Thrush Green Page 2

  "All that's troubling him," old Piggott had called after her, "is whether he'll be fit to go to the fair!"

  When Ruth awoke on the first day of May her first thought, as always, was of that nightmarish scene which had changed her life. The old accustomed horror engulfed her as her mind fought to turn itself away from such bitterness. But, to her surprise, the feeling was not so sharply cruel on this particular day. True, her mind shied from its remembrance like a terrified horse, but it did not plunge and toss, this way and that, in grief-maddened panic, in its efforts to shake off the devil that possessed it. It was as though a veil had been dropped between the dreadful picture and her mind's eye. She could see it all, down to the smallest detail, but the picture was dimmed, the impact was gentler, and her own feeling less agonized.

  Could it really be true that time healed everything? Ruth wondered. For six weeks now she had awakened daily to a sickening sense of loss and humiliation, and this was the first time that she had felt any lessening in the misery that engulfed her.

  The clock of St. Andrew's struck seven and she could hear movements from Paul's room across the landing. The first of May! The day of Thrush Green Fair! No wonder that he was awake early. If the rash had gone and his temperature remained normal she felt sure that he would be allowed to go to the fair. Dr. Lovell would be along as soon as possible, she knew, to put the little boy out of his suspense.

  She sat up and reached for her slippers. The sun was already striking rainbows from the dewy grass and gilding the roofs of the caravans on Thrush Green. As Ruth thrust her feet into her slippers she was struck once again by a second marvel. The thought of seeing young Dr. Lovell again had sent the faintest flicker of warmth into her sad heart. She sat on the side of the bed and considered this phenomenon dispassionately. To have the searing pain lessened at all was remarkable enough for one morning, but to find a little warmth among the dead ashes of her day-today existence was even more extraordinary.

  Wondering and bemused, shaken with a vague sense of gratitude for mercies received, she went to the bedroom door. And clutching this crumb of comfort to her she made her way across the sunlit landing to see Paul.

  2. The Great Mrs. Curdle

  MRS. CURDLE heard St. Andrew's clock strike seven as she lifted the boiling kettle from her diminutive stove. She had been up and about for over an hour, moving slowly about her caravan, straightening the covers on the bunk, shaking the rag rug and even giving the brass on her beloved stove an early rub with metal polish.

  The stove was the delight of her heart and had been built especially by a friend of her late husband's to fit neatly into the end of her tiny home. The top was of gleaming steel which Mrs. Curdle rubbed up daily with emery paper, hissing gently to herself like a groom to a horse, as her busy hand slid back and forth, back and forth across the satin of the surface.

  A circular lid could be lifted off and the fire then sent up its released heat to Mrs. Curdle's kettle, stewpot or frying pan. When the food was cooked, or the teapot filled, it could be kept hot by standing it farther along the hob, and frequently the top of the little stove was filled with a variety of utensils each giving off a rich aroma, for Mrs. Curdle was a great cook.

  The front of the stove was black but decorated with a great deal of brass. The knobs and hinges of the tiny oven door gleamed like gold against the jet-blackness. Another door, covering the bars of the fire, could be let down and formed a useful ledge. It was here that Mrs. Curdle heated her great flatiron, propping it up on its back with the ironing surface pressed to the glowing red bars.

  But this morning the stove, despite its comforting warmth and beauty, failed to cheer Mrs. Curdle's troubled heart. She had known, as soon as she awoke, that this was going to be one of her bad days, for the burning pain in her back and stomach had already begun to torment her.

  "Dear, oh dear!" had muttered poor Mrs. Curdle, heaving her back painfully from the narrow bunk. She had sat there breathing heavily, for a full ten minutes, rubbing her enormous stomach as rhythmically as she did the gleaming stove top, and talking aloud to herself as was her custom.

  "And only a morsel of fried liver and onions for me supper! Never touched the cheese and never wetted me lips with nothin' stronger than tea all yesterday. An' there's no doubt about it—I'll have to turn it all in—turn it all in!"

