Part 10

Throughout the holidays John sang his customary ballads, “The Bicester Ram,” “The Unquiet Grave,” and dozens of others. After songs there would be things to eat. Then a game of cards, and after that things to eat. Then a walk to the inn, to the church, to a farm, or to a friend’s where, in all jollity, there would be things to eat and drink. They went to a meet of the hounds, a most successful outing for it gave them ravening appetites. In short, as the cousin’s wife said when bidding farewell, it was a time of great enjoyment.

And Pettigrove said so too. He believed it, and yet was glad to be quit of his friends in order to contemplate the serene dawn that was to come at any hour now. By New Year’s Day Mrs. Cronshaw had not returned, but the big countryman was patient, his mind, though not at rest, was confident. The days passed as invisibly as warriors in a hostile country, and almost before he had begun to despair February came, a haggard month to follow a frosty January. Mist clung to the earth as tightly as the dense grey fur on the back of a cat, ice began to uncongeal, adjacent lands became indistinct, and distant fields could not be seen at all. The banks of the roads and the squat hedges were heavily dewed. The cries of invisible rooks, the bleat of unseen sheep, made yet more gloomy the contours of motionless trees wherefrom the slightest movement of a bird fetched a splatter of drops to the road, cold and uncheering.

All this inclemency crowded into the heart of the waiting man, a distress without a gleam of anger or doubt, but only a fond anxiety. Other anxieties came upon him which, without lessening his melancholy, somewhat diverted it: his wife suffered a sudden grave decline in health, and on calling in the doctor Pettigrove was made aware of her approaching end. Torn between a strange recovered fondness for his sinking wife and the romantic adventure with the widow, which, to his mind at such a juncture, wore the sourest aspect of infidelity, Pettigrove dwelt in remorse and grief until the night of St. Valentine’s Day, when he received a letter. It came from a coast town in Norfolk, from a hospital; Caroline, too, was ill. She made light of her illness, but it was clear to him now that this and this alone was the urgent reason of her retreat from Tull at Christmas. It was old tubercular trouble (that was consumption, wasn’t it?) which had driven her into sanatoriums on several occasions in recent years. She was getting better now, she wrote, but it would be months before she would be allowed to return. It had been rather a bad attack, so sudden. Now she had no other thought or desire in the world but to be back at Tull with her friend, and in time to see that fairy may tree at bloom in the wood—he had promised to show it to her—they would often go together, wouldn’t they—and she signed herself his, “with the deepest affection.”

He did not remember any promise to show her the tree, but he sat down straightway and wrote her a letter of love, incoherently disclosed and obscurely worded for any eyes but hers. He did not mention his wife; he had suddenly forgotten her. He sealed the letter and put it aside to be posted on the morrow. Then he crept back to his wife’s room and continued his sick vigil.

But in that dim room, lit by one small candle, he did not heed the invalid. His mind, feverishly alert, was devoted to thoughts of that other who also lay sick, and who had intimidated him. He had feared her, feared for himself. He had behaved like a lost wanderer who at night, deep in a forest, had come upon the embers of a fire left mysteriously glowing, and had crept up to it frightened, without stick or stone: if only he had conquered his fear he might have lain down and rested by its strange comfort. But now he was sure of her love, sure of his own, he was secure, he would lay down and rest. She would come with all the sweetness of her passion and the valour of her frailty, stretching smooth, quiet wings over his lost soul.

Then he began to be aware of a soft, insistent noise, tapping, tapping, tapping, that seemed to come from the front door below. To assure himself he listened intently, and soon it became almost the only sound in the world, clear but soft, sharp and thin, as if struck with the finger nails only, tap, tap, tap, quickly on the door. When the noise ceased he got up and groped stealthily down his narrow crooked staircase. At the bottom he waited in an uncanny pause until just beyond him he heard the gentle urgency again, tap, tap, and he flung open the door. There was enough gloomy light to reveal the emptiness of the porch; there was nothing there, nothing to be seen, but he could distinctly hear the sound of feet being vigorously shuffled on the doormat below him, as if the shoes of some light-foot visitor were being carefully cleaned before entry. Then it stopped. Beyond that—nothing. Pettigrove was afraid, he dared not cross the startling threshold, he shot back the door, bolted it in a fluster, and blundered away up the stairs.

