Part 15

‘I come ’ome,’ said Sally in the doorway, still bright with the sheer enjoyment of the ride, yet, faced by her father’s amazement, conscious of a slight lowering of her temperature. ‘My! You ain’t ’alf small, Father,’ she added, surprised, after looking at the tall Jocelyn and the broad Mr. Thorpe, by how little there was of Mr. Pinner. ‘Almost count you on the fingers of one ’and,’ she said.

‘Want more fingers than I got to count _you_,’ retorted Mr. Pinner, retreating behind the counter and feeling that these words somehow constituted a smart preliminary snub.

He didn’t offer to kiss her. He stood entrenched behind his counter and stared up at her, struck, after having got out of the habit of her beauty, into a new astonishment at it. But it gave him no pleasure. It merely frightened him. For it blew up peace.

‘Where’s your ’usband?’ he inquired, afraid and stern.

‘Oh--_’im_,’ said Sally, trying to look unconcerned, but flushing. ’E’s with ’is mother, ’e is. Ain’t you pleased to see me, Father?’ she asked, in an attempt to lead the conversation off husbands at least for a bit; and tighter to her side she hugged the box of chocolates, because the feel of it helped her to remember Father-in-law’s approval and encouragement. And he was a gentleman, wasn’t he? And a lot older even than Father, so must know what was what.

‘Oh, indeed. With ’is mother, is ’e,’ said Mr. Pinner, ignoring her question. ‘’Oos car was that?’ he asked.

‘Father-in-law’s,’ said Sally, hugging her chocolates.

‘Oh, indeed. And ’oo may father-in-law be?’

‘The gentleman as is--as was goin’ to marry Mr. Luke’s mother.’

‘Oh, indeed. And you ride about in ’is car meanwhile. _I_ see.’

‘Lent it to me so I can come ’ome.’

‘What do ’e want to send you ’ere for, then?’ asked Mr. Pinner, leaning on his knuckles, his blue eyes very bright. ‘Ain’t your ’ome where your ’usband’s is? Ain’t that a married woman’s ’ome?’

‘I only come on a visit,’ faltered Sally, whose spirits were by now in her shoes. Her father had often scolded her, but she had never been afraid of him. Now there was something in his eye that made her feel less sure that she had taken, as Mr. Thorpe had told her, the one possible and completely natural step. ‘I only come for a few days, while Mr. Luke----’

‘Mr. Luke know you’re ’ere?’ interrupted her father.

‘’E don’t know yet,’ said Sally. ‘But I----’

‘That’s enough,’ said Mr. Pinner, holding up a hand. ‘That’s quite enough. No need for no more words. You go back right away to your ’usband, my girl. Come to the wrong box, you ’ave, for ’arbourin’ runaway wives.’

‘But, Father--’ she stammered, not yet quite able to believe that in coming back to him she had only got out of the frying pan into the fire, ‘you got to listen to _why_ I come----’

He held up his hand again, stopping her. He had no need to listen. He could see for himself that she was a runaway wife, which was against both man’s and God’s laws.

Sally, however, persisted. She put her bag down on the counter, behind which he firmly remained, and facing him across it tried to give him an idea of what had been happening to her, and what had been going to happen to her much worse if she had stayed.

He refused to be given an idea of it. He turned a deaf ear to all explanations. And he was merely scandalised when she said, crying by this time, that she couldn’t, couldn’t be left alone with Mr. Luke’s mother, for where a husband thinks fit to leave his wife, said Mr. Pinner, always supposing it is respectable, there that wife must remain till he fetches her. This he laid down to Sally as a law from which a married woman departs at her peril, and he laid it down with all the more emphasis, perhaps, because of knowing how unlikely it was that he himself would ever have had the courage to enforce it in the case of Mrs. Pinner, and that, if he had, how certain it was she wouldn’t have stayed five minutes in any place he tried to leave her in.

Sally was in despair. What was she to do? The little shop looked like paradise to her, a haven of peaceful bliss after the life she had led since last she saw it. She cried and cried. She couldn’t believe that her father, who had always been so kind really, wouldn’t let her stay with him for the two days till Jocelyn got back to Cambridge.

