Secret drama

Front matter

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Class 3_

Book

Chapter I The Mother

i

Having placed the tray on the table, Mrs. Jesson stood, without a movement, without a change in her intense and profound expression, looking at the dishes set round the slim silver vases of roses on the white cloth. She was not thinking. She was shaking with an accentuation of the happiness which, ever since she received Marie’s letter, had steadfastly endured in her. It was as if the dainty and simple things gathered in the yellow light had in some mysterious manner convinced her of the reality of her happiness. Everything seen during this interval of time which lay between her departure from America and her position of immobility here beside the table had had the vagueness, the imponderable faintness, of an illusion. But the old Spode teacups were real; the silver cake-basket, the silver spoons, thin with age, the cucumber and ham sand¬ wiches, the honey, amber and thick in the perfect holes of the comb—they were all real.

She raised her eyes. Small, pale, moist, between triangu¬ lar lids, they gazed through a window at the long snipped shadow of the woodlands unmoving, dark, on a sky without a cloud. Her lips twitched. She looked inspired, she looked as if she were contemplating some state of being, beautiful, religious, personal, which made her heart burn and her large wrinkled hands tremble on the handles of the tray. Almost inaudibly she spoke.

“To be a mother—‘I thank the gods that have given me love and a child.’ ”

In her immobility, in her rapt contemplation of space, in her supreme artless sentimentality, she was dramatic, she was impressive. There was no sound of any other human being in the house nor the garden, and yet, stand¬ ing there with her roughly modeled rust-red face uplifted, her lips moving as she murmured the words of Kipling underlined long ago and then memorized, she had a declama¬ tory look as if she were testifying to a creed in the face of an immense multitude. Presently she smiled; she glanced again at the table. Had she forgotten anything? Marie always said she couldn’t think and act too. It was be¬ cause she was getting old. And she was excited now. But everything seemed to be on the table.

For a moment she restlessly rubbed the handles of the tray, in an indeterminate mental condition, her mind busied with the tea and yet conscious still of those bright convic¬ tions, hopes, and faiths. Then with an effort she divorced it from the world of dream on a swift remembrance of Marie’s condemnation of that part of her life. “Marie knows I’m old-fashioned,” she thought, “and when I get thinking I make mistakes. And if, as she says, everything I think is wrong—well, it’s only waste of time. But I can’t believe that all the old things are wrong.”

Her eyes lifted in the stress of that immense perplexity, but she had altered her position a little and they looked now not on the skyline, but at her reflection in a mirror on the opposite wall. She was immediately distracted from the problems of Victorian and Georgian morality. She walked across to the mirror. She assiduously examined herself.

Only the protuberance of her back revealed her seventy years. Her thick body was vigorous and firm. She wore a dark-blue chiffon coat and a blue silk dress, but she had fastened up the skirt when a little while ago she watered some young cabbages, and a rather short white cotton pet¬ ticoat revealed not only several inches of solid leg below it, but also vaguely indicated the presence of those shapes within it. Her broad pink arms, bare from the elbow, hung at her sides. Her thick and flattened profile set be¬ tween the white crispness of abundant hair, and the dim soft¬ ness of her dress, with the lips forming a thin arch above the bold chin, the nose fleshy, the eyes, intent, meditative, faintly perplexed, under unconsciously angry brows, seemed to suggest her for long service, for endurance, for an unend¬ ing self-immolation. She had a dauntless and stoical look as of one fitted for the rigors of life—for the demands on the body and the wounds for the spirit.

She wondered whether Marie would approve her appear¬ ance. She expected there were a great many faults she didn’t see. “I’ll put a little powder on,” she thought.

She could not look at herself with any emotion that was not inspired by her sense of her relation to Marie. She had no interest in herself as an individual. She was important, morally and physically, only as she affected Marie’s esthetical susceptibilities, her happiness, or her ideas. At this moment she positively felt Marie’s black, dispassionate, resigned eyes scrutinizing her; she unpinned her skirt and shook it down, and went out of the room quickly, with a happy admission of the redness of her unpowdered face. She smiled because it was so sweet to feel that she was obeying Marie’s wishes. As she mounted the staircase she thought:

“It doesn’t matter what an old woman like me looks like, but Marie thinks every one will notice me; she wants me to be a credit to her.”

