Esther Waters

<h2 id="id01903" style="margin-top: 4em">XXVIII</h2> <p id="id01904" style="margin-top: 2em">She went round the house bolting and locking the doors, seeing that everything was made fast for the night. At the foot of the stairs painful thoughts came upon her, and she drew her hand across her eyes; for she was whelmed with a sense of sorrow, of purely mental misery, which she could not understand, and which she had not strength to grapple with. She was, however, conscious of the fact that life was proving too strong for her, that she could make nothing of it, and she thought that she did not care much what happened. She had fought with adverse fate, and had conquered in a way; she had won countless victories over herself, and now found herself without the necessary strength for the last battle; she had not even strength for blame, and merely wondered why she had let William kiss her. She remembered how she had hated him, and now she hated him no longer. She ought not to have spoken to him; above all, she ought not to have taken him to see the child. But how could she help it?</p> <p id="id01905">She slept on the same landing as Miss Rice, and was moved by a sudden impulse to go in and tell her the story of her trouble. But what good? No one could help her. She liked Fred; they seemed to suit each other, and she could have made him a good wife if she had not met William. She thought of the cottage at Mortlake, and their lives in it; and she sought to stimulate her liking for him with thoughts of the meeting-house; she thought even of the simple black dress she would wear, and that life seemed so natural to her that she did not understand why she hesitated…. If she were to marry William she would go to the "King's Head."</p> <p id="id01906">She would stand behind the bar; she would serve the customers. She had never seen much life, and felt somehow that she would like to see a little life; there would not be much life in the cottage at Mortlake; nothing but the prayer-meeting. She stopped thinking, surprised at her thoughts. She had never thought like that before; it seemed as if some other woman whom she hardly knew was thinking for her. She seemed like one standing at cross-roads, unable to decide which road she would take. If she took the road leading to the cottage and the prayer-meeting her life would henceforth be secure. She could see her life from end to end, even to the time when Fred would come and sit by her, and hold her hand as she had seen his father and mother sitting side by side. If she took the road to the public-house and the race-course she did not know what might not happen. But William had promised to settle £500 on her and Jackie. Her life would be secure either way.</p> <p id="id01907">She must marry Fred; she had promised to marry him; she wished to be a good woman; he would give her the life she was most fitted for, the life she had always desired; the life of her father and mother, the life of her childhood. She would marry Fred, only—something at that moment seemed to take her by the throat. William had come between her and that life. If she had not met him at Woodview long ago; if she had not met him in the Pembroke Road that night she went to fetch the beer for her mistress's dinner, how different everything would have been! …If she had met him only a few months later, when she was Fred's wife!</p> <p id="id01908">Wishing she might go to sleep, and awake the wife of one or the other, she fell asleep to dream of a husband possessed of the qualities of both, and a life that was neither all chapel nor all public-house. But soon the one became two, and Esther awoke in terror, believing she had married them both.</p> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />