Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (146 page)

CHAPTER VII
.

CLARA BREDE was sitting on her bed. Her hands were folded in her lap; her fair hair fell about her shoulders. Her dress, unfastened at the neck, revealed her full throat and a little of her white chest. Her blue eyes looked, unseeing, at her looking-glass, that, tilted upwards, showed her only the plain white of the ceiling. The lines of her face drooped a little, and were quite motionless. She had a tortoise-shell hairpin in one hand.

Her room was very small, the paper very pale, the coverlet, the toilet cover, the blind, the curtains, all white. Above the head of her bed hung a small photograph of her Cambridge College. The two candles on the dressing table made the place blaze. The servants in the room above were talking, and the higher notes of their voices came through the ceiling. “I wish I could see....” she said suddenly. Her voice startled her. She stirred, leaned forward and laid the hairpin on the dressing table. She raised both her hands to her hair and slowly untwisted a heavy coil. But they sank again into her lap. “No, I can’t go to bed,” she said.

She moved one hand towards her pillow.

She was going to lie down. Then she remembered to have read somewhere that lying down fully dressed injured the complexion. “What nonsense,” she said, but her hand returned to her lap. Perhaps it was true. She sat motionless. “And this is what I have come to!” she said. She sat silent for a very long time. Then she spoke: “I think he goes upon very wrong lines. I think he is dreadfully demoralising.”

Her eyes rested upon the tortoise-shell hairpins. She wondered whether, if she waved her hair, it would suit her. Dora had said it would.

“No one ever thanks him,” she said. She was speaking of George.

She was twenty-seven. She had left her college six years before, on the very eve of “going up” for her “tripos.” She had been sitting in her college study. Half-a-dozen other girls, her best friends, had been perched on the sofa, on the table, lying back in the lounge. They were talking about “what they were going to do” after that next week which was going to settle so much, for which they had been working hard enough, many of them. Clara was going in for teaching. It was needed so much; she had a vocation for it. She would love it; and with a little luck one might make a career. Clara — she was in these days exactly the same Clara — had sat gazing at a point in the wall, above the mantel-piece. “If I get through,” she said, “but I muddle things so dreadfully.”

“Oh,
you
!” her best friend said derisively. “You never made a slip since you learned your first declension in short frocks.”

Clara shook her head mildly. To herself she seemed so dreadfully wanting in “nerve,” in just that thing that makes one do things neatly, decidedly, and with an instinct for the right alternative. There were always so many alternatives; one could never be sure; life was so “difficult.”

“Good old Clara!” one of the girls said. Someone at the door called: “Here’s a telegram for Clara Brede.”

It said that her mother was very ill.

Mrs. Brede had been kept just alive for five years from that day. She had, before the telegram was sent, been struck down by a spasm of the heart. Clara, who was the only one to nurse her, had never gone back to her college. The sister next her had been married just before; the next was only eighteen; the next fifteen — that was Dora. Clara was the only one who could look after the house; it was large and rambling; there were three servants and the stables; her father needed help. She had frequently to sit up all night in her mother’s room, a place all shadows, where medicine bottles clicked on the shelves at the lightest footfall. She had tried at first to “keep up her work” — reading — through those long nights by the glimmer of a shaded night-light. She had to hold her book very close to it. She was not sure that it did her “any good.”

At first she had kept up a correspondence with her best friend still at college, and with a young graduate who gave private lectures in Cambridge. He was full of generous ambitions; he, too, had a “vocation” for teaching. The best friend became secretary to a training school. After a time the young graduate married. Their letters stopped like the dying away of faint sounds from outside a closed place. Things went very quietly. The two boys went to college, then out into the world. The next sister married. Dora went away to a high school, then to college too. Her father worked strenuously; in his big parish he drove congregations to church; in the diocese he combated the Ritualists. He travelled much, giving lectures, raising his loud voice in the country at large, attempting to bind the peasant to the land. All the while Mrs. Brede lay still, or crept very gently from the bed to the window. Three times they had gone to Wickham because it was very quiet and near the sea. There already Clara had seen George at a distance. She knew him as distinguished; she had read his verse at college. Once she heard him speak. He had been asking the postmistress about her rheumatism. He had struck Clara as being rather “finicking,” too nice in his dress, and a little meddlesome. Her college training had left her the tone of contempt for personal refinement and delicacy. She still desired people to be “purposeful.” She went back to her night watches. The house moved as quietly as ever. Nothing would ever disturb it.

She was dead and buried. She did not care to think of any “afterwards,” because it would have meant looking forward to her mother’s death. But she thought her thoughts. Life was none the easier because she had no “vocation” for that sort of life, and she had no one to talk to.

An under housemaid would ask for an extra night out, Clara was never certain. To refuse might be harsh, to grant it, bad for discipline. The girl might get into mischief if she went; if she could not, it might be a bitter disappointment, and Clara was tender towards the disappointed. She had Dora, too, to think for, and there was her father. She was no longer certain that she was a Christian; she was assuredly not certain that it was for the peasant’s good to keep him “on the land.” Sometimes she thought that any kind of propagandising was wrong. All the time, she copied out her father’s sermons at night; she wrote, from dictation, his violent letters to the
Times.
He abused her handwriting. Sometimes she forgot to cross her “t’s,” because she was thinking so hard about all these matters.

