Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
‘Well, I don’t know, Lilia. I took a chance on you.’
‘No, Antonia made you.’
‘Still, I still took a chance. Thought there ought to be something in Guy’s girl.’
In answer she drew up her body, trembling. She pressed her palms over her eyes. The air between them may have recorded something, for he turned, saying: ‘Don’t take it that way. Am I saying there wasn’t? But not for me, never for me—now was there?’
‘Wasn’t there ever, Fred?’
‘Are you asking me?’
From under her hands she said: ‘You are the one who ought to know.’
The chestnut, darkening into summer, canopied them over; over their heads were its expired candles of blossom, brown—desiccated stamens were in the dust. Over everything under the tree lay the dusk of nature. Only the car-tracks spoke of ever again going or coming; all else had part in the majestic pause, into which words were petering out. This was not so much a solution as a dissolution, a thinning-away of the accumulated hardness of many seasons, estrangement, dulledness, shame at the waste and loss. A little redemption, even only a little, of loss was felt. The alteration in feeling, during the minutes in which the two had been here, was an event, though followed by a deep vagueness as to what they should in consequence do or say. Impossible is it for persons to be changed when the days they have still to live stay so much the same—as for these two, what
could be their hope but survival? Survival seemed more possible now, for having spoken to one another had been an act of love. No word, look or touch were for some time to be needed to add more: instinctively now they rested, almost apart, under the saturating chestnut, with what they knew at work in them slowly. Only kept from slipping from Lilia’s lap by the idle hold of one of her hands, the letters were neither more nor less part of the scene than the spent match or the dropped shoe.
Light long footsteps, though not harkened to, were none the less to be heard in the stable yard. Jane stopped, however, short in the archway. She stared at those two beings whom, with a start, she perceived to be her father and mother.
Maud, limping a little, paced to and fro under the Montefort front windows, outside the lowly front garden fence. An open prayer-book was in her hands. Her movement had the monotony of a pendulum’s; her voice, loudly rising and falling, only came to a pause when, from time to time, she leafed through the Psalms for more maledictions.
They compassed me about also [she was now intoning] with words of hatred, and fought against me without cause.
For the love that I had unto them, lo, they take my contrary part; but I give myself unto prayer.
They have rewarded me evil for good, and hatred for my goodwill.
Set Thou an ungodly man to be ruler over him, and let Satan stand at his right hand. When sentence is given upon him, let him be condemned, and let his prayer be turned into sin.
Let his days be few, and let another take his office.
Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.
Let his children be vagabonds, and beg their bread; let them seek it also out of desolate places.
Let the extortioner consume all that he hath, and let the stranger spoil his labour.
Let there be no man to pity him, nor to
—
‘
—STOP it, Maud!’ shouted a voice within. A moment later, rending curtains apart, Antonia appeared at her bedroom window. ‘Stop it, I say.’
‘I have,’ said the child, looking sternly up.
‘Or go,’ said the other, weakening, ‘and play somewhere else.’
‘I am not playing.’
‘What d’you think you’re doing?’
‘Calling down vengeance. Couldn’t you hear me?’
Antonia was at a disadvantage. Her whole voice had spent itself on the shout; behind her dark-glaring glasses her eyes felt gummy. Pitchforked back again into the abnormalities of the afternoon, her spirit shrank from it all within her, without capacity, unfresh as the clothes in which she had slept. The beheld landscape, woods edging the gorge, cattle dotting the rise to the obelisk, seemed not so much unreal as real at her own expense. Apart from the manner of being wakened, it was unpleasing to be again awake. And to cap all, one was confronting Maud—who herself wore, though never with more composure, a select air of having been through hell. ‘Why do
you
look so bunged-up?’ she asked reluctantly.
‘Could I speak to you, Cousin Antonia?’
‘You are, aren’t you?’
Maud glanced at the cattle and said: ‘Alone.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of something.’
‘Can’t you find someone else?’
‘It depends who. Father has assaulted me.’
Antonia, digging for wax in one ear, said somewhat unfavourably: ‘Rats. Why should he?’
‘May I come up?’
‘No,’ said Antonia, preparing to quit the window. ‘Tell it to the Marines. I don’t feel well.’
Maud looked still more sombre. ‘Then I ought to tell mother.’
‘Heavens, and raise the roof?—though you’re clearly mad, Maud. All right, all right, all right then: come on up. - But for a minute, mind!’ Antonia groaned and went to cold-sponge her face; she thought of a drink, but up here was none.
Maud selected a blade of grass, placed it in as a marker and closed her prayer-book. She was to be heard to progress upstairs. She dealt three taps to Antonia’s door.
Antonia, from the washstand, said:
‘Now, …
what is it?’ The child entered this room unknown to her with an inhuman absence of awe or interest. She took her bearings, but in an abstract way—the draped dishevelled big bed, prodigal dressing-table, strewn sofa and cavernous open wardrobe were to her eye no more than what they in fact were, furniture. Here where Lilia had lingered to raise scenes, there where Jane so often gracefully had disposed herself fell Maud’s glance—noting, neutral, impervious. She was a little bothered by the unforeseeingness of the various chairs, of which no one seemed to have got itself into what could be considered a key position. The room represented an opportunity— apart from that, being allowed in here so clearly meant little to her that one saw how little it had meant to be kept out. She sat down, though always with the air of expecting she might do better later.
Antonia, wringing at the sponge, demanded: ‘Just what did happen?’
‘He knocked me about.’
‘Where?’
‘All over.’
‘No, I mean where did this happen?’
‘Near the gate of the Horse Field.’
‘What were you doing?’
