down—rolling her, choking her, but always sweeping her on, casting her up at length on that grey beach of total exhaustion where sorrow gives up at last its simulated dead....

It is always the child for whom a mother weeps when a son or a daughter dies; not the strong man or the mature woman, but the child whom she sees through and behind them and in them all their lives. The adult may have her confidence and pride, but it is the still faintly discerned child that holds and keeps her love. She looks up to the former, and is even a little afraid; the latter looks up to her, and sees her as God. For a mother, indeed, a child dies as soon as it ceases to be a child, though she may not weep for it then. Life, passing on inexorably, tells her that it is against nature to weep for this purely natural change. It is only when the grown man or woman, whom perhaps she can hardly recognise, is laid to rest, that she is allowed to weep. Then at last she may cry her heart out for the child who died but was never buried ever so long ago.

So it was for the child Tibbie that Mrs. Clapham wept, seated in the rocking-chair with the angry voice, her head dropped on the table on her outflung arms, and beside her the little lame chair resting lob-sidedly on the hearth. It was worm-eaten, it had lost a leg—the cane seat was ripped across; but it was still alive, as all much-used pieces of furniture are alive until they finally come to the axe. And indeed the personality of this chair was such as it seemed even the axe could hardly destroy. Low-legged, broad-seated, with a curved mahogany back, it had been a present to Tibbie from an old Colonel who lived in the place. A martyr to rheumatism himself, it had troubled him sorely to see the child sitting so often on the cottage step. “Suffer for it—she’ll suffer for it!” he used to say, stopping stiffly in front of her as he hobbled past; and after he had said it a time or two, he had sent the chair. Tibbie had simply lived in it from that time on—played in it, eaten, chattered and fallen asleep. It had had its place by the window in summer, by the fender during the winter. It was the centre of great games played by Tibbie and others out in the street, and she had even been seen, bound on some errand, dragging it after her on a string. It was a wonder, indeed, that it did not attend her to school. When she was older again she had sat in it while she sewed, the centre of billows of drapery sweeping all over the floor. The last time she had sat in it was with Baby Steve in her arms, her laughing fair head leaned to his sad eyes.... But it was neither as the young dressmaker nor as the young mother that Mrs. Clapham could think of Tibbie just then. The years of maturity were all of them wiped out, leaving only the many pictures of the child and the little chair.

Yet it was on that very day that Tibbie had sat in it with Baby Steve, that the chair had finally, so to speak, thrown up its job. It had been a brave chair, taking things as they came, turning when required into a railway-train or a ’bus, a chopping-block, perhaps, or even a stand for a machine. It had been made of sound stuff by sensible, skilled hands, and it showed itself worthy to its latest hour. But, as it is with the best people, so it was with the good chair; all in a moment it had begun to grow old. Quite suddenly it began to show its scratches and dents, and to lose the last of its fine gloss. It began to creak when a hand was laid on its back, as if it had been the giver resenting a sudden touch. Presently they discovered it to be worm-eaten, and knew then that it “wouldn’t be long.” Even then, however, it had managed to hold together, until this last day when it had decided to cease. Perhaps the recent rains had got into its old bones, or else the weight of the new generation was greater than it could face. Anyhow, Tibbie had sprung to her feet, saying “Mother! I do believe, Mother ... the old chair’s giving way!” and as they had stared at it, almost afraid, it had softly released a leg, and then laid itself down with the air of a live thing gently preparing itself for death....

They had stared at it for quite a long time before they had dared to touch it, and Tibbie had cried a little and laughed as well. It was a chair of character, she had said, and it knew its mind. It had been made for her as a child, and would serve no other, not even her own. And all the time that she had stared at the determined, absurd little chair, Stevie had stared at herself with his immutably sad eyes....

