Emmie, we had forgotten to say, was engaged to Walter George all the time she was carrying-on with Mr Noon. The fact so easily slipped her memory that it slipped ours. We ought to have mentioned it sooner, for the sake of Alfred Bostock even.
To be sure, Emmie had been engaged several times. She got engaged in peace-time as easily as other women do in war-time. On every possible occasion she accepted a ring: varying in value from ten shillings to three pounds. Almost every time she sent the ring back when the affair was over. Twice the young men had generously said she could keep it. Hence the three ornaments which decked her fingers, and of which she was justly proud.
One she wore ostentatiously on her engagement finger. It was one of those re-made rubies, quite red and nice, and Emmie felt she could honesdy say it was a real stone. It tied her to Walter George quite closely. She had shown it with pleasure to Gilbert, and told him its history. And he had wondered if he was bound by the laws of Emmie-gallantry to offer himself as an engagee. There wouldn’t be much harm in it. And Emmie would so lightly commit pre-wedding bigamy, and there is safety in numbers.
But he hadn’t gone so far, and Emmie had no ring of his. These rings, she loved them, they were her trophies and her romances, her scalp-fringe and her forget-me-not wreaths, her dried roses pressed into sound £. s. d.
Walter George was a quite nice boy: we are going to make his acquaintance. He was a clerk, and quite a gendeman. Let us say it softly, for fear of offending a more-than-sacred institution, he was a bank-clerk. He had walked out with Emmie all the time he was in Woodhouse, and she had hardly found an opportunity for a stroll with anyone else. Cruel authority, however, had moved him to the newly-opened branch of the London and Provincial bank in Warsop. He departed, deeply regretting the soft and cuddly Emmie, who made love an easy and simple path for him. For the ease and simplicity of his paths of love he was wise enough to be thankful. Therefore, when rumour whispered poison-gas in his ear, he looked at other maidens, and imagined himself cuddling with them in a dark entry, and wiped his ears. Emmie was Emmie. So far, she belonged to herself. His nature, being easy like hers, though less flighty, comprehended her sufficiently to realise that she was sipping all the flowers of love in her singleness in order to store the honey-jars of connubial felicity for him. The honey might be no more than golden syrup, but he would never know the difference. And therefore, so long as Emmie had the decency not to offend him too openly, he had the sense not to peep round the corner after her when she left him.
Some men want the path of love to run pleasantly between allotment gardens stocked with cabbages and potatoes and an occasional sweet-william: some men want rose-avenues and trickling streams, and so scratch themselves and get gnat- bitten: some want to scale unheard-of heights, roped to some extraordinary female of their fancy — chacun a son gout. Walter George was born in the era of allotment gardens, and thus Providence had provided for his marital Saturday afternoons. Which is saying a good deal. He was a bank-clerk too, and wanted to have an easy conscience and a dressy spouse. Church parade every Sunday morning was an institution to him. And he had quite a lot of cuddly lovey-doveyness. If anyone can mention to me a better recipe for a husband, I shall be glad to write it down.
Emmie took him seriously. Roses and rapture were good fun, but the cauliflower was the abiding blossom. Co-op. entries might have their thrill, but she was not one of those whose fanatic idealism insists on spending a life-time in such places. No, she would rather forfeit her chances of heaven than her chance of a home of her own where she could keep warm like a cat, and eat her cauliflower of a Sunday dinner.
In short, Emmie was au fond, very sensible, much more sensible than her father. She knew even better than he that the cauliflower is the flower of human happiness, and that rose-leaves act like senna. All very well to purge off the follies of youth with red, or better still with pink roses. And she was sooner purged than her father. If only he had understood, he would have slept better in his bed. But, seeing his own more frenzied colics revived in the vagaries of his Emmie, he reacted more violently than he need have done, and that largely from fear. Once his daughter had run away he began to realise this.
Having thus apologised for our characters, and demonstrated that they have a bed-rock of common-sense; having revealed their acquaintance with the fact that rose-leaves bring belly-aches, and that cauliflowers are delicious, and that Sunday dinner is the key-stone of the domestic arch, on which repeated arches all society rests; having proved, in short, that the Bostocks are of the bulldog breed, full of sound British sense; let us go on with our story with more self- satisfaction than heretofore.
Emmie arrived at her sister Fanny’s with real pains rending her. She knew it was rose-leaves, but blamed her father. In fact she was in a state of subdued hysteria. So she took to her bed, and decided to turn over a new leaf. No, not a rose-leaf. She decided, if possible, to open the last long chapter of a woman’s life, headed Marriage. She intended it to be a long and quite banal chapter, cauliflower and lovey-doves. Having at the moment a variety of pains in her inside, dubbed neuralgia of the stomach, she developed some of her own father’s reactionary hatred against the immortal rose. And though her hatred would lose its violence as the pains passed off: though it would decline into mere indifference, like her mother’s, except she would retain a little crisp flirtiness of manner, to show she kept her end up: still, this sound and sensible emotion, this fundamental detestation of rose-leaves because she knew what rose-leaves were (just like her father: a piece of impudent assurance too); this dislike of the immortal rose, and a consequent exaltation of the solid cauliflower would henceforth be the directing force of her life.
