The Native Heath, page 4
“Gossiping in the village shop, I suppose, and forgetting all about me.”
“Oh, dear, no—well, not exactly,” Mrs. Prentice replied. She could not tell Marian what she had been doing, but she was incapable of extemporizing. “I met Miss Pope.” She paused, trying to remember what she and Miss Pope had talked about, and after a moment it came back to her. “She says we’re going to be a New Town.”
It was fortunate that Miss Pope had told her this news, for Marian was so interested in it that she made no further enquiries as to how her mother had spent the morning.
“What—here in Goatstock?” she said. “Of course there have been rumours about it for ages, but I didn’t know it was settled. Is it definite?”
“So Miss Pope says. She’s very much against it. She says Goatstock will be swallowed up.”
By this time they were in the kitchen, and Marian had begun to peel potatoes for lunch. “I know one person who’ll be pleased,” she said. “And that’s Harriet.”
Mrs. Prentice thought that this hardly mattered, and that Miss Pope was a far better judge of the general good than Harriet Finch. But she did not say so, because Harriet was Marian’s friend and it did not do to criticize one’s daughter’s friends.
“Harriet has always wanted to live in a town, but of course she can’t because Lady Finch won’t budge. It will be like the mountain coming to Mahomet.”
Mrs. Prentice laughed. She did not quite understand what Marian meant (for surely it was Mahomet who went to the mountain?), but she was glad to see her daughter so gay and cheerful. Marian was looking extremely well, in spite of her hard life and the dreadful hospital food in the Nurses’ Home.
“Of course it won’t matter to me,” Marian went on. “I shall be married long before the New Town gets itself built. It won’t be built for years. You’ll have to take lots of photographs and send them out to me.”
She spoke casually, and her voice was as cheerful as ever. But Mrs. Prentice found it hard to make a casual, cheerful reply.
She had nothing against missionaries, and no doubt Hubert was an excellent one. She had nothing against Africa. But why couldn’t Marian be like other girls? Other girls did not get engaged to missionaries; other girls did not propose to spend their married lives nursing the heathen under the burning African sun.
No, not the heathen. They would be Hubert’s converts. But it was the same thing.
“My photographs never seem to come out,” she said.
CHAPTER III
The people who lived in Goatstock spoke of it as rural, but it was only a few miles from a manufacturing town. If it had not been for the steep and rugged hill to the east Goatstock might already have been engulfed by Reddrod, which lay beyond that hill and which was a by-word for ugliness, dirt and progress. The hill kept the Reddrod suburbs at bay, and its long ridge made a dividing line between the smoky, industrial part of the county and the fertile agricultural plain to the west. Protected by this geological rampart, Goatstock had remained a village.
It was a long, narrow village, bounded by the hill on one side and the canal on the other. To the south was the main road, with an efficient hourly bus service to Reddrod, or, in the other direction, to a small country town which people never visited unless they wanted to buy the gingerbread cake which was its sole claim to fame. The newer houses in Goatstock were all built on or near this main road, and the other end of the village remained much what it had been fifty years ago.
Here, in what might be called the slums, lived Lady Finch and her niece Harriet. No one knew for certain whether Lady Finch was very hard-up or very mean, but they lived in a plain little stone house whose windows needed painting and whose roof sagged alarmingly in the middle. It was called Urn Cottage; it was old, and had always borne this name, and neither Lady Finch nor Harriet minded, but Mrs. Prentice thought it was rather a peculiar name and one with morbid associations. She had once suggested to Harriet that the name was probably a corruption of heron, and that Heron Cottage would sound much nicer; but Harriet had replied, with a sort of mad logic, that her aunt simply doted on the goldfish.
The house stood a little above the road, and was approached by a short flight of steps and a stoneflagged path. There was quite a big garden behind it, but in front there was only a small plot of grass, at the top of the steps, and in the centre of this plot an extremely unornamental square pool where Lady Finch kept her goldfish. Lady Finch was the widow of a baronet, and this gave her a certain prestige in a neighbourhood where titles were rare, but her numerous interests, of which goldfish-culture was probably the least unusual, made people say she was eccentric.
