That had been a year ago and now they met weekly at the market, exchanging a whispered word or two when they could. They met at other times too, for after the shop was shut Job sometimes climbed up the hill to Angel Lane and scratched like a mouse at the back door. It opened most conveniently into the scullery, where they would be together for a few minutes and yet if Emma came into the kitchen Job could be gone in a flash. On the rare occasions when Emma was out he would creep into the kitchen and sit warming his half-starved body by the fire. The strong aroma which haunted the kitchen after his fish-impregnated wet clothes had been steaming in front of it for a short while could always be ascribed later to Sooty’s fish heads that had gone off.
For where Job was concerned Polly was without conscience. Followers were forbidden by Emma but when interrogated Polly would look her mistress straight in the eye and say, “No man or boy ever sets foot in my kitchen, ma’am, excepting only the sweep in the way of business,” without a blink of an eyelash. She was prepared not only to lie for Job but to steal for him, and she did sometimes steal a little of Emma’s flour to make the pasties he adored; but the meat and potato inside them were what she had saved from her own plate when Emma dealt her out her portion in the parlor. Out of her meager earnings she bought cough lozenges for Job, and salves for his cuts and bruises, and he on his side did what he could to serve her. He brought her blackberries and nuts and made nosegays for her, and from bits of wood he carved robins and wrens and mice for her amusement; she had a box in the attic full of these treasures. And treasures they were, though neither of them realized that the skill of his fingers amounted to genius.
Polly chose her eel and her fish heads without a glance at Job and then took them to him behind the stall to wrap up for her. He slipped into her basket, on top of the fish heads, a posy of sprays of scarlet blackberry leaves and soft grasses from the fen, and her hand went into his pocket holding a pasty whose filling was her last night’s portion of shepherd’s pie. Their eyes met and their hands touched for a moment, and the sun was warm upon them and the bright air trembled with ringing of the bells. Polly when she went away took the brightness, the music and the warmth with her, but darkness fell on Job.
7. Miss Montague
1.
A FEW days later Sarah cleared away the tea and lighted the lamp that stood beside Miss Montague’s chair. She would have drawn the curtains but Miss Montague stopped her. “There’s sunset still in the sky,” she said. “Is it not beautiful?”
“I don’t let such things worry me,” said Sarah. “Ring the bell when you’ve had enough of it.”
After she had gone Miss Montague sat apparently idle, her hands caressing the cat in her lap. Beyond the west window, behind the steep old roofs of Worship Street, the last of a fiery frosty sunset was burning itself out. Through the east window she could see through the branches of the elm trees the west front and the three great towers glowing with reflected light, so that it seemed as though the whole Cathedral were built of rosy stone. Evensong was over and everyone was having tea. There was no sound but the ticking of her clocks and the cawing of the rooks in the elms. Motionless in her chair Miss Montague left her room and went up and down the streets of the city, seeing the remembered pattern of its roofs against the sky, the leap of the Cathedral towers seen now from one street and now from another, knowing as she turned each corner exactly what she would see, for she had the city by heart. She went out of the South Gate and down into the fen, and saw the great flaming sky reflected in the water. She told over the names of the villages on their hills as though they were a string of jewels, and came back into the city again and found that the lamplighter was going his rounds and the muffin man was ringing his bell. Lamps and candles were being lit in the houses now and she looked in through the windows and saw the children having their tea, but nobody noticed her. If anyone at this moment was thinking of her it was as a very old woman who never left her house except to go to the Cathedral in her Bath chair when she was well enough, and perhaps they pitied her. They did not know how vivid are the memories of the old and that only the young are housebound when they can’t go out. Her memories ranged back over more than eighty years and covered a long span of the life of the city, and the birth and life and death of many men and women all of whom had been and were her friends. She did not forget a single one of them and now that she was so old she did not distinguish very clearly between those who were what the world calls dead and those who still lived here. No one had ever been so blessed with friends as herself. It astonished her. But then her whole life astonished her and caused her considerable amusement as she looked back upon it.
2.
She had been born in this house. Her grandfather had been a famous judge and in his day Fountains had been only the holiday home of the Montague family, but her father, lacking the ambition possessed by nearly all the Montagues and gaining a rich wife, had retired early from the army and had lived for most of his married life at Fountains. His daughter Mary had come fourth in his family of six children, all of them attractive except herself. She had been from the beginning a plain little thing, and when a brother in a fit of temper pushed her down the turret stairs and she broke her leg the accident did not improve her looks. The leg, unskillfully set, mended badly and afterward was shorter than the other. She had hurt her back also in the fall and it caused her much suffering, but of this she never spoke after she had been told it was only growing pains. In a family of six aches and pains were not much noticed, least of all in the least noticeable of the children. And so she grew up stunted in her growth and slightly lame. She was shy and never had much to say for herself, and no one could have guessed, seeing the little girl sitting like a mouse in the corner with her kitten, that the ambition and the adventurous spirit that had made the later generations of Montagues such a power in the land was more alive in her than in any of the other children.
