The Lost Girl Part 5

They felt safe with her. They knew she would not let them down. She would not intrigue into marriage, or try and make use of them in any way. She didn't care about them. And so, because of her isolate self-sufficiency in the fray, her wild, overweening backbone, they were ready to attend on her and serve her. Headley in particular hoped he might overcome her. He was a well-built fellow with sandy hair and a pugnacious face. The battle-spirit was really roused in him, and he heartily liked the woman. If he could have overcome her he would have been mad to marry her.

With him, she summoned up all her mettle. She had never to be off her guard for a single minute. The treacherous suddenness of his attack--for he was treachery itself--had to be met by the voltaic suddenness of her resistance and counter-attack. It was nothing less than magical the way the soft, slumbering body of the woman could leap in one jet into terrible, overwhelming voltaic force, something strange and ma.s.sive, at the first treacherous touch of the man's determined hand. His strength was so different from hers--quick, muscular, lambent. But hers was deep and heaving, like the strange heaving of an earthquake, or the heave of a bull as it rises from earth. And by sheer non-human power, electric and paralysing, she could overcome the brawny red-headed fellow.

He was nearly a match for her. But she did not like him. The two were enemies--and good acquaintances. They were more or less matched. But as he found himself continually foiled, he became sulky, like a bear with a sore head. And then she avoided him.

She really liked Young and James much better. James was a quick, slender, dark-haired fellow, a gentleman, who was always trying to catch her out with his quickness. She liked his fine, slim limbs, and his exaggerated generosity. He would ask her out to ridiculously expensive suppers, and send her sweets and flowers, fabulously recherche. He was always immaculately well-dressed.

"Of course, as a lady _and_ a nurse," he said to her, "you are two sorts of women in one."

But she was not impressed by his wisdom.

She was most strongly inclined to Young. He was a plump young man of middle height, with those blue eyes of a little boy which are so knowing: particularly of a woman's secrets. It is a strange thing that these childish men have such a deep, half-perverse knowledge of the other s.e.x. Young was certainly innocent as far as acts went. Yet his hair was going thin at the crown already.

He also played with her--being a doctor, and she a nurse who encouraged it. He too touched her and kissed her: and did _not_ rouse her to contest. For his touch and his kiss had that nearness of a little boy's, which nearly melted her. She could almost have succ.u.mbed to him. If it had not been that with him there was no question of succ.u.mbing. She would have had to take him between her hands and caress and cajole him like a cherub, into a fall. And though she would have like to do so, yet that inflexible stiffness of her backbone prevented her. She could not do as she liked. There was an inflexible fate within her, which shaped her ends.

Sometimes she wondered to herself, over her own virginity. Was it worth much, after all, behaving as she did? Did she care about it, anyhow? Didn't she rather despise it? To sin in thought was as bad as to sin in act. If the thought was the same as the act, how much more was her behaviour equivalent to a whole committal? She wished she were wholly committed. She wished she had gone the whole length.

But sophistry and wishing did her no good. There she was, still isolate. And still there was that in her which would preserve her intact, sophistry and deliberate intention notwithstanding. Her time was up. She was returning to Woodhouse virgin as she had left it. In a measure she felt herself beaten. Why? Who knows. But so it was, she felt herself beaten, condemned to go back to what she was before. Fate had been too strong for her and her desires: fate which was not an external a.s.sociation of forces, but which was integral in her own nature. Her own inscrutable nature was her fate: sore against her will.

It was August when she came home, in her nurse's uniform. She was beaten by fate, as far as chast.i.ty and virginity went. But she came home with high material hopes. Here was James Houghton's own daughter. She had an affluent future ahead of her. A fully-qualified maternity nurse, she was going to bring all the babies of the district easily and triumphantly into the world. She was going to charge the regulation fee of two guineas a case: and even on a modest estimate of ten babies a month, she would have twenty guineas. For well-to-do mothers she would charge from three to five guineas. At this calculation she would make an easy three hundred a year, without slaving either. She would be independent, she could laugh every one in the face.

She bounced back into Woodhouse to make her fortune.

CHAPTER IV

TWO WOMEN DIE

It goes without saying that Alvina Houghton did not make her fortune as a maternity nurse. Being her father's daughter, we might almost expect that she did not make a penny. But she did--just a few pence.

She had exactly four cases--and then no more.

The reason is obvious. Who in Woodhouse was going to afford a two-guinea nurse, for a confinement? And who who was going to engage Alvina Houghton, even if they were ready to stretch their purse-strings? After all, they all knew her as _Miss_ Houghton, with a stress on the _Miss_, and they could not conceive of her as Nurse Houghton. Besides, there seemed something positively indecent in technically engaging one who was so much part of themselves. They all preferred either a simple mid-wife, or a nurse procured out of the unknown by the doctor.