Dora, too, seemed to be growing up “frivolous.” At College she appeared to think most of dress, of college shirts, of neat collars, and of games. She treated life so gaily; she was always laughing. Apparently she did very little work, and never faced any of Clara’s “graver issues.” It worried Clara very much; her father, engrossed in his own work, left the matter entirely in her hands. What was she to do? She could not sympathise with Dora’s irresponsibility, yet she dare not “talk to” Dora. What had the graver issues done for her, Clara Brede? Dora now was, yes, she was, like a sun-beam. How could her sister play the cloud? Life was so difficult.

Then her mother died. She had seemed so much better. Clara, in the last sunshine of the year, had been taking a little walk, not going a mile out of earshot of the house. Her mother was sitting dead in the chair when she came back; her father was raving that he had killed her.

She had to face an entirely new situation. Of the old she had retained only one precious memory.

Her mother had awakened late one night, some months before, and had said: “Darling Clara, you are so good to me, so kind, so patient.” They had both cried very bitterly.

Clara had never thought of herself as kind or patient. She had done her work without any idea that she did it well. She had done her best, but not as to any manner born. So her mother’s words were very precious. Afterwards her mother had made her will. There was a respectable sum for the children. Clara was to divide it as she thought fit, giving to one more than to another, as their circumstances seemed to her to warrant, or not to give it at all if she liked. It marked her mother’s perfect trust in Clara, but it was one more responsibility, and she had her father upon her hands.

She had one more very bad year to pass through before they had settled down at Wickham. Horrible moments stood out. She had gone with her father to consult a Harley Street specialist. Mr. Brede had been moaning to her until seven in the morning, in the sitting room of a London hotel. She had had no sleep, they had had to wait a very long time in the specialist’s ante-room. Afterwards she had received long instructions as to the management of her father. She was to find a
locum tenens
for him, she was to take him abroad, she was to keep his mind engaged, she was to watch him unceasingly. He might become light-headed at times. She was to secure always rooms opening out of his. In foreign hotels it was a good thing to have a night porter within easy call. All the while she had been wanting to call out at the doctor: ‘And I? And I? What’s to become of me? Is
my
life worth nothing? Haven’t
I
got a sanity to lose?”

But she had appointed the
locum tenens
; she had gone abroad with her father. It remained in her mind as a long agony of trying to interest him in great pictures that made her eyes ache, by artists whose names seemed to be all like “Caravaggio.”

Mr. Brede grew a little better. They came to settle at Wickham. It all went on just the same. Then Dora came back; one day they met George. Mr. Brede had once or twice called on him, in the old days, when he had been trying to beat up recruits for the Society for keeping the peasant on the land. So when they met, George asked her father how the Society went. Mr. Brede had replied with his whole lamentable story. It had been one of his bad days, and he had shouted a good deal. It had shocked Clara. She was used to his outbreaks before strangers, but George was different, a distinguished man who would not stand intruders. She had had that idea of George.

George, however, had almost taken her father off her hands. He had become the centre of their lives.

She had the smallest room in the house, because from it she could hear through the wall the slightest sounds that her father made. It was so low that she could not take her dress off without rubbing her hands against the ceiling. She had not thought much about it before, but suddenly it struck her as abominable.

George had hardly noticed her. She would have said he had not really looked at her until that evening. When he had spoken about Thwaite he had really, as it were, tried to come in contact with her. He had always had a very kind tone, but an amused one, as if she were a person who had never thought about life. He had said: “A concierge of such a charm!” bantering things like that.

“I think I do not agree with him about Thwaite,” she said. His doctrine seemed to to be immoral. He had told her not to trouble about a man’s scrupulousness; the main thing was whether he was sympathetic. “I couldn’t subscribe to such a doctrine,” she said.

But, at least, he had spoken to her about life, about things that mattered, not only of books and flowers, and the gossip of the place. She wondered why gossip amused him. She had always thought that one ought to be above it. But he was interested in people’s lives. She sat speculating for a long time...

“Thwaite is unscrupulous,” she maintained. “He’s charming. I think he would make Dora an excellent defender, a splendid companion. But ought I to let Dora marry him?” He would be unscrupulous for her against all the world. But was that what most a woman needed? Would it be moral? What ought she to do? Mr. Moffat said that they would make such a charming family circle. But was that an excuse?

“Oh, if only—” she began. She was talking to herself again. It startled and shocked her. It was a sign that her mind, too, was yielding to a strain. Or was that idea, too, only self-consciousness?

“Yet, heaven knows,” she said, “I’ve no one else to talk to. No one.”

The pure lines of her fair face hardened; her eyes gazed more intently in front of her.

“He might have taken an interest in me!” she said. He never had. A hot glow had come over her one day while George had been taking his immense pains over her father. It had done her father no good; it had only made him talk the more and think the more about his own misery. She had wanted to say to George: “Why not talk to
me
?”

Ah, why not? No one, not ever, seemed to think that she could suffer. She had listened to her mother, to her father, to her sisters. Her girl friends had built, before her, their castles in the air. But they seemed always to cool at once if she began to talk about herself. “You? — you can do what you like,” they had always seemed to say. Why? Why should she be always credited with this cool efficiency? Why did no one — even George, who could see into so many hearts — ever see that she needed sympathy, help, counsel? Besides, she dare not really speak to Dora. She could not be certain that she had not “morbid” ideas, that it was not right for a child like Dora to share. She could not be certain. There was no one she could open her heart to. She needed it so much — ah, she needed it so much. She bowed her head, and sat for a long time lost in gazing at her hands. Her nails were very pink and delicate, her hands were very long. She laid them one within another, and thought that, surely, they were graceful.