Through her early years she lived withdrawn from the others and their rowdy games in which she could not join, happy in a phantasy world of her own. As soon as she could escape from lessons and the sewing of her sampler she would climb the turret stairs to the little room at the top of the tower, called Blanche’s Bower because it was said that it had been beloved of the Duchess Blanche, and here she would sit in the window seat, wrapped in a shawl, with the cat in her arms, looking out over the roofs of the city to the fens and the sea, and dream of the great things she would do. She would be an explorer and discover unknown lands, and be adored by the natives there. She would be another Elizabeth Fry and her life would be written and she would be the friend of kings and queens and everyone would love her. She would marry an ambassador and live in fabulous Russia and have twelve beautiful children who would worship the ground she trod on. She would be a great actress like Sarah Siddons and every man who saw her would fall in love with her. There was no end to the entrancing careers that she mapped out for herself, and in all of them her starved longing for love was satisfied up to the hilt.
Her awakening in adolescence was sudden and terrible. Her eldest sister Laura was to be married. It was the first wedding in the family and was to take place in the Cathedral and be a great social occasion. It never occurred to Mary that she would not be Laura’s bridesmaid with the other sisters. She was only a little lame and she could stand for quite a time when she had to. Yet the shock of being excluded was not so great as the shock of finding that in all the excitement of the wedding preparations no one, least of all her pretty, careless mother, seemed to think it necessary to explain to her why she was left out. She realized that they had never thought that she would expect to be a bridesmaid. Toward the end of the wedding reception her back was hurting her so much that she could hardly bear it. She crept away, no one seeing her, grabbed the cat and went up to Blanche’s Bower and sat on the window seat wrapped in her shawl, for although it was a warm spring day she was cold. She heard, as from a great distance, the joyous turmoil down below, and presently she saw them come out int
o Worship Street to watch the bride and groom and the chief bridesmaid, her second sister, drive away for the honeymoon. They were all there, her father and mother, the two brilliant brothers and the pretty younger sister who was already taller than she. Then full realization came to her. These brothers and sisters would do the kind of things of which she had dreamed, but she herself would never do them because the Mary Montague of her dreams was not the Mary Montague of the actual world. She was two people but until now only one had been really known to her, and she did not want to know the other. Characteristically she did not stay for long where she was, waiting for someone to come and find her in the gloaming and offer her sympathy. As soon as she was physically rested she went downstairs to forestall it, but no one had missed her.
She had humor and common sense and she soon knew what she must do. She must have done with her dream world, laugh at the ridiculous Mary who had lived in it and get to know the Mary whom she did not want to know, find out what she was like and what her prospects were. It sounded an easy program but she found it a grueling one. The phantasy world, she discovered, had tentacles like an octopus and cannot be escaped without mortal combat, and when at last her strong will had won the battle it seemed as though she were living in a vacuum, so little had the real world to offer the shy, frustrated, unattractive girl who was the Mary she must live with until she died. But free of the tentacles she was able now to sum up the situation with accuracy. She would not marry and being a gentlewoman no other career was open to her. She was not gifted in any way and she would never be strong and probably never free from pain. She was not a favorite with either of her parents, both of whom were vaguely ashamed of having produced so unattractive a child, and yet she was the one who would have to stay at home with them. And there was nothing to do at home. The prospect was one of lifelong boredom and seemed to her as bleak as the cold winds that swept across the fens, even at times as terrible as the great Cathedral in whose shadow she must live and die. For at that time she did not love the Cathedral and in her phantasy life the city had merely been the hub from which her radiant dreams stretched out to the wide wheel of the world. What should she do? Her question was not a cry of despair but a genuine and honest wish to know.
She never knew what put it into her head that she, unloved, should love. Religion for her parents, and therefore for their children, was not much more than a formality and it had not occurred to her to pray about her problem, and yet from somewhere the idea came as though in answer to her question, and sitting in Blanche’s Bower with the cat she dispassionately considered it. Could mere loving be a life’s work? Could it be a career like marriage or nursing the sick or going on the stage? Could it be adventure? Christians were commanded to love, it was something laid upon them that they had to do whether they liked it or not. They had to love, as a wife had to obey her husband and an actress had to speak her lines when the curtain rose, and she was a Christian because she had been baptized and confirmed in the Cathedral and went to matins every Sunday in her best bonnet. But what was love? Was there anything or anybody that she herself truly loved?