One was never quite sure of one’s welcome at Urn Cottage, and if Marian went uninvited she always approached it with caution. Of course Harriet would be glad to see her, but it was as well to make sure that Harriet was at home. This evening she stood for a minute at the top of the steps, wondering whether to ring the bell or yodel outside Harriet’s bedroom window. But just then Harriet came round the corner of the house, carrying a watering-can, and shouted a greeting.
“Good,” said Harriet. “Good to see you again. And we’ve had such a tiresome day. I need a respite.”
Marian laughed. Harriet looked as if she had had a tiresome day; her fair, silky hair was tumbling over her eyes and her hands were streaked with mud.
“You’re awfully unkempt,” she said.
“Why didn’t you come sooner?” Harriet demanded, putting down the watering-can and splashing the water over her shoes as she did so. Marian replied that she had only got home yesterday.
“That’s an age. I suppose parental claims come first. But I wouldn’t know about that, being an orphan.”
Harriet had a strong sense of drama, and as she spoke she instinctively assumed the face and bearing of an orphan—a pathetic, neglected orphan, alone in the world. It was easy for her, for she was small and thin and could look meek enough when she chose. But Marian rather disapproved of this play-acting, and she pretended not to notice.
“I came as soon as I could,” she said. It was not quite true, but Harriet accepted it.
“There’s masses of news,” she said cheerfully, abandoning her orphanhood. “Just a minute while I water the goldfish and then we’ll go in and talk.”
She poured the water into the pond. Marian thought the goldfish were very dull creatures, neither pets nor useful. She had often said so before, but that did not stop her from repeating it. Harriet protested that they were very intelligent.
“In their own way,” she added. “I mean, they are intelligent fish, not intelligent human beings.” She looked across at Marian and laughed. “You think they should be a dog, don’t you?”
“A dog?”
“An adoring dog. That’s what people who live in the country ought to keep. And useful hens, and perhaps a sleek tabby cat.”
Instead of which the Finches had goldfish, and bees, and a tortoise. The bees belonged to Lady Finch, the tortoise was Harriet’s, and they shared the goldfish between them.
“Perhaps I will have a dog, one day,” Harriet went on. “A large dog with a long pedigree, to give me moral support. An elkhound, or perhaps a Great Dane.”
Marian was just going to say that these would cost too much to feed, when she saw that Harriet was joking. It was tiresome that she always made fun of conventional country customs, such as keeping a dog or going for nice walks.
She sometimes thought Harriet had a faint touch of Lady Finch’s eccentricity, but one couldn’t say it ran in the family, for they were not related by blood. Harriet was the daughter of Sir Michael Finch’s brother; her parents had died young and Lady Finch had brought her up. Perhaps it was being brought up by Lady Finch that had made Harriet what she was.
At this point she remembered her manners and asked after Lady Finch’s health.
“Oh, she’s fine,” Harriet answered, leading the way into the house. “At least, she is now. This morning she had the toothache. That is why it has been such a tiresome day.”
“Poor Lady Finch,” Marian said firmly.
“Poor thing indeed. But you know what Aunt Finch is like with the toothache. A raging lion. And treating it with herbs, when anyone else would have gone to the dentist.”
As a student nurse with a scientific outlook Marian could not approve of Lady Finch’s faith in herbs and nature cures. She shook her head.
“But it worked,” Harriet said. “I am at a loss to account for it, but it worked. The toothache went. And now she’s doing something to the bees, so we can have a good gossip.”
The interior of Urn Cottage was as shabby as the outside, but it was a moderately comfortable house. The sitting-room had bookshelves all along one wall, and the other walls were hung with drawings of plants, done in pen-and-ink with botanical accuracy, the work of Lady Finch herself. There was a thick but very ugly carpet, a sofa which appeared to have strayed out of a Regency drawing-room and to have suffered considerably in the move, and a couple of leather-covered armchairs built on such a generous scale that one had to squeeze past them to reach the farther end of the room.
