The Black Boxer Tales Page 6

  She grew used to her loneliness. She tried not to think much of Henryson and Effie.

  The customers, however, liked to talk. ‘Well,’ they would say, ‘and how is Effie?’

  She generally knew nothing. That gave them a chance. Charlotte would be told the news.

  ‘They’ve a new car, didn’t you know? Yes, it’s blue, a lovely thing with corded blinds and silver fittings for flowers. And they say she’s going to have a baby. Is that so?’

  ‘Yes, in the summer.’

  ‘Perhaps that’ll do her good—she needed something like that.’

  ‘I think perhaps she did.’

  ‘Yes. A pound of sausages.’

  ‘Pork or tomato?’

  ‘Pork, if you’ve got them. A baby is often the salvation of a girl like her. And a half of black pudding. They say she’s changed already. Let’s hope she’ll come through it well.’

  ‘I only hope so.’

  The baby began to play an important part in her life; she was constantly thinking of it, imagining what it would be like, devising names and clothes for it as if it had been her own. Her bitterness and loneliness and hatred of Henryson were nullified when she thought of the baby. It seemed to embody her hopes and renew her fortitude and make life acceptable again.

  When it was born she was unutterably glad at the sight of its tiny, red, crumpled face, and she found it marvellously consoling and beautiful to go about thinking of the child.

  When she had nursed Effie she returned home, and then twice a week the girl and the baby came to stay with her while the draper drove to the villages to collect the weekly debts.

  The girl had changed. Bearing the child had made her slim and there was a certain beauty about her pale figure without its gross curves and insipid indolence. She was already indulging a love of lavish green and blue and yellow dresses, as she had always longed to do. Seeing her, Charlotte’s envy awoke, and Henryson began slowly to mean nothing to her. As the girl sat on the American sofa talking to her baby or feeding it from her big white breasts, still almost virgin and tender, Charlotte was jealous of her, and the desire for creation in her would awake and fret her until she longed to take the child from its mother and suckle it too.

  Later in the summer Effie and the draper began to drive out together to the villages and leave the baby alone with her all day. When she moved from the kitchen to the shop she wheeled the baby with her. She could not be separated from it. She felt as if her spirit were being infused with the child’s, and lived utterly in the days when the baby was left alone with her.

  She had the baby one afternoon in the kitchen, when she was rolling out pastry on a long table. Bowls of pepper and the dark wooden moulds for the pies stood in a row. An enormous black iron pot of chitterlings was boiling on the stove; a heap of raw pork stood ready for the pies.

  As she rolled and moulded the yellowish pastry she talked to the child. He looked fixedly up at her from his pink-and-cream carriage, with soft black eyes, as if he understood.

  ‘You dare look so, you beauty! Rascal! You know all about it! What is it then, who is it?’ She put her face close to the child’s. The child murmured and smiled. ‘Ah! he knows. What should we do without him? He’s so lovely, my little one. Heaven knows what we should do without him.’

  The bell rang in the shop. Wiping her floured hands on her pinafore she ran off, still calling to the baby as she ran.

  The customer was anxious to talk.

  ‘So you’ve got the baby again? You like that, I’ll be bound? One small pork-chop. Does he grow? Effie’s changed—I hardly know her. Quite small—my husband’s never in to dinner and I don’t eat a stock. Are you well?’

  ‘Oh! I’ve never been so well. I like the baby about me. He’s a companion to me.’

  ‘You’ll spoil him.’

  Charlotte smiled with guilt and happiness. ‘He’s spoilt already,’ she confessed. ‘We all spoil him.’ She cut the pork chop skilfully.

  Suddenly Charlotte stood alert, like a hare.

  ‘I heard something!’

  The women stood tense and listening.

  They heard a faint sound, a sound of escaping steam, and then a terrible cry. Hearing the scream of the child Charlotte threw down her knife and rushed into the kitchen. Scalding water was pouring over the child’s face from the meat-pot. The carriage had slipped on. But the baby had ceased screaming when she arrived. There was no sound but a faint growling in the pot and a hiss of steam.

