Sleep in Peace (55 page)

As in conscious life it was his nature rather to examine his desires than to repress them, they came past his censor in dreams in a fairly simple, little-transmuted form, and their disguise was easily penetrated. Holland was Olandlei, Hudley, of course. He was very familiar with the appearance of his father as a lion, and the representation of the sex element by Grace-cum-Madeline had often previously indicated to him that the blame for the separation between himself and his wife was probably not altogether on Gwen's side; but to the rest of the dream he had no clue. Why Shadrach and Co.? he thought—and at once he knew the answer. Shadrach and his fiery furnace were indissolubly associated in his mind with his father's prayer of thanksgiving for the escape of the Blue baby, when the Blackshaw House chimney fell and Mrs. Armistead died. The Blue baby—that, of course, was Laura.

Frederick exclaimed, and threw back the bedclothes. But no, he thought; it's too ridiculous. On the contrary, he thought, telepathy is not ridiculous at all; it's merely a phenomenon, as yet insufficiently investigated, of the same order as wireless telegraphy. Clearly the act of cerebration must cause vibrations; it only remains to devise an instrument capable of receiving them. A mind in tune with another mind, he thought, reaching for his clothes, is surely like a receiving-set tuned to a particular wave. From Laura's mind to Grace's, he thought, lacing up his shoes, and then from Grace's back to mine. At any rate, he thought, recklessly shooting the front-door bolts and hoping that his father would believe the resultant bangs to proceed from fog-signals on the railway, at any rate I cannot neglect such an intimation, such a message; better to be ridiculous now than remorseful for the rest of my life.

A point of dim, reddish light now began feebly to glow on one of the distant lower slopes: some farmhouse where there was illness, supposed Laura. And at the thought of human beings, doubtless in some close domestic scene, despair pushed Laura's will to the pitch of action; for human society rejected her, found her stupid, boring, useless, while she on her part shrank from its grief, its rage. Well, they can't reject me when I'm dead, thought Laura; this West Riding earth will receive me then. Here goes.

She peered over the edge of the Ellistone, whose jagged base was for the moment clear of mist. The rock was not as sheer as she remembered; still, a fall of some seventy feet into the tumbled mass of boulders below should be enough. She took off her coat.

A hand gripped her arm.

Laura, staggering, screamed.

Frederick threw himself back with all his force. He fell, pulling Laura with him. The impetus of their fall carried them rolling down the rear ledges, away from the rock face. They sat up in safety, bruised, scratched, bleeding, but very much alive.

Laura burst into hysterical laughter, followed by hysterical tears. Frederick put his arm round her, and said, “Now, now!” in a soothing tone. This seemed so inadequate to the occasion that Laura began to laugh again.

“Now, Laura! Now!” urged Frederick, squeezing her arm in a friendly, clumsy way. “Why did you want to throw yourself down? A young, happy,; unspoiled life like yours—why should you want to throw it away?”

“Happy! Unspoiled! It's impossible to be happy in Hudley,”
screamed Laura wildly. “It's so vile, so sordid, Frederick; it's unendurable.”

“Wo is me, that I am constrained to dwell with Mesech, and to have my habitation among the tents of Kedar,”
murmured Frederick.

“Exactly,” cried Laura bitterly. “The tents of Kedar!”

“But if you hate Hudley so much, why don't you try to do something to improve it?” argued Frederick.

“How can I?” wept Laura. “I'm so useless, Frederick, so
useless
. Nobody wants me, nobody wants my art; I'm useless, and I'm wretchedly unhappy. So why go on living, why preserve a useless life?”

“Explain to me about your art,” said Frederick. “Grace hasn't told me. Look, sit here.”

He took her elbow and urged her to a less precarious position on the rocky ledge. They sat close, side by side; Laura between sobs, in the high, shrill tone of hysteria, explained her artistic efforts and their consistent failure; Frederick listened earnestly, hands between knees, as her voice went up and down, died away, burst out again into wild complaint.

“Laura—forgive me,” said Frederick in his warm, golden tones, “forgive me, but I must say this. You're too self-centred, too completely absorbed in your own private circle and your private griefs. You need to break out, to get away from yourself imaginatively as much as you can. You need to do something for other people, be in contact with other human beings. You feed on yourself too much; that's why your art is so—forgive me, Laura—feeble.”