Harriet and Marian sat together on the sofa, and Harriet lit a cigarette. “Why don’t you smoke?” she asked. “Hubert isn’t here.”
Marian had given it up when she became engaged, because Hubert did not smoke and rather disliked seeing a woman smoking. He could tolerate it in a man, and he wasn’t in the least narrow-minded; it was just that he didn’t like to see it. She had explained this to Harriet, and now she explained it all over again.
“But he can’t see you. He’s in Africa.”
In some ways Harriet was very dense.
“I love Hubert,” Marian said earnestly. “If you love a person, you want to do what he wants.”
“Yes, but it ought to work both ways. If Hubert loves you, he ought to want to do what you want. Or at least not to stop you doing what you want.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Of course,” Harriet said, pursuing her theme, “it might become ridiculous. Two people, madly in love, each wanting to do what the other wants. Suppose one of them wanted swing music, cocktail parties, and late nights, and the other wanted Beethoven quartets and a cloistered existence. Then true love would simply make each of them change—to please the other—and they’d be no better off.”
“I don’t see—”
“The Beethoven fan would become a swing fan, and vice versa. You gave up smoking to please Hubert, and for all we know he may be puffing away like a chimney in Africa, to please you.”
“Of course he isn’t,” Marian said indignantly. “Hubert wouldn’t be so silly.”
Marian was a pretty girl, but her normal expression was placid. Some people would have called her phlegmatic, and though Harriet was not one of them she could not help reflecting that it suited Marian to be flushed and indignant. She hoped Hubert would sometimes contrive to upset his beloved; though it did not seem likely. She had only met Hubert once, when he came to stay with the Prentices before leaving for the mission field, and he had seemed to her a dull but very amiable young man. Serious, calm, good-natured, like Marian herself, and a clergyman into the bargain.
It was a pity, Harriet thought. Marian was too solemn already, and she needed someone to stir her up. She couldn’t be really in love with Hubert. Love, to Harriet’s dramatic mind, was fire and fury, a heightening of all the emotions, a condition in which one suffered jealous agony as well as ecstatic happiness. Marian was marrying Hubert for no particular reason, or for some humdrum reason which wasn’t the right one, and in so doing she was ruining her life. She would vegetate in the wilds of Africa, getting duller and duller, and producing children with a double inheritance of dullness. She would turn the heathen—and herself—into models of dreary mediocrity.
“No, no!” Harriet cried aloud, revolted by this picture. Though she made fun of Marian she was very fond of her.
“What’s the matter?” Marian asked. “And do pull your skirt down, Harriet. Suppose anyone looked in through the window.”
“No one will.”
But at that moment someone did. It was only Lady Finch, but it gave Marian a shock all the same. A sudden glimpse of a beekeeper, veiled and armoured for the fray, might give anyone a shock.
“Bother,” said Harriet. “Aunt Finch must have been routed. She always comes to the front door when she’s routed—the bees call the chase off when they get to the corner of the house.”
She pulled down her skirt. Marian patted her hair and prepared to stand up. After a short pause Lady Finch came into the room, and by way of greeting announced rather crossly that the bees had got inside her veil and stung her twice on the chin.
She was a tall woman, with a haggard weather-beaten face, a dominating nose, and a mass of densely black hair. Even without her Wellington boots, elbow-length gauntlets and long green veil, she looked rather odd and not a little alarming. In spite of a long acquaintance Marian never felt quite at ease with Harriet’s aunt; though Lady Finch was usually kind to her and had once told Harriet who gleefully passed it on—that Marian’s basic instincts were remarkably pure.
At the moment Lady Finch was not interested in Marian; she was telling Harriet about the goats. It was the proximity of the goats that had put the bees in a bad temper, for it was well known that they couldn’t bear goats. She had warned the farmer what would happen, if he allowed his goats to graze in that field.
