CIRCUMSTANCES made it necessary that before the end of the month May should inform old Mrs. Trewhella of Jenny's expected baby.
"What did she say?" Jenny inquired when the interview was over.
"She said she thought as much."
"What a liberty. Why? Nobody could tell to look at me. Or I hope not."
"Yes, but her!" commented May. "She's done nothing all her life only make it her business to know. They're all like that down here. I noticed that very soon about country people."
"What else did she say?" Jenny went on with for her unusual persistence. She was not yet able to get rid of the idea that there was something remarkable in Jenny Pearl going to have a baby. Not even the universal atmosphere of fecundity which pervaded the farm could make this fact a whit more ordinary.
"She didn't say much else," related May, not rising to the solemnity of the announcement, the revolutionary and shattering reality of it.
"But she's going to tell him?" Jenny asked.
"That made her laugh."
"What did?"
"Her having to tell him."
"Why?" demanded Jenny indignantly.
"Well, you know they're funny down here. I tell you they don't think nothing about having a baby. No more than picking a bunch of roses, you might say."
This humdrum view of childbirth, although it might have relieved her self-consciousness, was not at all welcome to Jenny. She could not bring herself to believe that, when after so many years of speculation on this very subject, she herself was going to have a baby, the world at large would remain profoundly indifferent. She remembered how as a child she had played with dolls, and how in the foggy weeks before Christmas she had been wont to identify her anticipation with the emotional expectancy of young motherhood. And now it was actually in the slow process of happening, this event, happening, too, as far as could be judged, without any violent or even mildly perceptible transfiguration, mental or physical. Still it must not be forgotten that Mrs. Trewhella had divined her condition. By what? Certainly not at present by her form or complexion.
"I think it's your eyes," said May.
"What's the matter with them now?"
"They look different somehow. Sort of far-away look which you didn't use to have."
"Shut up," scoffed Jenny, greatly embarrassed.
That evening when, after tea, Jenny leaned against the stone hedge under a sunset of rosy cumulus, Trewhella came through the garden and faced her.
"So you and me's going to have a child, missus?"
Jenny resented the assumption of his partnership and gave a cold affirmative.
"That's a good job," he sighed, staring out into the air stained with crimson from twilight's approach. "I feel brim pleased about that. There'll be some fine Harvest Home to Bochyn come September month."
Then from the vagueness of such expressed aspirations Zachary turned to a practical view of the matter on hand, regarding his wife earnestly as he might from the support of a gate have looked discriminatingly at a field of young wheat.
"Is there anything you do want?" he presently inquired.
Perhaps the cool straightness of the question contained a hint of expert advice, as if for his field he would prescribe phosphates or nitrate or sulphate of ammonia. There was no suggestion of spiritual needs that might call out for nourishment under the stress of a new experience. Jenny felt that she was being sized up with a view to the best practical conduct of the agitating business.
"I wish you wouldn't talk about me," she protested, "like you talked about that cow the other day at dinner."
Trewhella looked perplexed. He never seemed able to grasp whether this sharp-voiced Londoner whom he had married were laughing at him or not.
"I've always heard it spoken," he began slowly. He always proceeded slowly with a conversation that held a warning of barbed wire, as if by disregarding the obstacle and by cautious advance any defense could be broken down.
"I've always heard it spoken that the women do dearly love something or other at such times. Mother used to tell how before I were born, she were in a terrible hurry to eat a Cornish Gillyflower. But there wasn't one tree as bore an apple that year. Irish Peaches? Ess, bushels. No, that wouldn't do for her. Tom Putts? Sweet Larks? Ess, bushels. No more wouldn't they serve. Boxers? Sops and Wines? Ess, bushels, and, darn 'ee, they made her retch to look at 'em."
"She'd properly got the pip, hadn't she?" observed Jenny mockingly.
Trewhella saw the wire and made a circuit.
"So I was thinking you might be wanting something as I could get for 'ee on market-day to Camston."
