The Lost Girl

y nurse. Being her father's daughter, we might almost expect that she did not make

their purse-strings? After all, they all knew her as Miss Houghton, with a stress on the Miss, and they could not conceive of her as Nurse Houghton. Besides, there seemed something

ne moment reflected on the advice. She had become a maternity nurse in order to practise in Woodhouse, just as James Houghton had purchased his elegancies to

y-four years. Here was the old Alvina come back, rather battered and deteriorated, apparently. There was even a tiny touch of the trollops in her dowdiness-so the shrewd-eyed collier-wives decided. But she was a lady still, and unbeaten. Undeniably she was a lady. And that was rather irritating to the well-to-do and florid daughter of W.H. Johnson, next door but one. Undeniably a lady, and undeniably unmastered. This last was irritating to the good-natured but easy-comin

the gloom-unless one liked to go miles round a back street, to the yard entry. There was James Houghton, faintly powdered with coal-dust, flitting back and forth in a fever of nervous frenzy, to Throttle-Ha'penny-so carried away t

re back to find us busy." And he

sband should come into the room. On his entry she became blue at the lips immediately, so he had to hurry out again. At last he stayed away, onl

n her return, all the poor invalid could do

ook dreadful.

tle figure in the bed had

mother?"

the servant had been nursing the invalid between them. Miss Frost was worn and rather heavy: her old buoyancy and brightness was gone. She had become irritabl

ich had not a single word to exchange: an almost after-death love. In these days Mrs. Houghton never talked-unless to fret a little. So Alvina sat for many

in

her. And so it was during these months nursing her mother. She attended constantly on the invalid: she did a good deal of work about the house: she took her walks and occupied her place in the choir on Sunday mornings. And yet, from August to January, she seemed to be seated in her chair in the bedroom, sometimes reading, but mostly quite still

stantly blanked in with white powdery ash, which it was fatal to try to poke away. For if you poked and poked, you raised white cumulus clouds of ash, and you were left at last with a few darkening an

thin, they rested very still in her lap, there was a ladylike stillness about them as she took her walk,

not hers. Returning up-channel to re-discover their course was quite another matter from flowing down-stream into the unknown, as they had done thirty years before. This supercilious and impertinent exploration of the generation gone by, by the present generation, is nothing to our credit. As a matter of fact, no generation repeats the mistakes of the generation ahead, any more than any ri

e future remains for ever an infinite fie

e of the mother, the fate of the daughter will be otherwise. That is organically i

s Houghton. What ought James Houghton to have done differently? Everything. In short, he should have been somebody else, and not himself. Which is the reductio ad absurdum of idealism. The universe should be somet

espair. This was the end of another woman's l

bstinate self-importance than ever James' shop-windows were. She expected to be made happy. Every woman in Europe and America expects it. On her own head then if she is made unhappy: for her expectation is arrogant and impertinent. The be-all and end-all of life doesn't lie in feminin

e because she wasn't happy, well, she had died of her own heart-disea

nd slow death. Sorrow and slow death, because a man had not married her. Wretched man, what is he to do with these exigeant and never-to-be-satisfied women? Our mothers pined because our fathers drank and were

received one or two overflow pupils from Miss Frost, young girls to whom she gave lessons in the dark drawing-room of Ma

done with them? She gave them away, without consulting anybody. She kept a few private things, s

She liked space, she liked the windows. She was strictly mistress, too. So

tting up house, in the beginning. And now he begrudged the household expenses, begrudged the very soap and candles, and even

ce of appeal, Alvina was almost coldly independent. She did what she thought she would. The old manner of intimacy persisted between her and her darling. And perhaps neither of them knew that the intimacy itself had gone. But it had. There was no spontaneous inter

the effort. And Alvina quickly would attend on her, bring her tea and take away her music, try to make everything smooth. And

't work I s

lvina. And in her expostulation there

nswer. Her face took

ore to Alvina now than anything that was expressed. She began to hate outspokenness and direct speaking-forth of the whole mind. It nauseated her. She wanted tacit admission of difference, not open, wholehearted communication. And Miss Pinnegar mad

