The Tale of Triona. William John Locke

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СКАЧАТЬ lost caste. It is true that, afterwards, patronizing efforts were made by Brahminical uncles and aunts and cousins to bridge over the impassable gulf; but Mrs. Gale, very much in love with her pig-selling husband, snapped her fingers at them and told them, in individually opposite terms, to go hang.

      It was a love match right enough. And a love match it remained to the very end of all things; after she had borne him two sons and a daughter; all through the young lives of the children; up to the day when the telegram came announcing the death of their elder son—the younger had been killed in the curious world accident a month or so before—and Stephen Gale stood by her bedside—she had even then succumbed to her incurable malady—and said, shaken with an emotion to which one does not refer nowadays:

      “Mary, my dear, what am I to do?”

      And she, the blood in her speaking—the blood that had given itself at Agra, Lucknow, Khandahar, Chitral—replied:

      “Go, dear.”

      Olivia, sitting by, gripped her young hands in mingled horror and grief and passionate wonder. And Stephen Gale, just fifty, went out to avenge his sons and do what was right in his wife’s eyes—for his wife was his country incarnate, her voice, being England’s voice. A love match it was and a love match it remained while he stuck it for two or three years—an elderly man at an inglorious Base, until he died of pneumonia—over there.

      Mrs. Gale had lingered for a year, and, close as their relations had been all Olivia’s life, they grew infinitely closer during this period of bereavement. It was only then that the mother gave delicate expression to the nostalgia of half a lifetime, the longing for her own kind, and the ways and thoughts and imponderable principles of her own caste. And, imperceptibly, Olivia’s eyes were opened to the essential differences between her mother and the social circle into which she had married. Olivia, ever since her shrewd child’s mind began to appreciate values, knew perfectly well that the Trivetts and the Gales were not accounted as gentlefolk in the town. She early became aware of the socially divided line across which she could not pass so as to enter Blair Park, the high-class girls’ school on the hill, but narrowed her to Landsdowne House, where the daughters of the tradespeople received their education. And when the two crocodiles happened to pass each other on country walks she hated the smug, stuckup Blair Park girls with their pretty blue and white ribbons round their straw hats, and hated her red ribbon with “LH” embroidered on it, as a badge of servitude. When she grew up she accepted countless other social facts as immutable conditions of existence. Mortals were divided by her unquestioning father into three categories—“the swells,” “homely folk like ourselves,” and “common people.” So long as each member of the three sections knew his place and respected it, the world was as comfortable a planet as sentient being could desire. That was one factor in his worship of his wife: she had stepped from her higher plane to his and had loyally, unmurmuringly identified herself with it. He had never a notion, good man, of the shocks, the inner wounds, the instinctive revolts, the longings that she hid behind her loving eyes. Nor had Olivia; although as a schoolgirl she knew and felt proud that her mother really belonged to Blair Park and not to Landsdowne House. As she grew up, she realized her mother’s refining influence, and, as far as young blood would allow, used her as a model of speech and manner. And during the long invalid years, when she read aloud and discussed a wide range of literature, she received unconsciously a sensitive education. But it was only in this last poignant intimacy, when they were left starkly alone together, that she sounded the depths of the loyal, loving, and yet strangely suffering woman.

      “I remember once, long ago, when you were a mite of five,” Mrs. Gale had said in a memorable confidence, “we were staying at a hotel in Eastbourne, and I got into conversation on the verandah with a Colonel somebody—I forget his name—with whom we had spoken several times before—one of those spare brown, blue-eyed men, all leather and taut string, that wear their clothes like uniform. You see, I was born and bred among them, dear. And we talked and we talked and I didn’t know how the time flew, and I missed an appointment with your father in the town. And he came and found us together—and he was very angry. It was the only time in our lives he said an unkind word to me. It was the only time I gave him any sort of cause for jealousy. But he really hadn’t. It was only just the joy of talking to a gentleman again. And I couldn’t tell him. It would have broken his dear heart.”

      This was the first flashlight across her mother’s soul, and in its illumination vanished many obscure and haunting perplexities of her girlhood. Had Mrs. Gale lived the normal life of women, surrounded by those that loved her, she would doubtless have gone to her grave without revealing her inner self to living mortal. But infinite sorrow and the weakness engendered by constant physical pain had transformed her into a spirituality just breathing the breath of life and regarding her daughter less as a woman than as a kindred essence from whom no secrets could be hid. At her bedside Olivia thus learned the mystery of birth and life and death. Chiefly the mystery of life, which appealed more to her ardent maidenhood.

      So when at last her mother faded out of existence and Olivia’s vigil was over, she faced a world of changing values with a new set of values of her own. She could not formulate them; but she was acutely conscious that they were different from those of the good, honest Mr. Trivett and the dull and honourable Mr. Fenmarch, and that to all the social circle which these two represented they would be unintelligible. In a way, she found herself possessed of a new calculus in which she trusted to solve the problems which defied the simple arithmetic of the homely folk of Medlow.

      All these memories and vague certainties passed through the girl’s mind as she sat before the fire in self-examination after her victory, and conflicted with the prosaic and indicatively common-sense arguments of her late advisers. She knew that father and brothers, all beloved and revered, would have been staunchly on the side of the Trivetts. On the other hand, her mother, as she had said to her husband on the edge of a far, far greater adventure, would have said: “Go, dear.” Of that she had no doubt. … Yet it meant cutting herself adrift from Medlow and all its ways and all its associations. It meant a definite struggle to raise herself from her father’s second social category to the first. It meant, therefore, justifying herself against odious insinuations on the part of her scant acquaintance.

      And then the youth in her rose insistent. During all these years of stress and fever which had marked her development from child into woman she had done nothing but remain immured within the walls familiar from her babyhood. Other girls had gone afar, in strange independence, to vivid scenes, to unforgettable adventures, in the service of their country, in the service of mankind—just as her brothers and father had gone—and she had stayed there, ineradicable, in that one little tiny spot. The sick-room, the kitchen, the shops in Old Street, where, in defiance of Food Controller, she had fought for cream and butter and eggs and English meat so that her mother could live; the sick-room again, the simple white and green bedroom which meant to her little more than the sleep of exhaustion; the sick-room once more, with its pathos of spiritual love and physical repulsion—such had been the iron environment of her life. Sorrow after sorrow, and mourning after mourning had come, and the little gaieties of the “homely folk” of her father’s definition had gone on without her participation. And her girl friends of Landsdowne House had either married rising young tradesmen in distant towns, or had found some further scope for their energies at the end of the Great Adventure and were far away. In the meanwhile other homely folk whom she did not know had poured into the town. All kinds of people seemed to be settling there, anyhow, without rhyme or reason. It was only when there was not a house to be rented in the neighbourhood that she understood why.

      “You have a comfortable home of your own. Why, on earth, don’t you stay in it?” Mr. Trivett had asked.

      But she had stayed in it, alone, for the three months since her mother’s death, waiting on the law’s delays; and those three months had been foretaste enough of the dreary infinite years that would lie before her, should she remain. She was too young, too full of sap, to face СКАЧАТЬ