"No, thanks, there's nothing I want. Not even a penny pomegranate," said Jenny, who was anxious for Zachary to go. She did not like this attempt at intimacy. She had not foreseen the alliance of sympathy he presumably wished to form on account of her child. The more she considered his claim, the more irrational and impertinent did it seem that he should dare assume any share in the unborn miracle worked by Jenny Pearl.
Trewhella pulled himself together, still progressing slowly, even painfully, but braced to snap if necessary every strand of barbed wire still between him and his object.
"What I were going to say to 'ee was, now that there's this lill baby, I'd like for 'ee both to go chapel. I've said nothing so far about your not going; but I daren't run up against the dear Lord's wrath in the matter of my baby."
"Don't be silly," said Jenny. "How can anything happen to my baby without its happening to me?"
"Well, I'd like for 'ee to come," Trewhella persisted.
Here was Jenny in a quandary. If she refused, according to her fiery first impulse, what religious pesterings would follow her round the garden. How he would drawl in that unnatural manner of speech a lot of rubbish which had nothing to do with her. He might even take to preaching in bed. He had once frightened her by demanding in a sepulchral speculation whether she had ever reflected that the flames of hell were so hot that there a white-hot poker would be cool as ice-cream. If on the other hand she submitted to a few hours' boredom, what an amount of treasured liberty would be sacrificed and what more intrusive attempts might not be made upon the inviolable egoism.
"But I don't like church and chapel," said Jenny. "It doesn't interest me."
Then she saw her husband gathering his eloquence for wearisome argument and decided to compromise—and for Jenny to compromise meant character in the melting-pot.
"I might come once and again," she said.
Trewhella seemed relieved and, after a moment's awkwardness in which he gave her the idea that he was on the verge of thanks, departed to his business.
So, not on the following Sunday, for that would have looked like too easy a surrender, but on the Sunday after that, Jenny and May went in the wake of the household to the Free Church—a gaunt square of whitewashed stone, whose interior smelt of varnish and stale hymn-books and harmonium dust. The minister, a compound of suspicion, petty authority and deep-rooted servility, had bicycled from Camston and had in consequence a rash of mud on his coat. Without much fire, gnawing his mustache when in need of a word, he gave a dreary political address in which several modern statesmen were allotted prototypes in Israel. The mean Staffordshire accent destroyed whatever beauty was left to his maimed excerpts from Holy Scripture.
"What a terrible man!" whispered Jenny to May.
Presently during the extempore prayers, when the congregation took up the more comfortable attitude of prayer by bending towards their laps, Jenny perceived that the eyes of each person were surreptitiously fixed on her. She could see the prying sparkle through coarse fingers—a sparkle that was instantly quenched when she faced it. Jenny prodded May.
"Come on," she whispered fiercely. "I'm going out of this dog's island."
May looked alarmed by the prospect of so conspicuous an exit, but loyally followed Jenny as they picked their way over what seemed from their upright position a jumble of corpses. An official, either more indomitably curious or less anxiously self-repressive than the majority, hurried after them.
"Feeling slight, are 'ee, missus?" inquired this red-headed farmer.
"No, thanks," said Jenny.
"It do get very hot with that stove come May month. I believe it ought to be put out. And you're not feeling slight?"
"No, thanks."
The man seemed unwilling to go back inside the chapel; but the two girls walked quickly away from him down through the deserted village.
After dinner the incident was discussed with some bitterness.
"How did 'ee go out of chapel like that?" asked Trewhella.
"Because I don't go to a chapel or a church neither to be stared at. It's a game of mine played slow, being stared at by a lot of old crows like them in there."
Jenny defiantly surveyed Zachary, his mother and old Mr. Champion, while May murmured encouragement behind her.
"’Tisn't paying any great respect to the dear Lord," said Trewhella. "Trooping out like a lot of great bullocks! I went so hot as lead."
"’Tisn't paying any great respect to the dear Lord, staring at two women when you belong praying," said Granfa severely.