And there was now darkness, the candle in his wife’s room having spent itself, but as a glow from the fire embers remained he did not hasten to light another candle. Instead, he fastened the bedroom door also, and stood filled with wondering uneasiness, dreading to hear the tap, tap, tap come again, just there, behind him. He listened for it with stopped breath, but he could hear nothing, not the faintest scruple of sound, not the beat of his own heart, not a flutter from the fire, not a rustle of feet, not a breath—no! not even a breathing! He rushed to the bed and struck a match: that was a dead face.... Under the violence of his sharpening shock he sank upon the bed beside dead Carrie and a faint crepuscular agony began to gleam over the pensive darkness of his mind, with a promise of mad moonlight to follow.

Two days later a stranger came to the Pettigrove’s door, a short brusque, sharp-talking man with iron-grey hair and iron-rimmed spectacles. He was an ironmonger.

“Mr. Pettigrove? My name is Cronshaw, of Eastbourne, rather painful errand, my sister-in-law, Mrs. Cronshaw, tenant of yours, I believe.”

Pettigrove stiffened into antagonism: what the devil was all this? “Come in,” he remarked grimly.

“Thank you,” said Cronshaw, following Pettigrove into the parlour where, with many sighs and much circumstance, he doffed his overcoat and stood his umbrella in a corner. “Had to walk from the station, no conveyances; that’s pretty stiff, miles and miles.”

“Have a drop of wine?” invited Pettigrove.

“Thank you,” said the visitor.

“It’s dandelion.”

“Very kind of you, I’m sure.” Cronshaw drew a chair up to the fireplace, though the fire had not been lit, and the grate was full of ashes, and asked if he might smoke. Pettigrove did not mind; he poured out a glass of the yellow wine while Cronshaw lit his pipe. The room smelled stuffy, heavy noises came from overhead as if men were moving furniture. The stranger swallowed a few drops of the wine, coughed, and said: “My sister-in-law is dead, I’m sorry to say. You had not heard, I suppose?”

“Dead!” whispered Pettigrove. “Mrs. Cronshaw! No, no, I had not, I had not heard that, I did not know. Mrs. Cronshaw dead—is it true?”

“Ah,” said the stranger with a laboured sigh. “Two nights ago in a hospital at Mundesley. I’ve just come on from there. It was very sudden, O, frightfully sudden, but it was not unexpected, poor woman, it’s been off and on with her for years. She was very much attached to this village, I suppose, and we’re going to bury her here, it was her last request. That’s what I want to do now. I want to arrange about the burial and the disposal of her things and to give up possession of your house. I’m very sorry for that.”

“I’m uncommon grieved to hear this,” said Pettigrove. “She was a handsome lady.”

“O yes,” the ironmonger took out his pocket-book and prepared to write in it.

“A handsome lady,” continued the countryman tremulously, “handsome, handsome.”

At that moment someone came heavily down the stairs and knocked at the parlour door.

“Come in,” cried Pettigrove. A man with red face and white hair shuffled into the room; he was dressed in a black suit that had been made for a man not only bigger, but probably different in other ways.

“We shall have to shift her down here now,” he began. “I was sure we should, the coffin’s too big to get round that awkward crook in these stairs when it’s loaded. In fact, ’tis impossible. Better have her down now afore we put her in, or there’ll be an accident on the day as sure as judgment.” The man, then noticing Cronshaw, said: “Good-morning, sir, you’ll excuse me.”

The ironmonger stared at him with horror, and then put his notebook away.

“Yes, yes, then,” mumbled Pettigrove. “I’ll come up in a few minutes.”

The man went out and Cronshaw jumped up and said: “You’ll pardon me, Mr. Pettigrove, I had no idea that you had had a bereavement too.”

“My wife,” said Pettigrove dully, “two nights ago.”

“Two nights ago! I am very sorry, most sorry,” stammered the other, picking up his umbrella and hat. “I’ll go away. What a sad coincidence!”