“Poor goats,” Harriet said.
“I meant to finish the spring-cleaning today, but I’d only done three hives and then I had to stop. Now I shall swell,” Lady Finch said fussily, peering at her chin in the looking-glass that hung over the fireplace.
“It doesn’t show much.”
“It will be worse tomorrow. I shall look a perfect fright.”
“You can stay indoors,” Harriet suggested. “No visitors allowed, in case they should have nervous breakdowns. It would be a first-class excuse for getting rid of Miss Pope.”
“I can’t possibly stay indoors. It would interfere with my programme.”
Marian and Harriet exchanged a quick glance. Lady Finch was a woman of many interests, and her days were divided like a school timetable, the hours named and numbered in advance. There were social duties—she did not enjoy these, but believed they were necessary—and domestic duties; there were also bee-keeping and scientific gardening and Yoga exercises and Planned Reading. But her chief interest at present was in the book she was writing and the research it entailed. This took so much of her time that the rest of the programme was often disorganized, and in consequence, every now and again, there would be a period of hyper-activity which she described as ‘catching up with things’.
Such a period was now overdue, and Harriet’s glance expressed apprehension; for when she was catching up with things Lady Finch, like a galloping horse, was difficult to check. The danger, however, was not immediate. Lady Finch had her plans for tomorrow, but they were plans which had been made at the beginning of the week, and the timetable still held good.
“It’s my day for collecting,” she went on. “And I’ve got to go and call on Mrs. Dunstan at Belmont House. Only afternoon I can fit it in.”
Marian wanted to say that it was too soon to call; for she had been brought up to know the rules and was aware that one must give people time to settle down. But one did not say such things to Lady Finch, who had her own rules.
“Mother was wondering about them,” she said instead. “She wondered whether—”
“Whether they’re respectable? Of course they are. They’re the old man’s nieces.”
“Not both of them. It was Mrs. Dunstan that got left the house.”
“Yes, yes, Harriet, I know that. I suppose she was his favourite, but Dora Duckworth’s a niece as well. They’re first cousins, and of course they are also first cousins of Francis Heswald up at Heswald. General Heswald was a younger brother of Francis Heswald’s father.”
Neither Marian nor Harriet could see that this made Francis Heswald, Mrs. Dunstan, and Dora Duckworth into first cousins, but they were quite prepared to take Lady Finch’s word for it.
“Dora Duckworth,” murmured Harriet. “I imagine her as small and fat, waddling a bit when she walks. Something like Jemima Puddleduck.”
“And there’s a nephew as well,” said Lady Finch. “But I don’t suppose he will be living at Belmont House—he’s probably just staying there to help them with the moving in. Pity. He might have done for Harriet.”
“Is he a Duckworth?” Harriet asked. “I don’t think I could marry a Duckworth. Not if he was small and fat, and waddled.”
In Marian’s home the acquisition of a husband was not a subject that was openly discussed, at least between parents and children, and she was often disconcerted by Lady Finch’s candour. But no one could accuse Harriet of over-eagerness to acquire a mate; on the contrary, she was almost too ready to find fault with the candidates her aunt suggested.
“He’s a Dunstan,” said Lady Finch. “No relation to the Heswalds of course.”
“He’s an engineer,” said Marian, unable to resist adding her mite of knowledge.
“A very respectable profession,” Harriet said approvingly. “Almost as good as being a missionary.”
Marian gave her a reproachful look. If they had been alone she would have spoken in defence of missionaries, but she was not going to say anything in front of Lady Finch, who had a whole chain of theories about the natural goodness of the untutored savage and the necessity for leaving him to go his own way uncontaminated by western civilization. It was, of course, all rot; but to argue with her was simply a waste of time. She had tried it once, and had found herself up against Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a host of other authorities; and although she knew Lady Finch was talking nonsense she had been unable to produce good convincing arguments to refute her. So she contented herself now with the reproachful look, to show Harriet that missionaries were not a subject for jest.
