Having pocketed his fare the freckled rustic took himself and his antediluvian cab back to the village limbo from which they had briefly emerged. Loughlin checked his luggage into the care of the porter, an angular man with one eye who was apparently the only other living being in this remote minute station, and sat down in the platform shade. July noon had a stark eye-tiring brightness, and a silence so very deep—when that porter ceased his intolerable clatter—that Loughlin could hear footsteps crunching in the road half a mile away. The train was late. There were no other passengers. Nothing to look at except his trunks, two shiny rails in the grim track, red hollyhocks against white palings on the opposite bank.
The holiday in this quiet neighbourhood had delighted him, but its crowning experience had been too brief. On the last day but one the loveliest woman he had ever known had emerged almost as briefly as that cabman. Some men are constantly meeting that woman. Not so the Honourable Gerald Loughlin, but no man turns his back tranquilly on destiny even if it is but two days old and already some half-dozen miles away. The visit had come to its end, Loughlin had come to his station, the cab had gone back to its lair, but on reflection he could find no other reasons for going away and denying himself the delight of this proffered experience. Time was his own, as much as he could buy of it, and he had an income that enabled him to buy a good deal.
14
Moody and hesitant he began to fill his pipe when the one-eyed porter again approached him.
“Take a pipe of that?” said Loughlin, offering him the pouch.
“Thanky, sir, but I can’t smoke a pipe; a cigarette I take now and again, thanky, sir, not often, just to keep me from cussing and damming. My wife buys me a packet sometimes, she says I don’t swear so much then, but I don’t know, I has to knock ’em off soon’s they make me feel bad, and then, dam it all, I be worsen ever....”
“Look here,” said the other, interrupting him, “I’m not going by this train after all. Something I have forgotten. Now look after my bags and I’ll come along later, this afternoon.” He turned and left the station as hurriedly as if his business was really of the high importance the porter immediately conceived it to be.
The Honourable Gerald, though handsome and honest, was not a fool. A fool is one who becomes distracted between the claims of instinct and common sense; the larger foolishness is the peculiar doom of imaginative people, artists and their kind, while the smaller foolishness is the mark of all those who have nothing but their foolishness to endorse them. Loughlin responded to this impulse unhesitatingly but without distraction, calmly and directly as became a well-bred bachelor in the early thirties. He might have written to the young beauty with the queer name, Orianda Crabbe, but that course teemed with absurdities and difficulties for he was modest, his romantic imagination weak, and he had only met her15 at old Lady Tillington’s a couple of days before. Of this mere girl, just twenty-three or twenty-four, he knew nothing save that they had been immediately and vividly charming to each other. That was no excuse for presenting himself again to the old invalid of Tillington Park, it would be impossible for him to do so, but there had been one vague moment of their recalled intercourse, a glimmering intimation, which just now seemed to offer a remote possibility of achievement, and so he walked on in the direction of the park.
Tillington was some miles off and the heat was oppressive. At the end of an hour’s stroll he stepped into “The Three Pigeons” at Denbury and drank a deep drink. It was quiet and deliciously cool in the taproom there, yes, as silent as that little station had been. Empty the world seemed to-day, quite empty; he had not passed a human creature. Happily bemused he took another draught. Eighteen small panes of glass in that long window and perhaps as many flies buzzing in the room. He could hear and see a breeze saluting the bright walled ivy outside and the bushes by a stream. This drowsiness was heaven, it made so clear his recollection of Orianda. It was impossible to particularize but she was in her way, her rather uncultured way, just perfection. He had engaged her upon several themes, music, fishing (Loughlin loved fishing), golf, tennis, and books; none of these had particularly stirred her but she had brains, quite an original turn of mind. There had been neither time nor opportunity to discover anything about her, but there she was, staying there, that16 was the one thing certain, apparently indefinitely, for she described the park in a witty detailed way even to a certain favourite glade which she always visited in the afternoons. When she had told him that, he could swear she was not finessing; no, no, it was a most engaging simplicity, a frankness that was positively marmoreal.
