Chapter III: Polly Hears the News

Peter’s watch had stopped and when he had struck a match to look at it he had not noticed that it was stopped. Polly was later home than ever she had been. She had come along dark, deserted streets to the serenade of cats. A drunken man had lurched after her once, so she had thought. He was really seeking for his lost pipe. Polly’s fear where there was nothing to fear, her hardihood where there was everything to fear, was one of those inexplicable mysteries peculiar to flapperdom.

Her heart was yet beating in the panic caused by the semi-paralysed man hunting for his pipe.

She opened the door gently, crept into the passage, and hung up her coat to a loud whistling meant to convey utter innocence of the lateness of the hour. The thought of facing her Dad made her feel like a worm. But here she was, quite safe! What had they to worry about? As if she couldn’t take care of herself! Peter had said she could. She got morally ready to face the music, and to enact that start of surprise as she saw the clock. As she stepped forwards into the darkness she saw that only a bar of red firelight shone under the middle door. It must be late. Dad must have taken Granny back to Cherrydale after her selling of pies in Narrowfields, his usual custom. She could dodge off to bed before he got back.

There would be her mother, of course----

But as Nan had let off the steam earlier in the day she would get off better than otherwise. Moreover, Nan would look on this disobedience as a bang in the eye for Cherry, and be pleased.

Polly pushed open the door.

She stared into an empty kitchen.

Her whistling fell off slackly--stopped dead.

She approached the supper table. Granny had been here. The cloth was on in her honour and the cup she always drank out of. Remnants of crumbs lay about. Polly tasted one. Granny’s Saturday gift of pies. Then, she saw--a whole one, untouched on her Dad’s plate, that his pot had had no tea in it.

She poked the fire into a blaze and looked at the clock. Her start of surprise was real enough. It wanted only twenty minutes to twelve.

It was borne in upon her that they had gone out to seek for her, that her Dad had refused to eat until she was in.

Then she saw Rag--inside at this hour!

Cherry always put the dog to bed religiously so soon as he came in on a Saturday night, to have Rag fresh for that Sunday morning parade.

It dawned on her that they must have gone to bed.

They had left that pie and pot for her.

They had left the door for her.

They were going to let her do as she liked.

“Hello, Rag!” she said, leaning down to pat Rag.

Her voice was wobbly.

The house was so forlorn.

After bracing up herself for a justification of being so late--this solemn deadness pressed upon her with weighty accusation--she drew out the baby chair she used to sit in, and squeezed herself down into it, before the fire. She was thinking of Becky, wondering how Becky would go on.

She could tell Becky they had left the door for her.

What a triumph!

“Hello, Rag,” she said again, at this juncture.

Rag grunted and lolled out his tongue.

“Twenty-six and sixpence this week, Rag,” she said, in a proud whisper. “An’--I _can_ take care o’ myself, can’t I, Rag?”

She pulled the dog up on her knees.

He commenced gravely to lick her face.

Usually she defended herself against this procedure.

“Lick ’em off, Rag,” she whispered approvingly. “Lick ’em off.” Her face was screwed up in the painfully tolerating way that had angered Peter as he struck a match to look at her before kissing her to order.

Rag was unconscious of the martyrdom.

The rough red tongue went gravely over cheek, chin, forehead----

“That’ll do, Rag,” she said, decisively.

Which was just as she had said it to Peter at the same point.

Nobody here to scold; to pour her tea; to fasten the doors; to ask her where she had been and cause her to lie. The stunning new phase of freedom came to her with a cold desolation. She was being belittled to-night. Great things were happening to her, but in a topsy-turvy way. Two men had kissed her. The door had been left for her. And--why hadn’t her father been her mother? Her old grievance came up again amidst the tumult and chaos of a day’s memories that set up a milestone dividing her life from all the days gone by.

Rag whimpered as she put him off her knee.

She patted him as compensation, with that equivocal tenderness in little things, cruelty and lack of proportion in big ones, peculiar to the flapper.

Then, whilst she brooded upon the demoralisation of Adam Wild’s kisses--rubbing her mouth to rub them off as a child would--she suddenly remembered that the little pink bow had come off her best hat and there wouldn’t be time to put it on before going to Sunday School. The vital consequence of the matter thrust her childish fury against the sordid farmer out of mind.

Taking a candle she stole on tip-toe into the parlour. She entered it with a sharp consciousness of its dusty discomfort that always came upon her. When she had a parlour--all her own----!

Here, as she set the candlestick down on the littered round table with its faded cloth, she saw something that drove the pink bow out of her mind. Granny Harker’s bonnet with its immemorial red geraniums glaring from the dusty blackness of it, stared her boldly in the face. She touched it as if it must be visionary. And, as she paused, it was borne in upon her that something was the matter with the house, something awful, something----She walked out of the parlour, the candle-light on her blanched face. Granny Harker, who never would sleep away from home, was here.

“Mam!” she called up the stairs.

There was no answer.

“Dad!” she faltered.

The strangeness of the altogether strange night shook her girl’s soul with terror.