She was impressed by the quietude of the house. If Marie were not coming—if Marie did not exist—if she were alone! She glimpsed horror. The reality of her posi¬ tion made her tremble again. Marie was coming—did exist—she would never be alone. Wait a little and hear the house then, see then this brown, dumb, staring passage! She had a vision of the yellow road from Mellbury Station, the faded blue trap moving down it, and Marie, brilliant, impenetrable, careless, seated beside Johnny. There would be boxes in the hall, noise, confusion. . . .

In the open doorway of her bedroom she stopped and listened. No, there wasn’t a sound on the road. How silly she was! The train had only just come in.

Without a thought, or conscious vision; moving with a sense of pervading light, light which flushed the outside world, the room, and filtered into her head and washed over the whole moral landscape of her life, she went to the dressing-table and shakily powdered her face and neck. Her heart beat quickly. She was almost frightened. The magnificent reality took shape as a picture so perfect that, contemplating it, she could not believe in its permanency.

She stared breathlessly at that vision of Marie in the gar¬ den which involuntarily her mind had offered her as a simplification of all her chaotic knowledges. Marie with her always now—fixed here, one with the life of the house, within the range of her eye, the clasp of her hand. If she moved or spoke, desolation would descend on her. Per¬ fect passivity, a supreme caution, these alone would preserve the tenure of that picture. No, she couldn’t believe in its everlastingness. Marie wouldn’t stay. A few months, per¬ haps a year—and she would be alone again.

Her hands descended to the dressing-table and rigidly rested there. Her broad bosom stirred. Her eyes, tragic¬ ally still, stared with a glassy darkness from the dry white which now rose, with a frigid and insensitive look, above her dress. She was conscious of the soundless room be¬ hind, of the house gathered about her, suddenly sinister in its hush; its apathy only superficial, full of an implacable intention, patient, assured; without turning she could see the hill, no human movement nor sound on it.

In the passage a door opened and closed. Footsteps passed her room and descended the stairs. She drew a long breath.

“I mustn’t look forward,” she said. “I’ve always tried not to, and I must try now. I must live in the present. It’s the only way, if one is to have any peace at all. I mustn’t think about the future. The present is very good. I’m very happy—and thankful. I won’t think about what may come to me. It only frightens me—and then perhaps it don’t come after all.”

She laughed a little, curling and uncurling her fingers against her dress. So for a moment she remained, moving her lips, steadily moving her lingers. Then she turned; she went out of the room, downstairs and towards the kitchen, following the light, quick footsteps whose direction she unconsciously had noted.

ii

Since she left school twelve years ago, Marie Jesson had not had more than six consecutive months at home with her parents. A year traveling in Germany with a girl¬ friend, another year with the same friend in Scotland, six months in Ireland, two years in a flat in Kensington when she and this devoted May Bessant ran together a small art shop, living, they said, “quite indifferent to physical con¬ ditions, happy mentally among our beads and lovely old curios—Bohemian but perfectly moral”; scattered months on the east coast and under the South Downs, two years in France doing clerical work with the V.A.D., a year in America with her mother after her father’s death, a year with May in London—these were some of the phases of Marie Jesson’s life from the age of twenty to thirty-two. During them, or in the period when she was considering some new form of action, she came home to Rowe Green, the little village near the edge of the Weald under the shapes of the three finest heights of the North Downs— Brend Hill, Hirst Hill, and Broad Down. She never stayed longer than six months.

For that time she tolerantly received her mother’s wor¬ ship and submission; she subjected her mother to discipline in such matters as social deportment, suppression of individuality, and cultivation of recognized social and moral principles; she flirted with her father; she exploited her interest in the village, her democracy, her fine perceptive¬ ness for all that was delicate, humorous, tragic, ironic, in the lives of “this class of people”; and then she withdrew in a confusion of luggage and admiring attendants, without a backward glance at that massive and stiff figure standing in its incongruous silks—Mrs. Jesson always wore silk dresses—just inside the porch.