But again it was not this particular Tibbie who was present to Mrs. Clapham while she sat and wept. Her mind rejected that Tibbie, just as the chair had rejected her, and as it rejected her even now. Lobsided, battered and old, it yet refused to evoke any picture but that of the spring-flower of a child. It spoke of Tibbie as clothes speak of their wearers after they are gone; it looked like Tibbie—itwasTibbie, because of that picture of her which it kept alive.... Mrs. Clapham wept and wept, dropping her head on her arms; looked at the chair that was Tibbie and wept ... looked away and wept ... looked back and wept ... and wept, and wept, and wept,andwept....

Presently, after she had been crying for ever and ever, as it seemed, but in reality barely for half an hour, there came the same birdlike tap at the door that had startled her in the morning. Now, however, she scarcely noticed it, and that part of her brain which did chance to take it in wiped it out again instantly as some sign from a lost world. The door opened gently at last as she did not answer, and Mrs. Tanner advanced with brave if birdlike movements into the room.

She went straight to the weeping woman, and stood beside her at the table, now laying a soft little touch on a flung-out arm, now patting and soothing and smoothing the bent head. Her actions, light and neat as those of a wren, worried Mrs. Clapham no more than if they had been the hoppings of the bird itself. They gave her, indeed, something of the same feeling of friendly warmth, of unasking companionship, of brisk life that knew nothing of death; and presently, as she wept and wept, crying aloud on her dead child, turning to stare at the chair that was Tibbie, and yet emphatically wasnot—she had the impression that a bird was actually in the room. Even the little sympathetic sounds which Mrs. Tanner uttered from time to time seemed to her almost like twitters and chirps from some delicate feathered throat.

“My Tibbie! My little lass!...” The sleeves of the black gown were soaked through and through with tears, as well as the white front which Tibbie had fashioned with such pride.

“Poor mother—poor soul!” Mrs. Tanner, as she chirped, was gently undoing the strings of the old woman’s bonnet, pulling out the pin that was supposed to be holding it in place, and setting both of them on a side-table. The bonnet would do well enough for the funeral, she was saying to herself, and so would the black gown, with a bit ofcrêpefor that touch of white....

“I can’t believe it.... ’Tisn’t likely! ’Tain’t true.... My bonny Tibbie!”

“Poor soul! Poor dear!”

“What ha’ they gone and done to her? What’s been wrong? What ha’ they done to her when I wasn’t there?”

“Poor dear! Poor soul!”

Mrs. Tanner, still giving her little chirps, hunted until she found the clean linen handkerchief with which Mrs. Clapham had completed her toilet that morning, and began to dab gently at the sleeves and the white front. She dabbed, too, at the quivering face down which the tears streamed as if all the tears that mothers have ever shed were being poured at once from that single fount. There were patches of dust, she noticed, on the charwoman’s gown, and dust on her hands which her tears were turning to grime. Her skirt was pulled all awry, and her bonnet had been askew; and, remembering how she had looked in the morning, Mrs. Tanner was struck to the heart. Presently she too was crying as she stroked and dabbed, though with light, twittering sounds that were still rather birdlike in effect.

But the first spell of grief was nearly exhausted by now, and Mrs. Tanner’s sobs, almost noiseless though they were, succeeded in bringing her neighbour’s to a close. With the instinctive unselfishness of the mother who has taught herself to be always the one to weep last, Mrs. Clapham made an effort to control herself at the first signs of another’s grief. Soon she was trying to sit up, dabbing for herself with the handkerchief which she had taken from Mrs. Tanner, and saying—“Nay, my lass, don’t cry ... don’t you grieve for me ... you’ll have trouble enough of your own”—between the great sobs which still shook her as if they actually took her by the shoulders, and the great tears that still welled and rolled and welled again after each useless dab.

“It seems that hard—and you so happy an’ all!” Mrs. Tanner broke out in a little wail, hurriedly searching for a handkerchief of her own. The wail, however, put the finishing touch to the mother’s effort after self-control. To be told that a thing was hard was in itself a call to her splendid courage; and, patiently scrubbing her wet cheeks with the wet linen, she presently strangled her sobs into a succession of long-drawn sighs.

