Miss Mole

her back, for she knew that the view, from below, of a woman ascending the stairs is often unfortunate, but when she had turned on the light in her room and looked at her reflection, she forgave him, though she had not done with him yet. Mr. Blenkinsop was clearly not a reader of character or a connoisseur of human rarities, and there was no reason why he should encourage the attentions of this woman with the satirical nose, a rather sallow skin and eyes of no particular colour, yet she felt as uneasy as a soldier in a hostile country who has left an unconquered fortified place behind him. She wished she had introduced the subject of Mr. Corder; that might have roused him and instructed her at the same time. Forewarned was forearmed and Mrs. Gibson’s views would be of no value. To her, all reverend gentlemen were good and most of them were awful; they were like the stars; they shed their light, but they were unapproachable. However, though there was no doubt about what she would say, her way of saying it might be amusing, and when Hannah had changed her outdoor dress for an old silk one which looked well enough by artificial light, she tapped on Mrs. Gibson’s sitting-room door and popped in without waiting for a summons.

“Oh, there you are, dear,” Mrs. Gibson sighed. “Always so cheerful!”

“What’s the matter?” Hannah asked, for Mrs. Gibson’s voice was melancholy and she was sunk in her chair as though she had been pushed there.

“He’s been at me,” Mrs. Gibson said, “about the Riddings. He’s just this minute left me. It’s either them or him, he says. What d’you think of that? I’m sorry to say it, but I call it unkind, unkind to me and to those poor things down there. Now, what would you do yourself, Miss Mole, dear? Would you turn them out? No, I know you wouldn’t. Standoffish as she is, considering everything, if you know what I mean, I can’t help feeling I’ve got a duty by her. I can keep my eye on her. And there’s that baby. I never had one of my own and, if you ask me, the motherly ones are those that never had any.”

“Ah,” said Hannah weightily. Her thoughts, straying from Mrs. Gibson’s problem, were pursuing this idea. She had believed it was her own and she was surprised to find that it was also Mrs. Gibson’s. “But you had a husband,” she said.

“Well, of course, dear. And I was a good wife to him. Those are his own words.”

“I was wondering,” Hannah said, “if the best wives are the ones who are not married.”

“Oh, my dear, I don’t hold with that kind of thing!”

But Hannah was trying to find proofs for her theory that non-realization was the highest good.

“I don’t mean what you mean,” she said.

“I’m glad of that,” said Mrs. Gibson. “There’s too much of that kind of thing nowadays⁠—so I’m told.”

“Dreadful, isn’t it?” Hannah murmured back.

“And anyhow, there’s no question of that here, I’m thankful to say, but he tells me there’ll be trouble again; he says he doesn’t feel the same about the place. He says he needs quiet after his day’s work.”

Hannah made a loud, derisive noise. “Work! Chasing money with a little shovel! It’s like playing tiddleywinks! And quiet!” She held up a hand. “Listen, Mrs. Gibson. There’s not a sound.”

Mrs. Gibson nodded complaisantly. “A well-built house. I don’t know where he’d find a better. And then, you see, I knew his ma. At the sewing-meeting. I don’t go now, dear. I’ve enough to do with the mending at home and Mr. Blenkinsop’s very hard on his socks, but in the old days, with Mrs. Blenkinsop and Mrs. Corder, I went. And now she’s passed away and little did I think then I’d ever have her son for a lodger. She was a gloomy woman, I must say, but all the same, there it is.”

“And Mrs. Corder⁠—what’s she like?”

“Dead, too, dear. Yes. Pneumonia. It’s a terrible thing. Here today and gone tomorrow. Only ill for a week. Poor man! I’ll never forget the funeral.”

Now Hannah made a vague sound of sympathy. “A loss to the chapel,” she suggested.

“Well”⁠—Mrs. Gibson, who had been growing drowsy over the fire and her reminiscences, tried to sit more upright and her voice was almost a whisper⁠—“well, I don’t know about that. People used to say things. She was never at the Sunday evening service, and that didn’t look well, did it?”

“Tired of hearing him talk, perhaps.”

“That might have been it,” Mrs. Gibson said with unexpected tolerance. “A wife feels different to anybody else. But at the sewing-meeting, now and then, she’d be funny rather. Absentminded,” she added, triumphant at finding the right word.

“Thinking of him,” Hannah suggested again.

“Ah, now, you can’t have it both ways!” Mrs. Gibson cried cunningly.

“No, but you can think in heaps of them,” Hannah said, and she gave her nose the twist which could mean disgust or a bitter kind of satisfaction.

Mrs. Gibson wisely ignored these possibilities. “And then, he’d come in and give us a look round, as cheery as you could want.”

“I know,” said Hannah.

“And laugh! He was full of his jokes.”

“I know,” Hannah repeated grimly. How was she going to meet those jokes, or were they less frequent in the family circle? She was convinced that his wife had hated him, and while Mrs. Gibson rambled on, Hannah was either gazing into a future full of dislike for that hearty man or reconstructing the married misery of Mrs. Corder.

“How I’ve been talking!” Mrs. Gibson said at last. “And you haven’t told me what I’m to do about Mr. Blenkinsop.”

“Tell him he ought to be ashamed of himself,” Hannah said, rising from the hearthrug, and she went away, leaving Mrs. Gibson disappointed, for the first time, in the resourcefulness of Miss Mole.

VI

Beresford Road and Prince’s Road meet at a point just below