If Alvina wanted to make her fortune--or even her living--she should have gone to a strange town. She was so advised by every one she knew. But she never for one moment reflected on the advice. She had become a maternity nurse in order to practise in Woodhouse, just as James Houghton had purchased his elegancies to sell in Woodhouse.

And father and daughter alike calmly expected Woodhouse demand to rise to their supply. So both alike were defeated in their expectations.

For a little while Alvina flaunted about in her nurse's uniform.

Then she left it off. And as she left it off she lost her bounce, her colour, and her flesh. Gradually she shrank back to the old, slim, reticent pallor, with eyes a little too large for her face.

And now it seemed her face was a little too long, a little gaunt.

And in her civilian clothes she seemed a little dowdy, shabby. And altogether, she looked older: she looked more than her age, which was only twenty-four years. Here was the old Alvina come back, rather battered and deteriorated, apparently. There was even a tiny touch of the trollops in her dowdiness--so the shrewd-eyed collier-wives decided. But she was a lady still, and unbeaten. Undeniably she was a lady. And that was rather irritating to the well-to-do and florid daughter of W.H. Johnson, next door but one. Undeniably a lady, and undeniably unmastered. This last was irritating to the good-natured but easy-coming young men in the Chapel Choir, where she resumed her seat. These young men had the good nature of dogs that wag their tails and expect to be patted. And Alvina did not pat them. To be sure, a pat from such a shabbily-black-kid-gloved hand would not have been so flattering--she need not imagine it! The way she hung back and looked at them, the young men, as knowing as if she were a prost.i.tute, and yet with the well-bred indifference of a lady--well, it was almost offensive.

As a matter of fact, Alvina was detached for the time being from her interest in young men. Manchester House had settled down on her like a doom. There was the quartered shop, through which one had to worm one's enc.u.mbered way in the gloom--unless one liked to go miles round a back street, to the yard entry. There was James Houghton, faintly powdered with coal-dust, flitting back and forth in a fever of nervous frenzy, to Throttle-Ha'penny--so carried away that he never saw his daughter at all the first time he came in, after her return. And when she reminded him of her presence, with her--"h.e.l.lo, father!"--he merely glancied hurriedly at her, as if vexed with her interruption, and said:

"Well, Alvina, you're back. You're back to find us busy." And he went off into his ecstasy again.

Mrs. Houghton was now very weak, and so nervous in her weakness that she could not bear the slightest sound. Her greatest horror was lest her husband should come into the room. On his entry she became blue at the lips immediately, so he had to hurry out again. At last he stayed away, only hurriedly asking, each time he came into the house, "How is Mrs. Houghton? Ha!" Then off into uninterrupted Throttle-Ha'penny ecstasy once more.

When Alvina went up to her mother's room, on her return, all the poor invalid could do was to tremble into tears, and cry faintly:

"Child, you look dreadful. It isn't you."

This from the pathetic little figure in the bed had struck Alvina like a blow.

"Why not, mother?" she asked.

But for her mother she had to remove her nurse's uniform. And at the same time, she had to const.i.tute herself nurse. Miss Frost, and a woman who came in, and the servant had been nursing the invalid between them. Miss Frost was worn and rather heavy: her old buoyancy and brightness was gone. She had become irritable also. She was very glad that Alvina had returned to take this responsibility of nursing off her shoulders. For her wonderful energy had ebbed and oozed away.

Alvina said nothing, but settled down to her task. She was quiet and technical with her mother. The two loved one another, with a curious impersonal love which had not a single word to exchange: an almost after-death love. In these days Mrs. Houghton never talked--unless to fret a little. So Alvina sat for many hours in the lofty, sombre bedroom, looking out silently on the street, or hurriedly rising to attend the sick woman. For continually came the fretful murmur:

"Vina!"

To sit still--who knows the long discipline of it, nowadays, as our mothers and grandmothers knew. To sit still, for days, months, and years--perforce to sit still, with some dignity of tranquil bearing.

Alvina was old-fashioned. She had the old, womanly faculty for sitting quiet and collected--not indeed for a life-time, but for long spells together. And so it was during these months nursing her mother. She attended constantly on the invalid: she did a good deal of work about the house: she took her walks and occupied her place in the choir on Sunday mornings. And yet, from August to January, she seemed to be seated in her chair in the bedroom, sometimes reading, but mostly quite still, her hands quietly in her lap, her mind subdued by musing. She did not even think, not even remember.

Even such activity would have made her presence too disturbing in the room. She sat quite still, with all her activities in abeyance--except that strange will-to-pa.s.sivity which was by no means a relaxation, but a severe, deep, soul-discipline.