“Nay, now, Maggie Turner, don’t you go saying it’s hard! It’s meant, likely; it’s sent.... Tibbie would never ha’ murmured and said it was hard!...” A large tear that had been left behind escaped boldly and followed the rest. “Eh, but it come that sharp, didn’t it?” she exclaimed wistfully. “Never a letter to say she was ill or owt! What, she was well enough when she writ last, though it’s a while now. Eh, how was it nobody thought to write and say as I’d best come!”

“It must have been right sudden,” Mrs. Tanner answered, also drying her tears. “Happen it was her poor heart.”

“Nay, her heart was right enough, I’ll swear! ’Twas always in the right place—bless her ... bless her!” Her voice rose suddenly in a passionate wail, and she rocked sharply to and fro.

“Ay, but t’ War was a great strain, you’ll think on. A deal o’ folks say their hearts isn’t what they used to be after that.”

“Ay, I’d forgotten t’ War....” So many worlds may people inhabit in one life and one world that even a world-wide war may be shut out.... “She took it hard, I know; she never said much, but she took it hard. But she was right strong, all the same, was my little lass.... Nay, it was never her heart.”

“It might be pewmonia, likely. That finishes folk ter’ble sharp.”

“Nay, nor her lungs, neither. They was always as sound as a bell.”

“There’s other troubles, though, as anybody might have....” Mrs. Tanner glibly began a list, but was waved by the bereaved mother into silence. “Not for my Tibbie!” was Mrs. Clapham’s answer to every one. “There was nowt wrong wi’ her from tip to toe.”

“Ay, well, there’s always accidents and suchlike,” was Mrs. Tanner’s ultimate, rather helpless contribution, but Mrs. Clapham grudged even that indisputable fact. It was as if, by continuing to prove that by no possible chance could Tibbie have come to die, she would presently have succeeded in proving that she was actually still alive.... “She wasn’t the sort to go having accidents, wasn’t my Tibbie,” she finished firmly. “She was that light on her feet, she’d never go falling downstairs, or getting herself run over, or the likes o’ that. That sharp wi’ her eyes an’ all—it was lile or nowt she ever missed; nigh as quick as yon fingers of hers wi’ a needle and cotton!”

“Ay, she was smart, was Tibbie—right smart! Eh, and that bonny and all!” They had another weep together over the lost beauty of face and form that gives to the grave its most poignant anguish.... “You’ll be going to her, likely?” she ventured presently, when they were again calm. “Telegraph said as you’d best come.”

“Ay, I’m going, of course.” Mrs. Clapham looked startled, gave her face a last scrub, and made an effort to rise to her feet. Her eyes went round to the little clock, and she gave a gasp. “Six o’clock? Nay, it can’t be! Whatever’s wrong?... Eh, what was I doing setting and yowling here!”

She struggled up by means of the table, her voice rising until it was shrill, crying out that she must go to Tibbie, that she must be off at once, that somehow she must be with her girl before it was night. Once more the tears poured down her face as she stretched out her hands blindly across the distance that divided herself and the newly dead....

“First thing while morning!” Mrs. Tanner soothed her, also weeping again. “It’s over late now, you’ll think on.”

“I’m going to my poor lass!”

“Ay, that you shall ... you shall that!”

“I’ll go if I have to creep....” She made a painful effort to reach the door, while the other twittered about her with nervous chirps.

“Nay, now, you can’t do that.... It’ll be a matter o’ sixty mile! It’ll do the poor thing no good, neither, now that she’s dead and gone.”

The words brought her to a sudden halt, spreading their hopelessness on the evening air. She had forgotten, in her eagerness, that it was not a live Tibbie whom she went to seek.... “Ay, that’s so,” she admitted heavily, lifting her hand to her head. “I’m fair moidered to-night,” she muttered at length; “things has gone that fast ...” and slowly, heavily, went back to the angry chair.

