Chapter XXXVIII

Viola did not get any farther than the paddock. She only wanted to set a screen between herself and any human eyes.

She sat down under the trees and saw between the green dancing of the leaves a vague, firm line of blue.

The air was alive, as if the pulse of the day beat through it. It was the noon hour, still and full of scent. The drowsy, persistent song of the bees was the only sound she heard. It seemed an ancient sound, older than birds’ songs, as old as the silence of the dreaming earth. Her thoughts ran through her mind disconnectedly, like intermittent pain. She watched the light in the trees, and the small, hovering, gold bodies of the bees, between her and the hedge shadows.

Viola’s heart was heavy within her, heavy and sick. She was not yet conscious how sharp a blow she had received, because she had not yet had time to connect it with her dreams and watch them die.

All her life long she had hated and avoided ugliness, she would not look at it; she had not needed to look at it, and every one had praised this evasion in her as a virtue.

She had never known badness, and though she lived in a world permeated by hidden irregularities and where innuendo was the spice of wit, she had either not understood it, or she had escaped it by laughter. Laughter was always safe. It was safer than dignity, safer than self-respect. You got away from whatever you didn’t like by it, and it didn’t make you look like a prig.

But there are situations even in modern life which cannot be met by laughter.

If it had only been Reggie! Viola knew that she could have forgiven Reggie.

Reggie wouldn’t really have meant it. His whole character didn’t go into his acts. All day long he did things that weren’t a part of him. If he had infidelities they couldn’t have reached his heart. They would have been as careless as the clever way he put on his clothes.

But for Jim to do a cruel act and not to let it count was incredible. If Jim had done it, he was not Jim. He was a man like other men, only not nearly so nice. No other man that Viola knew had a sister who was a thief, and spoke with a Cockney accent.

These disadvantages did not make her believe Jim was more likely to be guilty, but if he was guilty, it somehow made it all more irredeemable and squalid.

Her imagination was as shaken and solitary in its world of blossoms and sunshine as Jim’s had been long ago, struggling through a snowstorm. Beauty was a bitter taste on her lips.

She put her hand up with a little nervous gesture to shut out the loveliness of the unconscious world.

The earth was made of flowers and light. Buttercups and daisies, wood sorrel and tiny speedwell stood up transfixed and shining in the sunlight. By the hedge the cow parsley spread high its filmy lace. There was nothing to match her desolation, or to make it seem less mocking to take the name of God in vain.

Viola had a very dim idea of God; she had never thought very seriously about an Invisible World, but she liked to see somebody else believe in Him, and she thought, for she was very young, you could not sin and keep the sense of God alive in you.

If Jim had wronged and left a woman, Viola knew he must have wronged and left God.

Nor was she as sure now that he had ever had Him.

She couldn’t ask Jim, because if he was that kind of man she wouldn’t believe him, and she wouldn’t ever know if he was that kind of man or not, unless she could believe in him.

She wished she could have asked Mrs. Bligh more questions, but Mrs. Bligh was like her mother. She knew too much, experience had robbed her doubts of all their benefits. She would dash all Viola’s challenging hopes with axioms.

‘Men are like that,’ she would say. ‘God sends us these crosses. Be thankful you have found out in time.’

But Viola wasn’t at all thankful. She wasn’t sure God did send crosses in the shape of the failure of other people’s hearts, and she could not believe that all men had so little honour.

She couldn’t speak to Mr. Bligh because he didn’t like painful subjects. He dodged them as if they were blows.

She wondered with a queer little flash of self-reproach if people had ever wanted to speak to her of their troubles and hadn’t dared because she shrank from pain.

It was the first time she had discovered that fastidiousness could be a weakness and not a strength. She buried her head in the cool grass and wished that she could keep the darkness over her.

She felt unsure of herself. Who was she to steer a course unlike the world around her? To put aside the beliefs and practices of her own people; and where had this presumption led her? Hadn’t the inner life failed?

The outer life didn’t promise so much, but it didn’t fail. Money bought what it set out to buy. You could appreciate possessions at their full value. You weren’t robbed of lovely surfaces. But if you pushed all these aside and stood out for what was at the bottom of your heart, you could be more robbed than any bank could rob you.

If the inner life went, everything she had went, except material comfort.

