Authors: Stella Gibbons
‘Well, Cousin Judith, if you really think she will be about again in a few days, perhaps I might look in at her hut this morning, and arrange about the curtains,’ said Flora, preparing to go. Judith did not answer at first.
‘The fourth time,’ she whispered at last. ‘Four of them. Love-children. Pah! That animal, and love! And he—’
Here Flora realized that the conversation was not likely to take a turn in which she could join with any benefit, so she went quickly away.
‘So they all belong to Seth,’ she thought, while putting on her mackintosh in her bedroom. ‘Really, it is too bad. I suppose on any other farm one would say that it set a bad example, but of course that does not apply here. I must see, I think, what can be done about Seth …’
She picked her way through the mud and rancid straw which carpeted the yard without encountering anyone except a person whom she took from his employment to be Reuben himself. He was feverishly collecting the feathers dropped by the chickens straying about the yard, and comparing them in number with the empty feather-sockets on the bodies of the chickens; this, she supposed, must be a precautionary measure, to prevent any
feathers being taken away by Mark Dolour to his daughter Nancy.
Reuben (if it were he) was so engrossed that he did not observe Flora.
Flora approached the hut in some trepidation. Her practical experience of confinements was non-existent, for such of her friends as were married had not yet any children and most of them were still too young to think of marriage as anything but a state infinitely remote.
But she had a lively acquaintance with confinements through the works of women novelists, especially those of the unmarried ones. Their descriptions of what was coming to their less fortunate married sisters usually ran to four or five pages of close print, or eight or nine pages of staccato lines containing seven words, and a great many dots arranged in threes.
Another school dismissed confinements with a careful brightness, a ‘So-sorry-I’m-late-darling-I’ve-just-been-having-a-baby-where-shall-we-go-for-supper-afterwards?’ sangfroid which Flora, curiously enough, found equally alarming.
She sometimes wondered whether the old-fashioned, though doubtless lazy, method of describing the event in the phrase, ‘She was brought to bed of a fine boy’, was not the best way of putting it.
A third type of woman novelist combined literature and motherhood by writing a good, serious first novel when they were twenty-six; then marrying, and having a baby, and the confinement over, writing articles for the Press on ‘How I shall Bring Up my Daughter’, by Miss Gwenyth Bludgeon, the brilliant young novelist, who gave birth to a daughter this morning. Miss Bludgeon is in private life Mrs Neil McIntish.
Some of Flora’s friends had been exceedingly frightened, not
to say revolted, by these painstaking descriptions of confinements; and had been compelled to rush off to the Zoo and bribe the keepers to assure them that the lionesses, at least, got through the Greatest Event of Their Lives in decent solitude. It was comforting, too, to watch the lionesses cuffing their fubsy cubs about in the sunlight. The lionesses, at least, did not write articles for the papers on how they would Bring Up their Cubs.
Flora had also learned the degraded art of ‘tasting’ unread books, and now, whenever her skimming eye lit on a phrase about heavy shapes, or sweat, or howls or bedposts, she just put the book back on the shelf, unread.
Musing thus, she was relieved when a voice replied: ‘Oo’s there?’ to her tap upon the door of the hut.
‘Miss Poste, from the farm,’ she answered, composedly. ‘May I come in?’
There was a silence; a startled one, Flora felt. At length the voice called suspiciously:
‘What do ’ee want wi’ me and mine?’
Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists call a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake. The most ordinary actions became, to such persons, entangled in complicated webs of apprehension and suspicion. She prepared to make a long explanatory statement – but suddenly changed her mind. Why should she explain? Indeed, what was there to explain?
She pushed the door open and walked in.
To her relief, there were no sweat nor howls nor bedposts. There was only a young woman whom she presumed to be Meriam, the hired girl, sitting over an oil stove and reading what Flora, who had a nice sense of atmosphere, at once identified as ‘Madame Olga’s Dream Book’. Baby there was none, and she was puzzled. But she was too relieved to wonder much what the explanation could be.
The hired girl (who was, of course, rather sullen-looking and like a ripe fruit) was staring at her.
‘Good morning,’ Flora began, pleasantly, ‘are you feeling better? Mrs Starkadder seems to think you will be about again in a day or two, and if you feel well enough, I want you to wash
the curtains in my bedroom. When can you come up to the farm and fetch them?’