Pinnegar. But her very breeding had that Protestant, northern quality which assumes that we have all the same high standards, r

wisdom with a new admiration. The two were talking of Dr. Headle

Pinnegar, "it takes his

k her father's sort-as well as her mother's and Miss Frost's. It took every sort to make all sorts. Why have standards and a regulation pattern? Wh

hing to be ashamed of. If there was, heaven knows what it might have been, for their talk was ordinary enough. But Alvina liked to be with Miss Pinnegar in the kitchen. Miss Pinnegar wasn't co

ing to her pupils. She took her walk in the afternoon. Once and only once she went to Throttle-Ha'penny, and, seized with sudden curiosity, insisted on being wound down in the iron bucket to the little workings un

knowledge of the whole affair, and seemed like some not quite trustworthy conjuror who had conjured it all up by sleight of hand. In the background the miners stoo

e way seemed to press on you. It was as if she were in her tomb for ever, like the dead and everlasting Egyptians. She was frightened, but fascinated. The collier kept on talking to her, stretching his bare, grey-black hairy arm across her vision, and pointing with his knotted hand. The thick-wicked tallow candles guttered and smelled. There was a thickness in the air, a sense of dark, fluid presence in the thick atmosphere, the dark, fluid, viscous voice of the collier making a broad-vowelled, clapping sound in her ear. He seemed to linger near her as if he knew-as if he knew-what? Something for ever unknowable and inadmissible, something that belonged purely to the underground: to

eautiful elevations of houses and trees, and depressions of fields and roads, all golden and floating like atmospheric majolica. Never had the common ugliness of Woodhouse seemed so entrancing. She thought she had never seen such beauty-a lovely luminous majolica, living and palpitating, the glossy, svelte world-surface, the exquisite face of all the darkness. It was like a vision. Perhaps gnomes and subterranean workers, enslaved in the era of light, see

l and grey, in their enslaved magic. Slaves who would cause the superimposed day-order to fall. Not because, individually, they wanted to. But because, collectively, something bubbled up in them, the force of darkness which had no master and no control. It would bubble and stir in them as e

heir dirt. Their walk was heavy-footed and slurring, their bearing stiff and grotesque. A stream they were-yet they seemed to her to loom like stra

even whilst she was there in the midst. The curious, dark, inexplicable and yet insatiable craving-as if for an

g insatiable and inexplicable. But the very craving kept her still. For at this time she did not translate it into a desire, or need, for love. At the back of her mind somewhere was the fixed idea, the fixed intention of findi

rengthened. A restlessness came over everybody. There was another short strike among the miners. James Houghton, like an excited beetle, scurried to and fro,

him and teaching him and laughing with him and spending really a remarkable number of hours alone with him in her room in Woodhouse-for she had given up tramping the country, and had hired a music-room in a quiet street, where she gave her lessons. And the young man had hung round, and had never wanted to go away. They would prolong their tête-à-tête and their singing on till ten o'clock at night, and Miss Frost would return to Manchester House flushed and handsome and a little shy, while the young man, who was common, took on a new boldness in the streets. He had auburn hair, high colouring, and a rather challenging bearing. He took

ther, deluges of rain and north winds, cutting the tender, summer-unfolded people to pieces. Miss Frost wilted at once. A silence came over her. She shuddered when she had to lea

a bad bronchitis cold. Then suddenly one morning she cou

r father instantly for the doctor, she heaped the sticks in the be

old," whispered Miss Frost hurriedly, trying to

in her cool voice, wherein none the less

t lifted

e said, and she smile

sensitive in her nursing, she seemed to have second sight. She talked to nobody. In her silence her soul was alone

icate winsomeness at Alvina, and Alvina smiled back, with

t her hand from under the bedclothes, and laid

whispered Miss Frost, looking wi

Miss Frost,"

n-"except-" and she enumerated some tiny legaci

mber," said Alvina

bright, wonderful look, that ha

dear," she

ld not suppress the whimpe

with a heavy, almost accusing look, sinister. Then they closed again. And sometimes they looked pathetic, with a mu

ed, with her lovely white hair smeared also, and disor

She knew that her darling carried awa

gony of self-reproach, regret; the agony of remembrance; the agony of the looks of the dying woman, winsome, and sinisterly accusing, and pathe

the days after the death. Only when she was alone

she said in her abrupt way to Miss Fro

" expostulated Mr

feel anything any more," said Alvina, wit

hild. But you'll

e heart," per

gently. "You can't expect-

don't believe i

hard. To one of her gossip

Mrs. Houghton complained bitterly, sometimes, that she had no love. They were everything to one another, Miss Frost

e little bit that Miss Frost was dead

just a brief line on a piece of notepaper expressing a wish that Alvina should ha

he clothes, piano, books and music. Miss Frost's brother had these latter, at his own request: the books

herself. You can see why she never wanted to grow old, so that she couldn't work. Y

lvina and Miss Pinnegar might move about and talk in vain. They could never remove the sense of waiting to finish: it was all just waiting to finish. And the three, James and Alvina and Miss Pinnegar,