“But Frederick, I
do
try to get in contact with other people,” sobbed Laura, thinking of her wretched hours at dances. “And they reject me.”

“That's because you always approach them thinking of yourself and not of them,” explained Frederick in his kindest tone. “You think: what can
I
do for them, instead of: what can I do for
them?”

“If you knew what had finally driven me out here you might think that was a little hard, Frederick,” cried Laura. “Gwen. . .” She was quite unable to go on, but broke down completely, burying her face in her handkerchief and sobbing without control.

“Doesn't it ever occur to you, Laura,” said Frederick in a sad tone: “That Gwen, and such women as Gwen, are sacrificed to make such women as you and Grace?”

“No, it doesn't,” snapped Laura angrily. “I think that's quite untrue.”

“The Marthas of this world,” began Frederick.

“I've always
hated
Martha,” argued Laura hotly. “There was Christ, about to say something really fine, noble, important, and Martha must go fussing about the dinner and interrupting Him. I often think Martha's descendants must have colonised the West Riding.”

“Somebody has to cook the dinner,” urged Frederick, delighted to have drawn her into argument.

“Not necessarily—not at that moment,” persisted Laura. “It's a wrong sense of values, Frederick; it's putting the unimportant things first.”

“But if you feel this so strongly, why don't you
do
something about it?” urged Frederick..

“How
can
I?” cried the wretched Laura loudly, beating her hand on her knee. “Nobody
wants
my work.”

“Then try another kind—try social work—ask the Council of Social Welfare for something to do. Try somehow to become part of the life about you, Laura,” urged Frederick earnestly. “You live in it, but you're not of it. I always feel that, when I come to Blackshaw House—you seem to decline to mingle your life with those about you, to merge it in the general stream. Ludo is the same. And yet you're both so warm-hearted, so affectionate. I can't understand it.”

Laura gave a deep sigh. She said:

“I can. It's fear.”

“I see,” said Frederick gravely.

There was a long pause.

Laura rose. “Well, come along,” she said, climbing carefully to the ground. “It's cold. We shall both catch cold. I can't commit suicide with you here, Frederick, so we may as well go home.”

Frederick smiled rather sadly, for her tone reminded him of his wife.

“I wish you'd read Forster's
Howard's End
, Laura,” he said. “There's a very fine passage towards the end, urging us always to compare, to draw analogies between the actions of others and our own.”

“The beam and the mote idea, you mean,” Laura threw back over her shoulder.

“Yes. Of course it's impertinent of me to appear to scold you,” said Frederick earnestly, stumbling behind her along the uneven path. “Believe me, I'm scolding myself at the same time—and for the same faults. I don't myself participate sufficiently in contemporary life; I take things too much at second-hand, from books.”

“Really, Frederick!” said Laura, exasperated. She felt inclined to ask him whether Geoffrey and Madeline were his idea of non-participation, but refrained, for in such matters Frederick was easily shocked. Instead she said: “I suppose you took prison at second-hand?”

But he's perfectly right about me, she thought, with the lucidity of extreme fatigue: I don't participate. I live in a house with two young children, and I know nothing about children's upbringing at all. I've lived through the greatest war in history, and scarcely participated in it at all. I couldn't give any coherent account of its course and strategy, or even of its major fronts and their results; I've only a few vague ideas floating loosely in my mind—tanks, Lord Kitchener, trenches, Zeppelins, mud. Take Scapa Flow for instance—I always thought it was on the west coast of Scotland until a chance allusion in a magazine the other day. And then Versailles. The only thing I know about the Peace of Versailles
is the League of Nations. Oh, and Wilson's Fourteen Points. But I don't remember what they are. Then there's Ireland, and the Saar. What a sluggish, half-conscious life I've lived! Frederick's right: I don't participate. It's true, she consoled herself, that the great majority of Hudley women are as bad or worse; but then I always prided myself on being superior. I don't participate.

They stumbled wearily down into the valley, and up the long, the interminably long, hill home. By the time they reached the gates of Blackshaw House, Laura could hardly place one foot before the other.

“Can you get into the house?” whispered Frederick.

“Yes—the back door's open,” returned Laura.

“I'll wait and see you in,” said Frederick.