She flew upstairs. On the top step the candle fell and guttered out.

“Mam! Granny!” she said, babyishly.

For Polly was only seven years old at that moment. All her cocksureness, her adventuring with the fires of life, her premature attempts at womanhood were shed, leaving her a baby calling on those she loved in her light-hearted selfish way.

The stillness became full of bogies.

She rushed into a whitewashed room almost as light as day under the moonlight. The shadows of birdcages were thrown upon the wall from an opposite one, for Cherry had once fancied canaries.

“Mam!” she said, shrilly.

A tousle-headed Nan, staring wildly, half rose from a tumbled bed.

“Oh--tha’s come--bitch!” she said.

“Becky’s watch stopped an’----” began Polly.

“Tell another, whilst thy mouth is warm,” said Nan.

She spoke the words with mechanical use, but they did not bite.

She stared at the white figure as it seated itself on the bed.

She dropped the awful thunderbolt without a word of warning.

“Thy father’s got his legs ta’en off,” she said.

The little clock that half-dragged its wheels, then whirred palpitatingly, alone broke the silence.

Polly’s face was staring incredulously into her mother’s. Her voice came with a ghostly protest.

“Ooo!” she said, in a tongue-tied way. Then, “No. No.”

“Ten shillings,” wailed the shrew. “Ten shillings! That’s all he can get in this world an’ it mightn’t be that much. Ay, a train went right ower him. They’d to take ’em off, right away.”

Polly rocked herself.

Then she said, “It--it can’t be true.”

“It’s true enough,” sobbed her mother. “My God! Ten shillings. I shan’t know which end on it to start on. What did I do it for? I never thought o’ that----”

Her words conveyed nothing to the dazed girl, beyond the sordid priority of the monetary loss above all.

“Will he----Did they say----Who----?”

She started three sentences without finishing one of them.

“They say he’s a chance,” said Nan. “That Breeze lad came to tell us.” Then she returned to the economic plane.

Polly went downstairs.

The front door opened, shut, and Granny Harker came into the kitchen, bare-headed, just as she had been peering into the night for Polly.

She gave the fire a poke that splintered a big cob and lit up the kitchen--revealing Polly cowered down in the baby-chair, her hands covering her face.

“Oh, she’s telled thee,” observed the old Calvinist.

Polly nodded without uncovering her face.

“Ay. It’s fine news to come hoam to--at this time!” observed Granny.

Through her fingers Polly saw the fat hand point at the clock.

Withal the roundest, slowest, easiest voice in the world, it had something merciless in it.

Polly rose from her crouching attitude.

Her face, drowned in tears she made no attempt to wipe away, looked half fearful resentment at Granny.

“It’s soon enough to come hoam--here!” she said, though her voice trembled at her own wild courage. It seemed to her that the world was against her, cornering her, to-night.

Granny surveyed her with something tender struggling through the clouds on her brow--the tenderness she always fought against and would, to her dying day.

“Hasta ever tried to mak’ it a nicer shop to come hoam to, lass?” she asked.

“Ooo! Leave me alone,” said Polly.

She sat down again.

“Out o’ the fryin’ pan into th’ fire tha’ll jump, if tha doesn’t mind,” said Granny. Then she said, knowingly, “I did it mysel’, so I know.”

Whereupon Polly uncovered her eyes and looked at Granny with interest struggling through her misery.

Granny returned the look with a mild solicitude.

She set the kettle on to boil again, and plumped herself down in Nan’s chair.

“What he’ll do--without feet--the Lord only knows,” she said, grimly, looking across at the easy chair. “Though she’s my own lass. Well, what is--is.”

Polly went on crying.

“Eh, dry up, little cock-throstle!” said Granny, after a while. “Sitha! There’s a sup o’ tay, an’ this pie. Come on. We mun go on eytin’, or we’se make bad waur.”

Whilst Polly ate, to her cheerful encouragements, she was mentally shaking her head. A giant down-fallen--a shrew no longer held in bondage--a seventeen-year-old lass who came home at half-past eleven, hawking a face with God’s beauty and the devil’s stamp of irresolution. What was coming?

“God help this house!” she exclaimed fervently, at length, in her slow, country accents. “An’--God help it.”

As for Polly--she was fishing “sweethearts” out of her tea, according to the old irresistible impulse, and laying them out, one by one, in her saucer. She performed the rite with the minimum of interest, it is true. But her destiny, her wonderful destiny, tantalised her with curiosity--even in this awful moment, when it seemed to her that she could not be happy any more, never any more.

“Come here, I’ll do thy hair, cock-throstle,” said Granny.

So Polly sat in the old baby-chair, Granny’s first present to her, and the old woman brushed out her hair.

And as she brushed, listening to the chirping of a cricket in the warm ashes, looking across now and then at Cherry’s empty chair, Betty Harker came to the conclusion that Polly’s feet needed to be set on a rock, and that they were such foolish feet they would never find the rock without help.

“Is that too tight?” she asked, plaiting the shower of gold into a cable.

“Just nice, Gran,” said Polly.

She rose and flashed a moved, warm look at the old woman, through new tears.