  • V •

  After the child had died, Charlotte was left alone. The draper and Effie did not come to see her.

  She closed the shop every Thursday, put on black clothes, and went to the cemetery. She spent a long time trimming the grass, watering the soil and arranging chrysanthemums at the head of the tiny mound. After a time the keeper came to know her, and she to recognize the same faces week after week, and gradually she gained a sort of happiness from it all.

  She came home very tired one Thursday, and found a letter awaiting her. She sat down on the broken sofa overlooking the narrow yard and read it.

  The shop-bell rang as she was reading. She lifted her head from her hands, slowly dried her moist eyes, and then went to answer.

  A little boy stood at the counter. He searched for the money in the pocket of his blue blouse and looked up at her.

  ‘A polony, please,’ he said. His voice was timid. He stretched out his hand.

  To Charlotte he looked like a small pink ghost. His eyes never left her. His childish stare, as he watched her pick out the fat red sausage and wrap it up for him, contained such a profundity of trust and belief in her that she felt she must talk to him. She placed the sausage on the counter and smoothed his hair and said:

  ‘Do you know, I’m going to America.’

  He did not appear to understand. He seemed to contract into a faint mistrust of her. He said nothing, and she repeated what she had said:

  ‘I’m going to America. Don’t you know where that is?’

  He shook his head, still regarding her.

  ‘Not America?’ She pressed his two cheeks with her hands. ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘It’s over the sea, a long way, I don’t know how far.’

  She could feel his trust for her ebbing away. His face seemed to slip through her fingers. His eyes were distant and half afraid.

  He thought a moment, looking uneasy, and then asked:

  ‘What are you going for?’

  She shook her head. What was she going for?

  The answer came to her lips half instinctively.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  There was a pause again. He searched her with his eyes and seemed to ponder over her.

  ‘Don’t you want to go?’ he said.

  And the same answer started from her:

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’

  He became more than ever like a pinkish-white ghost; she could discern only his small bright eyes fixed upon her with perplexity. He had now no faith in her. He stood a little away from the counter, hesitant and uneasy, gently critical of her with all his childish contempt and suspicion of grown-up tears.

  Suddenly she could bear his stare no longer, and with an abrupt movement gave him the sausage, took his money and let him depart. Before withdrawing she saw him still watching her with curiosity, his little steadfast face a white blur in the falling dusk beyond the window.

  She retired to the living-room, sat on the sofa and again read the letter her sons had sent asking her to go away. The house seemed stuffy and smelled of years of cooked meat. It was nauseating and loathsome, this smell, representing everything that had been worthless and ugly in her life—all that which had been colourless and had come to nothing. It was already too dark for her to decipher the letter. Instead she sat there with the child’s naive words going to the root of her being again: ‘What are you going for? Don’t you want to go?’ And, as before, she was at a loss for an answer. As the a
utumn afternoon faded, its primrose driven away by gold and tawny orange and the first purplish red of darkness, she thought of America again and again, and the thought of being uprooted frightened her. Could she go? How far was it? How many miles? The uncertainty of an unknown, far-off world, and the slightest tremor at the roots which bound her to the place where she had come as a young wife and where she now sat alone appalled her.

  There remained at last only a scrap of blue in the sky, pale as a hyacinth, fledged by a ring of clouds as pure and delicate as flowers of snow. As darkness came on, she took her candle and chopped her kindling and laid a fire in the copper, ready for the following day.

  Finally she sat down and by and by, in the gaslight, read her letter again. All at once it was as if she fell into a dream; the past had come back, her sons were still with her, she had never loved the draper and the child had never died. She was going away; she was going to uproot herself. Life would be different. There was a marvellous happiness awaiting her. She was never coming back again.

  And as suddenly it vanished. She got up quickly, put away her letter and set about grilling the sausages.

  Punctually at half-past eight she carried them into the crowded shop, saw the same faces as ever and heard the same voices, skilfully slid off the steaming sausages, and asked her usual question:

  ‘Well, and what was it like at the theatre to-night?’