It had been the inner life which made her release herself from Reggie, and read _Ann Veronica_, and cry because she saw two old people sitting on a doorstep in the rain. It had not absorbed much of her time, but it had occasionally pushed its way up and shaken her—it had shaken her most often and most strangely since she had met Jim’s formidable eyes.

Was her inner life simply perversity, like a craving for something indigestible to eat?

Then a very strange thought occurred to Viola. Supposing she wasn’t Viola Egerton, supposing she was a housemaid—that particular housemaid. Supposing she was what people call ‘wronged.’ Who would help her most? Where did people like this poor creature turn?

She thought of her mother and Mrs. Bligh, and she found herself trembling. Their way of dealing with the world was so short and cold. Of course they were good women, so far above temptation that no wind of it had ever shaken them, but they wouldn’t be particularly consoling to take sins to.

She thought of Reggie and how he had said, ‘I have no patience with failures—I never give a workman two warnings.’ She thought of herself, if some one came to her in great trouble, wouldn’t she just feel terribly uncomfortable and tell somebody else about it?

Jim wouldn’t. Jim would take troubles, his own or somebody else’s. Even if Jim had sinned, was it worse than not knowing how to be kind? Was the question really so much what people had done as what their doing had made of them? Of course this was going rather far, but when you are unhappy you do go rather far.

Mrs. Bligh had said she didn’t know the rights of the case—but perhaps somebody else did. Perhaps she could find out?

Viola buried her head deeper in the grass. She didn’t want to find out. She thought it would be nicer than anything to melt into the earth and forget; not to find out anything, nor to believe anything.

It was curious, but she had never wanted to be without consciousness before. She did not know how unhappy she was, nor that the panic longing to be blotted out is the last stronghold of the nerves before the will frees them into action. When she raised her head she had thought of something to do.

Mrs. Bevan, the Bligh’s cook, had been with them for twelve years. She must have known this housemaid—she might know her still.

Viola moved quickly through the paddock and the walled garden to the kitchen door.

Mrs. Bevan had just finished dinner. She stared with a certain severity at the visitor who, without an engagement, had missed a profitable meal.

‘Would you take anything to eat on a tray, miss?’ she asked without enthusiasm.

‘No thank you, Mrs. Bevan,’ said Viola quickly. ‘I came to ask you a question. Do you know anything about a housemaid who left here ten years ago—a housemaid who was in trouble?’

Mrs. Bevan, whose colour was always high, rapidly purpled.

‘I do and I don’t,’ she said shortly. ‘Girls who have married and live respectably with several children and a sober husband shouldn’t be asked questions—not to my mind.’

Viola put a small, persuasive hand on Mrs. Bevan’s arm.

‘I only want to know where she lives,’ she said gently. ‘I wouldn’t hurt or worry her for the world, but there’s something I want to see her about, and I thought you might know her name and address? Mrs. Bligh has lost sight of her.’

Mrs. Bevan softened, but she still felt that if she was appealed to she ought also to be confided in. It was difficult, however, to press this point, as the young lady seemed oblivious of it. So she gave Viola, Emily Dunstan’s address, and finished up with, ‘There’s nothing wrong, I hope, to come down sudden upon either of them?’

Viola shook her head, and with that curious air of finality common to the ruling class, she thanked Mrs. Bevan and retreated towards the garage.

Emily Dunstan lived only fourteen miles away. Mr. Bligh had a small car which he drove very badly. He had been amazed at the expertness of Viola and had put the car at her disposal.

She moved without hesitation now, and told no one where she was going.

The sun poured down upon her small, tense figure, the car shot over the broad, white road, which ran like a streak of milk under its wheels.

The flying trees raced by with an unreal air. It was difficult to say where speed began and time ended. The world went by in a flash, but it kept going by for ever.

Emily Dunstan lived at Three Mile End, and a local builder had been let loose upon the country-side. Mrs. Dunstan’s small and feverish red house next to the Police Station might have been in London, but it had wall-flowers, a strip of pansies in front of the gate, and a brave show of calceolarias on the window ledges.

Mrs. Dunstan was a tall, good-looking woman; she had a high colour and fine, short-tempered brown eyes.

She did not, to Viola’s surprise, look like a person who had ever been in trouble.

She glanced with respect at Viola’s motor, dusted a chair for her in a small, prim parlour whose fantastic rigidity was broken by a rocking-horse and a baby’s perambulator, and stood in front of her, determined to keep her place.

