Crescendo (23 page)

1

Twenty minutes she had waited already, and there was a good five more to go before that bus would condescend to arrive, thought Ethel crossly, peering at her watch in the half-light. And here she was getting drenched in this wretched rain, which seemed to get colder and heavier every drop that fell. Fancy that nice summer day turning out like this! But it was only what you could expect, it was never safe to trust anything or anybody; they always let you down.

Thinking she had heard a sound, she poked her head out beyond the stile in the wall where she had taken shelter, but nothing was coming down the road, and raindrops splashed her face. She drew in her head sharply and crouched down on the step. Her best coat, too! Trailing on the ground! She gathered it about her knees—but what was the use? She would only crease it. For a moment she considered returning to High Royd, but decided against it as she had decided before. She dare not go back, and that was the truth of it. Old Freeman's eyes as he gave her the money had been terrifying, almost mad. Yes, mad; that was it, mad. All those artists and people like that were mad, when you really got down to it, reflected Ethel virtuously; they were not safe to be about, really. It was best to have nothing to do with them. She wished she'd never let the place to Freeman.

How the old man's hand had trembled when he took the picture!

But what of it? Her rent was due to her, she was within her rights.

2

There certainly was a noise of some kind beating through the pouring rain. It came from behind her. Footsteps. Fast, heavy footsteps, rushing down the flagged path from the house. They sounded so urgent, so headlong, that Ethel moved apprehensively out of the stile so as not to be in the runner's way. Now the runner came into sight; it was a girl; it was Freeman's daughter, Gay. Her eyes were wide and staring, her shoulders drenched. She was heavy with child.

“You shouldn't be running like that!” exclaimed Ethel involuntarily.

“My father, my father!” cried Gay, panting. “Gas! Gas! He has tried to gas himself! Telephone the hospital. Tell them to send a doctor. Go to the telephone kiosk halfway down the hill. Quick! Quick! Please telephone my husband as well, Mrs. Eastwood. Peter Trahier. He's at the Hudley Technical College. Tell him to come quickly. Please telephone quickly, Mrs. Eastwood, or my father will die.”

“But why has your father—done it?” asked Ethel, stunned.

“I don't know. He must have been unhappy. Please telephone quickly, Mrs. Eastwood. I wouldn't trouble you, but I can't go myself. I can't leave him.”

There's another reason why you can't go, my dear, thought Ethel coarsely. And indeed as Gay turned to climb the path she stopped abruptly and crossed her arms over her body and bowed in pain. Her untidy hair fell forward round her face so that Ethel could see the nape of her neck, very young and white and slender. A groan burst from the girl's lips.

Suddenly a fearful feeling of guilt filled Ethel from head to foot. It burned and throbbed, it seemed to tear her fiercely;
her tongue swelled, her throat contracted, her stout legs trembled, her entrails moved. He gassed himself because I gave him back his picture, she thought. I don't mind that so much, she thought defiantly, he's an old man and he's had the best of his life, but if this girl has a miscarriage I shan't be able to bear it. I simply shan't be able to bear it, she thought, and to her astonishment found that she was weeping. Why was she thinking, not only of this young Gay—a silly name at the best, she told herself crossly—but of Charlie Martin and his widow and those ill-clad children of his, and of her own stillborn child, cold and deformed and strangely dark in hue? Why think of them? She did not know; she only knew that if this girl, with her trusting look and her heavy body, should lose her baby, Ethel would have to admit that this misfortune and all the rest of Ethel's dreary, barren, angry life was Ethel's fault.

“I'll go, I'll go, don't worry,” she cried thickly. “I'll telephone. You go back and—have you turned off the taps and opened the windows and that? You go back and rest.” Her common sense reasserted itself at the sound of her own familiar voice. “I'll wait for the bus and go down in that—it'll be quicker in the long run.”

“Yes—that will be best,” whispered Gay. She straightened herself with an effort, and, one hand held to her body, stumbled up the path to High Royd.