  And with the same gentle, ladylike smile she listened to the babble of friendly voices. And while she listened she kept telling herself that perhaps after all it was the Will of God that what was to happen would happen, and that when it was time to change or move or die it would be so. One knew no more.

  A Flower Piece

  The blackthorn tree stooped over the high bank above the road. Its branches were clouded with white blossom and the spring sunlight threw lace-like patterns on the earth that had been trodden bare underneath the tree. The grass of the bank was scattered with big, pale-blue violets and stars of colt’s-foot and daisies very like chance blackthorn blossoms that the wind had shaken down. In the hedge behind the blackthorn were companies of pale green lords-and-ladies that had thrust up their unfurled hoods through a thicket of dog’s-mercury. They looked cold and stately. The sunlight was sharp and brilliant and against the blue of the sky the blackthorn tree was whiter than a summer cloud.

  On the road below stood a row of cottages and in the back gardens wives were beating carpets and gossiping. A clergyman rode by on a bicycle, carrying The Times and a bunch of daffodils. A blackbird squawked and dipped across the road and vanished into a spinney of hazels as he passed.

  A girl of seven or eight was sitting under the blackthorn. The tree was so twisted and stooping that she sat there in a kind of room, shut in by a roof and walls of blossoming branches. It was very sweet and snug there on the dry floor in the freckling sunlight. She had taken off her pinafore and had spread it across the earth and had set in the centre of it a tin that had once held peaches. In the tin she was arranging flowers among ivy leaves and grasses. She had put in celandines and dog-violets and colt’s-foot and a single dandelion, with a spray or two of blackthorn. She arched her fingers very elegantly and sat back to admire the effects. She had fair, smooth hair, and she had made a daisy chain to bind round her forehead. It gave her a very superior and ladylike air which was not lost on her.

  Presently she ceased arranging the flowers and began to smooth her dress and polish her finger-nails on her palms, lingering over them for a long time. At last there was a movement in a hawthorn bush a little distance away and a voice called quietly:

  ‘Do I have to come in now?’

  The girl looked up in the direction of the voice.

  ‘You have to wait till I tell you,’ she whispered sharply.

  And then in a totally strange voice, very high-pitched and affected, like the voice of a stage duchess, she sang out:

  ‘I’m at my toilet, my dear. An awful nuisance. Do excuse me.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Only a moment! I’m still in my déshabillé.’

  She began to make hurried imaginary movements of slipping in and out of garments. Finally she undid two buttons at the bodice of her dress and turned back the bodice of her dress, revealing her naked chest. She looked down at herself in admiration, breathing heavily once or twice, so that her bosom rose and fell very languidly and softly. She gave one last touch to the flowers in the peach-tin and then whispered:

  ‘You can come in now. Act properly.’

  Another child came out of hiding and stood outside the hawthorn tree. She was a brown, shy, unassuming creature, about six or seven, with beautiful dark eyes that reflected the dazzling whiteness of the sloe blossom so perfectly that they took fresh light from it. Her voice was curiously soft and timid and whispering.

  ‘Do I have to come straight in?’ she said.

  ‘You have to be in the garden first. You look at the flowers and then you ring and the servant comes.’

  ‘Oh! what lovely may,’ said the other child, talking softly to herself.

  ‘It’s not may! It’s lilac.’

  ‘Oh! What lovely lilac. Oh! dear, what lovely lilac.’

  She pulled down a branch of blossom and caressed it with her cheek. It was very sweet and she sighed. She acted very charmingly, and finally she rang the bell and the servant came.

  ‘May I see Mrs. Lane?’

  ‘Not Mrs. Lane,’ came an awful whisper. ‘Lady Constance. You’re Mrs. Lane.’

  ‘Is Lady Constance in?’

  ‘Will you go into the drawing-room?’

  She stooped and went through a space in the blackthorn branches. The fair child for a moment did not notice her. She had broken off a thorn and she was absorbed in stitching imaginary embroideries very delicately. Suddenly she glanced up with a most perfect exclamation of well-mannered surprise.