The hired girl huddled closer over the oil stove, looking at Flora in what the latter interestedly recognized as the Tortured Dumb Beast manner. When she spoke, her voice was low and drawling:
‘Why do ye come here, mockin’ me in me shame – and me only out of me trouble yesterday?’
Flora started, and stared a little.
‘Yesterday? I thought it was today. Surely you – er – didn’t I hear? – that is, weren’t you crying out, only about ten minutes ago? Mrs Starkadder and I both heard you.’
The beginnings of a sullen smile, rather like a plum in quality, touched the hired girl’s sensual lips.
‘Ay, I moithered out a bit. I was rememberin’ me trouble yesterday. Mrs Starkadder she weren’t in the kitchen when me time came on me. How should she know what I bin through, and when I bin through it? Not that I ever says much while it’s goin’ on. ’Tain’t so bad as some people make out. Mother says it’s because I keeps me spirits up and eats hearty aforehand.’
Flora was pleasantly surprised to hear this, and for a second wondered if the women novelists had been misinformed about confinements? But no: she recollected that they usually left themselves a loophole by occasionally creating a primitive woman, a creature who was as close to the earth as a bloomy greengage and rather like one to look at and talk to, and this greengage creature never had any bother with her confinements, but just took them in her stride, as it were. Evidently, Meriam belonged in the greengage category.
‘Indeed,’ said Flora, ‘I am glad to hear it. When can you take the curtains down? The day after tomorrow?’
‘I never said as I’d wash your curtains. Haven’t I enough to bear, wi’ three children to find food for, and me mother lookin’ after a fourth? And who’s to know what will happen to me when the sukebind is out in the hedges again and I feels so strange on the long summer evenings—?’
‘Nothing will happen to you, if only you use your intelligence and see that it doesn’t,’ retorted Flora, firmly. ‘And if I may sit
down on this stool – thank you, no, I will use my handkerchief as a cushion – I will tell you how to see that nothing happens. And never mind about the sukebind for a minute (what
is
this sukebind, anyway?). Listen to me.’
And carefully, in detail, in cool phrases, Flora explained exactly to Meriam how to forestall the disastrous effect of too much sukebind and too many long summer evenings upon the female system.
Meriam listened, with eyes widening and widening.
‘’Tes wickedness! ’Tes flying in the face of Nature!’ she burst out fearfully at last.
‘Nonsense!’ said Flora. ‘Nature is all very well in her place, but she must not be allowed to make things untidy. Now remember, Meriam – no more sukebind and summer evenings without some preparations beforehand. As for your children, if you will wash the curtains for me, I will pay you, and that can go towards buying some of whatever it is children have to eat.’
Meriam seemed unconvinced by the argument for coping with sukebind, but she finally agreed to wash the curtains on the next day, much to Flora’s satisfaction.
While Flora was making the final arrangements, her glance was wandering thoughtfully round the hut. It was of the variety known as ‘miserable’, but it was plain to Flora’s experienced eyes that, unlikely as this seemed, somebody had been tidying it up. She was sure that the greengage had never even heard of such a process and wondered very much who had been at work.
While she was drawing on her gloves, there came a sharp tap at the door.
‘’Tes mother,’ said Meriam, and she called: ‘Come in, mother.’
The door then opened and on the threshold, taking in Flora from heels to beret with snapping little black eyes, stood a rusty black shawl with a hat alighting perilously upon the knob of hair which crowned the top of its head.
‘Good morning, miss. A nasty day,’ snapped the shawl, furling a large umbrella.
Flora was so startled at being addressed in a respectful and
normal manner by anyone in Sussex that she almost forgot to answer, but habit is strong, and she recovered her wits sufficiently to agree graciously that the day was, indeed, nasty.
‘She comes from up at the farm. She wants me to wash her bedroom curtains – and me with me trouble only a day behind me,’ said Meriam.
‘Who’s “she”? The cat’s mother?’ snapped the shawl. ‘Speak properly to the young lady. You must excuse her, miss; she’s more like father’s side o’ the family. Ah! it was a black day for me when I took up with Agony Beetle and left Sydenham for Sussex (all my people live in Sydenham, miss, and have these forty years). Wash them? Well, I never thought I’d live to hear of anyone up at Cold Comfort wanting a bit of washing done. They might begin on that old Adam of theirs, or whatever he calls himself, and no harm would be done, I’ll lay. She’ll wash them for you, miss. I’ll bring them along myself tomorrow afternoon and put them up for you.’
