Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories Read Free

was the very person to dispossess him of these unlikeable characteristics. I was wrong.
    It was many years indeed before I grasped that Bertha never dispossessed anybody of anything. The truth about Bertha was in fact very slow in coming to me. All I thought I saw in the incident of the tennis club was a girl who, consorting with an idiot, had caught a rash of idiocy. It was too early for me to know that the same characteristics that had turned her temporarily into a decorous wife for an elderly gentleman were the very same as those that were now turning her into a flapper of loud clipped speech, skirts above her knees and a taste for wild parties at dubious clubs on riversides. Grieflessly, swiftly and with not the slightest pressure on the nerves of conscience she had slipped out of the part of widow as easily as she might have slipped out of one of her petticoats, taking on the new tone, new pattern and new outlook of another man.
    About a year later Tom Pemberton, driving his car home very late and very fast one night in a thunderstorm, with Bertha at his side, crashed into a roadside tree for the last time.
    By one of those strange tricks that surround violent and accidental death Pemberton was terribly mutilated while Bertha, thrown clear, landed with miraculous gentleness ongrass, dazed but unbruised, as if she had slid gently down a helter-skelter at a fair.
    Only a few weeks later a great scandal broke out in the town.
    Bertha, by this time, had gone back to live with her mother in The Pit. It might have been supposed that the few hundred pounds James William Sherwood had left her would have revolutionised life behind the dark little front window and the treadle sewing machine. Nothing of the kind had happened. The sick, yellow-eyed figure went on treadling as desperately as ever; in
The Waterloo
the ex-pug unfolded to all who would listen his tale of light-weight triumphs; and Bertha, splendid and well dressed as ever, went back to the factory.
    Two or three days after the death of Tom Pemberton a young curate named Ormsby-Hill called to see Bertha in The Pit, bearing the conventional condolences of the clergy and hoping, after the crash and its mutilations, that all was well as could be expected. Clergymen have a strange habit of calling on their sheep at awkward times and Ormsby-Hill, getting no answer at the front door of the house, which no one ever used anyway, went round to the back, among the miserable naked yards, just after six o’clock. The ex-pug, by that time, was already in
The Waterloo
, and Bertha’s mother, free for a few minutes after the long day of treadling, was out doing shopping.
    Bertha, big arms and chest bare in a sleeveless chemise, was at the kitchen sink, washing away her factory grime.
    â€˜Oh! come in if you can get in,’ she said. She clearly remembered the young curate at Tom Pemberton’s funeral. ‘I’m afraid the kitchen’s in a mess. Can you find a chair in the living room?’
    Ormsby-Hill sat down in the little living room while Bertha, entirely unaffected, finished washing and drying herself in the kitchen. It was never very clear to me, nor I think to anyone else, why Ormsby-Hill had entered the church. He was in all ways the complete opposite of the young curate of convention. Big, bovine, sensuous-lipped, fond of beer and rugby football, he belonged to that class of clergymen, not I think so common now, who thought godliness should be muscular and the way to heaven a hearty free for all. He thought the gospel went down much better from clergymen who offered it while dressed in tweeds rather than dog collars, with pints of foaming ale in their hands rather than crucifixes and by means of sportsmen’s services, sometimes actually held in pubs, where the congregation was roughly addressed as ‘chaps.’
    That evening he had gone to The Pit in trepidation, with some idea that Bertha was a wild bad girl. Nobody liked going down to The Pit