He would certainly write to her; yes, and he began to think of fine phrases to put in a letter, but could there be anything finer, now, just at this moment, than to be sitting with her in this empty inn. It was not a fair place, though it was clean, but how she would brighten it, yes! there were two long settles and two short ones, two tiny tables and eight spittoons (he had to count them), and somehow he felt her image flitting adorably into this setting, defeating with its native glory all the scrupulous beer-smelling impoverishment. And then, after a while, he would take her, and they would lie in the grass under a deep-bosomed tree and speak of love. How beautiful she would be. But she was not there, and so he left the inn and crossed the road to a church, pleasant and tiny and tidy, whitewalled and clean-ceilinged. A sparrow chirped in the porch, flies hummed in the nave, a puppy was barking in the vicarage garden. How trivial, how absurdly solemn, everything seemed. The thud of the great pendulum in the tower had the sound of a dead man beating on a bar of spiritless iron. He was tired of the vapid tidiness of these altars with their insignificant tapestries, candlesticks of gilded wood, the bunches of pale flowers oppressed by the rich glow from the windows. He longed for17 an altar that should be an inspiring symbol of belief, a place of green and solemn walls with a dark velvet shrine sweeping aloft to the peaked roof unhindered by tarnishing lustre and tedious linen. Holiness was always something richly dim. There was no more holiness here than in the tough hassocks and rush-bottomed chairs; not here, surely, the apple of Eden flourished. And yet, turning to the lectern, he noted the large prayer book open at the office of marriage. He idly read over the words of the ceremony, filling in at the gaps the names of Gerald Wilmot Loughlin and Orianda Crabbe.
What a fool! He closed the book with a slam and left the church. Absurd! You couldn’t fall in love with a person as sharply as all that, could you? But why not? Unless fancy was charged with the lightning of gods it was nothing at all.
Tramping away still in the direction of Tillington Park he came in the afternoon to that glade under a screen of trees spoken of by the girl. It was green and shady, full of scattering birds. He flung himself down in the grass under a deep-bosomed tree. She had spoken delightfully of this delightful spot.
When she came, for come she did, the confrontation left him very unsteady as he sprang to his feet. (Confound that potation at “The Three Pigeons”! Enormously hungry, too!) But he was amazed, entranced, she was so happy to see him again. They sat down together, but he was still bewildered and his confusion left him all at sixes and sevens. Fortunately her own rivulet of casual chatter carried them18 on until he suddenly asked: “Are you related to the Crabbes of Cotterton—I fancy I know them?”
“No, I think not, no, I am from the south country, near the sea, nobody at all, my father keeps an inn.”
“An inn! How extraordinary! How very ... very ...”
“Extraordinary?” Nodding her head in the direction of the hidden mansion she added: “I am her companion.”
“Lady Tillington’s?”
She assented coolly, was silent, while Loughlin ransacked his brains for some delicate reference that would clear him over this ... this ... cataract. But he felt stupid—that confounded potation at “The Three Pigeons”! Why, that was where he had thought of her so admirably, too. He asked if she cared for the position, was it pleasant, and so on. Heavens, what an astonishing creature for a domestic, quite positively lovely, a compendium of delightful qualities, this girl, so frank, so simple!
“Yes, I like it, but home is better. I should love to go back to my home, to father, but I can’t, I’m still afraid—I ran away from home three years ago, to go with my mother. I’m like my mother, she ran away from home too.”
Orianda picked up the open parasol which she had dropped, closed it in a thoughtful manner, and laid its crimson folds beside her. There was no other note of colour in her white attire; she was without a hat. Her fair hair had a quenching tinge upon it that made it less bright than gold, but more rare. Her19 cheeks had the colour of homely flowers, the lily and the pink. Her teeth were as even as the peas in a newly opened pod, as clear as milk.
“Tell me about all that. May I hear it?”
“I have not seen him or heard from him since, but I love him very much now.”
“Your father?”
“Yes, but he is stern, a simple man, and he is so just. We live at a tiny old inn at the end of a village near the hills. ‘The Black Dog.’ It is thatched and has tiny rooms. It’s painted all over with pink, pink whitewash.”
“Ah, I know.”
“There’s a porch, under a sycamore tree, where people sit, and an old rusty chain hanging on a hook just outside the door.”
