"I _am_ quite sure--" said Alvina. "I"m quite certain."
"c.o.c.k-sure people are often most mistaken," said Miss Pinnegar.
"I"d rather have my own mistakes than somebody else"s rights," said Alvina.
"Then don"t expect anybody to pay for your mistakes," said Miss Pinnegar.
"It would be all the same if I did," said Alvina.
When she lay in bed, she stared at the light of the street-lamp on the wall. She was thinking busily: but heaven knows what she was thinking. She had sharpened the edge of her temper. She was waiting till tomorrow. She was waiting till she saw Albert Witham. She wanted to finish off with him. She was keen to cut clean through any correspondence with him. She stared for many hours at the light of the street-lamp, and there was a narrowed look in her eyes.
The next day she did not go to Morning Service, but stayed at home to cook the dinner. In the evening she sat in her place in the choir. In the Withams" pew sat Lottie and Albert--no Arthur. Albert kept glancing up. Alvina could not bear the sight of him--she simply could not bear the sight of him. Yet in her low, sweet voice she sang the alto to the hymns, right to the vesper:
"Lord keep us safe this night Secure from all our fears, May angels guard us while we sleep Till morning light appears--"
As she sang her alto, and as the soft and emotional harmony of the vesper swelled luxuriously through the chapel, she was peeping over her folded hands at Lottie"s hat. She could not bear Lottie"s hats.
There was something aggressive and vulgar about them. And she simply detested the look of the back of Albert"s head, as he too stooped to the vesper prayer. It looked mean and rather common. She remembered Arthur had the same look, bending to prayer. There!--why had she not seen it before! That petty, vulgar little look! How could she have thought twice of Arthur. She had made a fool of herself, as usual.
Him and his little leg. She grimaced round the chapel, waiting for people to bob up their heads and take their departure.
At the gate Albert was waiting for her. He came forward lifting his hat with a smiling and familiar "Good evening!"
"Good evening," she murmured.
"It"s ages since I"ve seen you," he said. "And I"ve looked out for you everywhere."
It was raining a little. She put up her umbrella.
"You"ll take a little stroll. The rain isn"t much," he said.
"No, thank you," she said. "I must go home."
"Why, what"s your hurry! Walk as far as Beeby Bridge. Go on."
"No, thank you."
"How"s that? What makes you refuse?"
"I don"t want to."
He paused and looked down at her. The cold and supercilious look of anger, a little spiteful, came into his face.
"Do you mean because of the rain?" he said.
"No. I hope you don"t mind. But I don"t want to take any more walks.
I don"t mean anything by them."
"Oh, as for that," he said, taking the words out of her mouth. "Why should you mean anything by them!" He smiled down on her.
She looked him straight in the face.
"But I"d rather not take any more walks, thank you--none at all,"
she said, looking him full in the eyes.
"You wouldn"t!" he replied, stiffening.
"Yes. I"m quite sure," she said.
"As sure as all that, are you!" he said, with a sneering grimace. He stood eyeing her insolently up and down.
"Good-night," she said. His sneering made her furious. Putting her umbrella between him and her, she walked off.
"Good-night then," he replied, unseen by her. But his voice was sneering and impotent.
She went home quivering. But her soul was burning with satisfaction.
She had shaken them off.
Later she wondered if she had been unkind to him. But it was done--and done for ever. _Vogue la galere._
CHAPTER VI
HOUGHTON"S LAST ENDEAVOUR
The trouble with her ship was that it would _not_ sail. It rode water-logged in the rotting port of home. All very well to have wild, reckless moods of irony and independence, if you have to pay for them by withering dustily on the shelf.
Alvina fell again into humility and fear: she began to show symptoms of her mother"s heart trouble. For day followed day, month followed month, season after season went by, and she grubbed away like a housemaid in Manchester House, she hurried round doing the shopping, she sang in the choir on Sundays, she attended the various chapel events, she went out to visit friends, and laughed and talked and played games. But all the time, what was there actually in her life?
Not much. She was withering towards old-maiddom. Already in her twenty-eighth year, she spent her days grubbing in the house, whilst her father became an elderly, frail man still too lively in mind and spirit. Miss Pinnegar began to grow grey and elderly too, money became scarcer and scarcer, there was a black day ahead when her father would die and the home be broken up, and she would have to tackle life as a worker.
There lay the only alternative: in work. She might slave her days away teaching the piano, as Miss Frost had done: she might find a subordinate post as nurse: she might sit in the cash-desk of some shop. Some work of some sort would be found for her. And she would sink into the routine of her job, as did so many women, and grow old and die, chattering and fluttering. She would have what is called her independence. But, seriously faced with that treasure, and without the option of refusing it, strange how hideous she found it.
Work!--a job! More even than she rebelled against the Withams did she rebel against a job. Albert Witham was distasteful to her--or rather, he was not exactly distasteful, he was chiefly incongruous.
She could never get over the feeling that he was mouthing and smiling at her through the gla.s.s wall of an aquarium, he being on the watery side. Whether she would ever be able to take to his strange and dishuman element, who knows? Anyway it would be some sort of an adventure: better than a job. She rebelled with all her backbone against the word _job_. Even the subst.i.tutes, _employment_ or _work_, were detestable, unbearable. Emphatically, she did not want to work for a wage. It was too humiliating. Could anything be more _infra dig_ than the performing of a set of special actions day in day out, for a life-time, in order to receive some shillings every seventh day. Shameful! A condition of shame. The most vulgar, sordid and humiliating of all forms of slavery: so mechanical. Far better be a slave outright, in contact with all the whims and impulses of a human being, than serve some mechanical routine of modern work.
She trembled with anger, impotence, and fear. For months, the thought of Albert was a torment to her. She might have married him.
He would have been strange, a strange fish. But were it not better to take the strange leap, over into his element, than to condemn oneself to the routine of a job? He would have been curious and dishuman. But after all, it would have been an experience. In a way, she liked him. There was something odd and integral about him, which she liked. He was not a liar. In his own line, he was honest and direct. Then he would take her to South Africa: a whole new _milieu_. And perhaps she would have children. She shivered a little. No, not his children! He seemed so curiously cold-blooded.
And yet, why not? Why not his curious, pale, half cold-blooded children, like little fishes of her own? Why not? Everything was possible: and even desirable, once one could see the strangeness of it. Once she could plunge through the wall of the aquarium! Once she could kiss him!
Therefore Miss Pinnegar"s quiet harping on the string was unbearable.
"I can"t understand that you disliked Mr. Witham so much?" said Miss Pinnegar.
"We never can understand those things," said Alvina. "I can"t understand why I dislike tapioca and arrowroot--but I do."
"That"s different," said Miss Pinnegar shortly.