The Black Boxer Tales Page 5

  Nothing approaching love had ever touched her. Her thoughts of love were naive, chaste, beautiful. Perfection, to her, lay in someone who would overlook her stoutness and idolize her and hurry her away from the shop and the eternal odour of steaming meat and the people who laughed at her. Where such a person was she did not know; she could not imagine; but the dreamy pursuit of this elusive figure kept her from dejection.

  • II •

  Charlotte had also three sons. They were big, ambitious, industrious fellows, and they resembled their father at the age when he had wooed her with a slow, persistent love which had at length induced her to leave the milliner’s where she was apprenticed and start in a cooked-meat business with him. They had grown up with a loathing for their father’s business. She was not sorry. She knew they were really fitted by their persistence and cleverness for something better, and secretly she had encouraged the experiments in chemistry and mechanical things which as boys they had conducted in the outhouse in the yard. They must be great, better, different, she was always thinking. She was almost pitifully ambitious for them. Once a week she found them a little money for experiments. She taught them a revulsion for the cheap meat they sold and the neighbourhood in which they lived. And when they decided to emigrate it was she who encouraged them, found the money, and wept over them. They were now in America, quite successful, sending her a letter and a little money from time to time, and the two youngest were about to be married

  She missed the mere masculine presence of them deeply. From a practical point of view there was need for a man in the shop. Effie did little but think and read and wait, and was short of breath and had fainting fits over the pastry-board if she worked too hard. Charlotte vaguely thought of employing a man. But she wanted an honest, trustworthy man, a juggler not a conjuror.

  She knew of no one. She had few friends. Work had given her little leisure, and the shop tied her, body and soul. She was too proud to entertain in their one dark room, with its broken sofa and eternal reek of cooking meat and spices, and its view over the dismal yard and the factory chimneys blacking out half the sky beyond. She was also inclined to be resigned, almost fatalistic, about her lot. If God had placed her there, she must remain; when it was time to change or move or die no doubt God would say so; and whatever was to happen, would happen. One knew no more.

  Once a week, however, they received a visit from an old acquaintance. In the old days he had come in a pony-trap; now he owned a small green two-seater. As soon as they heard the horn, they knew who was coming and sat up.

  ‘Victor Henryson!’

  Charlotte would wipe her greasy or floury hands on her apron, Effie would untie the strings, the bell would ring, and Charlotte would flutter into the shop to chat with their old friend the credit-draper.

  He always greeted her with a suave and rather mocking bow which was the key to her faint distrust of him. He was a little man, plump and dapper, with a smart chestnut moustache and a keen fresh red complexion. He dressed in dark blue suits thinly striped with grey, with a little blue-and-white spotted handkerchief, which added the last touch to his slightly affected person, always peeping loosely from his breast. He was almost her own age, but he had kept himself fresh and youthful. For Charlotte however there had always been something oily and over-affable about him, and she mistrusted the way he always greeted her:

  ‘Well, and how is the world using our little milliner?’

  To her annoyance she was always the little milliner to him. He had known her first as an apprentice, but she detected something mocking in the remembrance. And she would reply coolly:

  ‘Well, I am still here.’

  ‘Oh! Don’t be dismal,’ he would say. ‘Surely we can do something for you? Surely there’s a little piece of something that would gladden your heart? Some new bird-feather trimmings, now? Don’t say “No”. I can tell you’re aching to see them.’

  ‘No really, really—’

  He would run to the car and return laden with boxes. She would still protest. She had no money. He was also a great gossip; she would never be rid of him.

  But as soon as her eyes alighted on the feathers, green, white, purple, gold, black and scarlet, the shop would seem gayer, and she would begin to turn them over, timidly at first, but rapidly with excitement, smoothing and brushing them with her finger-tips, even sniffing them and pressing them to her pale cheeks. Memories of her girlhood and youth would overcome her, the bright-coloured feathers would seem to be the very symbols of past happiness mingled with unrealized and half-forgotten things, and at last she would succumb.

  ‘You know,’ she would say, half playfully, as she found her purse and gave him the money, ‘you want shooting.’

  ‘Oh! be honest—is it I, or the feathers?’

  ‘Oh! go along with you!’

  ‘But is it now?’

  ‘Why you, of course—you’d turn the head of a stone statue.’

  It was this persuasiveness which she mistrusted and disliked, but which she found irresistible, the power to make her talk for an hour when the pies were waiting, or to buy a piece of primrose chiffon or an emerald feather which she knew she would never use. Each time she bought something from him she bought unwillingly, against her own judgment and her own heart, and yet she liked talking to him, however grudgingly she did it and however foolish and unprofitable she knew it to be. She envied him for having kept his youth while she had lost hers. She was faintly jealous of the air of gentility he had been able to preserve. Her own had so long ago been crushed and dissipated.

  Invariably when she talked to him the problem of Effie came up. Effie was becoming the bane of life, utterly incompetent and thankless, more and more a creature of indolence and stubborn pride.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Charlotte would say to him, ‘what is the matter with her? Can you tell? She just sits still, and yet she’s dissatisfied. She’s discontented with everything. She wants something. I know that—I know she wants something. But what? If I ask her she won’t answer.’