"Darn 'ee," said Trewhella savagely. "’Tis nothing to do with you, a heathen old man as was once seen picking wrinkles off the rocks on a Sunday morning."
"I believe it is then," said Granfa stoutly. "I believe that it's got a brae lot to do with me and, darn 'ee, if it hasn't——"
He thumped the table so that all the crockery rattled. This roused Mrs. Trewhella, who had been blinking in silence.
"Look, see what you're doing, Granfa. You'll scat all the cloam," she cried shrilly.
Trewhella, having surveyed Jenny's defenses, began his usual slow advance.
"What nobody here seems to understand is my feelings when I seed my missus making a mock of holy things."
"Oh, rats!" cried Jenny, flouncing angrily from the room.
Nothing could persuade her to humor Zachary so far as to go to chapel a second time. It pleased her to contemplate his anxiety for the spiritual welfare of the unborn child. "I wish you'd wrastle with the devil a bit more," he said. But she would only set her lips obstinately, and perhaps under his mother's advice, Zachary gradually allowed the subject to drop.
Jenny and May went often to the cliffs in the fine weather, mostly to Crickabella (such was Granfa's name for their favorite slope), where summer marched by almost visibly. The sea-pinks turned brown, the sea-campion decayed to an untidy mat of faded leaves and flowers. Bluebells came up in asparagus-like heads that very soon broke into a blue mist of perfume. The ferns grew taller every day, and foxgloves waved right down to the water's edge. On the moorland behind the cliffs, heather and burnet roses bloomed with azure scabious and white mothmulleins, ladies' tresses and sweet purple orchids. Here and there grew solitary columbines, which Jenny thought were lovely and carried home to Granfa, who called them Blue Men's Caps. Remote from curious eyes, remote from life itself save in the progress of inanimate things towards the accomplishment of their destiny, she dreamed unceasingly day after day amid the hollow sounding of the ocean, watching idly the metallic green flight of the shags, the timorous adventures of rock pipits, and sometimes the graces of a seal.
With the advance of summer Jenny began to dread extremely the various insects and reptiles of the country. It was vain for Thomas to assure her that apple-bees did not sting without provocation, that eeriwigs were not prone to attack, that piskies were harmless flutterers and neither Johnny Jakes nor gram'ma sows actively malicious. These rural incidents of a wasp on a hat or a woodlouse in a sponge were to her horrible events which made her tremble in the recollection of them long afterwards. The state of her health did not tend to allay these terrors, and because Crickabella was comparatively free from insects, that lonely green escarpment, flung against the black ramparts of the towering coast, was more than ever dear to Jenny.
In July, however, she was not able to walk so far as Crickabella, and was forced to pass all her days in the garden, gazing at the shimmering line of the hills opposite. Granfa Champion used to spend much time in her company, and was continually having to be restrained from violent digging in the heat. During August picture post-cards often arrived from girls spending their holidays at Margate or Brighton, postcards that gave no news beyond, "Having a fine old time. Hope you're alright," but, inasmuch as they showed that there was still a thought of Jenny in the great world outside, very welcome.
August dragged on with parched days, and cold twilights murmurous with the first rustle of autumn. Jenny began to work herself up into a state of nervous apprehension, brooding over childbirth, its pain and secrecy of purpose and ultimate responsibilities. She could no longer tolerate the comments passed upon her by Mrs. Trewhella nor the furtive inquisitiveness of Zachary. She gave up sitting at dinner with the rest of the household, and was humored in this fad more perhaps from policy than any consideration of affection. The only pleasure of these hot insufferable days of waiting was the knowledge that Zachary was banished from her room, that once more, as of old, May would sleep beside her. There was a new experience from the revival of the partnership because now, unlike the old theater days, Jenny would often be the first in bed and able to lie there watching in the candlelight May's shadow glance hugely about the irregular ceiling, like Valérie's shadow long since in the Glasgow bedroom. Where was Valérie now? But where was anybody in her history? Ghosts, every one of them, where she was concerned.