“There’s no call to do that; what’s got to be done must be done.”

“I’ll not detain you long then, just a few details: I am most sorry, very sorry, it’s extraordinary.”

He took out his notebook again—it had red edges and a fat elastic band—and after conferring with Pettigrove for some time the stranger went off to see the vicar, saying, as he shook hands: “I shall of course see you again when it is all over. How bewildering it is, and what a shock it is; from one day to another, and then nothing; and the day after to-morrow they’ll be buried beside one another. I am very sorry, most sorry. I shall of course come and see you again when it is all over.”

After he had gone Pettigrove walked about the room murmuring: “She was a lady, a handsome lady,” and then, still murmuring, he stumbled up the stairs to the undertakers. His wife lay on the bed in a white gown. He enveloped her stiff thin body in a blanket and carried it downstairs to the parlour; the others, with much difficulty, carried down the coffin and when they had fixed it upon some trestles they unwrapped Carrie from the blankets and laid her in it.

Caroline and Carrie were buried on the same day in adjoining graves, buried by the same men, and as the ironmonger was prevented by some other misfortune from attending the obsequies there were no other mourners than Pettigrove. The workshop sign of the Tull carpenter bore the following notice:

Small ☞COMPLETE UNDERTAKER Hearse Kept.

and therefore it was he who ushered the handsome lady from the station on that bitter day. Frost was so heavy that the umbrage of pine and fir looked woolly, thick grey swabs. Horses stood miserably in the frozen fields, breathing into any friendly bush. Rooks pecked industriously at the tough pastures, but wiser fowls, unlike the fabulous good child, could be neither seen nor heard. And all day someone was grinding corn at the millhouse; the engine was old and kept on emitting explosions that shook the neighbourhood like a dreadful bomb. Pettigrove, who had not provided himself with a black overcoat and therefore wore none at all, shivered so intensely during the ceremony that the keen edge of his grief was dulled, and indeed from that time onwards his grief, whatever its source, seemed deprived of all keenness: it just dulled him with a permanent dullness.

He caused to be placed on his wife’s grave a headstone, quite small, not a yard high, inscribed to

CAROLINE The beloved wife of John Pettigrove

Some days after its erection he was astonished to find the headstone had fallen flat on its face. It was very strange, but after all it was a small matter, a simple affair, so in the dusk he himself took a spade and set it up again. A day or two later it had fallen once more. He was now inclined to some suspicion, he fancied that mischievous boys had done it; he would complain to the vicar. But Pettigrove was an easy-going man, he did not complain; he replaced the stone, setting it more deeply in the earth and padding the turf more firmly around it.

When it fell the third time he was astonished and deeply moved, but he was no longer in doubt, and as he once more made a good upheaval by the grave in the dusk he said in his mind, and he felt too in his heart, that he understood.

“It will not fall again,” he said, and he was right: it did not.

Pettigrove himself lived for another score of years, during which the monotony of his life was but mildly varied; he just went on registering births and deaths and rearing little oaks and pines, firs and sycamores. Sentimental deference to the oft-repeated wish of his wife led him to join the church choir and sing its anthems and hymns with a secular blitheness that was at least mellifluous. Moreover, after a year or two, he _did_ become a parish councillor and in a modest way was something of a “shining light.”

“If I were you,” observed an old countryman to him, “and I had my way, I know what I would do: I would live in a little house and have a quiet life, and I wouldn’t care the toss of a ha’penny for nothing and nobody!”

In the time of May, always, Pettigrove would wander in Tull Great Wood as far as the hidden pleasaunce where the hawthorn so whitely bloomed. None but he knew of that, or remembered it, and when its dying petals were heaped upon the grass he gathered handfuls to keep in his pocket till they rotted. Sometimes he thought he would leave Tull and see something of the world; he often thought of that, but it seemed as if time had stabilized and contracted round his heart and he did not go. At last, after twenty years of widowhood, he died and was buried, and this was the manner of that.