Flora replied that this would do very well, and it says much for the cumulative effect of the atmosphere of Cold Comfort that she felt almost moved as she spoke the words to one who seemed to possess some of the attributes of an ordinary human being, and who seemed to perceive (however dimly) that curtains must be washed and life generally tidied up before anyone could even begin to think of enjoying it.
She wondered if she should enquire after the welfare of the baby, and had just decided that this might be a little tactless when Mrs Beetle demanded of her daughter:
‘Well, ain’t you going to ask me ’ow ’e is?’
‘I knows. There ain’t no need to ask. He’ll be doing fine. They allus does,’ was the sullen reply.
‘Well, you needn’t sound as though you wished they wouldn’t,’ said the shawl, tartly. ‘Lord knows, they wasn’t very welcome, pore little innercents; but now they
are
’ere, we may as well bring them up right. And I will, too. It’s to me advantage. Come another four years and I can begin makin’ use of them.’
‘How?’ asked Flora, pausing at the door. Was a flaw about to disclose itself in the hitherto admirable character of the shawl?
‘Train the four of them up into one of them jazz-bands,’ replied Mrs Beetle, promptly. ‘I seen in the “News of the People” that they earns as much as six pounds a night playin’ up West in night-clubs. Well, I thought, here’s a jazz-band ready-made to me ’and, as you may say; and it’s better still now there’s four of them. I’ve got ’em all under me hand in one family, so’s I can keep an eye on the lot of them while they’re learnin’ to play. So that’s why I’m bringing them up right, on plenty of milk, and seein’ they get to bed early. They’ll need all their strength if they ’ave to sit up till the cows come ’ome playin’ in them night-clubs.’
Flora was rather shocked, but she felt that, though Mrs Beetle’s scheme might be a little
callous
, it was at least
organized
, which was more than could be said of any other life which the four embryo musicians might lead if their upbringing were left to their mother or (a yet darker thought) to Grandfather Agony Beetle himself.
So she went off, after a pleasant farewell to Meriam and her mother, and a statement that she would come in some time to see the new baby.
**After she had gone the hut sank into a dim trough of languor, pierced only by the shrill beam shed by the personality of Mrs Beetle, which seemed to gather into one all the tenuous threads of the half-formulated desires of the two women which throbbed about them.
Meriam huddled on her stool, the coarsened lines of her body spreading like some natural growth born of the travail of the endlessly teeming fields. In thick, lewd whispers, she began to tell her mother what Flora had advised her to do. Her voice rose … fell … rose … fell … its guttural syllables punctuated by the swish of Mrs Beetle’s broom. Once Mrs Beetle flung open a window, muttering that the place was enough to choke a black, but save for this interruption Meriam’s voice droned on like the voice of the earth itself.
‘Well, you needn’t sw-sw-sw-sw about it as though you was talkin’ to someone from the Vicarage,’ observed Mrs Beetle at the conclusion of her confidences. ‘It’s no news to me, though I wasn’t quite sure ’ow it was done nor ’ow much they cost …
Anyway, we know now, thanks to Miss Interference from up the ’ill. And I’ll lay she’s no better than she ought to be, a bit of a kid like ’er sailing in ’ere as bold as brass and talkin’ to you about such things. Still, she does look as if she washed ’erself sometimes, and she ain’t painted up like a dog’s dinner, like most of them nowadays. Not that I ’old with wot she told you, mind you. It ain’t right.’
‘Ay,’ agreed her daughter, heavily, ‘’tes wickedness. ’Tes flyin’ in the face of nature.’
‘That’s right.’
A pause, during which Mrs Beetle stood with her broom suspended, looking firmly at the oil stove. Then she added:
‘All the same, it might be worth tryin’.’
Flora’s spirits were usually equable, but by lunch-time the next day the combined forces of the unceasing rain, the distressing manner in which the farmhouse and its attendant buildings seemed sinking into decay before her eyes, and the appearance and characters of her relatives, had produced in her a feeling of gloom which was as unusual as it was disagreeable.