Warsop — and with this word the story gets on its feet again — lies but ten miles from Eakrast, across the forest. After two days of temper, hysteria, neuralgia of the stomach, after-effect of rose-leaves, or whatever it may have been, Emmie began to recover her common-sense. She had eaten the rose, and would make an ass of herself no more. So she lay and plotted for settling down in life.
The school and school-house were one building. In the front, the long school-room faced the road: at the back, the house-premises and garden looked to the fields and the distant forest.
Fanny, Emmie’s sister, was a dark, rather big-nosed girl, very good-natured. She had been married for a year, and had a baby. She received Emmie without too much surprise or consternation. In Fanny’s sky the weather always blew over.
“Don’t bother. It’ll blow over,” she said to Emmie as she said all her life to herself.
She put her sister on the sofa, covered her up, and gave her a hot cup of tea; then she waited for Harold to come in. Emmie could hear Harold, on the other side of the wall, talking away at the scholars.
“Now then, Salt, what river comes next? Witham Welland Nene and Great Ouse — what comes after that? Don’t you know? Do you know what your own name is? What? Oh, you do, do you. What is it? What? Salt! And if the Salt hath lost its savour? You don’t know, do you. No, you wouldn’t. Tell him what river comes next, Poole.”
Emmie guessed it was Geography: therefore probably near the end of the afternoon. Listening, she could occasionally hear a shrill word from the assistant teacher, a girl, who was apparendy taking sewing. There were only about forty-five scholars in the whole school.
The itch came over the rose-leaf-griped girl, to be down in the school-room taking a lesson. She longed to begin with a “Now then — .” Fanny had been a teacher, and had helped Harold till the advent of the baby. When the baby was a bit older, she would get a servant and go into the school again with Harold. It was so handy. You could just pop in and turn the pudding while the children were doing their drawing. You could pop in and put the kettle on at half-past three, and at four o’clock you would find it singing nicely.
Emmie envied Fanny her little school and school-house. As for Harold, he was all right. He was very respectable and a bit of a mardy, perhaps — but he was all right.
“Hello Emmie. We weren’t expecting you,” he said when he came in from school and found her at tea with Fanny and the baby. He talked in the rather mouthing fashion which teachers often have in the Midlands. “Have you got holidays at Woodhouse then?” he continued, his first thought of course, being school.
“No, I’ve come away from our Dad for a bit.”
“Oh! I thought perhaps you’d closed for measles. We’ve twelve absent this afternoon. — What’s amiss then.”
“Oh, same old song. Our Dad nagging the life out of me till I can’t put up with it. I thought I’d come here a bit if you’d have me.”
“Yes, you’re welcome. But won’t your Dad be more wild than ever? What about school?”
“I’ve sent to tell them I’m bad. And I am an’ all. I’m feeling damn bad, Harold!”
“Are you, why what’s wrong?”
“I’ve got a cramp in my inside till I don’t know what to do with myself. I had to sit down about six times coming from the station.”
“And she’s not eaten a thing,” said Fanny.
“Looks to me as if she’d better go to bed,” said the sympathetic Harold. “I’ve had a sore throat for this last week. I’ve been thinking, Fanny — have you got that linseed in th’ oven?”
Fanny had.
“You’d better look at it an’ see it’s not too dry. I sent Bendey for a stick of Spanish juice. You’d perhaps have some of that Emmie. I know it’s an old-fashioned remedy, but it does me more good than these modern preparations like aspirin and camphorated chlorodyne and such.”
Fanny meanwhile was at the oven looking into a steamy stew-jar, from which came a strange odour of flax-seeds. She stirred the brown, pulpy, porridgy mass, and Harold came to look.
“It would do with a drop more water, dear, don’t you think it would?” he said to Fanny, putting his arm round her neck as they both stared into the stew-jar, she crouching on the hearth-rug.
“Just a drop,” said Fanny. “Take it from the kettle.”
And between them they concocted the mess.
On the other side of the tall range which prevented, or which was to prevent the baby from walking into the fire, in future days, the bedding was airing.
“Should you like to go to bed now, Emmie?” asked Harold in concern.
“Oh, I can wait,” said Emmie.
“You needn’t wait,” said Harold, disturbed to see her sitting there mute with a pinched-up face, doubling herself over as twinges caught her.