3

The journey in the bus was pleasurable, for Ethel in a loud excited voice told the conductor the story of Freeman's attempted suicide, and both he and all the passengers were eager to help, so that Ethel found herself quite the heroine of the hour. The conductor thought of change for the telephone and provided a pile of pennies, and going up to the front drew back the communicating window and told the driver the need
for haste, so that the bus plunged and rattled down the hill. Advice was offered by the passengers on the proper mode of dialling the hospital, and an argument broke out as to whether High Royd lay in fact in the borough of Hudley or of Ashworth, or even in the domain of the West Riding County Police.

“It won't matter, they'll come whichever,” said an old man.

“Don't worry, missus. They'll be here in five minutes from when you telephone,” said another. “That's their rule.”

Other passengers opined that the police should be summoned as well, and one woman even pressed the claims of the Fire Brigade, who were the people most practised, she said, in artificial respiration. This was considered far-fetched by the other passengers, and Ethel did not accept either of these notions.

“I shall do what Mr. Freeman's daughter asked me,” she said virtuously. “The hospital and her husband—that's what she said.”

All this was reassuring and even pleasant, so that when the kiosk was reached and the driver drew up the bus with a jerk, Ethel dismounted in a confident frame of mind, and declined various offers of help without seriously considering them. The process of self-rehabilitation had begun; guilt was being pushed out of sight; Ethel wanted to be the one who had saved Freeman's life by her prompt action. But when the brightly lighted cheerful bus had rolled away, and Ethel was left in a dark country road, miles, as she felt, from anywhere, guilt and panic sprang up again together. Her heart was beating heavily as she entered the lighted box and dialled 999.

“What service do you want?” said a voice at once.

“Hospital—an accident,” cried Ethel. “Quick, quick!”

There was a pause. Ethel suffered. It Freeman should die! If Gay should have a miscarriage! Oh, why don't they answer, she thought in anguish. How long can a man live after being
gassed? It's disgraceful how these public institutions neglect their duty. We pay for them, don't we?

“Ambulance depot, Hudley General Hospital,” said a male voice in her ear.

Ethel, surprised, stuttered a moment, then recovered and panted: “Mr. Freeman of High Royd has gassed himself. Please come quickly.”

“Hold on a minute, madam!” cried the voice urgently. “
Where
did you say the casualty was?”

“High Royd. Hurry, hurry!”

“But where is High Royd?”

“Oh, it's on the bus route to Blackstalls. Almost at the top of the hill. Brow Lane,” wailed Ethel.

“Very good, madam. We'll be there,” said the voice, and the line went dead.

Ethel leaned against the side of the kiosk, exhausted by her emotions. After a moment or two her breathing slowed, she sighed and felt more normal, and tilting the telephone directory on its shelf towards her, began to search for the number of the Hudley Technical College. She tried
College
and
Technical
but it was not there; she turned to
Hudley
and saw three pages of entries which she felt really too tired to scan. Sighing, she painfully tracked down the T items among the Hudleys, but the one she wanted was not to be found there. She slammed the book down angrily, and for a moment gave the whole thing up. Why trouble further? After all, she had notified the hospital. Surely that was enough.

But no, it was not enough. Charlie's arm round her waist beneath the hawthorns, his shabby widow and those untidy children, the look on the eldest boy's face as he poured silver into her hand, the body of her own poor infant—no, when one remembered these things, what she had done was not enough. She must do everything that Gay had asked of her, or she would feel forever guilty. Her face brightened as a thought
struck her; she made the greatest moral effort of her life and pulled herself up towards the telephone; counting pennies and examining the table of instructions, she rang her own number in Ashworth.

1

It was now quite dark, and the lamp at the end of Naseby Terrace suddenly lighted and shone into the room. Feeling her privacy unbearably invaded, Dorothea sprang up from the bed and drew the curtains with an angry hand.