For the moment there was a sense of prosperity--or probable prosperity, in the house. And there was an abundance of Throttle-Ha'penny coal. It was dirty ashy stuff. The lower bars of the grate were constantly blanked in with white powdery ash, which it was fatal to try to poke away. For if you poked and poked, you raised white c.u.mulus clouds of ash, and you were left at last with a few darkening and sulphurous embers. But even so, by continuous application, you could keep the room moderately warm, without feeling you were consuming the house's meat and drink in the grate.

Which was one blessing.

The days, the months darkened past, and Alvina returned to her old thinness and pallor. Her fore-arms were thin, they rested very still in her lap, there was a ladylike stillness about them as she took her walk, in her lingering, yet watchful fashion. She saw everything. Yet she pa.s.sed without attracting any attention.

Early in the year her mother died. Her father came and wept self-conscious tears, Miss Frost cried a little, painfully. And Alvina cried also: she did not quite know why or wherefore. Her poor mother! Alvina had the old-fashioned wisdom to let be, and not to think. After all, it was not for her to reconstruct her parents'

lives. She came after them. Her day was not their day, their life was not hers. Returning up-channel to re-discover their course was quite another matter from flowing down-stream into the unknown, as they had done thirty years before. This supercilious and impertinent exploration of the generation gone by, by the present generation, is nothing to our credit. As a matter of fact, no generation repeats the mistakes of the generation ahead, any more than any river repeats its course. So the young need not be so proud of their superiority over the old. The young generation glibly makes its own mistakes: and _how_ detestable these new mistakes are, why, only the future will be able to tell us. But be sure they are quite as detestable, quite as full of lies and hypocrisy, as any of the mistakes of our parents. There is no such thing as _absolute_ wisdom.

Wisdom has reference only to the past. The future remains for ever an infinite field for mistakes. You can't know beforehand.

So Alvina refrained from pondering on her mother's life and fate.

Whatever the fate of the mother, the fate of the daughter will be otherwise. That is organically inevitable. The business of the daughter is with her own fate, not with her mother's.

Miss Frost however meditated bitterly on the fate of the poor dead woman. Bitterly she brooded on the lot of woman. Here was Clariss Houghton, married, and a mother--and dead. What a life! Who was responsible? James Houghton. What ought James Houghton to have done differently? Everything. In short, he should have been somebody else, and not himself. Which is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of idealism. The universe should be something else, and not what it is: so the nonsense of idealistic conclusion. The cat should not catch the mouse, the mouse should not nibble holes in the table-cloth, and so on and so on, in the House that Jack Built.

But Miss Frost sat by the dead in grief and despair. This was the end of another woman's life: such an end! Poor Clariss: guilty James.

Yet why? Why was James more guilty than Clariss? Is the only aim and end of a man's life, to make some woman, or parcel of women, happy?

Why? Why should anybody expect to be _made happy_, and develop heart-disease if she isn't? Surely Clariss' heart-disease was a more emphatic sign of obstinate self-importance than ever James'

shop-windows were. She expected to be _made happy_. Every woman in Europe and America expects it. On her own head then if she is made unhappy: for her expectation is arrogant and impertinent. The be-all and end-all of life doesn't lie in feminine happiness--or in any happiness. Happiness is a sort of soap-tablet--he won't be happy till he gets it, and when he's got it, the precious baby, it'll cost him his eyes and his stomach. Could anything be more puerile than a mankind howling because it isn't happy: like a baby in the bath!

Poor Clariss, however, was dead--and if she had developed heart-disease because she wasn't happy, well, she had died of her own heart-disease, poor thing. Wherein lies every moral that mankind can wish to draw.

Miss Frost wept in anguish, and saw nothing but another woman betrayed to sorrow and a slow death. Sorrow and a slow death, because a man had married her. Miss Frost wept also for herself, for her own sorrow and slow death. Sorrow and slow death, because a man had _not_ married her. Wretched man, what is he to do with these exigeant and never-to-be-satisfied women? Our mothers pined because our fathers drank and were rakes. Our wives pine because we are virtuous but inadequate. Who is this sphinx, this woman? Where is the Oedipus that will solve her riddle of happiness, and then strangle her?--only to marry his own mother!

In the months that followed her mother's death, Alvina went on the same, in abeyance. She took over the housekeeping, and received one or two overflow pupils from Miss Frost, young girls to whom she gave lessons in the dark drawing-room of Manchester House. She was busy--chiefly with housekeeping. There seemed a great deal to put in order after her mother's death.

She sorted all her mother's clothes--expensive, old-fashioned clothes, hardly worn. What was to be done with them? She gave them away, without consulting anybody. She kept a few private things, she inherited a few pieces of jewellery. Remarkable how little trace her mother left--hardly a trace.

She decided to move into the big, monumental bedroom in front of the house. She liked s.p.a.ce, she liked the windows. She was strictly mistress, too. So she took her place. Her mother's little sitting-room was cold and disused.