The Woman Who Had Imagination (16 page)

She met no one coming down the path, and in her desperate hurry might not have seen them if she had. Until lately the path had been public, a right of way going far back in time, but at Christmas some deer in the park had been molested and the path closed. She and her father alone had been granted the special privilege of it. There had been a putting up and a breaking down of fences which had distressed her. She was distressed also because her father had said nothing,
not a word, on the side of the people. ‘My silence,' he said, ‘will be ample evidence of my impartiality.' But it was clear enough, and to her painfully clear, that his sympathies were with Abrahams, the owner, whom he could not afford to offend. She had found herself despising for the first time the old liaison of church and property. It had struck her so forcibly that she had been angry, her anger breeding a kind of timid horror at the mere realisation of that emotion. Alone, as she hurried up the path, it was difficult to realise that she had ever cherished emotions, sinful emotions, like hatred and anger. And she felt ashamed, the pain of her conscience mingling with the pain of her fears.

Where the path divided into two she took the left-hand turn to the house. The right-hand path, formerly a way to the vicarage, had been cut off by a new snake-fence. She saw that the fence had been smashed down again. It had happened since the snow. She could see the scars and fractures made by the axes on the new skinned chestnut stakes and the black footprints in the islands of snow.

She felt at once distressed again and as she hurried on she half resolved to speak to Abrahams. She would reason with him; she would make him see the pettiness of it all. He must see it. And she would make him see it, not for her own sake nor for her own satisfaction, but for his own sake and the sake of his fellow men. Words of entreaty and reason came easily to her mind: ‘What you give comes back to you. It comes back a thousand
fold. Surely you don't need me to tell you?' softened and quickened by her fears and agitations about her father.

But suddenly the house appeared from behind its dark barricade of yew and pine. The sight of it, huge and red, with its weather-green cupola high on the grey roof, made her suddenly and inexplicably nervous, and her footsteps on the gravel drive and their echo among the trees seemed painfully loud to her in the frost-silent air.

She hurried up the steps leading to the terrace and the house. Along the terrace formal rows of flower-beds lay bleak and empty, the earth snow-flattened and lifeless. She rang the big brass door-bell and waited, apprehensive. A servant came, she murmured a request about the telephone, and a moment later she was in the entrance-hall, the door shut behind her.

The telephone stood on a large mahogany table in the hall. She sat down in a chair by the table, picked up the receiver and gave her number. She spoke very low, so that Abrahams, if he were about, should not hear her; but the operator could not catch what she said and asked her once, twice and then even a third time, to repeat the number. She repeated it, her face growing hot and scarlet, her voice in her own ears so loud that she felt she was shouting and that Abrahams would hear and come into the hall. Her fears were multiplied into panic, all her resolutions to speak to Abrahams driven away. She gave her message for the
doctor quickly, too quickly, so that again she had to repeat the words, and again louder.

In the middle of this confusion she became conscious of another voice. It was Abrahams, saying:

‘Let me see what I can do, Miss Vaughan.'

In another moment he was standing by her, had the telephone from her hands and was half-shouting: ‘A message for the doctor. Yes, yes. Put a jerk in it, do. Ask him to come at once, for the Reverend. Yes, he's very bad. It's urgent. For the Reverend at once, please.'

She stood apart half-nervous, half-affronted, until he had finished speaking. His way of speaking about her father, off-handedly as it were, as the Reverend, offended her. Yet when he put down the receiver she was bound to murmur her thanks.

‘And now I must go,' she added quickly.

‘Oh, stop an' have a cup o' tea,' he began.

‘Oh no, I must get back,' she said. ‘I'm urgently needed. I must get back.'

‘Ah, you can swallow a cup o' tea in a jiff,' he insisted. ‘It'll help to keep the cold out.'

