The Stepson (18 page)

The Schoolmaster stood for a moment, peering as if dazzled.

‘Why, Kate,' he said, ‘is that you? I wondered how the door came to be ajar.' He held out his hand, and when she grasped it he laid his other hand on hers. ‘Why, this is a surprise,' he said, and there was a tinge of pleasure in his colourless voice. ‘And how are you? You look well.'

‘I felt I must come over,' said Kate, ‘and see how you were getting on.'

He turned to the fire. ‘I will make the tea,' he said.

‘I've made it, Father,' said Kate.

‘For two?'

‘Yes, for two.'

‘I'll just … There are some stewed plums in
the larder.' He went out and in a moment returned, carrying a glass dish, plates, spoons, and another cup and saucer.

‘It's nine months since I went away,' said Kate.

‘Not quite,' said the Schoolmaster. ‘Thirty-five weeks yesterday.'

His lips closed themselves precisely and Kate noticed the familiar vertical lines from the corners of his mouth to his chin. He drew up another chair.

‘You sit there, Kate, in your old place,' he said, pointing to the place near the fire, ‘and pour out as you used to do.'

And Kate sat in her old place and they acted again a fragment of their old life. Yet how different under its outward similarity was their relation now. It seemed almost to Kate that she was a middle-aged woman sitting with a middle-aged man whom she had known years ago. There was a sense of strangeness in this meeting again, for it was not a taking up of old sympathies, but a discovery of vague sympathies where before there had seemed to be none. They were in truth shy strangers, bettering their acquaintance.

‘It's nice to be here again,' Kate said as she handed the Schoolmaster his tea.

He glanced at her quickly. ‘Really?' he said. ‘Does it really seem nice to you? And yet you were very glad to leave here. You didn't think when you left, did you, that it would be nice to return?'

‘No,' said Kate. ‘I wasn't happy. I was glad to go.'

‘I never knew,' said the Schoolmaster, ‘whether you were happy or not. You never spoke of your feelings.'

‘And you wondered sometimes what they were?' Kate asked.

He nodded. ‘Often!'

‘But you never asked me.'

‘No I….' He hesitated. ‘I found it difficult to …' The old man blushed, as though making some intimate confession. ‘You see, Kate, it has always been difficult for me to …' He made a helpless gesture with his hands.

‘It was a strange thing, wasn't it,' she said, ‘that we should live together all those years and yet know nothing of each other, like two shadows moving about the house?'

‘You always avoided me, Kate.'

Kate nodded. ‘I couldn't help it. You never seemed to expect anything else.'

‘No,' said the Schoolmaster at last. ‘I didn't expect anything else. Years ago, I … well … I gave it up, retired into my shell.' He bowed his head and again his face reddened. It was evident that to talk thus openly about himself filled him with shame. For a moment they sat in silence, disturbed only by the faint murmuring of the kettle and the clink of Kate's cup as she set it back in the saucer.

‘How was that?' she asked tentatively; but it
seemed that he had not heard her question. He sat with his bony hands clasped before him, his eyes fixed on his plate and a wintry smile faintly lighting his face.

‘We were great friends once, you and I, Kate,' he said, ‘when you were a little thing. You won't remember that. It was not until you were about eight that I … that we …' He flagged again, and it seemed to Kate that she was talking to a timid child.

‘What happened?' she asked.

For a moment he did not reply. He was not smiling now, but his eyes were still fixed on his plate, as if he expected to read the answer to her question there. Then his lips parted.

‘I don't quite know,' he said precisely.

‘Surely I wasn't to blame,' Kate quietly urged, ‘at that age?'

He raised his eyes and spoke shortly. ‘I think your mother was to blame.'

‘Mother?'

‘She drew you away from me.'

‘Poor Mother,' said Kate. ‘You think she put me against you?'

He set his lips primly and a little grimly. ‘I thought so for years,' he said. Then he made a gesture as though abandoning his old resentment. ‘What does it matter now?' he said, sighing. ‘It is difficult to know what people do intentionally and what happens because it must happen.'

