Awakening Read Free Page A

dustwomen in their filth; crossing-sweepers and the flither-lasses of Filey who scale the cliffs to haul up baskets of bait – sitting on ledges way above the sea, shouting and whistling to the ships. A powerful woman in trousers in Wigan, he said, is considered less barbarous than a crinolined fine lady. Joss hung on his every word.
    The rain dies down. Beatrice steps out to peg up sheets and, glancing back, sees with a qualm an invalid behind the pane. The heavy sheets billow like canvas sails. In the interior gloom, the sick woman, not yet twenty-seven, is a patch of shadow against the cushions. Anyone else she could bear to lose. But spare Anna. Beatrice offers the Almighty without a second thought Elias (not his wife though), Mrs Peck and all the Salisbury Pecks and Hatchers. Toss in the small Eliases. Beatrice can’t abide children. They bring noise and care; they kill mothers. She’s seen it too often to be intensely eager for marriage.
    Don’t think these things, don’t. But how do you stop yourself thinking the thing before it’s thought? It’s a test. Mortals cannot win. Calvinism is in the Pentecost blood. Jehovah decided everything aeons ago: when He created the world, He knew me in advance. He sees through me; His lidless eye penetrates to my heart and kidneys. You’re open to the Almighty like a coroner’s corpse on a slab, putrescent with sin. To Him we are like the jelly tadpoles wriggling round in the pond, transparent.
    And Anna said the other night in a lull between pains, ‘Have you ever thought, Beatrice, that if Almighty God were human, He’d be a criminal, we’d have to send Him to the penal colonies or … hang Him as a mass murderer? Look at the mess He’s made.’
    There’s something that comes over Anna that makes one think the word hysterical. A word Beatrice prefers to heretical . If truth were known, they’re both backsliding daughters. But only Anna seems to reckon this a virtue rather than a sin.
    â€˜Annie, we did execute him,’ was all Beatrice said. She spoke in a tone of rueful triumph. ‘We crucified our Saviour. You know we did. For loving us.’
    â€˜I didn’t.’
    â€˜You did. The Jews killed him on behalf of the human race.’
    â€˜Not with my consent. I wasn’t there. Anyway I meant God the Father, not the Son.’
    â€˜They are the same, dear. Think before you speak.’
    â€˜Well, that’s what I do. Perhaps it’s better not to think?’
    â€˜Or not to read all those unsettling books and journals.’
    â€˜Mirrie brings them. I like to discuss them with her.’
    â€˜When is Mrs Sala going off to the Continent?’
    Anna’s friends, Mr and Mrs Sala, are rich and cultured Unitarians from the north of England: to them Jesus Christ is not God, just a good man. Beatrice shudders at this atheistical rationalism. Something in Mrs Sala distresses one: a big-boned lady with a contralto voice, the light of a terrible, questioning sincerity in her pale eyes and no limit to her powers of speculation. She exerts an all but mesmeric influence over Anna. Indeed, it’s not impossible that Mrs Sala practises the art of mesmerism. Her face plunges forward at you, staring with sympathetic intensity. Apparently there exists a phrenological cast of this formidable skull: Mrs Sala is said to have had her hair shaved off in order that its bumps could be measured.
    Are all these bluestocking females such simpletons? Can they really imagine that the key to the human soul resides in the bumps of a skull?
    First Lore, with her head-in-the-sky philosophical notions, and now Mrs Sala with her heresies have holed Anna like a colander full of doubts.
    Hush now, hush: Father would have counselled that doubt is natural, a part of faith. And I was a better person, kinder, less caustic, Beatrice thinks, before I had to step into Papa’s shoes. Tapering, buttoned,