“I’ll make your bed directly I’ve fed baby,” said Fanny, picking up the infant that was crying crossly for food.
“I can do it,” said Harold. Like a good economical soul and husband, he had taken his jacket off when he came in, and was in his shirtsleeves. “I’ll take th’ oven shelf up, Fanny,” he added.
“Take the bottom one,” said Fanny, who was faintly squeezing her breast between two fingers as she directed the nipple to the infant. “It’s not so red-hot as the top one.”
Harold wrapped the oven shelf in an old piece of blanket, and took it upstairs with him and the candle, for a bed- warmer. In the spare bedroom he went methodically about, making up the bed.
“I tell you what,” he said as he came down, “I’ll put that oil-stove up there a bit, to warm the air. It comes rather cold.”
And he rubbed his arms, through his shirtsleeves.
Another half-hour, then, saw Emmie in a warm bed, in company of the oven shelf against which she knew she’d knock her toe. She screwed herself up upon her pains, which, though genuine enough, seemed to proceed from a sort of crossness which she could not get over. The little paraffin oil- stove shed its low light and its curious flat oil-flame warmth across the atmosphere. Harold appeared with a cup of the brown, slimy steaming linseed-and-liquorice stew and pressed her to drink it.
“I take a lot of it, and find it does me worlds of good. I think it’s the oil, myself. I’m sure it’s better than cod-liver oil. Your skin gets so nice and soft if you take it regular.”
But Emmie, her naturally fluffy hair rather astray over the pillow, her little brows rather tense, would not look at it.
“Don’t come near me, my lad. I don’t want to be looked at,” she said, half hiding her crossness in a sort of gruffness.
“Is it all that bad. I’ll go down and make you a bran-bag, should I? — You’ve not lost your good looks, anyhow. — But should I make a bran-bag for you?”
“Ay — ” said Emmie.
Down he went, found there was no bran, put his hat and coat on and went down the lane to borrow some: returned, and stuffed it into a flat flannel bag, put this between two plates in the oven, to heat, and finally carried it, piping hot, up to Emmie, who gratefully hugged it against her.
“Thank you, my old chuck,” she said to him. “It’s rosy, that is.”
“Perhaps that’ll shift it,” said Harold.
“Ay — perhaps.”
But she had her pains all through the night, and said in the morning she hadn’t slept a wink. She looked peaked, and Harold was bothered, so he sent a note for the doctor: much against Emmie’s will. The doctor said it was neuralgia of the stomach, and Emmie said it felt like it. Harold made Fanny write to Woodhouse, and in the school-room from time to time he would raise his voice a little and say:
“Less noise there down at that end! You know what I’ve told you. You know how poorly Miss Bostock is, in bed in the house. Think of others besides yourselves.”
And the scholars duly hushed themselves, and felt important, having somebody poorly in bed in the school-house.
That evening Harold came up to Emmie for a fatherly talk.
“What’s wrong between you an’ Dad more than usual?” he asked.
“Oh nothing,” said Emmie.
“Nay, come, it’s not nothing. It must be something rather special, if you’ve not told Fanny yet.”
“I don’t feel like talking, either,” she said.
“You’d better tell us. You’d feel better if you got it off your chest.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” said Emmie.
“Nay,” expostulated the young man. “If that’s the way you feel towards me and Fanny, then we know how matters stand.”
Emmie sulked in the bed with her new bran-bag, and Harold sat in the chair beside the little oil-stove — there was no fireplace in the bedroom — and felt offended.
“Oh damn you,” said Emmie. “You’re an old nuisance.”
“Ay, I know I’m an old nuisance, if I don’t just please you altogether,” said Harold, rather flattered than otherwise. “But it’s for your own good I ask you. It’s nothing to me personally — except I always want to do my best for you and for all of you, for Fanny’s sake. Though it isn’t so very much I can do. Still, I’ll do my bit whenever I get a chance.”
There was a slight pause after this oration.
“I had a walk with Gilbert Noon, if you want to know,” said Emmie.
“What, with Gilbert Noon from Haysfall Technical? I should have thought he’d have known better. And did your Dad catch you?”
“Yes.”
“And what did he say?”
“He knocked Gilbert Noon’s cap off, and had his own cap knocked off back again, and they both fell down in the dark in a gooseberry bush, and all the blame laid on me, of course.”
“You don’t mean to say so! Did they go for one another?”
“I didn’t stop to look. Our Dad’s a devil — an interfering spying devil. He’ll kill me before he’s done.”
And Emmie pulled the sheet over her face and blubbered underneath it. Poor Harold, who was in a whirlpool of emotion, sat pale as death in the chair, and felt like offering himself up as a burnt offering, if he could but find an altar with a fire going.