“Thank you. I suppose I ought to thank you for saving my life, too,” said Laura wearily. “But I don't know yet whether I'm grateful or not. How did you come to be there, Frederick?” she suddenly exclaimed.

Frederick told her.

Although she agreed perfectly with his view of the agency which had transferred the message of her danger through Grace's mind to his, a thrill of superstitious pleasure ran down Laura's spine. She turned pale, smiled strangely, and felt that life in Hudley was the richer for the incident. Then, with a murmured word of farewell to her brother-in-law, she stumbled away into the house, weakly crawled upstairs, threw herself into bed and fell into an exhausted but satisfied sleep, determined to begin participation in the morning. Yes, she would try hard to be like other people; she would cut her hair, she would share their interests; she would participate.

“Doctor and the other nurses are going to be very late this afternoon,” said the Head Nurse breathlessly: “They had such a
heavy clinic this morning, they didn't finish till after one. So could you come and give me a hand in the weighing room till Doctor comes, Miss Armistead?”

“Certainly, Nurse,” said Laura, rising.

She took her pen and went into the next room. On the forms some twenty mothers were already gathered, all holding infants in their arms. It was not yet two o'clock, and most of the children were asleep, but here and there one stirred beneath its shawl. Clinging to their mothers' skirts, or galloping round the room, or watching, with absorbed eyes and running noses, the junior nurse measuring out ointment and serving dried foods at cost price, were the older children, not yet of school age, but too mobile to be safely left at home.

“Come along, then,” urged Nurse, holding out her arms to a mother in the front row. “Ted Aykroyd, Miss Armistead.”

Laura rapidly flicked through the index and picked out the card bearing Ted's case-history. She was proud of these index cards, and the system on which they were filed, for the whole arrangement had been organised by herself, to the great admiration of the clinic nurses.

“Fourteen pounds eight last time,” she called.

Nurse adjusted the weight; the mother, smiling, unwound a shawl and handed out a naked child. Laura spread a piece of clean soft paper over the flannel-covered scales, and Nurse laid the baby carefully down. He had gained in weight so considerably since last week that the scale-pan sank with a thump. Terrified, the child screamed, and shot his legs and arms frantically in the air; his whole body turned pink with rage and muscular effort, and tears of anger appeared in his fine clear eyes. “Now! Now!” urged his mother tenderly, bending over him, her hands hovering over the scale as she repressed her desire to comfort by touch. “Now, Ted!”

“Fifteen pounds,” called Nurse. She beamed. “That's splendid, Mrs. Aykroyd,” she said, shouting above the sobs of the twenty
babies, awakened by Ted's cries. “Doctor
will
be pleased. Ted's had pneumonia, you know, Miss Armistead. But you're picking up nicely now, love, aren't you?”

Smiling with pleasure and nodding to Ted's mother, Laura entered the weight on the card.

They had weighed about half a dozen babies, and some fifteen more new ones had come, when the doctor and the other senior nurse rushed in. Laura at once sprang up and returned to the further room, for her allotted task, these Monday afternoons when she came to the clinic, was to act as the doctor's clerk.

“Such a sad clinic this morning, Miss Armistead,” said the doctor, her charming eyes wide with distress. She threw her hat and coat on the piano—the Awe Hill clinic was held in a Congregational Sunday-school and the school furnishings remained all the week—without noticing where they fell; tied on a waterproof apron and dived into her white overall. “I do hope it will be more cheerful this afternoon.”

“I'm afraid it won't,” said Laura ruefully. “Except Ted Aykroyd —he's gained half a pound.”

“Splendid,” said the doctor, who was perfectly familiar with the weights, diseases, family histories, and probable future difficulties of every baby who had visited the Hudley Child Welfare Clinic for the last five years. She sat down, put her left foot on a footstool, buttoned her overall, and greeted Mrs. Aykroyd, who was just entering the room. “This water isn't hot, Nurse,” she said sternly, dabbling a finger in the movable washstand by her side. Nurse ran for the kettle; the doctor slowly and meticulously washed her hands. “Now, Ted,” said the doctor: “Let's have a look at you.” She took the child into her lap, supporting his head on her raised left knee, and held out a hand to Laura, who put into it the child's case-card; the afternoon's work had begun.