  She had gone slowly about her toilet, wiping her strong brown face with a damp cloth and giving her neck and magnificent bosom a perfunctory wipe afterwards. She dressed herself in her black stuff dress, put on a dazzling flowered overall and pulled on a red and grubby cardigan. Her hair she combed through carefully with soapy water and braided it into shiny sticky bands, with two loops hanging at each side of her head, each encircling an ear. Gold drop earrings, the wedding gift of her husband, had glittered against Mrs. Curdle's weather-beaten cheeks for over fifty years and these, with the exception of a gold brooch with the word Mizpah embossed upon it, were the only ornaments that the old lady wore.

  She had been a handsome girl, tall and beautifully proportioned, with plentiful black hair and lustrous dark eyes. And now despite her seventy-odd years and her great girth she was still a fine-looking woman, with her jutting haughty nose and compelling gaze beneath the thick arched brows. She had treated her husband as an equal, in business affairs, in their domestic life, and as the father of their eight children. She had been as strong physically as he, for he was a slight man, and they had shared the heavy manual work needed in setting up and taking down the equipment of their business. When he had died, as the result of a fall from the framework of his own swing boats, at the age of fifty, Mrs. Curdle had mourned him deeply. She had lost, not only a husband, but her dearest companion and partner in a flourishing concern.

  But Mrs. Curdle had not mourned for long. The three oldest children were of an age to help in the fair, but there were five smaller ones, the youngest hardly able to walk and still needing the board across the doorway of the caravan to protect her from falling headlong down the three wooden steps that led precipitously to the great world beyond her tiny home.

  She was determined that nothing should part her from the fair, which she and her husband had built up over the years, with back-breaking effort. Two men, both distant relations of her husband's, remained to help her, and these two she ruled as strictly as she did her own struggling brood. Instant obedience was expected, and on the rare occasions when it was not forthcoming Mrs. Curdle's mighty arm would swing, or her cruel tongue would lash, and child or fair-hand would meekly acknowledge his master.

  Those who knew her but slightly marveled that the children, as they grew old enough to earn their own livelihood, elected to stay with one so ruthlessly overbearing. But despite her matriarchal severity Mrs. Curdle was scrupulously just and uncommonly warmhearted, and her family adored, as well as feared, her. She had no room in her life for loafers, grumblers or petty thieves; but an honest man or woman found in this indomitable old lady kindness, sympathy and the wisdom born of experience.

  Mrs. Curdle had many friends and very few enemies in the half a dozen or so counties which her caravan traversed in the southern part of England. She was known to three generations in villages and towns; and when the rumor had gone around that the great Mrs. Curdle was thinking of selling her business and that the fair would be no more, it came as a sad shock. Grandparents in the water meadows of Wiltshire, fathers and mothers in the gray Cotswold villages, and little children playing among the wooded upper reaches of the Thames valley all felt the same pang of regret at the possibility of this annual joy passing from them forever.

  "It doesn't seem possible," old Dr. Bailey had said to his wife, the week before Mrs. Curdle's visit was due. "May the first, without Mrs. Curdle on Thrush Green—why, the whole idea's absurd! It just isn't May the first without Mrs. Curdle!"

  "We shall miss the flowers," said his wife. She was sitting in an armchair in the window of the patient's bedroom which looked across Thrush Green to the village school. T
he doctor was comfortably propped up against his pillows in the evening sunshine. He had spent the warm afternoon pottering about in his garden, smelling the lilac, admiring his tulips and watching a blackbird flutter back and forth, her beak full of wriggling insects for her nestlings nearby.

  But now he was tired and quite content, as the April day cooled, to be helped back into his comfortable bed and to read or gossip lazily with his wife.

  "Those flowers!" said the old man, shaking his head. "A bigger and brighter bunch each year it seems."

  Mrs. Curdle's annual bunch of flowers constituted something of a problem in the doctor's house, for they were artificial and lasted forever. They were indeed works of art, great mop-headed beauties made from finely cut wood shavings which curled into unbelievable shapes. Mrs. Curdle had learned this handicraft as a young girl and was an expert. When the flowers had been made she dyed them yellow, pink, orange and scarlet and mounted them among evergreen twigs of laurel. They made a dazzling bouquet, not without charm, but the bunch which was presented each May Day by Mrs. Curdle in person to the doctor was of such gargantuan proportions that Mrs. Bailey was hard put to it to find a suitable place for it.