It sometimes seemed to Mrs. Jesson that nearly half her married life had been a battle with the desolating effects of that constantly recurring scene of resignation. Until her husband’s death, two years ago, she could never, when¬ ever Marie was absent, come to the porch and look across the reedy oval of the Green without becoming sensible of a faint, insidious sadness which seemed to brood over the pale brown widths, without catching in the sensitive air some light, melancholy vibration of those times of pain, almost of despair. The illusion of Marie’s presence grew stronger then. She had to turn sharply to exorcise from the whispering wild place that gay figure suspended in some familiar movement of departure and always with averted face, with eyes set inexorably on some distant goal. Never regretfully looking back, nor lingering. No, never.

Mrs. Jesson was an American. She had come to England with a party of friends when she was thirty-six, and there met Henry Jesson. She married him a year later. He was a doctor whose practice extended over Rowe Green, where he lived, and the neighboring villages of Mellbury, Hirstwood, and Brend. Mrs. Jesson adored him. In the exaltation of her love and her conception of wifely duty she relinquished, with almost a fiery joy in her sacrifice, all idea of returning to America and her people. For she wanted to return. She never completely lost that feeling of the temporary character of her stay in England. The years passed without bringing to her any sign of a near end of life in this place; but her eyes still rested on the strong contours of the hills, the seemingly imponder¬ able blue shade of the South Downs with its illusion, through the altering light, of placid stir, in the indestructible sense of them all as foreign, as having no claims on her fidelity, no power of inspiration nor assistance.

After thirty-four years she still felt that, spiritually, she was only camped here, and when her husband died she returned with Marie to America, passionately forcing her¬ self to believe that she would not again touch English shores —no, not even though Marie had made the ominous de¬ mand that the house at Rowe Green should be let furnished instead of sold—passionately figuring Marie always with her, even while haunted by Marie’s decisive “I shan’t stop here for good, if you do. I shall be running over occasion¬ ally at least.”

She did stop a year. Then she sailed for England, for London, for May Bessant. Mrs. Jesson remained, hoping, losing herself in long, formless broodings, growing daily more conscious of an awful silence and blankness. She seemed to sit for hours in a profound stillness, listening. She was always listening. She could not subdue that feeling of dwelling in the deepest parts of her nature, absolutely without communication or contact with any human being.

ii

Her sisters and' their children were with her and she loved them. Her communion with them was sweet, but—she was alone, she was in silence. How unhappy she was!

Then Marie’s letter came. Marie was fired with a con¬ ception of life at Rowe Green—esthetical, calm, natural. She longed to enjoy it. Mother was to return at once and turn out the people in the house and make all ready for Marie’s arrival. Marie was then flying off to Ireland with May for a final hectic time before embracing nature and the “neolithic villagers.” She would be back when St. Hubert’s was in order. She had quite decided to settle at Rowe Green with occasional flights into subtler and more progressive spheres. Didn’t mother want to see her own daughter? Re¬ turn at once.

Mrs. Jesson returned.

m

It was Miss Wilson who had gone into the kitchen. She was now in the scullery, washing out a cup and saucer. One of the taps was running and she had not heard Mrs. Jesson’s entrance. She stood with her eyes fixed on the cup which she revolved in her fingers, half out of the shining water.

Mrs. Jesson on her arrival at Rowe Green had found herself confronted with two difficulties. The first was that Mr. Baird, to whom she had let the house, had bought a cottage in Somerset and was having it enlarged with the intention of moving there in six months on his retirement from business. It was not yet ready for him, and he re¬ ceived with consternation Mrs. Jesson’s cablegram asking him to find other quarters. He waited till her arrival and then suggested that he and his wife should withdraw to Somerset to apartments and endeavor to hasten on the alterations, while Dido his daughter and Hilda his niece re¬ mained here with Miss Hyde the companion-help, if Mrs. Jesson could spare three rooms and the kitchen. Of course the girls could go to an hotel. But—very happy here— pretty place—felt at home—and it was quite impossible to get rooms for the whole family at Blagdon. The vil¬ lage was full up—such a bad month August, and besides, some of the women ought to be near town.