Two men were digging his grave on the morning of the interment, a summer’s day so everlasting beautiful that it was incredible anyone should be dead. The two men, an ancient named Jethro and a younger whom he called Mark, went to sit in the cool porch for a brief rest. The work on the grave had been very much delayed, but now the old headstone was laid on one side, and most of the earth that had covered his wife’s body was heaped in untidy mounds upon the turf close by. Otherwise there was no change in the yard or the trees that grew so high, the grass that grew so greenly, the dark brick wall, or the door of fugitive blue; there was even a dappled goat quietly cropping. A woman came into the porch, remarked upon the grand day, and then passed into the church to her task of tidying up for the ceremony. Jethro took a swig of drink from a bottle and handed it to his mate.

“You don’t remember old Fan as used to clean the church, do you? No, ’twas ’fore you come about these parts. She was a smartish old gal. Bother me if one of they goats didn’t follow her into the darn church one day, ah, and wouldn’t be drove out on it, neither, no, and she chasing of it from here to there and one place and another but out it would not go, that goat. And at last it act-u-ally marched up into the pulpit and putt its two forelegs on the holy book and said ’Baa-a-a!’” Here Jethro gave a prolonged imitation of a goat’s cry. “Well, old Fan had been a bit skeered but she was so overcome by that bit of piety that, darn me, if she didn’t sit down and play the organ for it!”

Mark received this narration with a lack-lustre air and at once the two men resumed their work. Meanwhile a man ascended the church tower; other men had gone into the home of the dead man. Soon the vicar came hurrying through the blue door in the wall and the bell gave forth its first solemn toll.

“Hey, Jethro,” called Mark from the grave. “What d’you say’s the name of this chap?”

“Pettigrove. Hurry up, now.”

Mark, after bending down, whispered from the grave: “What was his wife’s name?”

“Why, man alive, that ’ud be Pettigrove, too.”

The bell in the tower gave another profoundly solemn beat.

“What’s the name on that headstone?” asked Mark.

“Caroline Pettigrove. What be you thinking on?”

“We’re in the wrong hole, Jethro; come and see for yourself, the plate on this old coffin says Caroline Cronshaw, see for yourself, we’re in the wrong hole.”

Again the bell voiced its melancholy admonition.

Jethro descended the short ladder and stood in the grave with Mark just as the cortège entered the church by the door on the opposite side of the yard. He knelt down and rubbed with his own fingers the dulled inscription on the mouldering coffin; there was no doubt about it, Caroline Cronshaw lay there.

“Well, may I go to glory,” slowly said the old man. It may have occurred to Mark that this was an extravagantly remote destination to prescribe; at any rate he said: “There ain’t no time, now, come on.”

“Who the devil be she? However come that wrong headstone to be putt on this wrong grave?” quavered the kneeling man.

“Are you coming out?” growled Mark, standing with one foot on the ladder, “or ain’t you? They’ll be chucking him on top of you in a couple o’ minutes. There’s no time, I tell you.”

“’Tis a strange come-up as ever I see,” said the old man; striking one wall of the grave with his hand: “that’s where we should be, Mark, next door, but there’s no time to change it and it must go as it is, Mark. Well, it’s fate; what is to be must be whether it’s good or right and you can’t odds it, you darn’t go against it, or you be wrong.” They stood in the grave muttering together. “Not a word, Mark, mind you!” At last they shovelled some earth back upon the tell-tale name-plate, climbed out of the grave, drew up the ladder, and stood with bent heads as the coffin was borne from the church towards them. It was lowered into the grave, and at the “earth to earth” Jethro, with a flirt of his spade dropped in a handful of sticky marl, another at “ashes to ashes,” and again at the “dust to dust.” Finally, when they were alone together again, they covered in the old lovers, dumping the earth tightly and everlastingly about them, and reset the headstone, Jethro remarking as they did so: “That headstone, well, ’tis a mystery, Mark! And I can’t bottom it, I can’t bottom it at all, ’tis a mystery.”

And indeed, how should it not be, for the secret had long since been forgotten by its originator.

_The Fancy Dress Ball_

There was a young fellow named Bugloss. He wore cufflinks made of agate with studs to match but was otherwise an agreeable person who suffered much from a remarkable diffidence, one of nature’s minor inconsistencies having been to endow him with a mute desire for romantic adventure and an entire incapacity to inaugurate any such thing.