But she was at the door, rigid, drawing on her thin kid gloves. Against her prim nervous voice Abrahams' seemed aggressively loud, almost coarsely self-confident. He himself was big-framed, getting to stoutness, his hair very grey above the red temples. He cultivated the prosperous country air, with loose check tweeds, a gold watch chain, and brown boots as polished
as a chestnut. But his butterfly-collar, stiff and white, and his black necktie upset the effect. He had made his money quickly, out of boots and shoes, during the war period, rising from nothing. The tightness, the struggle of the early years had left its mark ineffaceably on his features, his lips compressing narrowly and his eyes hardening, at unexpected moments, with unconscious avarice. Coming out into the country, to enjoy his money, he had lost his wife within a year, and had presented the church with a window of stained glass in her memory. He still had about him the hardness, the bluster and the coarseness of the factory. And it was this about him which intimidated her and made her draw on her gloves, more rigidly and hastily, by the door.

Seeing that she would not stay he stood with his hand on the big iron door-latch.

‘And how is the Reverend?' he asked.

‘He's very ill,' she said, ‘very ill.'

‘I'm sorry to hear it, I am that, very sorry.'

It seemed an unconscionable time before he began to lift the door latch. In the interval, remembering her resolution to speak about the fence, she half-reproached herself: it was her duty, now that her father could no longer speak, to say something. It was clearly her duty. But still she said nothing. The words she had formed so clearly and easily in her mind had been driven away by her foolish panic and fear.

‘Ah, well, if you must go,' said Abrahams, lifting the door latch.

‘I
must
go,' she said. Her voice was strangely distant with its prim, polite emphasis.

‘Anything I can do? Can I have anything sent down?' he said.

‘Nothing,' she said. ‘Thank you. Nothing at all.'

She fled, buttoning her coat collar against the freezing air, not glancing back, knowing by the long interval before the sound of the door clanging, that he was watching her.

Down by the lake the waterfall fell with an even sharper, thinner sound in the ice-covered lake. The duck had not returned and the ice was empty of all life, growing darker every moment. Little patches of new black ice and frozen snow cracked under her feet as she panted up the path, beyond the lake, towards the rectory. The house, its grey stone drabbened but unsoftened by time and rain, stood half-hidden by a line of elms, a gaunt solitary place, walled in, with half its windows plastered over long ago, a squat stone belfry in the roof of the disused stables, a light burning in a single upstairs window. She hurried on, apprehensive, fearing the worst intuitively, falling into the old half-running, half-walking pace, hardly pausing to shut the gate in the stone wall of the garden.

Before she could reach the house the front door opened and the white figure of the servant-girl appeared and stood there ready to meet her. With tears in her voice she began to tell Rose Vaughan what she already half-knew, that her father was dead.

She spent the first days of the New Year putting things in order, on wet days indoors, arranging her father's papers, packing his sermons into neat piles, which she tied together with tape, rejecting old letters, reading through them and sometimes weeping a little and then reproaching herself both for reading and weeping. On fine days she and the servant-girl carried the rejected papers out to the garden, in clothes-baskets, and set fire to them under the elms, but the earth and the dead elm leaves were never dry and the papers burnt sluggishly, with thick harsh smoke that hung under the wet trees and stung the women's eyes. At last rain set in, dismally and as though it would last the year, and a south-west wind that cried in the house and howled in the black dripping elms. The burnt and half-burnt scraps of paper were blown about the garden like black and white leaves until the rain soddened them at last and the wind hurled them into corners and under the clumps of dead chrysanthemum stalks that had never been cut down. Driven indoors again with no papers to arrange, the women scrubbed and polished the floors and furniture and washed the pictures and the windows. In that large house, built more than a hundred years before for a more spacious family than had ever lived in it, there were rooms which had never been used and some which had never been opened for
twenty years. The women flung open their windows and the rain blew in on the mice-chimbled floor-boards, the old travelling-trunks, the piles of faded and forgotten church magazines, the rotting sunshades, the disused croquet sets, the piles of half-rotten apples laid out on sheets of
The Times
to dry for that winter and even the winter before. The women worked with a great show of noise and hustle, tiring themselves out in an unconscious effort to efface the effect and the memory of death.