‘Yes,' said Kate, ‘and it's difficult, as well, to do what you want to do, even if you want it ever so much.'

His pale eyes raised themselves quickly to hers as if he were both surprised and grateful for her understanding.

‘Have you, too, found that, Kate?' he asked.

She nodded. ‘Always.'

They had finished their tea and Kate found herself by mere force of habit clearing the table. ‘I'll wash up,' she said, taking up the tray.

‘Don't trouble, Kate,' her father answered. ‘Mrs. Gales always comes in at eight.'

Kate left the tray in the scullery and returned. ‘You manage all right, then?' she asked.

‘Oh, quite, as you see.' He waved a general indication of the kitchen.

‘Yes,' said Kate, ‘the place is nice and clean.' She did not dare to ask if he was happy. Had he ever, she wondered, been either happy or unhappy during the last fifteen years? Perhaps even he himself could not have told her.

He went over to the table near the window. ‘I have taken up a hobby since you went away, Kate,' he said, and he began to take some pieces of finished fret-work from under the table. ‘I find it a good thing,' he said in that dry, correct tone which always used to irritate her so much, ‘to have something to work at sometimes'; and, bending meagre and
hesitant beside her chair, he began to show her one by one the thin squares and oblongs of fretted wood. In Kate's simple eyes they were very beautiful.

‘Why, Father,' she said, looking up at him with surprise and admiration on her face, ‘however did you learn to do it so well?'

He coloured with pride like a boy, examining each piece lovingly as she handed it back to him.

‘If you like them,' he said, ‘I will make one for you. You shall have it next time you … That is, if you …'

‘Oh thank you, Father,' she said. ‘I should love to have one. I shall be over again before long, you may be sure.'

‘Well,' said the Schoolmaster, ‘I shall have to think it out. Perhaps I could work your initials into a design'; and Kate saw that he was delighted at the prospect of making something for her.

He went to put the fret-work back in its place under the table, and Kate rose and began to put on her hat, saying that she must go. Then, having made herself ready, she turned to say good-bye. He stood before her embarrassed, and then reached out a hesitating hand. Kate took it and then, putting up her face to his, she kissed him; and as she crossed the green towards the Elchester road, she looked round and saw him still standing, spare, upright and lonely, in the doorway of the ugly little house. She waved her hand and he waved back, and soon
she had turned onto the road and the school was lost to sight. Her heart was warm with something which she could not define. Was it happiness or sadness, or a blend of both? She knew at least that it was something which it was good to have felt, and that she had found what she had set out to seek at her old home.

Kate's visit to her father occupied her mind much during the following days. It had affected her profoundly, and she knew that it had profoundly affected him, and yet the words they had actually spoken, as she went over them in her memory, were, in comparison with the effect they had produced, extraordinarily dry and superficial. But what did that matter? The words, whatever their weakness, had sufficed to pierce the armour they had worn against each other all these years and to transform them from enemies into friends. It was strange to contemplate the change which had come over her own attitude. For Kate's life had kept her a child in mind long after her body had reached womanhood, and all the time she had lived at Penridge she had retained the childish belief that all grown-up people except herself were strong and self-sufficient. She had never doubted that the father whom she hated was a strong, self-sufficient man whose coldness and austerity towards herself were the outward sign of his qualities. In her young ignorance it had never occurred to her that he could be other than he seemed, that under the stern exterior there cowered a timid, thwarted creature that craved for affectionate indulgence. If only he had dared to show her the weaker side of himself, how different those weary years together might have been. But that, as she now
saw, was exactly what his weakness had made impossible to him. It was his weakness and defencelessness which had compelled him to assume the mask which had helped to make her life with him so joyless a thing. By the discovery of this, it seemed to Kate, she was at last delivered from the spell of her unhappy youth.

As she thought over these things, she was sitting at the sewing-machine in the parlour window making a shirt for David. That commonplace task filled her with an extraordinary happiness: it was as if the whole of her being found expression in the work. This was the fourth shirt she had made since David had left The Grange: those that she had intended to make for Ben had in the meantime been neglected. Her thoughts flowed on, and under her hand the machine rattled and hummed, filling the room with a noise like the buzz of a huge frantic bluebottle.