  Each year Mrs. Curdle asked to see how the previous year's bouquet had worn, so that the doctor and his wife were in honor bound not to destroy these offerings.

  "Do you realize, my dear," said the doctor, "that we've had a bunch of Curdle blooms ever since 1915?"

  "Forty-odd years with the top shelf of the pantry occupied," commented Mrs. Bailey. "And then having to remember to unearth them before the day! Really, I shan't know myself."

  "I don't like the idea," responded the doctor with vigor. "To think of that caravan drawn up in some buttercup field under the lee of the same hawthorn hedge forever, with grass seeding over the wheel tops, and the shafts down, rotting—no, I tell you! It's against nature. Mrs. Curdle's too game to let that happen. Surely, she'd never let it happen!"

  But there was a query in the old man's tone and silence fell upon the room. Outside, the blackbirds scolded and the sound of children playing on the green, glorying in the first few outdoor games of spring, could be faintly heard. Mrs. Bailey stole a glance at her husband. His blue eyes were gazing far away and his wife knew that he was thinking of that distant evening when he and Mrs. Curdle had first met, on just such an April evening, many years ago.

  Doctor Bailey was then a young man in his twenties, newly qualified and recently married and settled in this, his first practice. The tall house on Thrush Green had been but sparsely furnished, for the young couple had great aspirations but little money, and most of the furniture was solid Victorian stuff given by their parents. The large room to the left of the graceful hooded front door was young Dr. Bailey's surgery. Later, as his family came into the world, it was to be the dining room and a new surgery was built at the side of the house, but when Mrs. Curdle first knew him the doctor and his wife dined in a sunny little room at the back of the house, conveniently near the kitchen.

  They had been at supper on that far-distant evening when Mr. Curdle, white with panic, had drummed madly on the glass of the hall door. The little maid-of-all-work had been disdainful, telling the wild-eyed rough-looking man that Dr. Bailey had finished his evening surgery and was not at home.

  At this the sorely tried husband had broken into such cries of frustration and wrath that the good doctor had thrust aside his plate and gone out into the hall to discover what all the hullaballoo was about.

  "It's me missus, sir," had said Mr. Curdle, clutching the doctor's arm. "It's on the way—afore time. Ain't never seen her this way afore!"

  "I'll come," had answered the doctor, picking up his bag from the hall table. The maid had retired, tossing her head at the thought of such low people as them gyppos having the sauce to interrupt the master at his supper.

  The two men had crossed the green to the small caravan. The husband was voluble with anxiety.

  "This makes the fourth," he had told the doctor, "and never a minute's worry with any on 'em! Be as strong as a 'orse, me old gal; but never see her this way!"

  The doctor had entered the tiny caravan which was stuffy and evil-smelling after the fragrance of the April evening outside. It seemed packed with humanity, for as well as the patient, writhing and moaning in the narrow bunk, there were two women administering advice and pungent potions, and three small children.

  "Get them all outside," the doctor had said curtly, and the crowd had melted away leaving him with his patient and her husband hovering anxiously at the door. After a brief examination he had scribbled a note and handed it to the husband.

  "Run across to my house with that and tell my wife to lose no time," he said.

  "What's it for?" stammered the man.

  "For the ambulance. We must get her into the county hospital straight away."

  The man vanished at once, but the patient had burst into hysterical screaming at the word hospital.

  "Ah, don't 'ee send me there, doctor dear! Please don't send me to that place, doctor. I'll die—that I will! I'll die!"

  "You'll die if you don't go, young woman," the doctor had said honestly. The straight words had shocked her into silence and she lay quietly until the ambulance had arrived. It was a high dignified vehicle, the pride of Lulling Cottage Hospital, and the outcome of many fetes and jumble sales in the neighborhood.