‘Nothing. He twisted my arm. He swore.’
‘Good heavens.’
‘He gnashed his teeth. He even trod on my toe.’
Antonia, measuring out mouthwash, remarked: ‘Yes, he saw red, apparently. Come on, Maud—what
had
you been doing to him?’
‘Just standing there.’
‘Well, you must ache all over. But I can’t see where we others come into this.’
‘He seized your letters, Cousin Antonia.’
Antonia, blank, asked: ‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Those ones there is being this fuss about.’
‘Stop, though—who said they were mine?’
‘Everything in this house belongs to you.’
Antonia stood and swilled round her mouth, then gargled.
‘Mother always says so,’ averred Maud.
‘I dare say,’ said Antonia, having done. ‘But in any case, what were
you
doing with them?’
‘They were under a stone under a tree.’
‘I dare say: till you came along and pinched them. Having, of course, no notion who’d put them there?’
‘Jane. But they were not hers.’
‘Who are you to say so?’
‘You said so, yesterday. At dinner.’
Spat-out mouthwash reddened Antonia’s basin. She stonily went on to look to see, in the glass above, what first sleep then water out of the jug had succeeded in doing to her make-up. ‘Cold cream!’ she commanded, hand out, forgetting Maud was not Jane. Maud justifiably did not budge. ‘Oh, all right,’ grunted Antonia, ‘I’ll get it.’ But she gave up the idea; seating herself, instead, on her bed at the pillow end, back up against the damask panel. ‘Jane set store by those letters,’ she said judicially, ‘wrongly or rightly. Didn’t you know?’
‘Yes. That was why I knew they should go to father.’
‘Now, why on earth?’
‘Because he
is
our father.—Or was,’ Maud added, after a dreadful pause, testing the reflex in a wrenched shoulder.
‘So you—? But you told me just now he seized them.’
‘The sight of them threw him into that fury.’
Antonia refolded her arms, ‘You were holding out on him, eh? What for, eh—fun?’
‘How could it have been for fun, Cousin Antonia?’ the child asked, not so much scornfully as thoughtfully, gimleting through her inquisitor with her eyes.
‘Money, then?’ supplemented the other quickly.
Maud looked away, though only to think again. ‘He once promised I was to have ten shillings.’
‘Why?’
‘For not pestering mother, if I had not. And I haven’t.’
‘As you took the chance to remind him?—But look here, though, Maud, if you needed cash why didn’t it strike you to come to me? I could have been interested in those letters.’
Maud blinked, for the first time. ‘But they’re yours anyhow.’
‘Would that stop me from wanting to have them back? For all you knew, I might have been good for a pound.’
‘Father needed them more, Cousin Antonia.’
‘What on earth made you think that? Whatever for?’
‘To put a stop to their being around.’
‘You really think that?’
‘Yes. It made him look small.’
‘What did?’
‘Those letters being around.’
‘But they weren’t,’ said Antonia. ‘Jane had them.’
With contempt Maud said: ‘They went on being around.’
‘What’s your father done with them?’
‘I don’t know. I fell down and he walked away. I bled.’
‘Well, another time leave things where you find them. Or don’t find them.’
‘You
know who found them, Cousin Antonia. I only afterwards saw where they’d been put.’ The child looked towards the washstand. ‘May I wash blood off my frock?’
‘No; not in here,’ said Antonia sharply. ‘You’ve probably simply been tearing at your hives.’
‘No, I fell on my knee. And I could be bleeding internally.’
‘Not you, Maud.’
‘Mother’s known that to happen.’
‘Well, look how you knock other people about.’
This was true. Maud was specially feared by children with whom she attended school. Complaints from parents filtered through to Montefort; rumour enlarged upon her doings. Rare were school days unmarked by instances of aggression; studious classroom and play-hour yard alike offered her outlets, but it was the transport provided for the Protestant children which on the whole best lent itself to her purpose. A motor vehicle known in the locality as the Protestant Van circulated around these roads twice daily, gleaning up or delivering home again outlying pupils; and low sank, each schoolday morning, the hearts of those already pent up within as a slowing-down announced the approach to Montefort. Maud, in wet weather rendered still more terrible by a pixie hood, and often perched atop of a cracked gatepost, was to be found contemplatively waiting, one knew for what. The Protestant Van—it had been said—became like a bag of cats inside from the moment Maud stepped up into it. For she knew not only how to begin but how to beget fights. Terminate as they might in hobnailed boots, still were the shins of young boys exposed and tender; the no less blameless tweetering little girls pinkly invited pin-sticking, hair-pulling, pinching. Retaliation at least attempted caused Maud from time to time to be black-and-blue, or proudly scarred in the face like a student dueller. But somehow the little Protestants in the van never effectively did combine against her—so did she sow dissension in their ranks that when deposited at the school entrance they were in a state of all-round bad blood and suppurating mutual suspicion. A point to be noted about Maud was that she confined her attacks to her co-religionists: she had never been heard of kicking a Catholic child.
It also was true, now, that though Maud thought fit to play up her bodily injuries, no great complaint as to them was really suggested: she
was
injured, but in some other way. Antonia’s reference to her prowess caused her only just to restrain herself from an impersonal, non-disclaiming smile—the idea could have been pleasurable enough, but just now was unhappily not the time for it. She so redisposed the hem of her skimpy frock as to lay bare the slightly blood-clotted knee—not so much, it seemed, for Antonia’s benefit as her own; for, heels hitched up under her on the chair-rung, she bent forward as though actually communing with the wound.
Antonia said: ‘And leave him alone, in future.’
‘I shall not need to. God will have cast him out.’