But not even for one night would Mr. Pinner, who was secretly terrified of Jocelyn, and sure he would be hot on his wife’s tracks and make a scene and blame him if he gave her so much as an inch of encouragement, harbour her. Back she should go by the very next train to her husband and her duty; and the breaking of marriage vows, and the disregard of the injunctions in the New Testament which had so much shocked her in Jocelyn, were now thrown at her by Mr. Pinner, who accused her of precisely these. Useless for Sally, clinging to the hope of somehow being able to justify herself and be allowed to stay, to say through her tears that the Gospel didn’t mention what a woman had to do but only what a man had to, because to that Mr. Pinner replied that no Gospel could be expected to mention everything, and that in any case, when it came to sinning, the sexes couldn’t be kept apart.

§

He walked her off to the little station three miles away. The bag the respectful chauffeur had wanted to carry for her up those few steps she now carried three miles herself.

‘Pity you was in such a ’urry to let that there car go,’ Mr. Pinner remarked sarcastically, as they trudged almost in silence along the lanes.

Sally gulped; delicately, because even her gulps were little gulps,--gentle, delicate little things. She didn’t know what was to become of her, she really didn’t. Go back to that dreadful house, and arrive in the middle of the party? Face real wrath, real deserved wrath, from those who even when they were being kind had terrified her? So thoroughly had Mr. Pinner’s horror at what she had done cleared her mind of Mr. Thorpe’s points of view that she felt she hadn’t a leg to stand on, and would do anything, almost, sooner than, covered with shame, go back to the anger of the Lukes. But what? What could she do except go back? Yet if she had been miserable there while she was still good, how was she going to bear it now that she had become wicked? She shuddered to think of what Mrs. Luke would be like really angry--and Mr. Luke, who had the right not to leave her alone even at night....

Sadly did Sally gulp from time to time, and every now and then emit a faint sob, as she walked in silence that morning beside the adamant Mr. Pinner to the branch-line station. She hadn’t been in the Woodles district very long, but it seemed to her as she passed along its quiet lanes that she loved every stick and stone of it. It was what she understood. It was peace. It was home. Her father went with her as far as Cambridge, so as to put her safely into the express to Liverpool Street, and his instructions were, after buying her a first class ticket--he felt that Mr. Luke would wish her to travel first class, and it gave him a gloomy pride to buy it--that she was to take a taxi from Liverpool Street, and go in it all the way to South Winch.

He then, with the ticket, gave her a pound note.

‘It can’t be more than ten miles out,’ said Mr. Pinner, who had never in his life before squandered money, let alone a pound, on a taxi, but who tried to console himself with the thought that it would have been well spent if only it got Sally safe back to where she belonged; and though he was depressed he was also proud, for it, too, gave him a kind of sombre satisfaction.

‘Been an expensive day for me, this,’ he said, gloomy, but proud.

Sally gulped.

He kept her in the waiting-room at the station till the last moment, for she was attracting the usual too well-remembered attention, and beauty in tears was even more conspicuous than beauty placid, and then he hurried her along to the front of the train, and put her in a carriage in which there was only one lady--a real lady, of course, thought Mr. Pinner, anxiously taking stock of her, or she wouldn’t be travelling first class.

‘Beg pardon, Madam,’ he said in his best behind-the-counter manner, taking his hat off. ‘You goin’ to London by any chance?’

Seeing that the train didn’t stop till it got there, the lady couldn’t say anything but yes; and then Mr. Pinner asked her if she would mind keeping an eye on his daughter, who, though a married lady too--the lady made a little bow of acknowledgement of this tribute to her evidently settled-down appearance, though she was, in fact, a spinster--yet didn’t know her way about very well.

Then when the train began to move, and Sally’s face, as she leant out of the window to say goodbye, was a study in despair, Mr. Pinner relented enough to pat her tear-stained cheek, and running a few steps beside the carriage bade her not take on any more.

‘What’s done’s done,’ he called out after the train, by way of cheering her.

And Sally, dropping back into her corner, pulled out her handkerchief and wept.