  ‘What if she shouldn’t know?’ he asked.

  ‘How—how can that be? I always knew what I wanted.’

  ‘Perhaps Effie is different.’

  ‘Do you understand her then?’

  ‘Effie is different—that’s all I understand.’

  ‘Yes, but what’s to be done?’

  ‘Let her dream,’ he would say. ‘She must have her dreams.’

  ‘But can’t you find her something to do?’ she would cry. ‘If only you pay her enough for her train-fare each day and her dinner—she doesn’t eat much—it will be something. She will have started. You see? She will have started.’

  But the draper and his wife managed everything between themselves, and there was no chance of an opening for Effie. He could only occasionally bring her a pillow-slip of oddments, faulty silk stockings, underclothes, lengths of cheap lace and flowered prints and braids, on which she could make a little profit when she resold them to women in the shop.

  And this he did. The lots of oddments went easily. Effie seemed to like the idea; and Charlotte was delighted. Charlotte with her experience decided the prices and Effie took the whole profits, and the next bag of oddments became a great event.

  That springtime, however, he ceased suddenly to call on them. They were mystified and hurt, and wondered how it could be. With the weekly oddments no longer interesting her, Effie became lower in spirits, and did nothing again but dream and wait. Charlotte felt bitterly towards Henryson, as if he had cheated them.

  Effie decided at last to go to his shop in the next town and see him. She returned with a peculiar, far-away, chastened look on her face. She was to say that he lacked all heart to come and see them. He would come soon. But now he could not face them. His wife had died. Effie was strangely touched, and without knowing if it were for Henryson or his wife, she cried in the train, full of pity, and again when she told the news to her mother.

  Charlotte’s pity was of a dumb, oppressive kind, b
ut, unlike Effie, she knew whom she pitied. She became aware of a searching compassion for Henryson, and could not turn her thoughts away from him. She wanted to express her feelings for him, but he still never came to see them, and after some weeks she wrote him a letter.

  Soon after this letter he came. He was dressed in black and hardly seemed as plump as before and was content rather to be spoken to than speak. He had not been crushed. Death had only cheated him, taking him unawares; it had not tortured and revolutionized him with its pain. Beneath his moody seriousness, like his body beneath his black clothes, he remained the same.

  Nevertheless Charlotte was filled with tenderness for him. When she looked at his black-clothed figure, so sober and unnatural, and noticed the same blue-and-white spotted handkerchief peeping as of old from his breast, she was sorry and wanted to weep for him.

  He came a second time and she invited him to have tea with them, and it made her heart lighter to see him eating and to hear him talk to Effie. She felt that he had changed. His jauntiness was absent; his eyes were no longer mocking, and she never saw one glimpse of the oily persuasiveness she so mistrusted and disliked.

  He lingered until darkness, until the shop was lighted, and only went reluctantly. When the shop was closed Effie brought out a beautiful length of dark reddish velvet he had given her, soft and luxurious and with a bloom on its face like a ripening plum. Charlotte was dazzled. She held it up, draped it into folds, spread it out like a beautiful shadow.

  ‘And he’s given it to you? Given it you?’ she could only ask, astounded.

  The girl nodded and clasped the velvet in her hands. Charlotte was brought to a decision about him.

  ‘He’s so nice—so much nicer,’ she said. ‘He used to be so superior and he always talked so boastingly and mockingly. But you know he’s changed. He’s quieter, more sincere, quite different.’

  The girl did not answer, but crushed the velvet against her bosom before putting it away.

  • III •

  Spring came. The rhododendron began to show cones of pale green among its blackened leaves, and Charlotte and Effie began to hope for flowers. The draper came one afternoon and spent a long time putting fresh soil in the tub. He explained to them that it was wood-soil, the dark loam of hundreds of years, which he had stopped to gather from the woods as he drove over to see them. The woods were in full garland, decked out with primroses and hyacinths and windflowers and the shy white wood-violets that give themselves away by their very sweetness. He had come to ask if they would drive out and gather flowers with him.

  The shop was shut at noon on the following day. Charlotte had not been for a drive for years, since the early days of the motor car, and she wrapped herself up in many scarves and an old veil. Her excitement was almost childish, but Effie was ready quickly, strangely tranquil, with a kind of becalming certitude about her.

  The day was brilliant with spring blue and sunniness. They bowled along rapidly out of the town, Charlotte sitting silent and transfixed beside the draper. She half forgot Effie in watching the green country unfolding and in looking for primroses in the open spaces between the birch trees. In her happiness she had already begun to attach importance to things the draper said to her, to odd moments when he had talked about the loneliness of his life and his need for companionship. When she thought of him the old need for a masculine presence about her was aroused again. They drove on, mile after mile, into deeper woodland. She could see the bluebells running like a light blue flame over the dark earth. Where she had once distrusted him, she found it impossible to repeat his name without pleasure. Why was that? Wasn’t she too old for such thoughts, wasn’t it silly, wasn’t it an illusion, wasn’t it false? By and by the car came to a standstill by a little clearing. Over the earth were blowing and dancing delicate windflowers, white and mauve, flowing back among the trees like pale streams and cascading into hollows and over banks like purest snow, ceaselessly dancing and shining.