Finally it was done: all the rooms had been cleaned and aired, the last of the big heavy foot-worn carpets had been turned and re-laid, the clumsy mahogany furniture had been polished and set back in its original places, as though it had never been moved. And suddenly there was nothing to do. The wet January days, which had seemed so short, began to seem very long, and the house, which had seemed so bustling and alive, began to recapture the air of silence and death.

Like a veneer, the lively effect of clearing-up the house began to wear off, leaving a drab under-surface of realities, a troublesome sense of loss, a dread of loneliness and bills and formalities. There was a will. The rector had left a little over a hundred and fifty pounds. With the books and the furniture, it was to come to Rose; so that there would, perhaps, after the sale, be two hundred and fifty pounds.

She realised that it was nothing. It might last her,
with care, with extreme, bitter care, for five years — no more than a day out of the life which lay before her. To supplement it she might do a little private teaching. She would see: she would have to see. The house would no longer be hers; there would, of course, be another rector. These things seemed to her a cruel complication of realities, a kind of equation she had never been brought up to solve.

But one thing she saw, instantly. The servant must go. And having sacked her she felt at once an insufferable loneliness. Parishioners called in the afternoons and she called in return on them, but after darkness she sat there, in the vast house, absolutely alone, with nothing to think of except herself and her dead father, her mind fretted by its own fears and its half-imagined fears. She was driven to bed at nine o'clock and then eight and even earlier, with the Bible from which her father had taught her to read a passage every night since childhood. Upset one evening and going up to bed early to cry herself to sleep she woke, half through the night, to remember that she had forgotten, for the first time, for as long as she could remember, to read that passage. She went downstairs with a candle to find her Bible. As she came back the candlelight fell on something white lying in the passage, by the front door. She picked it up, a letter.

It was a note from Abrahams, asking her if she could not go up to tea on the following day. Inexplicably she felt offended. The very tone and language of the
letter seemed offensive: ‘What about coming to tea one day, say to-morrow (Thursday). Should like to discuss question of memorial to Reverend. Need not reply. Will send car.' It was so common, so detestable that she felt quite suddenly enraged.

In the morning, trying to forget the letter, she succeeded only in recalling its words and renewing her own annoyance. She went about in a state of prim, rigid vexation, the very attitude she would adopt if she were to meet Abrahams. But beneath it all she was inexplicably afraid of seeing him.

And quite suddenly she saw it differently. She would go: of course she would go. Not to go would seem so childish, so discourteous. She was not sure that it was not even her duty to go.

So in the afternoon she was ready, in black except for the thin stitched lines of white on the back of her tight black gloves, when the car arrived. No sooner was she sitting silent, behind the chauffeur, than she wished she had not come.

As the car drove down the hill from the rectory, towards the village, and then up by the private road through the park she stared out of the windows at the wet January landscape, noticing for the first time the red misty flush of elm and beech buds, and then, in the park, the first flicker of aconites, coldest yellow, uncurling in the winter grass. Farther up, under the shelter of the house and its yews, a few odd half-opened snowdrops, like frailest white toadstools, bloomed
about the grass. The flowers, so early, filled her with a sense of comfort shot with flashes of envy.

In the house it was so warm that she could have fallen asleep. She and Abrahams sat by a huge fire of wood in the drawing-room, she with her hat and gloves still on, parochial fashion, the words ‘I mustn't stay' rising from long foolish habit to her prim lips.

‘Ah, make yourself at home,' said Abrahams, genially.

Dotted about the room, on tables and in the deep window sills, were bowls of blue and white hyacinths, whose fragrance she breathed with an unconscious show of deep pleasure, longingly.

Abrahams seemed pleased and was telling her how he had planted the bulbs himself and how much he had given for them when tea arrived, the pot and jugs and tray of silver.

‘After tea I'll show you in the conservatory,' said Abrahams. ‘Interested in flowers, I know?'

‘I am indeed,' she said.