§

Yes. What was done was done true enough, she thought, mopping the tears as they rolled down her face, including her having married Mr. Luke and his mother; for she now regarded him and his mother as all of a piece.

The lady at the other end of the carriage, who, however hard she tried, couldn’t take her eyes off her--and she did try very hard, for she hated staring at grief--ventured after a while to repeat Mr. Pinner’s advice, and suggested, though in more Luke-like language, that Sally shouldn’t take on. Whereupon Sally, the voice being sympathetic and the face kind, took on more than ever.

‘Oh, _please_ don’t,’ said the lady, much concerned, moving up to the seat opposite her. Such liquefaction she had never seen, nor such loveliness in spite of it. When she herself cried, which was very rarely--what was the good?--she became a swollen thing of lumps. ‘You mustn’t, really,’ she begged. ‘Your eyes--you simply mustn’t do anything to hurt them. What is it? Can I help at all? I’d love to if I could----’

By the time they were rushing through Bishops Stortford Sally had told her everything. Incoherent and sobbing at first, there was something about this lady that comforted her into calmness. She wasn’t at all like Mr. Thorpe, yet she took his sort of view, not Mr. Pinner’s, and was even more sympathetic, and even more understanding. It really seemed, from the questions she asked, as if she must know the Lukes personally. She said she didn’t, when Sally inquired if this were so, and laughed. She was very cheerful, and laughed several times, though she was so kind and sorry about everything.

‘You can’t go back there today, anyhow,’ she said at last. ‘Not into the middle of that party----’ she laughed and shuddered, for Sally had explained with a face of horror that nobody at all was going to be at the party who wasn’t either a lady or a gentleman except herself. ‘You shall come and stay with me for a few days till your Mr. Luke goes to Cambridge, and then we’ll see what happens. But I’m not going to let you go back into the clutches of that Mrs. Luke.’

And she leant forward and took her hand, and smiled so kindly and cheerfully, and said, ‘You’ll come for a day or two to our house, won’t you? My father isn’t there just now, and I’ve got it all to myself. Come till we have made up our minds about what to do next.’

This really seemed too good to be true. Sally turned scarlet. Was she saved? Saved, at the very last minute, from horror and disgrace?

‘Just for a day or two,’ said her new friend, who couldn’t take her eyes off Sally’s face, ’till your husband can find somewhere for you to live. We’ll help him to look. I’ll come with you, and help to find something. No, it doesn’t matter a bit about your not having any luggage--I can lend you everything. And we’ll write to him if you like, and tell him you can’t and won’t stay with his mother. Don’t you think this is quite the best plan? Don’t you, Sally?’

And she smiled, and asked if she might call her Sally.

‘But,’ hesitated Sally, for she didn’t want to get anybody into difficulties, ‘Father says I’m a runaway wife, and ’e wouldn’t ’arbour me ’imself because of that.’

‘Oh, but somebody must. And I’m the very one for it, because I’m so respectable, and not a wife. Don’t you worry, you lovely thing. We really must bring your Mr. Luke to his senses. By the way, hasn’t he got a Christian name?’

‘You never ’_eard_ such a name,’ said Sally earnestly, who felt, to her own great surprise, almost as comfortable and easy with this strange lady as she had with Mr. Soper. ‘Outlandish, I call it.’

Her new friend laughed again when she told her it was Jocelyn. ‘Aren’t you delicious,’ she said, her bright eyes screwed up with laughter.

Sally liked being called delicious. It gave her assurance. Jocelyn had called her lots of things like that in his red-eared moments, but they hadn’t done her much good, because they never seemed to go on into next day. This lady was quite in her ordinary senses, her ears were proper pale ears, and what she said sounded as though it would last. And how badly Sally needed reassurance after the things Mr. Pinner had said to her that morning!

‘Now you come along with me,’ said her friend, jumping up as the train ran into Liverpool Street, her eyes, which were like little black marbles, dancing. ‘And please call me Laura, will you? Because it’s my name.’