Viola was less sure of hers. She asked Emily twice if she was Mrs. Dunstan, Mrs. Emily Dunstan? and then seemed hardly to know what she had asked her for.

Emily felt sure that Viola wanted her husband’s vote; her car hadn’t electioneering ribbons on, but it was only when ladies wanted something out of you that they were nervous.

She couldn’t give Viola her husband’s vote as it was already promised to the Liberal member, who was always wanting something done to his greenhouses. But Emily knew how to speak to ladies, even persuasive ones, when she had to say ‘No’ to them.

‘I’m afraid you will think me dreadfully interfering and even perhaps impertinent,’ Viola said at last. ‘But I’ve come to ask you a question, and I have this much right to ask it, Mrs. Dunstan—it matters to me terribly what the answer is!’

‘I’m sure, Miss,’ said Emily serenely, ‘I’d gladly answer you anything you like, though if it’s about politics I can’t say my head’s as clear as my husband’s. Men always having more time to read the paper and more language after having read it, than what, if we have a pride in our homes we could afford to spend on it. Of course ladies are different.’

‘But, Mrs. Dunstan,’ said Viola, ‘what I have to ask you hasn’t anything to do with politics. It has to do with your former life.’

Emily had ten years and five children between her and the past, but her eyes hardened a little.

‘Yes, miss,’ she said, with a warning hostility in her voice.

‘It’s when you were with Mrs. Bligh—I come from there——’ Viola said more quickly. ‘I’m their friend, Mrs. Dunstan, but I’m even more the friend of some one they knew—about whom there is a rumour which perhaps you could help me to contradict. I hate to bother you about it—I know for you it is all over and put away for ever—but, Mrs. Dunstan, will you—can you tell me—if it was Jim Barton, in that other life, who did you a great wrong?’

Mrs. Dunstan’s face changed curiously. The memory of that incident was buried, but it was not dead. A softer expression came into her eyes. ‘No, Miss,’ she said after a pause, ‘he didn’t ever wrong me. I’d rather not go into particulars, if you don’t mind. It’s all over now, and the least said soonest mended. But there’s one thing you don’t forget, when you’ve been down, and that’s being—well, being treated just as if you were like anybody else, stood by, as you might call it. I knew even at the time it was better that the poor little thing should die, and I’ve nothing to complain of on the part of them I was with—they gave it a funeral, but they said flowers wasn’t suitable, and I had no money at the time, of course, of my own. Jim Barton—he’d been asking about me, though he had no call to, I was angry when I heard about it, and I wouldn’t see him; but he sent the flowers, a cross made of white lilies and pink and white roses. I can see them now. It was the middle of winter and that cross cost money. And he hadn’t anything more to do with the child than you had. There’s things women don’t forget, you know, Miss, whether they’re respectable or not. He found me a good place afterwards, too, but I thought more of them roses than I did of anything else.

‘I wrote and told Mrs. Bligh there’d been a mistake made about the child’s father, and who it was, for I knew Jim Barton thought the world of her, and I wanted her to know the truth of it, if nobody else did.

‘But she didn’t answer me—a perfect lady Mrs. Bligh always was, but not much help to you if you wasn’t what she expected.

‘If you’ll excuse me asking, Miss, why do you want to know?’

‘Because,’ said Viola, ‘I’m going to marry Mr. Barton.’

‘Reely!’ said Emily. She wasn’t Mrs. Dunstan now, nor the mother of the dead baby who was forgotten—she was Emily who had lived at Mrs. Bligh’s, and she deeply disapproved of a lady, a very obvious lady, marrying Jim Barton.

Viola had not kept her place. She did not even see that Mrs. Dunstand had. Her eyes were full of tears. She got up and took Mrs. Dunstan’s slightly reluctant hand in hers.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I can’t thank you—I wanted so much to know the truth. I think I did really all the time, in my heart, know it, but not enough. Forgive me if I have hurt you, and remember if you want him to be happy, that I shall try to make him happy, and that you have helped me.’

Mrs. Dunstan withdrew her hand.

‘I’m sure I hope you’ll both be very happy, Miss,’ she said, ‘and I’ll be much obliged if you’ll give my kind remembrances to Mr. Barton when you see him next.’

Emily’s eyes held no more memories. She took her visitor to the door and watched her drive off with qualified approval. She was a lovely young lady and she knew how to drive a car, but Emily herself would never have dreamed of marrying Jim Barton.