None Other Gods, Robert Hugh Benson [book recommendations for young adults .TXT] 📗

The Major had retired upstairs about ten o'clock, taking his socks with him, presumably to sleep in them, and Frank had heard him creaking about upstairs for a minute or two; there had followed two clumps as the boots were thrown off; a board suddenly spoke loudly; there was a little talking--obviously the Major had awakened Gertie in order to make a remark or two--and then silence.

Frank had not slept for half an hour; he was thinking, with some depression, of the dreary affair into which he had been initiated, of the Major, and of Gertie, for whom he was beginning to be sorry. He did not suppose that the man actually bullied her; probably he had done this sufficiently for the present--she was certainly very quiet and subdued--or perhaps she really admired him, and thought it rather magnificent to travel about with an ex-officer. Anyhow, it was rather deplorable....

* * * * *


When he awoke next morning, the depression was on him still; and it was not lifted by the apparition of Gertie on which he opened his eyes from his corner, in an amazingly dirty petticoat, bare-armed, with her hair in a thick untidy pig-tail, trying to blow the fire into warmth again.

Frank jumped up--he was in his trousers and shirt.

"Let me do that," he said.

"I'll do it," said Gertie passionlessly.

* * * * *


The Major came down ten minutes later, considerably the worse for his night's rest. Yesterday he had had a day's beard on him; to-day he had two, and there was a silvery sort of growth in the stubble that made it look wet. His eyes, too, were red and sunken, and he began almost instantly to talk about a drink. Frank stood it for a few minutes, then he understood and capitulated.

"I'll stand you one," he said, "if you'll get me two packets of Cinderellas."

"What's the good of that?" said the Major. "Pubs aren't open yet. It's only just gone five."

"You'll have to wait, then," said Frank shortly.

Presently the Major did begin to bully Gertie. He asked her what the devil was the good of her if she couldn't make a fire burn better than that. He elbowed her out of the way and set to work at it himself. She said nothing at all. Yet there was not the faintest use in Frank's interfering, and, indeed, there was nothing to interfere in.

Food, too, this morning, seemed disgusting; and again Frank learned the difference between a kind of game played by oneself and a reality in which two others joined. There had been something almost pleasing about unrolling the food wrapped up at supper on the previous night, and eating it, with or without cooking, all alone; but there was something astonishingly unpleasant in observing sardines that were now common property lying in greasy newspaper, a lump of bread from which their hands tore pieces, and a tin bowl of warmish cocoa from which all must drink. This last detail was a contribution on the part of Major and Mrs. Trustcott, and it would have been ungracious to refuse. The Major, too, was sullen and resentful this morning, and growled at Gertie more than once.

Even the weather seemed unpropitious as they set out together again soon after six. Rain had fallen in the night, yet not all the rain that there was overhead. There were still clouds hanging, mixed with the smoke from the chimneys; the hedges seemed dulled and black in spite of their green; the cinder path they walked on was depressing, the rain-fed road even more so. They passed a dozen men on their way to the pits, who made remarks on the three, and retaliation was out of the question.

* * * * *


It was very disconcerting to Frank to find the difference that his new circumstances made; and yet he did not seriously consider changing them. It seemed to him, somehow or other, in that strange fashion in which such feelings come, that the whole matter was pre-arranged, and that the company in which he found himself was as inevitably his--at least for the present--as the family to a child born into it. And there was, of course, too, a certain element of relief in feeling himself no longer completely alone; and there was also, as Frank said later, a curious sense of attraction towards, and pity for, Gertie that held him there.

At the first public-house that was open the Major stopped.

"I'll get your Cinderellas now, if you like," he said.

This had not been Frank's idea, but he hardly hesitated.

"All right," he said. "Here's fourpence."

The Major vanished through the swing-doors as a miner came out, and a gush of sweet and sickly scent--beer, spirits, tobacco--poured upon the fresh air. And there was a vision of a sawdusted floor and spittoons within.

Frank looked at Gertie, who had stopped like a patient donkey, and, like a prudent one, had let her bundle instantly down beside the Major's.

"Like one, too?" he said.

She shook her head.

"Not for me." ... And no more.

In a couple of minutes the Major was out again.