“Ay, sit still and rest yourself, that’s it,” Mrs. Tanner coaxed. “You must take care of yourself, think on. There’ll be a deal to do at far end. I’ll send them Rawlinson folk a card, saying you’ll be coming by t’ first train, and I’ll get my Joe to ax ’em at t’ ‘Red Cow’ about the time. There’ll be two or three things you’ll want, likely, if you’re going to stop. I’d best see about putting them up.”

Mrs. Clapham found spirit to murmur “You’re right kind!”—the identical speech that she had been making throughout the day, a sort of continual “Selah” to recurring pæans of praise. Now it seemed as if the very words that composed it could not be quite the same; but then she herself seemed anything but the same. The silver bob of her hair had slipped from its moorings with the shock of her fall; loose hairs strayed across her cheeks, or straggled over the black gown. Her face, drained of its colour, seemed actually to have lost its shape, and wrinkles had come into being that were only the merest guesses before. Her eyes looked blind with age, with weeping, with mental and physical pain. Her hands shook as they wandered from table to chair, or came back to their miserable, fretting movement over her knees.... And yet even in storm and wreck she still looked wholesome and clean, fine even amid dust and tears and the crushing agony of her grief. It was chiefly the splendid buoyancy of the morning that was gone, the happy confidence, the gallant strength. Never again would she look as though she had suddenly been given the earth. Never again would she look like a ship coming homeward in full sail.

She roused herself a second time to find Mrs. Tanner hunting for something to serve as a rest. “You’ll be more comfortable-like wi’ summat under your leg,” she was chirping thoughtfully. “Whatever have you been doing to make yourself so lame?”

“Nay, I don’t know, I’m sure....” Again she put up her hand and pushed wearily at her hair. It was quite true that for the moment she could not remember how the accident had occurred, so far had the events of the afternoon receded into the past. “I fell in t’ road somewheres,” she added presently, knitting her brows, and Mrs. Tanner, remembering the dust on the black gown, nodded a wise head. Still hunting for a rest, she came at last to the little chair. “This’ll do grand,” she began, picking it up, but Mrs. Clapham put out a hand.

“Nay, not that,” she said, quickly, without looking at it. “There’s summat else, likely, but—not that.”

“What, it’ll do it no harm, will it?” Mrs. Tanner protested, puzzled. “It’s an old broken thing, I’m sure!”

The charwoman turned her head and gazed at it for a moment without speaking, and then—“It’s—it’s t’ babby chair!” she managed to get out chokingly, and burst again into a storm of tears. Backwards and forwards she rocked under the fresh torrent of grief, almost tearing the good black gown with her working, sorrowful hands. “Nay, I couldn’t put foot on it whatever!” she sobbed, shaking her head so that the silver bob slipped further and one of Tibbie’s carefully sewn hooks burst at her throat. “It would seem near like putting my feet on the corpse of the poor lile lass herself!

“Shove it in t’ cupboard agen, will you?” she finished brokenly, turning her eyes from it at last, and Mrs. Tanner, weeping herself for the child who would sit in the little chair no more, shut it away in its dark sanctuary, as the child, too, would be shut away....

The bursts of grief were growing shorter, however, as Nature accepted her bitter toll. The poor mother sat quietly enough while Mrs. Tanner propped her leg with a tub, eased the strain with a cushion, and wound a wet compress about her knee; quietly, too, told her where to find pen and ink, post-card and penny stamp. The post-card happened to show a picture of the parish church, and, forgetting her trouble, she brightened sharply. “Yon’s where she was wed,” she began briskly; “ay, send her that——” and then bit her lip with a deep sigh, and fell again to rubbing the black gown....