After having once returned thus to ordinary life from her private world of grief, it seemed childish (excessive and unworthy of a Dean) to cast herself down on the bed again; she stumbled across the room and put on a light. Her smooth bare arms now prickled with gooseflesh; she realised that she was cold, that rain was pouring down outside; angrily she tore off her bright thin frock and began to dress herself in the skirt and cardigan and high-necked blouse which she wore to work in the shop. The change from the hot colours and exciting pattern of the frock to this plain black and white attire seemed to Dorothea to match the change in her life: poetry had fled and she was left with colourless, chilly prose. As she dressed she decided, with a kind of despairing mockery, to examine all her possessions with a view to eliminating some before her departure for Scarborough—this practical and immensely dreary task, she told herself sardonically, suited her mood. She had just thrust her arms into the sombre wool when the telephone rang downstairs.

Could it be Richard? The colour rushed to her cheek at the thought. But no; she had told Richard she was going to bed with a headache, and Richard, who was familiar with the position of Mrs. Eastwood's telephone, was incapable of dragging a girl with a headache out of bed and down the stairs to answer a call from him. No; the call would prove to be some dreary business matter for Mrs. Eastwood. Dorothea listened casually for a moment, expecting to hear Mrs. Eastwood tread heavily along the hall to answer it. This did not happen, and it then struck Dorothea that she had, in fact, heard without noticing it through her first wild outburst of tears, the sound of the front door closing, so that probably her landlady had gone out. She sighed with exasperation, considered for a moment the possibility of letting the telephone ring but rejected it as altogether too irresponsible, and ran downstairs.

2

Nothing whatever could be heard at first when she put the receiver to her ear, but the practical Dorothea Dean was familiar with this situation and merely said: “Press Button A” in a weary tone. The coins fell and clicked, and Mrs. Eastwood's voice came through, panting and anxious as Dorothea had never heard it before, relating the story of her old tenant who had gassed himself, alone with his daughter, up Black-stalls Brow, no telephone, ambulance on its way.

“But she wants her husband and it's only natural, after all, and I'm afraid of a miscarriage, you see,” said Mrs. Eastwood. “He's at a class at the Hudley Technical College, his name's Peter Trahay or something, you must get hold of him somehow, Dot.”

“How do you spell it?”

“How should I know?” said Mrs. Eastwood irritably. “They'll know him at the Technical, surely. Get him up here quick. I'm afraid of a miscarriage, you see.”

“You'll stay with her till her husband comes?” urged Dorothea.

“Well—I suppose I
had
better go back,” said Mrs. Eastwood reluctantly. “But it's a mile or more up the road—the ambulance will be there before me, or at least I'm hoping so.”

“You must go back to her, Mrs. Eastwood,” said Dorothea firmly.

“You get her husband!” shouted Mrs. Eastwood.

Dorothea slammed down the receiver angrily. Of course she would find the poor girl's husband. Her heart went out to the girl. Recently married, expecting a first baby. Ah, what would not Dorothea give to be in such a situation! And now that wonderful, beautiful happiness was threatened by tragedy. She ruffled the pages of the local directory with a practised hand, found the Technical College quickly under the general heading of
Hudley Corporation
and dialled, and urged the toll-call operator to hasten, and waited. A female voice which Dorothea classified as teen-age answered, and Dorothea crisply told the story. The owner of the voice was clearly moved to sympathy and eager to help, but puzzled.

“Do you know which class he was attending?”

“I'm afraid I don't,” said Dorothea. “But can't you visit all of them?”

“We've more than a thousand students here tonight,” replied the teen-age clerk primly.

“It's a matter of life and death,” said Dorothea.

“We'll do our very best,” replied the clerk. “But some of the students have already left, you know.”

“
Please
do your best,” urged Dorothea.

“Oh, I will,” replied the teen-ager earnestly.

3

Dorothea rang off and stood considering. From being cold and stiff she now found she was hot-cheeked and trembling;
she felt as if, having been stranded on an icy bank of loneliness and rejection, she had been thrown back into the warm pulsating current of life with all its passion and all its agony. She imagined the dark hillside, the lonely house, the dying man, the young daughter, perhaps already in physical pain, certainly in nervous anguish, longing for the love and protection of her husband as Dorothea longed now for Richard Cressey.