She leaned out of the window, and waved. A chauffeur came running down the platform and opened the door; a car was waiting; and in another minute Sally was in it, once more sunk in softness, and once more with a lovely fur rug over her knees, while sitting next to her, talking and laughing, was her new friend, and sitting opposite her, neither talking nor laughing, a smart young lady in black, carrying a bag, who had appeared from nowhere and wasn’t taken any notice of, and who looked steadily out of the window.

‘What a _day_ I’m ’avin’, thought Sally.

But when presently the car stopped at a big house in a great square with trees in the middle, and a footman appeared at the door, and in the hall Sally could see another one just like him, and then another, and yet another, she was definitely frightened.

‘Oh lor,’ she whispered, shrinking back into the car.

‘No--Laura,’ said her new friend, laughing and taking her hand; and drawing it through her arm she led her up the steps of the house, and into the middle of the first real fleshpots of her life.

§

Fleshpots.

She had thought her honeymoon was a honeymoon of fleshpots; she had been sure Almond Tree Cottage was the very home of them; but now she saw the real thing: fleshpots _in excelsis_.

Her father had said, ‘Beware of fleshpots,’ when he was expounding the doings of the Children of Israel to her of a Sunday afternoon, ‘they don’t do no one no good.’ And she had been brought up so carefully, so piously, so privately, that she had never come across that literature of luxury, those epics of fat things, that are lavishly provided for the poor and skimped. The flunkeys and the frocks, the country castles and the town palaces, the food, the jewels and the dukes, had remained outside her imaginative experience. What she had read had been her Bible, and a few books of her mother’s childhood in which people were sad, and good and ill, and died saying things that made her cry very much. There was nothing to set her dreaming in these. Life, she thought, was like that, except for the lucky ones such as herself, who had kind parents and a nice back parlour to sit and sew in when their work was done. There were the gentry, of course; they existed, she knew, but only knew vaguely. Entirely vague they had been in her mind till she became a Luke, and found herself engulfed by them; and what an awe-inspiring engulfing it had seemed to her, with Ammond handing round everything at meals, and tea on a table you didn’t sit up at!

Now, as her new friend’s arm propelled her past the blank-faced footmen, across the great marble-floored and columned hall, she realised that Almond Tree Cottage had been the merest wheelbarrow in size and fittings compared to this. This was grand. More--this was terrible. It was her idea of a cathedral or a museum, but not of a place human beings washed their hands in, and talked out loud.

‘P’raps,’ she murmured to the lady called Laura, holding back as she was about to be taken into a room which she could see at once she would never feel comfortable in, and where far away in the distance was another of those tables with tea on it that one didn’t sit up at, ‘p’raps, if you don’t mind, I’d better be gettin’ along after all----’ for, being polite, she had forced herself to bow with a nervous smile to a gentleman in black, who was standing about and whose eye had met hers, and he hadn’t taken any notice but looked as blank-faced as everybody else, and the rebuff had terribly embarrassed her.

‘Come along,’ was all Laura said to that, calling out over her shoulder to the same gentleman in black to see that a room was got ready for Mrs. Luke; and he answered, as polite and mild as milk, ‘Very good, m’lady----’ so he was a servant, and Laura was one of those ladies Sally had heard her parents sometimes allude to with awe, who are always being told they’re ladies every time any one speaks to them, and who were, so Mr. and Mrs. Pinner declared, the pick of the basket.

‘P’raps,’ murmured Sally again, faintly, for the thought of having got among the pick of the basket unnerved her, ‘I’d best do what Father said, and take a taxi....’

‘You shall if you really want to,’ said Laura, ‘but let’s have tea first. And think of that party! It’s raging at this minute. Oh, Sally--could you bear it?’

Sally sat down on the chair Laura pushed up for her. She sat down obediently, but only on the edge of it, her long slender legs tucked sideways, as one sits who isn’t at ease. No, she couldn’t bear to go back to that party; nor could she, waiting till it was over, go back after it and face Mrs. Luke. It was more than flesh and blood could manage.