Mrs. Tanner set a fire in the cold grate, put on the kettle, and began to prepare supper. “You’ll not sleep if you don’t have summat to eat,” the little woman said, as she flitted about, “and it’ll be a bad job if you don’t sleep. You’d best have a warm bottle in your bed an’ all. I’ll see about begging yon grand rubber one of hers from Mrs. James. And me or Mrs. Airey or Mrs. Dunn’ll stop the night with you, if you want. I don’t know as it’d be right, anyway, to go leaving you alone.”

Mrs. Clapham said again “You’re right kind—you are that,” in the same dull tone which was such a mockery of the one that had stood for ecstasy and beatification. She sat so still that she did not even turn her eyes as Mrs. Tanner flew to and fro, darting out into the road after her passing Joe, and yet again to signal to Mrs. James and to return armed with the rubber bottle. There was scarcely anybody else whom the stricken woman would not have resented at this particular moment, but it was quite impossible to resent Mrs. Tanner. Always, as she nipped in and out, quick and cheerful, yet never loud, she had the quaint, delicate charm of a hopping and flitting bird.

All the time as she worked she kept up a shower of twitters and chirps—“Eh, but our Joe is ter’ble put about on your account, Ann Clapham!” and “My Joe says they’re all crying their eyes out about Tibbie down at the ‘Red Cow’”—but Mrs. Clapham scarcely answered. In her state of misery and exhaustion the kindly sympathy hardly reached her. It did not seem possible that she could get to Tibbie to-morrow. Every bone in her seemed to ache, every muscle and every nerve; while the ache of her heart in the midst seemed to swallow up all the rest, yet continually sent out to them fresh weariness and fresh pain....

She had tried to say to Mrs. Tanner that it was not hard, that somewhere and somehow something of which they had no definite knowledge meant it all for the best; and when the worst of the pain was over she would say it again. But at this particular moment, although she looked so resigned, she could neither say it nor even think it. As the minutes dragged on, and Mrs. Tanner, stopping her flittings around her, suddenly flitted upstairs, she grew more and more sullenly angry and frigidly bitter. It seemed to her not only wrong but absurd that Tibbie should have died, that her beautiful day should have come to an end like this. She had been so sure of the goodness of God, and, while she was most sure, her daughter had lain dead. Her heart had gone up to Him in great chants of praise, and yet He had known that this waited for her on her very hearth. She felt so terribly put to shame that even in the dignity of her trouble she could have hidden her humbled face. Now she blushed for herself, remembering her childlike pleasure in her success. Others, too, she thought, would remember, and make mock of her love, wondering how it had been possible for her not to know.... For the time being even her sorrow was merged in bitter resentment at her own betrayal. Later, standing by Tibbie’s coffin, self and its wrongs would be blotted out; but for the moment she could only remember that her confidence had been put to shame.

Mrs. Tanner had opened the back door during one of her many flittings, letting the last of the sun into the little cottage. Dipping through the mist in the garden, it sent a shaft of light slanting across the scullery, a sword of light, as it were, that came to rest just within the kitchen. It was as if the sun, that had come to honour the tenant in the early morning, had still another message for her before going. She had her back to it, however, sitting aching and grieving, full of deep bitterness and hard revolt. The world before her was dark beyond reach of light, even the terrible lightening of a shining sword.

She sank presently into a lethargy which was not sleep, but that dark, dreadful place where the soul no longer struggles to keep a hold on hope, but deliberately chooses for itself the eternal contemplation of woe. She sat hunched a little in the now-voiceless chair, her head bent, her eyes dull, her legs stiff on the upturned tub. Her hands, which had now ceased their travellings to and fro, lay as if numb or dead on the lap of the black gown. She looked as if she had had such a severe blow that it had killed even the wish to rise—killed everything, indeed, except the power to refuse to move or to feel again....

Upstairs, Mrs. Tanner’s light feet drew an occasional light creak from the sensitive boards. Mrs. Clapham listened to them without hearing them; and then, suddenly raising her eyes, beheld Emma Catterall standing before her.

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