Authors: Winifred Holtby
Day and night slid in and out of the ward as water fills and
empties a deep garden tank. Caroline lay subdued and
peaceful, taking pleasure in the sweets and oranges that Eleanor brought her, in her distribution of largesse to the
other patients and in the small tributes of respect she gradu
ally contrived to exact from the nurses. They called her 'Miss Denton-Smyth' now instead of 'Ma.' The almoner
came to visit her, and appeared to be duly impressed by her
declaration of profession as 'Journalist and secretary.'
She gave her age as fifty-eight; for supposing, she thought,
Father Mortimer or any of the directors were to hear that
she was over seventy. The knowledge that she was three months off her seventy-second birthday appeared far less
real and true than her conviction that she was good for
another ten years of work. Perhaps if they knew that she was over seventy they would want to superannuate her.
After all, a woman was as old as she looked and felt. 'Except for the pain in my leg, I feel about forty-five,' thought Caro
line. When Father Mortimer came to visit her, bringing her
fruit and flowers, she felt not a day more than seventeen.
Meanwhile, she was content to lie and dream. The green
distemper of the ward reminded her of the green hills of her old home near Leyburn, patterned by grey stone walls. The
farm at Denton lay spread out along the side of a hill.
Above it the black moorland climbed to the sunny sky, be
low it the rough road wound to the dale. Behind the house
the cowshed and fold yard snuggled beneath a small planta
tion. Caroline had always wished that the farm buildings were not so near the house. She wished that there was a
separate carriage drive to the front door. Visitors had to
take their gigs and pony carts straight into the stable yard,
which was also the farm yard, and walk through a narrow
gate in the garden wall to the front door. No one could call
a house with such an approach a Gentleman's Residence.
Long ago, when Caroline travelled with the Bassett-
Grahams, she had called her father a gentleman farmer, and had tried to console herself by reflecting that, since he had bought the fields between the house and the moor, he was a
landowner. But to-day she was content to think of him as a
yeoman farmer, to remember how he had slapped his friends
on the back in Middleham market, and told Yorkshire dia
lect stories in a loud, hearty voice. The humbler her origin, the more remarkable her achievement. What other farmers' daughters from the dales had done and seen all that she had done or seen?
It was strange, but that child's life at Denton now seemed
more vivid to her than all her subsequent adventures. She
remembered squeezing herself into the hay rack above the stalls in the cowshed, eating cubes of raw turnip and com
posing poetry.
'What is happiness made of?
What makes it sweet and dear?
Is it the things we look at?
Is it the things we hear?'
That had been real poetry, with rhymes and rhythm and
the full blissful ecstasy of composition.
'If I'd had more time, I could have been a poet,' reflected Caroline, 'only between the claims of art and service I
had
to choose service, being by nature a pioneer and fighter.'
Still, she had written some good poems in her day. There was that afternoon on the Malvern hills with Adelaide. Oh, Adelaide, Adelaide Thurlby. How lovely in those days she
had been. So tall, so willowy, so distinguished, with her
white swan's neck, curving above the embroidered col
larless square of her Liberty gown. A lovely neck, Caroline
then had thought. No wonder she had dared to expose it
when everyone else
confined theirs in net and whalebone.
It was sad that later those swan-like curves had developed
into a goitre.
But when they picnicked together on the hills above the
school, and Adelaide read aloud
The Lotus Eaters,
while
Caroline, who had carried the baskets, made the tea, nothing was missing from Adelaide's beauty.
'I am glad, I am glad, that I have known what a really
intimate friendship can be,' thought Caroline. 'I am glad
that I have known her even if it meant deeper suffering.'
For the days of bliss and art and companionship had been followed by months of anxiety, when one epidemic after
another laid waste the school, and someone suggested that
the drains were not quite right, and dear Adelaide grew
nervy. Only Caroline knew what she had suffered from Adelaide's nerves when the pupils grew fewer and fewer,
until at last only six assembled round the long dining-room
table, and three of those were on reduced terms because
their parents were abroad. Of course Caroline had put her
own money into the school, and dear Adelaide had not paid
her salary for three terms.
When the crash came - no, no - that was a time that
Caroline did not want to remember. She had taken Ade
laide up to Darlington to nurse her through her inevitable
breakdown. Adelaide had recovered. From the moment
Dr. Waddington had entered her room, Adelaide's recovery
began. Ah, Sydney! thought Caroline, remembering that
snatched kiss in the passage, when she was carrying a tray up
for her mother's tea. It was the only time a man had ever
kissed her like that. She dreamed of it for days and nights.
She waited for his coming hour after hour. The clot, clot,
clot of his grey mare's hoofs on the high road still echoed in
her head.