A rather shattering honesty was as much a part of her as her strong will and her humor, and the answer to this question was that she loved the cat and Blanche’s Bower. She fed the cat and nursed him when he was sick, and she dusted the bower and kept a beaupot of flowers on the window sill. Her eyes were always on them, watchful for beauty to adore, for the ripple of the muscles under the cat’s striped fur, the movement of sun and shadow on the walls of the bower. And watchful for danger too. She had got badly hurt once rescuing the cat from a savage dog, and when the bower’s ceiling got patched with damp she gave her father no rest until he sent for the builder to mend the roof. She was concerned for them both and had so identified herself with them that they seemed part of her. Making a start with the cat, was it possible to make of this concern and identification a deliberate activity that should pass out in widening circles, to her parents and the servants and the brothers and sisters and their families, to the city and its people, the Cathedral, even at last perhaps to God Himself? It came to her in a flash that it must be wonderful to hold God and be held by Him, as she held the cat in her arms, rubbing her cheek against his soft fur, and was in turn held within the safety and quietness of the bower. Then she was shocked by the irreverence of her thought and tried to thrust it away. But she did not quite succeed. From that day onward it remained warm and glowing at the back of her mind.
So she took a vow to love. Millions before her had taken the same simple vow but she was different from the majority because she kept her vow, kept it even after she had discovered the cost of simplicity. Until now she had only read her Bible as a pious exercise, but now she read it as an engineer reads a blueprint and a traveler a map, unemotionally because she was not emotional, but with a profound concentration because her life depended on it. Bit by bit over a period of years that seemed to her long, she began to get her scaffolding into place. She saw that all her powers, even those which had seemed to mitigate against love, such as her shrewdness which had always been quick to see the faults of others, her ambition and self-will, could by a change of direction be bound over in service to the one over-mastering purpose. She saw that she must turn from herself, and began to see something of the discipline that that entailed, and found too as she struggled that no one and nothing by themselves seemed to have the power to entirely hold her when she turned to them.
It was then that the central figure of the Gospels, a historical figure whom she deeply revered and sought to imitate, began at rare intervals to flash out at her like live lightning from their pages, frightening her, turning the grave blueprint into a dazzle of reflected fire. Gradually she learned to see that her fear was not of the lightning itself but what it showed her of the nature of love, for it dazzled behind the stark horror of Calvary. At this point, where so many vowed lovers faint and fail, Mary Montague went doggedly on over another period of years that seemed if possible longer and harder than the former period. At some point along the way, she did not know where because the change came so slowly and gradually, she realized that He had got her and got everything. His love held and illumined every human being for whom she was concerned, and whom she served with the profound compassion which was their need and right, behind the Cathedral, the city, every flower and leaf and creature, giving it reality and beauty. She could not take her eyes from the incredible glory of His love. As far as it was possible for a human being in this world she had turned from herself. She could say, “I have been turned,” and did not know how very few can speak these words with truth.
Through most of her life no one noticed anything unusual about her, though they found her increasingly useful. The use her family made of her, however, was more or less unconscious, because she was always there, like Fountains itself, and because she was as unobtrusive as the old furniture whose quiet beauty seemed painted on the dusk of the ancient house. She was just Mary, plain, dumpy, lame, one of those people who do not seem to alter much as the years pass because they have no beauty to lose. The sons and daughters of the house enjoyed their visits home because Fountains was a peaceful sort of place. The servants were happy and contented and the work of the house ran smoothly. The grandchildren, especially those whose parents were in India and who were sent home to be looked after by their Aunt Mary, were more perceptive than their elders. When in after years they looked back on Fountains as upon a lost paradise they saw the face and figure of Aunt Mary as inseparable from it and they knew that they loved her. A few of them loved her as they loved no one else. Each one of them was quite sure that she loved him as she loved no one else; which was true, for seeing as she did the love of God perfectly in each creature of His creation and care she could love the creature as though it were all that existed, and she loved almost without favoritism.
Almost, because she was human. There was one who was dearer than all the rest, her brother Clive who had pushed her down the tower stairs.
He, alone among her brothers and sisters, grew to be more perceptive even than the children, because he never forgot what he had done. He intuitively knew that she endured constant pain and slept badly, though no one else knew because her strong will had enabled her not only never to speak of it but also for all practical purposes to overcome it; and he knew also, because she made him understand this, that she set some sort of value on her pain and thanked him for it. Just what its value was to her he could not understand, because explanation of the inexplicable was never Mary’s strong point. It deepened love, she said, and sharpened prayer by making them as piercing as itself if drawn into them. But this was beyond him. What was not beyond him was delighted comprehension of her impish humor, which she was too shy to reveal to many. With him she gave it full play and they had great fun together over the years. He alone of the family did not marry and though they met seldom, because as a soldier he was abroad a great deal, the bond between them grew stronger as they grew older. In late middle age his health failed and he came home to Fountains. In his forty-eighth year he died a hard death after a long hard illness through which Mary and Sarah nursed him, and after his death darkness enveloped Mary.