In the light of her new knowledge of her father she now considered Ben. He too had worn a mask for her, but what she had discovered under the mask was not an unsuspected humanity, but deceitfulness and lust. Yet, although in her father the hidden nature had proved to be the truer part, was this the case for every one? Might it not be that in some people the apparent nature was the truer and the hidden nature the less real part? It would surely be absurd to suppose that the true nature of every man was hidden, that no one was what he seemed to be. Life would be
impossible under such conditions. Might it not be, then, that the truer part of Ben was the part he had always shown to her, and that the ugly secret she had stumbled on was the weaker and less real side of him? If only she could persuade Ben to be frank with her, even in the hesitating and stumbling way in which her father had been frank, might they not reach to a deeper understanding? Yes, mutual understanding was everything: a brave and complete frankness would make all misapprehension impossible; and she began to imagine a conversation between herself and Ben in which all that painful secret about Emma was confessed and abolished. She could now forgive him readily, she believed, if only he would open his heart to her and show her that he was truly sorry for his cruel deception.

But suddenly Kate stopped working. The stream of her thought was arrested and the blood rushed to her face, for in a flash she had realized that, however frank Ben was with her, she herself could not be frank with him. How could she respond to his confession and repentance by telling him that she was in love with his son? To Ben it would certainly seem a monstrous thing that she should have fallen in love with this boy, and indeed, she told herself, it
was
a wicked and monstrous thing. But alas! although she told herself so over and over again, she did not believe it in her heart of hearts. Her heart, that fiery and untamable creature that follows its own instincts
and will not submit to the laws of the world, cried out that her love for David was beautiful and good. Was it not by the superabundance of that love that she had been prompted to visit her father? And how fully that prompting had been justified. She paused, entangled among these cross-purposes, her mind bewildered between the reason which had proved her love evil and her heart's burning conviction of its goodness; and in the face of that incontrovertible ardour her longing for frankness and understanding with Ben slid away from her unresisting, as snow slides from a laden bough when the thaw comes. For if her love made frankness impossible, then frankness had by that been proved the lesser good. Her love, at least, should be kept safe at all costs. She would live in it as in a secret world apart from the world of everyday life, leading there a blissful life of her own.

And yet, she reflected with a sigh, it would not be easy never to share her secret with a soul, for often the intensity of her emotion became oppressive. The more she pondered it, the more it clamoured for expression. It was as if her heart was filled too full of it, and unless she eased it in speech or action she would be consumed by the pent-up energy of it. If only she could pour out her feelings to David himself. But that would always be impossible, and she tried to imagine what he would think and say if she were to throw aside every restraint and confess all to him.
But such imagination was beyond her, and she fell, instead, to imagining impossible felicities, picturing his eyes kindling as they met hers and his arms opening to receive her; and then, pausing again in her work and closing her eyes, she submitted herself to the dream of those arms closing upon her and his lips seeking hers.

But next moment she opened her eyes with a sigh and reached out her hand again to the handle of the sewing-machine. Nothing that she could do, she knew well enough, could bring that dream to fulfilment. She must wait in patience, trusting to the future. What she meant by the future she did not dare to think.

So she went on with her work, and under the droning rhythm of the machine her thoughts thinned away, scattered, and were lost, and her mind became an empty thing whirled on the swift current of sound. She worked on till the machine-work of the shirt was finished, and then, taking needle, thread, and scissors, she began to work at the button-holes, singing to herself that song called
O Waly Waly
, which was one of the songs she had sung with David. She paused for a moment in the second verse and smiled to herself, remembering how, that morning in the orchard, she had avoided the last line. Now she avoided nothing, but sang on, identifying herself, as she always did when she sang, with the emotions of what she was singing. The sadness of the theme
filled her with a sweet, luxurious melancholy; the very spirit of love, it seemed to her, grown articulate.