  Dr. Bailey never forgot that ten-mile journey to the county town. He had sat inside watching his patient, after having directed the husband, who was now in tears, to sit in front with the driver. It was one of those typical April evenings, showery and sunny in turn. The sky was a purplish gray with heavy storm clouds and against this background the young green of the new leaves gleamed goldenly. As the ambulance lurched along through the scented odd-colored evening the doctor was struck, for the first time, by the memory of Millais's picture of "The Blind Girl." The artist had caught the same bizarre coloring exactly, and enhanced it by the addition of that unforgettable, glowing, auburn hair.

  Young Mrs. Curdle had clung pathetically to the doctor's hand throughout the journey. He had promised her that all would be well, that the hospital staff wanted to help and not to frighten her, and that if she did all that she was told the baby had every chance of being born alive and of flourishing. She had listened silently, tears rolling helplessly from her dark lovely eyes, but she knew, before the agonizing journey was over, that here was a true friend and counselor.

  The child had been born the next day after a grueling period of pain. It was a delicate boy and the mother was ill for over a month after the birth. She was moved to Lulling Cottage Hospital where Dr. Bailey saw her each day and grew to like this gallant young woman whose spirits returned slowly with her strength.

  No one could guess how much hospital life oppressed the girl. She lay in her bed on the veranda and gazed listlessly at the neat rose beds, each trim bush bearing a tidy label with its name, and she craved for the sight of a spray of pale wild roses tossing in the fresh breeze on the open downs, for the splash of rain on her face and the whistling of the wind through her hair.

  She ate the gray tepid food on the clean white plates obediently, and yearned for the mingled smell of wood smoke and hare broth and the clatter of her own metal spoon and platter. The one bright spot of her arid day was the visit of young Dr. Bailey. To her he was godlike. Without him she would have died, and her son with her.

  Every Sunday her husband came from whichever of the nearby towns the little fair was working. He came dressed in his best black and sat, monosyllabic and ill at ease, among the white counterpanes, the flowers and the rustling nurses.

  Mrs. Curdle questioned him sharply about the business and the children, but that done conversation languished, and each was secretly relieved when the visiting time was up and he made his sheepish farewells, too shy to kiss her before strangers and too loving to go without pain.

  Early in the June of 1914 Mrs. Curdle and the baby had joined the fair again in
a windswept Berkshire village, but not before Mrs. Curdle had given her thanks to the young doctor and promised to show him the baby on her next visit to Thrush Green at the beginning of the following May.

  "And take care of him," the doctor had said. "He's a fine boy and I shall look forward to seeing you both next May."

  But it was not to be, for within two months war had broken out in Europe and the doctor was fighting in France when Mrs. Curdle had called with her baby and the first of many bunches of lovingly made flowers. It was Mrs. Bailey, herself by now the mother of a young son, who admired the child and accepted the bouquet; and it was not until George Curdle (named after the King) was a sturdy child of five that he first saw the doctor who had helped to bring him into the world.

  And now, on this May morning more than forty years from those far-off days, Mrs. Curdle thought again of Dr. Bailey. She would go to him for medical advice, for the second time in her life. She had come to this decision slowly and painfully, and only at the promptings of prolonged and terrifying suffering.

  For months now the pain in her stomach had made her even more dictatorial than usual. Many a sharp word to her large family had called forth muttered blasphemies from growing grandchildren less willing to show the meek respect which their parents had done to the head of the tribe.

  Old Mrs. Curdle was too proud to consult her daughters, or even women friends of her own age, about her ailments. She suffered the burning pain, the nausea and the headaches without complaint, and only her growing impatience and tired eyes gave a hint that she was not a healthy woman.

  Secretly she had made up her mind that she was the victim of cancer. She had heard enough of this enemy to fear it, and she visualized this creeping evil groping about the tender members of her body with deadly tentacles. On one thing she was determined. If Dr. Bailey discovered a growth within her it would remain. Nothing, she swore, would be as terrifying to her as the hospital and the surgeon's knife. She would carry her pain back to the caravan and bear it as best she could, as she had done for so many months, until the good God released her from its clutches. She was used to it now and could settle down with it philosophically, like a mother with a bad-tempered child.