Imagined Corners. Willa Muir

be damned unpleasant to fall into. It was still as dirty and foul as ever. On a dark night, he reflected, it would be easy to come down to Dock Street and walk right over the edge into that scum. When he was a child that corner had always given him the creeps. He gazed into the murky water. Better to drown in the open sea than in that stagnant muck.

      He shivered and turned up his coat collar. Damn it all, he would get even with John yet. There was Elizabeth to back him up. Elizabeth swore that it took a higher kind of courage to come back from Canada than to stick on out there. So he hadn’t been a quitter when he left the farm. He had come back with more money than he started with. Nobody could say he was a quitter. Damn it all, if he was an out-and-out rotter Elizabeth would never have married him, and there was precious little about himself he hadn’t told her.

      Elizabeth made a fellow feel he had some guts in him. He would go home and shake it all off. Elizabeth was a wonder, he thought, striding up the street with the sea-wind behind him. Queer that none of the other chaps had had the nerve to make love to her. Of course, she said herself she was too brotherly for them. But she had fallen for him all right, all right.

      At the moment he was filled with passionate gratitude towards her. She was the biggest success he had ever had. She was one of those superior people who understood books, and yet she hadn’t turned him down. Far from it. He was the first man she had ever fallen for.

      He studied the figure of a girl coming towards him, her head down against the wind. Showed up a girl, that did. Elizabeth was as well made as any of them. God, he was glad to be well out of the time when he couldn’t look at a girl without thinking there was only a skirt between him and her. Elizabeth had saved him from that.

      Not consciously in words, not even in half-glimpsed images did he recognize Elizabeth as anything like an anchorage or a haven for his storm-driven life, but the feeling which was swelling his heart as he neared home would have engendered such a conception in a more articulate person. He was only aware that he had never felt like that before about any girl. As he fitted his latchkey in the door he was excited because he was to see his wife immediately, and his disappointment was all the more overwhelming when he found the drawing-room empty. The mistress, said Mary Ann, rushing from the kitchen, had left word she was sorry but she had to go out for tea. ‘With Mrs Doctor Scrimmager,’ added Mary Ann of her own accord; ‘at least they gaed out thegither.’

      ‘I’ll mak’ you a fly cup for yoursel’,’ she offered.

      ‘No, no, Mary Ann; you’ll never get a man if you offer him nothing but tea,’ said Hector. ‘Tell the mistress if she comes back before me that I’m away to the Club for something better than tea.’

      Mary Ann giggled. A heartsome young man, the master, and with a wee spark of the devil in his eye; just what a man should have.

      The wee spark of the devil in Hector’s eye was occasioned by a curious blend of emotions. Because Elizabeth had gone out he was not only disappointed, he was resentful with the same kind of resentment a child feels when it has hurt itself and its mother does not pick it up. He was also irritated because it was Mrs Scrymgeour whose company Elizabeth had preferred to his; he disliked Mrs Scrymgeour and wished that his wife were less intimate with the woman. At the same time he was conscious that he was a man, a swaggering, independent creature, and he was pleased to have an excellent excuse for flourishing his masculinity in despite of Elizabeth. He would go to the Club and have a high old time with the fellows. He was popular in the Club. He might, in fact, make a night of it. It would serve Elizabeth right.

      On his way to the Golf Club he passed close by the lighted windows of number seven Balfour Terrace, where Mabel was sitting alone at tea, turning over the new magazine the perusal of which was to lead her imagination to startling conclusions a little later in the evening.

      Next day the wind had increased to a storm; the thunder of the breaking grey sea could be heard in the High Street, and a relentless rain stung the faces of the goodwives as they scuttled from one snug shop to another doing their shopping.

      Mrs Hector Shand was standing at her drawing-room window gazing at the low clouds racing behind the few leafless trees of her garden. The prospect was bleak, but Elizabeth, being accustomed to unkind weather, was not depressed. She was planning to take a run on the links, for when a strong wind blew she could not help taking to her heels and following it.

      But the front-door bell rang, and almost immediately Mary Ann’s voice cried: ‘The mistress is in here, Miss Shand.’

      Aunt Janet was breathless; she tumbled rather than walked in, clutching a sodden umbrella and a brown-paper parcel.

      ‘Oh, my dear!’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, my dear!’

      ‘She’s heard about it,’ said Elizabeth to herself, feeling trapped.

      Aunt Janet was brimming over with solicitude; she had obviously come to comfort and to exhort, to investigate and bewail the scandal.

      ‘What a terrible thing!’ she cried, endeavouring to seize Elizabeth’s hands at the same time as Elizabeth tried to take the parcel and umbrella from her. ‘What a dreadful thing! Oh, I’m so upset. Where is he?’

      ‘Come and sit by the fire,’ said Elizabeth; ‘let me get your wet things off.’

      ‘I was sure I should find you in. I said to myself: “The poor child will be mourning her heart out.” Is Hector upstairs?’

      No, he’s gone out to the football match.’

      ‘But, my dear Elizabeth!’

      ‘It’s dreadful weather for standing about, I know. I shouldn’t spend a wet afternoon like that —’

      Aunt Janet’s visibly increasing distress broke off Elizabeth’s sentence.

      ‘That’s not what I meant at all – not at all.’

      Janet put a hand on the younger woman’s knee.

      ‘My dear, how do you know he won’t go and get drunk again? Why did you let him go? I heard all about this dreadful affair of last night —’

      ‘How did you hear about it?’

      ‘But, Elizabeth, it’s the talk of the town. I heard about it from at least three different sources.’

      ‘Oh, I suppose so. I didn’t think.’

      ‘And now you say he’s at a football match.’

      ‘He won’t be tackling people there,’ said Elizabeth, laughing. ‘And he won’t get drunk, Aunt Janet, for he promised me—’

      ‘I was sure of it. I was sure you would lead the poor boy in the right direction.’

      ‘Besides, it wasn’t so bad, not so very bad, from what I can make out. They were all rather well on, and Hector was practising Rugger tackles. It was quite an accident that Hutcheon got his collar-bone broken.’

      ‘But, my dear, I heard that young Hutcheon was brought home in a dreadful state, simply covered with mud and blood.’

      ‘Then they must have been scrumming in the street. Still, I’m sure it was only a lark. It’s easy to break a man’s collar-bone when you pitch him over; I’ve seen Hector do it before.’

      ‘Hector doesn’t know his own strength. Well, my dear, it’s a mercy you can take it so calmly; but really, my dear, I am so distressed. I was told that they were swearing and blaspheming in the street in the most dreadful manner, wakening people out of their beds.’

      Elizabeth repressed a smile.

      ‘I don’t believe it’ll happen again,’ she said. ‘Hector’s terribly ashamed of himself.’

      ‘It mustn’t happen again, Elizabeth. You must do all you can to prevent it.’

      ‘Well, last time I told Hector I would go down to the Club and drag him out by the hair of the head if he did it again, and this time I have threatened to go down and get drunk beside him—’