It was in architecture that he found his way of life, quite a profitable and genteel way; for while other hands and heads devised the mere details of drainage, of window and wall, staircase, cupboard, and floor, in fact each mechanical thing down to the hooks and bells in every room, he it was who painted those entrancing draughts of elevation and the general prospect (with a few enigmatic but graceful trees, clouds in the offing, and a tiny postman plodding sideways up the carriage drive) which lured the fond fly into the architectural parlour. It must be confessed that he himself lived in rooms over the shop of a hairdresser, whose window displayed the elegantly coiffed head and bust of a wax lady suffering either from an acute attack of jaundice or the effects of a succession of late nights: next door was an establishment dealing exclusively, but not exhaustingly, in mangles and perambulators. In Bugloss’s room there were two bell handles with wires looking very handy and complete, yet whenever he desired the attendance of the maid he had (_a_) to take a silver whistle from his pocket; (_b_) to open the door; and (_c_) to blow it smartly in the passage.

His exceeding shyness was humiliating to himself and annoying to people of friendly disposition, it could not have been more preposterous had he been condemned to wear a false nose; he might have gone (he may even now be going) to his grave without once looking into a woman’s eyes. What a pity! His own eyes were worth looking at; he was really a nice young man, tall and slender with light fluffy hair, who if he couldn’t hide his amiable light under a bushel certainly behaved as if it wasn’t there. Things were so until one day he chanced to read with envious pleasure but a good deal of scepticism a book called _Anatol_ by a Viennese writer; almost immediately the fascinating possibilities of romantic infidelity were confirmed by a quarrel which began in the hairdresser’s house between the young hairdresser and his wife, Monsieur and Madame Rabignol, and lasted for a week in the course of which Bugloss learned that the hairdresser was indulging in precisely one of those intrigues with an unknown lady living somewhere near by; Madame Rabignol, charming but virulent, protested a thousand times that it must be a base woman who walked the streets at night, and that Monsieur Rabignol was a low pig. The fair temptress, it appeared, was given to the use of a toilet unguent with the beguiling misdescription of “Vanishing Face Cream”; that was an unfortunate circumstance, because the wife of the hairdresser, a very cute woman, on her husband’s return from an evening’s absence, invariably kissed him and smelt him.

“Evil communications,” saith St. Paul (borrowing the phrase from Menander), “corrupt good manners,” and his notion must have something of truth in it, for these domestic revelations produced an unusual stir in the Bugloss bosom—he bought a ticket for a popular fancy dress ball and made a mighty resolve to discard his pusillanimous self with one grand gesture and there and then take the plunge. At a fancy dress ball you could do that; everyone made a fool of himself more or less; and Bugloss determined to plunge into whatever there was to plunge in. This was desperately unwise, but you are not to suppose that he harboured any looseness or want of principle; he was good and modest, and virtuous as any young man could possibly be; he only hoped, at the very least, to look some fair girl deep in the eyes. So he designed an oriental costume, simple to make (being loose-fitting), and having bought quantities of purple and crimson fabric he wrapped them up and sent the office-boy with his design, materials, measurements, and instructions to a dressmaker in the neighbourhood, whom he wisely thought would make a better job of it than a tailor. When the costume was finished he was delighted; it was magnificent, resplendent, artistic, and the dressmaker’s charge was moderate.

On the night of the ball, a warm August night with soft thrilling air and a sky of sombre velvet, he drove in a closed cab. Dancing was in the open, the lawns of a mansion were lent for the occasion, and Bugloss went rather late to escape notice—nearly eleven o’clock—but in the cab his timorousness conspiring against him had deepened to palpitating dejection; he was afraid again, the grand gesture was forgotten, and his attire was fantastically guarded from the public eye. From his window he had watched the arrival of the cab and had slunk down to it secretly—not a word to the Rabignols!—in a bowler hat and a mackintosh that reached to his feet; his fancy shoes were concealed under a pair of goloshes, the bright tasselled cap was in his pocket.