“Jenny,” he murmured above the beating of his heart. “Do you mean that you like me?”
“Yes, David.”
“Jenny,” he whispered. “I knew right from the start it would be like this. You do love me, Jenny?”
She gave a little nervous nod.
He took her in his arms. Nothing in all his life transcended the rapture of that kiss. He kissed her lightly, almost reverently. There was a tragic youthfulness, a complete betrayal of his inexperience in the tender awkwardness of that embrace. It was the queerest kiss she had ever known. Some curious quality in the kiss helped a tear tremulously down her cheek, another, and another.
“Jenny… you’re crying. Don’t you love me? Oh, my dear, tell me what’s wrong.”
“I do love you, David. I do,” she whispered. “I haven’t got anybody but you. I want you to go on loving me. I want you to take me out of here. I hate it here. I hate it. They’ve been beastly to me. And I’m sick of working in the millinery. I’ll not put up with it another minute. I want to be with you, right away. I want us to be married and happy and, oh, everything, David.”
The emotion in her voice moved him beyond the edge of ecstasy.
“I’ll take you away, Jenny. As soon as ever I can. Whenever I take my degree and get a post.”
She burst into tears.
“Oh, David, but that’s another whole year. And you’ll be in Durham, at the University, away from me. You’ll forget me. I couldn’t wait as long as that. I’m sick of it here, I tell you. Couldn’t you get a post now?” She wept bitterly; she did not know why.
It distressed him terribly to see her crying: he saw that she was overwrought and highly strung: but every sob she gave seemed to pierce him like a wound.
He soothed her, stroking her brow as her head lay upon his shoulder.
“It’s not so very long, Jenny. And don’t worry, oh, my dear, don’t worry. Why, I daresay I could get a post now if it came to the bit. I’m quite qualified to teach, you see. I’ve got the B.Litt already, you can take that in two years at the Baddeley. It’s not worth anything, nothing like the B.A., but I daresay if it came to a push I could get a job on the strength of it.”
“Could you, David?” Her streaming eyes implored him. “Oh, do try, David! How would you set about it?”
“Well.” Still stroking her brow he humoured her. Only the madness of his love made him go on. “I might write to a man at home who’s got some influence. A man named Barras. He might get me in somewhere in the county. But you see…”
“I do see, David,” she gulped. “I see exactly what you mean. You must take your B.A. But why not take it afterwards? Oh, think, David, you and me together in a nice little house somewhere. You working in the evenings with all your great big important books on the table and me sitting there beside you. It’s not so very hard to teach during the day. Then you can study, oh, ever so hard at night. Why, David, it would be wonderful. Wonderful!”
The picture, painted so romantically by Jenny, stirred him to a smiling tenderness. He looked at her protectively.
“But you see, Jenny, we must be practical…”
She smiled through her tears.
“David, David… don’t say another word. I’m so happy, I don’t want you to spoil it.” She jumped up, laughing. “Now, listen! We’ll go for a beautiful walk. Let’s go to Esmond Dene, it’s so lovely there, I do love it so, what with the trees and that beautiful old mill. And we’ll talk it all over, every bit of it. After all it wouldn’t do any harm just to write to this gentleman, Mr. Barras…” She broke off, fascinating him with her lovely eyes, all liquid and melting with her suppressed tears. She kissed him quickly, then ran off to get ready.
He stood smiling; uplifted, enraptured, perhaps a little perplexed. But nothing mattered beside the fact that Jenny loved him. She loved him. And he loved her. He thrilled with tenderness, an ardent hope for the future. Jenny would wait, of course she would wait… he was only twenty-two… he must take his B.A., she would come to see that later.
While he remained there, waiting for Jenny, the door flew open and Sally came into the room. She stopped short when she saw him.
“I didn’t know you were here,” she said, frowning. “I only came to get some music.”
Her frown was like a cloud sailing into the clear sky of his happiness. She had always been very odd with him, abrupt, caustic, perversely disagreeable. She seemed to have a grudge against him, an instinct for flicking him on the raw. Suddenly he wanted to be on good terms with Sally now that he was so happy, now that he was marrying her sister. And on an impulse he said:
“Why do you look at me that way, Sally? Is it because you dislike me?”
She faced him steadily: she wore an old blue drill costume, relic of her last year’s school days; her hair was very untidy.
“I don’t dislike you,” she said, with none of her usual precocious flippancy.
He saw that she was speaking the truth. He smiled.
“But you’re… you’re always so sour to me.”
She answered with uncommon gravity:
“You know where to get sugar if you want it.” And lowering her eyes suddenly she turned and went out of the room.
As Sally went through the door Jenny came swimming in.
“What’s the little cat been saying to you?” Not waiting for his reply she took his arm with a proprietary air, gave it a gentle squeeze. “Come along now, dear. I’m dying for us to have our lovely, lovely talk.”
She was bright now, yes, bright as a bird was Jenny. And why not? Hadn’t she every reason to be pleased, with a fiancé, not just a “boy” but a real fiancé, qualified to be a teacher. Oh! Marvellous to have a fiancé who was a teacher. She’d get out of Slattery’s right away, and out of Scottswood Road as well. She’d show them, show Joe too, she’d have a church wedding to spite them all, with a notice in the paper, she’d always set her mind on a church wedding, now what would she wear, something simple but nice… oh, yes, nice… nice… nice.
When David returned from his walk he wrote to Barras, “just to please” Jenny. A week later he had an answer, offering him a post as junior master at the New Bethel Street Council School in Sleescale. He showed it to Jenny, tom between reason and the rapture of his love for her, thinking of his parents, his career, wondering what she would say. She flung her arms round his neck.
“Oh, David, darling,” she sobbed. “Isn’t that marvellous, too marvellous for words? Aren’t you glad I made you write? Isn’t it really wonderful?”
Pressed against her, his eyes shut, his lips on hers holding her, oh, so tight, he felt with surging intoxication that she was right: it was really quite wonderful.
SIXTEEN
That morning, even before the telegram arrived for his father, Arthur was conscious of a singular elation. He awoke into it, was aware from the moment he opened his eyes upon the square of blue sky through his open window that life was very precious — full of sunshine and strength and hope. Naturally he did not always wake this way. Some mornings there was no sunshine, nothing awaited him but heaviness, a kind of immobile darkness, and the dismal sense of his own deficiencies.
Why was he so happy? That, like his moods of misery, remained inexplicable. Perhaps a premonition of the morning telegram, or of seeing Hetty in the afternoon. More likely the joyful recognition of his own improvement for, lying in bed with his hands clasped behind his head and the long span of his eighteen-year body luxuriously stretched, his first real thought had been: “I didn’t eat the strawberries.”