Then, that being so, and seeing that her father wouldn’t have her, the only thing to do was to stay where she was till Usband went to Cambridge on Saturday, and be thankful she had this kind lady to be with, and try and swallow all the servants and marble, and do her best to behave grateful. It was only for a couple of days, for directly Usband got to Cambridge she would go after him as a wife should. Fallen on her feet wonderfully she had, Sally anxiously assured herself; but nevertheless, as she sat on the edge of her chair, and great pictures looked down at her from vast walls, she felt excessively uneasy.

‘Tell me some more about the Lukes,’ said Laura gaily, arranging a little table in front of her on which her cup and plate had a nice lot of room, and nothing got spilt or dropped. ‘I think they’re such fun.’

‘Fun?’ echoed Sally, her lips parting.

She stared at Laura. Fun? The Lukes?

‘I never ’eard of a ’usband bein’ fun,’ she said in a very low voice, her head drooping.

‘Perhaps that isn’t quite the word,’ said Laura, ‘though I believe it’s a very good way of approaching them.’ And then she paused, teapot in hand, her eyes on Sally’s face. ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘you know you’re the most utterly beautiful thing?’

Whereupon Sally started, for this was the way Mrs. Luke had begun with her, and said quickly, even as she had said then, ‘But I can’t ’elp it.’

‘Help it?’ echoed Laura, astonished.

‘People begins,’ said Sally anxiously, ‘with “Oh my, ain’t you beautiful,” and ends with bein’ angry. It ain’t as if I could ’_elp_ it,’ she said, looking up at her new friend with eyes in which tears were gathering, for it would be more than she could bear on her empty stomach--she had had no food since her breakfast in Mr. Thorpe’s car--if she too were going to be angry with her.

Really such an extraordinary piece of good fortune as this had never yet come Laura’s way.

§

Now was Sally shovelled up by chance from the bottom of the social ladder to the top, for Laura was the spinster daughter of a duke. He was so aged that, by sheer going on living, everything he had ever done, good and bad, had been forgotten, and at last he had become an object of universal respect. Ninety-three next birthday; a great age. And his eldest son, the prospective duke, was sixty-five,--a great age too for anything that is still prospective. He was a marquis, Sally learned with surprise presently, when she was having her tea and Laura, who perceived she needed soothing, was trying to distract her by telling her about her relations; for she failed to understand why he shouldn’t be a duke. Pinners produced Pinners; why not dukes dukes?

But Laura said these things couldn’t be explained, and hurried on.

The old duke had married three times, and Laura was the product of what the neat-phrased French would call the third bed. All the beds, first, second, and third, had long vanished, and of the third, which had been very fruitful, Laura, and her brother Charles, and her married sister Terry, were the only surviving traces. The second bed had been barren; the first had provided the heir, and three ancient ladies old enough to be Laura’s mothers, who were scattered over England in varying degrees of resignation, one being the widow of a bishop, another the widow of a Cabinet Minister, and the third not yet the widow of a club man and expert bridge-player, who never came home till next day.

‘Why don’t ’e?’ asked Sally, manners seeming to demand that she should say something when, for an instant, her friend paused.

But Laura said these things couldn’t be explained, and hurried on.

Much the liveliest of the beds had been the one she herself came out of, and her blood pressure--except during the last year of the War, when unceasing hard work, combined with a diet of practically continual boiled fish, reduced it to a comfortable normal--had always been higher than was convenient. This led her into excesses. She must be up and doing; she found it impossible to sit still. Vitality bubbled in her quick speech and danced in her black eyes. She was now thirty-five, round and stubby, fleet of foot and swift of reply, and her past was strewn with charities she had organised, dressmakers she had established, hat shops she had run, estate agencies she had started, hospital beds she had endowed, arts she had supported, geniuses she had discovered, and four lovers.

Four weren’t many, she thought, considering the piles her sister Terry had got through. Laura’s lovers had come and gone, as lovers do, and she hadn’t minded much, because neither had they. There was something too electric about her for love. She seemed to crackle in their very arms. This disconcerted them; and each in his turn married some one else.

For a long time now she had been bored, and bored violently, and by the time she came across Sally she had seen everything, been everything, heard everything and done everything; and the prospect of seeing and being and hearing and doing over and over again, till her joints cracked and her hair fell out, was boring her into fits.