Mrs. Jesson consented.

The second difficulty was—maids. With four rooms let, she thought she could manage with a working-house¬ keeper and a daily girl. After some trouble she secured Miss Wilson for the former post.

Miss Wilson had hitherto supplemented the very small income drawn from the savings of the late Mr. Wilson, by teaching in a suburban private school; but her mother’s ill¬ ness had forced her to give this up, and after Mrs. Wilson’s death she found herself unable to obtain again even the w r eekly eight shillings and the daily lunch given in ex¬ change for a concentrated attention to the mental develop¬ ment of thirty ruthless and unscrupulous little boys and girls through a six-hour day. She came therefore to live with a married sister at Rowe Green, almost feverishly jus¬ tifying the gift of a room and food by doing most of the house-work and helping with the cooking. She had lived thus for a year. She was not happy. Her sister saw that, but was not sufficiently perceptive to discern the funda¬ mental reason for her discontent. She imagined that Nellie fretted because she was dependent on her sister, and, hear¬ ing of Mrs. Jesson’s domestic needs, suggested, under Nel¬ lie’s timid and wavering gaze, that here was a chance of independence, comfort, and at least as much ease and dig¬ nity as was allowed by the school life or the duties as “Auntie.”

“You’ll see plenty of people,” she said. “When Mrs. Jesson’s daughter gets back they’ll entertain a lot. It’s not a dull house.”

She did not understand then, nor afterwards in her few wondering retrospects, the meaning of the dim flush which moved under Nellie’s tender, slightly sallow skin; she could not name the expression with which for an instant Nellie’s momentarily steady eyes rested on her own. That strange look was subdued at once, but the flush remained as Nellie said she would consider the proposal.

She afterwards agreed to it.

Now she stood at the sink, a tall, thin, stooping woman of thirty-three. She had a delicate rather pretty profile, and, in her light, worn body, in the attitude of her head, quite shapeless with the smother of its untidy brown hair, in the fold of her soft, unrestful lips, the stir of her young, conscious eyes, a look of inward agitation. Her movements appeared automatic; they were not clumsy, but they had a palpably provisional air. She had the aspect of one who conscientiously recognized the exigencies of the present, but sustained them only through the contemplation of a possible and far different future, and who endured after every hopeful dream the pang of doubt, the darkness of realities.

i 4 SECRET DRAMA

“Are they Miss Hammond’s things, Nellie?” Mrs. Jesson asked.

Miss Wilson started perceptibly and looked round. “I didn’t hear you come in,” she explained, with a nervous laugh. “Yes; I’ve just brought them down.”

“You have the kettle on for tea? I’m expecting Miss Marie any moment.”

She had not moved from the doorway and one large white hand fumbled with the door-knob; she gazed be¬ yond Miss Wilson’s emotional face, at the three frying-pans hanging on nails along the edge of a shelf.

She did not see them. She scarcely saw Miss Wilson. Her mind was a blank, and her eyes blind to all concrete shapes. Marie’s figure swinging to her through light— she saw only that.

“It doesn’t seem like home to me until she comes,” she went on. “I haven’t seen her for a year. And it seems a lifetime. . . .”

She had a pause, struggling to reduce to words the shapes flashing, vague and beautiful and complex, on the fringes of her mind. She stood so long, silent, staring, absorbed, that Miss Wilson brought out weakly:

“I know what you must feel. I think a mother’s love . .

Mrs. Jesson glanced at her as from an immense distance. “Only a mother knows what a mother feels. You’ll know when you’re a mother, Nellie. You don’t know now.”

But if she could tell Nellie! She wanted to tell, not because she cared whether Nellie as Nellie knew or not, but because she wanted to demonstrate to a human being i5 the singularity of the mother’s state, its unapproachable wonder and mystery. She wouldn’t at that moment have been anything but a mother for worlds, she thought. Tell Nellie why, her brain urged. There she is, chaste, child¬ less; you pity her because she is these things. You hope she’ll know, one day, your ecstasy, the golden chaos you’re moving in. Tell her what you feel.

