“I thought that was beetles,” Hannah said innocently, “and we can have a practical study of them in the kitchen, if you like. I seem doomed to have trouble in kitchens. And that reminds me—How are the Riddings getting on? You know, I feel I haven’t been properly thanked for that evening.”
“Thanked!” Mr. Blenkinsop exclaimed, staring at her malignantly. “What I want to know is why on earth you wanted to do it. And as for thanks, whose did you expect?” he demanded, and with those words he marched away.
She had roused him at last, but she thought his fervour somewhat disproportionate to the slightness of the inconvenience he suffered.
XV
That night, Ethel left the Girls’ Club in the charge of Miss Patsy Withers and another helper and went home earlier than usual. She had a headache and felt miserable. It was cold in the tramcar, after the heat of the Mission Room, and she wanted to be in bed with a hot-water bottle and something warm to drink, and she wished, as she wished more often than anyone suspected, that she could find her mother at home. Ethel’s loss was of a different nature from Ruth’s. For Ethel, her mother had been a quiet voice and a kind hand, a voice never raised in expostulation and a hand that knew how to put a pillow under an aching head. When she was overwrought and her mother applied physical remedies, it did not occur to Ethel that in this refusal to reprove or advise, this assumption that her child was ill, her mother was doing all she could to treat her mentally. Ethel’s life was so fiercely subjective that her mother, for her, had hardly existed objectively. Perhaps no one and nothing existed for her in that sense and inevitably she became the prey of every misadventure. Now she sat huddled in her corner, trying to keep her eyes shut to ease her headache, but each time the tramcar stopped she had to open them to see who was boarding it or alighting: she had to make a quick comparison of each woman’s clothes with her own, to wonder if she could twist her hat into the shape of the one opposite, or train her hair to fall over her ears like that of the girl who had just come in, and under this eagerness to be doing something, this restlessness which had its value, there was a weariness of the Girls’ Club and a sense of futility.
Doris had not been there, Doris, her favourite, who had been elevated to service in the Corder’s household, and was supposed to adore Miss Ethel. There had been laughter of a familiar kind when her absence was mentioned and Ethel had felt sharp tears spring into her eyes, as though she had been struck. They were laughing because they knew more about Doris than she did, and they were glad because the favourite was proved disloyal.
Ethel told herself she was too sensitive, but that was her nature. She was hurt and she was anxious and her head throbbed more violently as she pictured Doris wandering in the darkness with a young man and imagined, with the inaccuracy of theoretical knowledge, the probably disastrous progress of that courtship. She would have to speak to Doris, and she knew that, in such matters, Doris would see her as a child in arms and feed her with appropriate sops. She had felt sure of her influence over the girl and her certainty was taken from her. Life, for Ethel, was something like walking across a bog, leaping from what looked like a solid tuft to another and finding many of them shaking and some sinking under her, and she lost her nerve, and then her judgment, at each mistake. Doris’s absence and the girls’ laughter had made the friendliness of Patsy Withers the more welcome and, in a gust of grateful confidence, Ethel had talked about Miss Mole and detected a gleam of pleasure in Patsy’s eyes when she told the puzzling story about the mattresses. It had been rather silly to tell her, Ethel thought, but then, she was so impulsive; she was sensitive and impulsive, and no one understood her now except Howard—and Wilfrid, when he was not teasing her. She had an unbounded admiration for her father, but she wished he had more time and patience to spare her. He had a way of making her difficulties seem very small in comparison with his own and of suggesting that he had cares enough already. There was Miss Mole—Ethel felt guilty again at the thought of her—who always listened with interest, but how could anyone be sure she was not another of those tufts? And there was God, she remembered hurriedly, and she looked askance at her neighbours, as though they had divined her forgetfulness. No one was looking at her and she shut her eyes again, saying she would pray, she must have more faith, and with that thought, or because the tramcar stopped at the place where she intended to get out, her troubles became less pressing.
She could have gone on to the halt at the end of Beresford Road, but this one was at the end of University Walk and once, as she walked back from the club, Wilfrid had overtaken her there and they had gone home together, by way of Prince’s Road, because Wilfrid had said it was more romantic, and then he had spoilt her happiness by asking why she walked so slowly.
Wilfrid was one of Ethel’s tufts, but so bright, so alluring, that she could not believe it would betray her, and she had found her own way of explaining its instability. It was not altogether satisfactory and she knew it, but it served for consolation when her faith in herself and in the charms she hoped she possessed, was tottering. Wilfrid and she were cousins and when he