She was in charge of two invalids then, her mother in one
room and Adelaide in another, and she had had little time for dalliance. Afterwards, after the desperate day when
Adelaide and Sydney announced their engagement, she had wondered bitterly whether, if she had spent more time with
Sydney and less in looking after Adelaide, she might not
have won him for herself. She had never believed that such
a kiss could mean just nothing.
Ah, but that had been bitter, bitter. Deep waters had
gone over her soul. Her mother had died in debt, and she
had lost her lover, her friend, her mother, her home and her
profession in one brief season. It seemed now so long ago,
that it might have been another person who had sat after the
funeral in the desolate house crying and crying, because she
was left alone to wash up the dishes after the funeral tea.
Her sister Daisy had had to catch a train back to Newcastle
because her baby had whooping cough.
But in the anguish of her estrangement, she had written
what was undoubtedly her best poem. It had been printed
in the
Northern Clarion - Epigram on the End of Love.
By Caro
line Smith.
'You said that death was not the End; most true; Death was not stronger than my love for you.
But since sweet love so lightly goes, my friend,
We are not dead, and yet - this is the End.'
It was strange that she could remember her poems so
clearly now. Their rhymes sang themselves over in her
mind at night.
It was something to have been a poet. Not everyone had
been kindled by the divine fire. 'One day,' thought Caroline
, 'I will write a long poem. All about pioneers.'
'Does the road wind up hill all the way?'
That was Elizabeth Browning, wasn't it? Or Jean Inge
low. Never mind. Caroline knew the answer.
'Yes, all the way and all the way,
Above Frienze all the way,
We'll climb for ever and a day,
But reach the heights to-morrow.
We'll climb the hot and dusty road
The paths where other pilgrims strode,
And cast aside our heavy load
Of loneliness and sorrow.'
She had composed that, hurrying up the hot, dusty hill
towards Fiesole, behind poor Dodo Bassett-Graham. Dodo's
tall, gaunt figure had raced up before her, Dodo's skirt trail
ing in the soft Italian dust. Caroline panting behind in her
tight shoes, and knowing that she would have to brush Dodo's skirt when they returned to the
villa, had almost
failed for a time to appreciate the privilege of being actually
in Italy, travelling with titled people. Poor Dodo had not,
of course, been quite right in her head. It was sad that not even membership of the aristocracy exempted men and women from these afflictions. Lady Bassett-Graham had
been an exacting woman, troubled, naturally, about her
eccentric daughter, whose vagaries grew more and more im
possible, until half-way through the Italian trip they had
decided to place her in a nursing home.
But Caroline had seen Italy. She had seen Milan and
Genoa and Florence. She had climbed the stairs of Savonarola's tower, she had looked at pictures in the Uffizi. She
had learned how to say 'Dov'e?' and 'Duomo' and 'Grazie.'
She had been to Paris. She remembered now the excitement
of finding her way through the unfamiliar lighted streets,
back to her small hotel.
Caroline was sorry for the sheltered, wealthy women who
had never experienced the chill rapture of travelling alone. She was sorry for the vulgar little factory girl dying in the
next bed, because she had never seen Paris.
Poor girl; she was rather like that naughty Barbara who had given them so much trouble at St. Angela's
Home of
Charity for Fallen Girls. Caroline had been secretary there
for a whole year. It was then that she became definitely and
blissfully a Catholic - an Anglo-Catholic, of course. The
little chapel soothed and delighted her; the altar candles, the
incense, and the quiet devotional movements of the Sisters
in their grave black gowns, had been very pleasant to her. Yet even there she had felt a little superior to the Sisters. For they had fled from the world while she was still in it. She knew so well the sweet danger that had assailed the
fallen girls. She knew so well, as none of the Sisters, she felt,
could know, the startled delight of surreptitious kisses. Had
Sydney not kissed her in the dark passage? Oh, she had
been a pioneer in her sympathy with these poor fallen girls, even if she eventually quarrelled with Mother Ursula about
the smoked haddock.
She had been a pioneer in the city. How well she remem
bered lifting her blue serge skirt with the braid binding to board a horse omnibus in Ludgate Circus. For nine months
she had worked in the office of an educational publisher,
drafting cultured little notices about history readers and
First French Courses. He had been a difficult man. Oh,
very difficult. It had been hard to lose her office job, but
even that tribulation had led her to new experience. She
had even ventured out to the suburbs as a canvasser for
orders.
Poor Daisy, living in Newcastle with Edward growing
fatter and balder. Poor Enid, so safe and dull and circum
scribed at Marshington. What could they know of real ex
perience and triumph? Of poetry and pain and loss and
work? When had they sat up all through the night, drafting
minutes, preparing reports, making coffee to keep them
awake so that they might work on, with pricking eyes and aching necks and shoulders? All pain and discomfort and
loneliness and failure became worth while if one had only a
Great Cause to serve.