But she couldn’t. The warm, bright scullery seemed to throb; a running flash from pewter and copper seemed to strike her eyes sharply in the intensity of her effort for self-expression. The steam from Nellie’s hot dish-water fantas¬ tically deepened her sense of groping in mists. She grasped the door-knob firmly in a momentary unconscious fear of the dissolution of her physical surroundings. The touch of its cold metal calmed her. She abandoned all attempt at analysis and presentation of her feelings. If she allowed herself to get so excited she would do something silly when Marie came, and Marie did so like her to be sensible. She looked kindly at Miss Wilson.

“Don’t make the tea directly you hear Miss Marie,” she said. “I’ll ask her if she wants it at once.”

She turned away, glancing round the kitchen. She felt that it was impossible for her to hurry, or do any definite thing. She was irresistibly impelled to make these pauses while she stared from a fresh angle at the simple, trivial objects which yet had so close an association with her life, so recondite a power to stir emotion and bring her near understanding of the realities of our existence. The sight of the kitchen now, not sunny but shadowless and sharp, was like the quick run of a new stream of delight i6 into her rich accumulations. She thought that she loved it. The space of brown floor, the square table, the deep reds and blues of the china on the dresser, her sewing-machine, the white ceiling cleanly spread above the dunness and emphatic colors below—they were not simple, they were intrinsically subtle and important. She almost reached the knowledge of them as being her moral supports, the ramparts which stood between her and the vast, dis¬ orderly outer loneliness, her safeguards against the feeling of pessimistic wonder and dismay. There was a flutter of memories in her head. She did become carried on to the thoughts: “It’s wonderful how these little things mean so much to us! I’ve worked myself out of many a fit of the blues at that old sewing-machine. And forgotten my sorrows for a time making pastry at that table. It’s a good thing we’ve plenty of work to do. If we sat down and let ourselves think—well, there wouldn’t be any sanity left in the world.”

She glanced back at Miss Wilson, who was polishing the cup. “It’s nice to be home again, Nellie.” She heard a sound in the hall. “Is that you, Bessie?”

“Yes, only me.”

Mrs. Jesson went into the hall.

A tall, fat old woman in black stood there. This was Bessie Hammond, a second cousin who had been living for some years in America with one of Mrs. Jesson’s sisters, and whom Mrs. Jesson had brought home to live at St. Hubert’s.

“Only me,” Miss Hammond repeated.

Out of her round, plump, yellow face her eyes stared at Mrs. Jesson. They were wide open, and this exhibition

*7 of much discolored eyeball round faded blue glassy irises gave her a look of aching intentness, of preparedness for some event; a vigilance which was made distressing by her obvious and realized unfitness to meet any event. She bore her shapeless, soft body uneasily as if she doubted its right to a portion of space or ground; she held a bas¬ ket of sewing as if the possible reproaches for having taken this basket had just occurred to her with numbing force.

In all other matters, there was nothing unusual about her. Thin brown hair lay closely to her large head and stood out at the back in a little knob. Her features were large and commonplace; her thick, pale lips looked inex¬ pressive; under the pallor of her eyes were deep brown hollows; small brown patches flecked the moist yellowness of her skin.

“Waiting for Marie?” she enquired.

“Yes. She’ll be here any minute now. Will you have another cup of tea when we have ours?”

“Yes, please, I think I will.” Miss Hammond smiled, a softer, happier look coming into her eyes. “So kind of you. I’ll just take my basket into the dining-room. So nice to think Marie’s coming, isn’t it?”

She had moved forward and now paused, her head turned towards Mrs. Jesson, her smile lingering, her eyes atten¬ tive.

“Very nice, Bessie. I shan’t know any peace until she’s in the house.”

Miss Hammond gave a high little laugh. “So kind of you—so nice to have her. Everything’s very nice, isn’t i8 it?” She shuffled, smiling-lipped, her eyes burning wanly in the clear shadow she had entered, towards the dining¬ room.