  ‘My dear Mrs. Lane! It is Mrs. Lane, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How sweet of you to come. Won’t you sit down? I’ll ring for tea. You must be tired.’ Ting-a-ling-a-ling! ‘Oh: Jane, will you bring tea at once, please. Thank you. Oh! do sit down, won’t you?’

  ‘Where do I sit?’ said the brown child.

  ‘On the floor, silly!’ whispered the fair girl. ‘Oh! do take the settee, won’t you?’

  ‘I was admiring your lovely may,’ said the brown child.

  ‘The lilac? Oh! yes, wouldn’t you like to take some?’

  ‘Oh! Yes. May I?’

  She began to crawl through the break in the branches again. Instantly the fair child was furious.

  ‘You don’t have to do that until I tell you,’ she whispered. ‘Come back and sit down now. Oh! yes, of course,’ she said aloud. ‘I’ll tell the gardener to cut you some.’

  The brown-eyed child crept back under the tree and sat down. She looked very meek and solemn and embarrassed, as though she were really in a drawing-room and did not know what to do with her hands. The fair child was acting superbly, not one accent or gesture out of place. The maid arrived with the tea and the fair one said with perfect sweetness:

  ‘Milk and sugar?’

  The dark child had become busy with hidden knots, her frock uplifted, and she did not hear. The fair-haired child took one look at her and became furious again.

  ‘Put your clothes down,’ she whispered terribly. ‘You’re showing all you’ve got.’

  ‘I can’t help it. It’s my knickers. I want some new elastic.’

  ‘But you mustn’t do it. Not in the drawing-room. We’re ladies!’

  ‘Ladies do it.’

  ‘Ladies don’t do it! Ladies have to sit nice and talk nice and behave themselves.’

  The brown-eyed child surrendered. She looked as though she were bored and bewildered by the affectations of the fair child and by the prospect of being a lady. She was constantly glancing with an expression of quiet longing at the blackthorn blossom, the blue sky and the flowers arranged in the peach-tin.

&n
bsp; ‘Milk and sugar?’ repeated the fair child.

  ‘Oh! yes please.’

  There were no teacups, but the fair child had gathered a heap of stones for cakes. The brown child sat with a stone in her hand. The other took a cake between her finger-tips and made elegant bites and munched with a sweetish smile. She made small talk to perfection, and when she drank her tea she extended her little finger. Finally she observed that the dark child was neither eating nor drinking. She looked at her as if she had committed unpardonable sins in etiquette.

  ‘Aren’t you having any tea?’ she said icily.

  The brown-eyed child looked startled and then declared timidly:

  ‘I don’t want to play this game.’

  ‘Why don’t you want to play?’

  The brown child did not answer. All the dignity of the fair child at once vanished. She made a gesture as though it were difficult to bear all the shortcomings of the younger child.

  ‘All because you can’t act,’ she said tartly.

  ‘Let’s go out and get violets and be real people.’

  ‘We are real people. You play so silly. You aren’t old enough to understand.’

  The brown-eyed child looked acutely depressed. Suddenly she dropped the stone and began to creep out disconsolately from under the blackthorn tree. The fair child adopted a new, cajoling tone.

  ‘It’s easy,’ she said. ‘You only have to put it on a bit and you’re a lady. We can start again and you can be a duchess. Come on.’

  The dark child looked back for a moment very dubiously, as though it were too much to believe, and then walked away up the bank. The other child sniffed and tossed her head with fierce pride and called out:

  ‘You needn’t think you can come back here now you’ve gone.’

  Without answering, the brown-eyed child walked away behind the hawthorn trees and by the hedge at the top of the bank. She became lost in a world of dog’s-mercury and budding hawthorn and pale violets. She came upon primrose buds and finally a cluster of opened primroses and a bed of white anemones. Talking to herself, she gathered flowers and leaves and put them in her hair, as the fair girl had done.