Granny’s handling of her hair had been balm on her sad heart--the little feather heart that might blow anywhere.

“Th’ next time tha comes to see me,” said Granny, “I’ll introduce thee to a reight, grand lad.”

Polly was silent.

The silence had varying qualities of surprise, suspicion, and--readiness for another scalp!

“Ooo, Gran!” pleaded Polly suddenly, “take me back hoam--to live with you again.”

And Granny Harker found that Polly had not yet outgrown those two years lived with her, ten years ago, that the lass looked on that place with the cherry-tree over the door as--home; that there were depths in the lightsome creature.

“Tha could make this place a lot pleasanter, Polly Ann,” she reminded her tenderly, using the little old name she had used to the seven-years-old-child.

“Ooo, Gran!” said Polly, tearfully. “You don’t know. You don’t know!”

“I’ve a bit of an idea what it’s like,” said Granny. “But--in this world, we can only try. An’ as for my takin’ other folks’ childer, I haven’t made sich grand wark o’ my own it’d be justified. Besides--thy Dad needs thee.”

Polly pulled her shoes off.

Granny’s last argument had been unanswerable.

“Night, Gran,” she said.

She knew better than to offer to kiss Granny.

No one had ever known the old Calvinist-democrat to submit to such tomfoolery. She said it was for folks with lots o’ time on their hands.

“Neet, cock-throstle,” said Granny genially.

It was her highest water-mark of sentiment, that quaint expression, in the old, slow voice. Beyond that she never went.

By aid of a match Polly found the fallen candle, relit it and advanced into her mother’s room. She set the candle down on a rush-bottomed chair with a big hole in it, and went downstairs.

She went up again with a pot of tea.

“Mam!” she said, standing by the bedside, “there’s some tea here. It’s sugared.”

The shrew raised herself on her elbow.

Out of the exhaustion of revolving the ten shillings problem she eyed her daughter. She saw in this erratic thoughtfulness of the girl’s a bidding for indulgence.

“Tha thinks tha’ll get round me, now tha’rt not fleyed o’ thy father any more,” screamed Nan, suddenly, and hurled the contents of the pot. Polly stepped quickly back. But the liquor had gone through the thin sleeve.

She went downstairs.

Granny put salve on.

Polly’s face revealed a hard, unyouthful cynicism.

She caught Granny’s keen, grey eye.

She slid her young arms round the tubby, ungraceful, homely figure.

“Ooo! Granny,” she said, with a hystericky laugh, “I’m too young. An’ it’s not in me. I don’t care for aught but--dancin’ an’ lads, I don’t. I can’t help it. I didn’t pick my pattern, did I? I were like to take after somebody, weren’t I? An’--they’re bad folk! I can feel ’em in me--pullin’ at me, makin’ me do things I don’t want to do.”

Granny stood erect with the big girl sobbing on her neck. She knew well enough whom the lass took most after, and her face grew more grim as she saw that vision of her prodigal daughter, of the guinea-gold hair.

“Tak’ another cup o’ tay up,” she said, withstanding the temptation to kiss the girl. “As for lads--wait till tha sees that lad at Cherrydale.”

But Polly went off, showing a disconsolate lack of interest, and without the second cup of tea. She was, as she said, too young to do gracious things without a return that elevated her in her own eyes.

As she nursed her smarting arm, sitting on the chair before the one thing in the house she had ever bought--a mirror--she soothed herself by a contemplation of her own face, viewing it from every point.

But as she heard Granny hobbling upstairs, with a long step and a short one, so it seemed, on account of her “gammy” leg (souvenir from Pa Harker, defunct), she hurriedly got off her things and jumped into bed.

Granny had taken up another cup of tea.

The shrew drank this one.

Nan’s one cardinal virtue, filial respect, had been put into her by the buckle end of a strap in the days when Granny’s tenderness had not come so near to the outside.

When Granny had undressed and struggled up on the bed, with much puffing for breath, Polly surprised her by saying, as the candle went out, “What’s his name, Granny?” As Granny was sitting gloomily on what she thought must be the ruins of the Cherry castle, it took her some time to understand that Polly was alluding to the--rock.

“Oh--that lad,” said Granny, after some thought. “Little pouse, I thought tha were asleep.”

Then she said, “What’s th’ good o’ axin’ that? It’s nobody tha knows. Well, he’s called Adam--like th’ first man, an’ his other name’s Wild. I allus go to my dinner at th’ Charity. Tha mun come to sing, an’ we’ll go up after. It’s six months off yet, but--that’ll be th’ best chance, natural-like.” Then her tone changed. “Eh, I wonder how yon poor lad is!” she said.

The human compassion in her voice for the son-in-law who retold her jokes, and whose jokes she carried about with her pies, was a contradiction to her iron theory of Pre-destination--and her iron worship of her close-cropped iron god, Cromwell. Whilst in her struggle against Destiny on behalf of Polly Cherry, it was characteristic that Granny’s commonsense soul had chosen for the foolish feet a human rock. And the rock Granny had chosen was more human than Granny knew.