Mrs. Jesson glanced at the clock. She moved nearer the inner hall door and gazed through its glass at the Green.

A little woman with a long, hopping walk was coming along the path which ran round to the shops. Recognizing Miss Hyde, Mrs. Jesson opened the door, went into the porch and opened the outer door.

“I’m waiting for my daughter,” she said. “I don’t see the trap.”

She looked from eyes shaded under her palm at the road’s perspective.

“Nor do I. She’s rather late, isn’t she? I expect you feel excited, Mrs. Jesson. I know I should. If any one’s coming to see me whom I haven’t seen for a long time, I’m:—oh, I can’t keep still. Excitement, you know. I shake all over, I can assure you I do. When it’s any one you’re fond of, you know, and you haven’t seen them for a long time—oh, I think it’s most trying. It’s an ordeal. It really is.”

Miss Hyde spoke very quickly and with movements of her tongue and mouth which suggested that she was dropping out pebbles. She moved quickly her little gray head in its stiff blue straw hat, her faint high brows, her interested, fair little eyes, her narrow shoulders. She was about sixty. Her glance was very bright and innocent. She looked delightedly at everything. Her pointed little face was brimmed with light; it diffused light. Most striki9

ing was her ardent endeavor to convey her sympathy, her pleasure, her contentment.

“I’ve just been shopping,” she went on, swinging her basket, and making a gay movement on the balls of her feet. “Miss Baird and Miss Nicholls are with me. But they met some friends, so I came on. Your daughter’s coming by the 5.22? I’ve never seen her. I didn’t see her when you were arranging to let the house, you know. I’m looking forward to seeing her. I like meeting fresh faces. Here come my charges.”

Mrs. Jesson slowly turned. Yes, they were there, Dido Baird and her cousin Hilda, approaching easily, Dido with her look of slight criticism, Hilda with her brown, surprised eyes faintly smiling. Mrs. Jesson shook hands with them. She said again that she was waiting for Marie, that she did not yet see the trap.

Dido said “Yes?” in her crisp, firm voice; she smiled, showing pretty small teeth between tender lips. Hilda smiled too, without losing, however evanescently, that look of mild astonishment.

What nice girls they were! She ought to be very happy, very thankful. Every one, as poor Bessie would say, was so kind. Mrs. Jesson beamed on the three faces. She began to tell them of her excitement, not looking at them after the first moment, but at the shining trees along the road. She felt them there, the three quiet bodies; and the feel¬ ing communicated to her a beautiful warmth. The world seemed full, harmoniously so. The feeling of homogeneity was precious to her. She felt strong and calm, supported, embraced.

Then Hilda, who had not yet spoken, said, her high, cool voice sounding pleased, “Isn’t that the trap?”

Mrs. Jesson’s heart jumped. She turned. A little square thing was coming along the road, very small, very dull on the spacious wash of yellow air under the luster of the far sky. The trap—Marie. She couldn’t speak. She could do nothing but stand, gazing at the growing square, at the two lines in it which gradually rounded out. She saw the spread of Marie’s large hat, the dusky pallor of her face— then the stir of eyes, the color of mouth and cheek. There were movements in the porch. Her companions were quietly withdrawing. Airily Marie waved.

Some force jerked her forward. Her throat ached and her eyes became full of tears. She heard Marie speaking, but the words did not reach her understanding. She was beside the trap now, holding up her unsteady hands. She gazed into Marie’s bright, amused eyes.

“Marie—darling,” she said.

Without touching the proffered hands Marie sprang down. “Hallo, mother! Why in the world did you wait out in this sun? Will nothing make you sensible? Now don’t touch my boxes. You won’t be any good; just go into the porch and be quiet.”

“Can’t I help, darling?”

“Go into the porch and don’t worry. Show a little sense, like a good woman.”

Mrs. Jesson went into the porch. She watched Marie and the boy getting a suit-case down. She hadn’t kissed Marie yet—nor touched her.

Patiently she waited.