  The draper and Effie threaded their way among the streaming whiteness of the flowers. Charlotte came behind very flushed, unwinding her many scarves and her old mauve veil.

  Effie and Henryson began to pick the flowers, stooping and walking slowly on together. She had no desire to pluck flowers, and knew that the anemones would droop, and she called out:

  ‘No, no, don’t pick them. They droop so soon. Only just sit still and watch them.’

  Henryson looked up, displaying a nosegay already. ‘Aren’t you coming?’ he called ‘Farther on there’ll be primroses and bluebells.’

  She shook her head. ‘I only want to sit and watch,’ she called. ‘It’s a good long time since I saw a wood in spring.’

  She spread out her coat and sat under a birch tree and watched the trembling sheet of windflowers in the sunshine. This was all she asked. To sit and watch; to think; to be alone with herself; to be conscious of nothing but the windflowers and the sky. As she sat there, however, her heart as if in contradiction began to long for the draper also. She glanced up at him, as he squatted among the flowers in a new grey suit. Was it foolish at her age, with grownup sons, to hope for the thoughts of a girl? Effie and the draper wandered off, following the pale tributaries of flowers. Soon she heard in the hush of the afternoon Effie’s voice calling, ‘Primroses—Look at them!—Primroses!’ but she did not rise, the wood grew silent about her and she fell a prey to her thoughts again. And gradually she wove about her the fabrication of life as it might be, how she would marry the draper, help in the business she loved and leave the shop for ever.

  She sat thinking of the happiness this would bring her. She felt still strong, mature, capable of love. She was like an old instrument; she would play if someone touched her. She closed her eyes, steeped in a blissful expectation of his return and of a love without which she felt unable to go on with the petty monotony of life as she had lived it for so long.

  She got to her feet at last, afraid of the damp earth. The sun had dazzled her. The windflowers seemed to burst about her into a white flame. She began to walk down the slopes, up and down and onwards through young birches and half-budded oaks and swaying whips of hazel, meeting the primroses drifting up from the dark hollows and seeing the stains of turquoise that were the bluebells on the ridge beyond. With the spring sunshine and the scent and the prospect of summer about her she felt an atom of girlish ecstasy awake and warm her blood, as if it had lain for years in the darkness of her unconscious womanhood

  She walked slowly, along a narrow path which occasionally ran into an opening yellow with primroses. She could neither see nor hear Effie and the draper.

  As she walked into a hollow of primroses splashed with blue and the deep gold of oxlips, she noticed something white, and stopped, and saw Effie’s dress. The girl lay stretched among the primroses, looking up through the trees at the sky. She lay clasping the draper against her breast, kissing him; and the draper in return was murmuring and showering kisses too on her fat arms and lips and breast.

  She retreated. Horrified and trembling, she sat down under a birch tree again, and for a moment she clung to the past, to her illusions and to the expectation of another existence which had meant so much to her. But soon she let everything collapse, able to think of nothing but how vulgar and sordid it was to her, how she hated them both, how she would do all in her power to obstruct and defile and destroy their love and plunge them into that same unhappiness into which she herself was sinking.

  • IV •

  For some weeks she hated Henryson. All her distrust for him returned. It was against her nature to forgive deceit and falsity; and she soured against him.

  But after a week or two, this vindictiveness gradually gave way to something calmer—the same resignation as before, and to the old belief in the will of God and fate. It had happened: what could change that? What was to happen, would happen. And she induced herself to sink into a kind of indifference about them, trying to shut her eyes to their love.

  There remained still a blackne
ss of disappointment and loss in her, but she smothered it. Summer came, and Effie and the draper began to drive out together in the little green car, and the whole town knew of their attachment. She did not care. What they did, they did, and so it remained.

  One day Henryson came to her and asked if he might marry Effie. She was prepared, and she received him calmly.

  ‘You can marry her,’ she said, too proud to show her grief, ‘but not for a year, and only then if you’ve courted her properly.’

  She still nursed some dark, primitive idea of thwarting him. In a year, who knows, it might be forgotten?

  But as the summer went on she could see how antagonistic they were towards her. Effie was prouder and more distant than ever. She openly said sharp and bitter things to her mother, and she often looked at her as if to say: ‘What right have you to be so selfish and narrow about us?’

  Finally, in July, they were married secretly. Charlotte felt bewildered and wretched and reproached herself continually.

  They did not come to see her until two months after their wedding. When they came Effie was slimmer and more shapely, as if married life and the change of environment and fresh work suited her. She looked happy; she was already going to have a baby. Underneath her pale green coat with primrose buttons and milk-white fur she was wearing a dress of chicory blue with a white girdle. She looked very attractive, and Charlotte saw that the draper took a pride in her and cared for her.

  They had come to ask if she would help when the baby came. After she had promised they went away hurriedly and did not come again until the pregnancy was five or six months old.