"Only had one packet left," he said, and with an air of extreme punctiliousness and magnanimity replaced one penny in Frank's hand. He had the air of one who is insistent on the little honesties of life. There was also a faintly spirituous atmosphere about him, and his eyes looked a little less sunken.

Then he handed over the cigarettes.

"Shouldn't mind one myself," he said genially.

Frank gave him one before lighting his own.

"You're a good sort," said the Major, "and I wish I could give you one of my old cigars I used to give my friends."

"Ah! well, when your ship comes home," observed Frank, throwing away his match.

The Major nodded his head as with an air of fallen grandeur.

"Well," he said, "_vorwaerts_. That means 'forward,' my dear," he explained to Gertie.

Gertie said nothing. They took up their bundles and went on.


(V)

It was not till a week later that Gertie did that which was to effect so much in Frank--she confided in him.

The week had consisted of the kind of thing that might be expected--small negligible adventures; work now and then--the Major and Frank working side by side--a digging job on one day, the carrying of rather dingy smoke-stained hay on another, the scraping of garden-paths that ran round the small pink house of a retired tradesman, who observed them magnificently though a plate-glass window all the while, with a cigar in his teeth, and ultimately gave them ninepence between them. They slept here and there--once, on a rainy night, in real lodgings, once below a haystack. Frank said hardly a word to Gertie, and did little more than listen to the Major, who was already beginning to repeat himself; but he was aware that the girl was watching him.

The crisis came about under circumstances that might be expected--on a rather sentimental kind of Sunday evening, in a village whose name I forget (perhaps it was Escrick) between Selby and York. Frank had made a small excursion by himself in the morning and had managed to hear mass; they had dined well off cold bacon and beans, and had walked on in the afternoon some miles further; and they came to the village a little after six o'clock. The Major had a blister, which he had exhibited at least four times to the company, and had refused to go further; and as they came to the outskirts of the village, volunteered to go and look for shelter, if the two would wait for him at a stile that led across fields to the old church.

The scene was rather like the setting of the last act in a melodrama of a theater on the Surrey side of the Thames--the act in which the injured heroine, with her child, sinks down fainting as the folk are going to church in the old village on a June evening among the trees--leading up to moonlight effects and reunion. There was no organ to play "off," but the bells were an excellent substitute, and it was these that presently melted the heart of Gertie.

When the Major had disappeared, limping, the two climbed over the stile and sat down with their bundles under the hedge, but they presently found that they had chosen something of a thoroughfare. Voices came along presently, grew louder, and stopped as the speakers climbed the stile. The first pair was of a boy and girl, who instantly clasped again mutual waists, and went off up the path across the field to the churchyard without noticing the two tramps; their heads were very near together.

Then other couples came along, old and young, and twice a trio--one, two young men in black, who skirmished on either side of a very sedate girl in white; one, two girls who shoved one another, and giggled, walking in step three yards behind another young man with his hat on one side, who gloried in being talked at and pretended to be rapt in abstraction. Then some children came; then a family--papa walking severely apart in a silk hat, and mamma, stout and scarlet-faced, in the midst of the throng. Finally there came along a very old Darby and Joan, who with many Yorkshire ejaculations helped one another over the stile, and moved on with bent heads, scolding one another affectionately. It was as this last couple reached the spot where the path ran into the corn that the peal of four bells broke out, and Gertie broke down.

Frank had not been noticing her particularly. He was gloomy himself; the novelty of the whole affair had gone; the Major was becoming intolerable, and Frank's religion was beginning to ebb from his emotions. Mass this morning had not been a success from an emotional point of view; he had had an uncomfortable seat on a pitch-pine bench in a tin church with an American organ; the very young priest had been tiresome and antipathetic.... Frank had done his best, but he was tired and bored; the little church had been very hot, and it was no longer any fun to be stared at superciliously by a stout tradesman as he came out into the hot sunshine afterwards.

Just now he had been watching the figures make their appearance from the stile, re-form groups and dwindle slowly down to the corn, and their heads and shoulders bob along above it--all with a kind of resentment. These people had found their life; he was still looking for his. He was watching, too, the strangely unreal appearance of the sunlit fields, the long shadows, the golden smoky light, and the church tower, set among cypresses half a mile away--yet without any conscious sentiment. He had not said a word to Gertie, nor she to him, and he was totally taken by surprise when, after the first soft crash of bells for