“Well now,” he said at length. “You shouldn’t let it get on your nerves. Dad means well, I suppose, only he goes a funny way about it. What do you take it to heart for? You can stop here for a bit till things blow over. Have you written to Walter George?”
He waited with beating heart for an answer. No answer: though a certain stilling of the under-sheet waters.
“Have you written to Walter George, Emmie?” asked Harold once more, in an excruciatingly gentle and pained voice.
A sniff from under the sheet.
“No” — from under the sheet.
Harold watched the sheet-top, which had grown damp during the bad weather, and, to its mournful blotting-paper blankness he said, tender, anxious, treading gingerly on the hot bricks of emotion:
“And aren’t you going to?”
No answer from under the sheet.
“You’re going to, aren’t you Emmie?”
No motion from under the winter-landscape of a sheet.
“You’re not in love with Gilbert Noon, are you Emmie? You’d never make such a mistake.”
“No I’m not, fat-head.”
This barked out from under the sheet gave Harold hopes of the re-emergence of the crocuses and scyllas of Emmie’s head. Surely a thaw had set in beneath the damp snow-scape of the sheet.
“Well I’m glad to hear that, at any rate. Because I’m sure it would be a mistake. I’m sure Walter George is the man for you, Emmie; though I must say your treatment of him is such as most men wouldn’t stand. I know I shouldn’t. But he hasn’t got a jealous nature, and that’s why he’s the right sort for you. — My word, if your Fanny treated me as you treat him, there’d be some fat in the fire, I can tell you. Somebody would have to look out. But different men, different ways. He’s not a jealous nature, thank goodness.”
Out popped crocuses, scyllas, christmas roses and japonica buds in one burst from beneath the wintry landscape. In short, Emmie’s head came out of the sheet, and her nose was so red with crying that we felt constrained to make the japonica flower too early.
“Different men have different ways of showing it, you mean,” she snapped. “He won’t have any occasion to be jealous, once he isn’t a hundred miles off. So there! I know what I’m doing.”
“Well, I’ve always said so. I’ve said to him more than once, ‘she’ll be as true as wax once the knot is tied, Walter George, but she’s not the one to leave at a loose end.’ And he sees it plain enough. Only he doesn’t think he’s in a position yet —
“But I tell you what! Why don’t you come here and help me? Miss Tewson is leaving at the end of February. You come here and help me, and you could see a bit more of one another while you make your minds up.”
Harold had his little plan. Indeed, life is made up of little plans which people manufacture for one another’s benefit. But this little plan Emmie had fore-ordained herself. It had occurred to her when she heard Miss Tewson’s treble chiming after Harold’s baritone in the school beneath. She wanted a little peace.
And so she began to feel somewhat better, and the pains began to diminish.
“You write him a note,” said Harold, “and I’ll ride over tomorrow night and take it him, and ask him to come over for the week-end. How about that, now? Does that suit?”
“I’ll see,” said Emmie.
But Harold knew the victory was won, and he went to bed with his Fanny as pleased as if all the angels were patting him on the back. And his Fanny was quite content that the marigolds of his self-satisfaction should shed themselves in her lap.
In the morning Emmie wrote to Walter George.
“Dear old bean-pod Lo and behold I’m at our Fanny’s, and bad in bed, and that mad with myself I could swear like a trooper. Come over and cheer me up a bit if you can. If you can’t, come over to the funeral. Ollivoy! E.B.”
Ollivoy was Emmie’s little pleasantry, substituted for au revoir. Sometimes she wrote olive-oil instead.
The day was Friday. She listened to the business of the school, and at last felt happier in bed. She felt what a luxury it was, to lie in bed and hear school going on: hateful school. She heard the children go shouting out, at midday, into the rain. There was rain on the window and on the wet bare creeper stalks. She wondered if Harold would ride ten miles through the weather.
Listening, she heard thud-thud-thud, and realised it was Fanny knocking with the poker on the fire-back downstairs, to summon Harold in from the school-room. This was Fanny’s wireless message to her overdue schoolmaster. Presendy the sister, rather blowsy but pleasant-looking, came up with stewed rabbit and a baked onion. Harold had thought out the baked onion. It was such a good receipt for earache and neuralgia of the face — a hot onion placed against the ear: therefore why not just as good taken internally, for neuralgia of the stomach. Nourishing as well. He explained to the two sisters, who had been school-teachers as well as he, what proportion of sugar there was in onions, and what proportion of other matter: something very encouraging, though we forget exactly the ratio. So Emmie plunged her fork into the nutritious bulb, which sent its fumes wildly careering round the room, and even tickled the nostrils of afternoon scholars, so that they became hungry again at five past two. We little know the far- reaching results of our smallest actions.