“What’s that for?”
20
“I don’t know what it is for, horses, perhaps, but it is always there, I always see that rusty chain. And on the opposite side of the road there are three lime trees and behind them is the yard where my father works. He makes hurdles and ladders. He is the best hurdle maker in three counties, he has won many prizes at the shows. It is splendid to see him working at the willow wood, soft and white. The yard is full of poles and palings, spars and fagots, and long shavings of the thin bark like seaweed. It smells so nice. In the spring the chaffinches and wrens are singing about him all day long; the wren is lovely, but in the summer of course it’s the whitethroats come chippering, and yellow-hammers.”
“Ah, blackbirds, thrushes, nightingales!”
“Yes, but it’s the little birds seem to love my father’s yard.”
“Well then, but why did you, why did you run away?”
“My mother was much younger, and different from father; she was handsome and proud too, and in all sorts of ways superior to him. They got to hate each other; they were so quiet about it, but I could see. Their only common interest was me, they both loved me very much. Three years ago she ran away from him. Quite suddenly, you know; there was nothing at all leading up to such a thing. But I could not understand my father, not then, he took it all so calmly. He did not mention even her name to me for a long time, and I feared to intrude; you see, I did not understand, I was only twenty. When I did ask about her he told me not to bother him, forbade me to write to her. I didn’t know where she was, but he knew, and at last I found out too.”
“And you defied him, I suppose?”
“No, I deceived him. He gave me money for some purpose—to pay a debt—and I stole it. I left him a letter and ran away to my mother. I loved her.”
“O well, that was only to be expected,” said Loughlin. “It was all right, quite right.”
“She was living with another man. I didn’t know. I was a fool.”
“Good lord! That was a shock for you,” Loughlin said. “What did you do?”
21
“No, I was not shocked, she was so happy. I lived with them for a year....”
“Extraordinary!”
“And then she died.”
“Your mother died!”
“Yes, so you see I could not stop with my ... I could not stay where I was, and I couldn’t go back to my father.”
“I see, no, but you want to go back to your father now.”
“I’m afraid. I love him, but I’m afraid. I don’t blame my mother, I feel she was right, quite right—it was such happiness. And yet I feel, too, that father was deeply wronged. I can’t understand that, it sounds foolish. I should so love to go home again. This other kind of life doesn’t seem to eclipse me—things have been extraordinary kind—I don’t feel out of my setting, but still it doesn’t satisfy, it is polite and soft, like silk, perhaps it isn’t barbarous enough, and I want to live, somehow—well, I have not found what I wanted to find.”
“What did you want to find?”
“I shan’t know until I have found it. I do want to go home now, but I am full of strange feelings about it. I feel as if I was bearing the mark of something that can’t be hidden or disguised of what my mother did, as if I were all a burning recollection for him that he couldn’t fail to see. He is good, a just man. He ... he is the best hurdle maker in three counties.”
While listening to this daughter of a man who made ladders the Honourable Gerald had been swiftly thinking of an intriguing phrase that leaped into his mind. Social plesiomorphism, that was it! Caste was humbug, no doubt, but even if it was22 conscious humbug it was there, really there, like the patterned frost upon a window pane, beautiful though a little incoherent, and conditioned only by the size and number of your windows. (Eighteen windows in that pub!) But what did it amount to, after all? It was stuck upon your clear polished outline for every eye to see, but within was something surprising as the sight of a badger in church—until you got used to the indubitable relation of such badgers to such churches. Fine turpitudes!
“My dear girl,” he burst out, “your mother and you were right, absolutely. I am sure life is enhanced not by amassing conventions, but by destroying them. And your feeling for your father is right, too, rightest of all. Tell me ... let me ... may I take you back to him?”
The girl’s eyes dwelt upon his with some intensity.
“Your courage is kind,” she said, “but he doesn’t know you, nor you him.” And to that she added, “You don’t even know me.”
“I have known you for ten thousand years. Come home to him with me, we will go back together. Yes, you can explain. Tell him”—the Honourable Gerald had got the bit between his teeth now—“tell him I’m your sweetheart, will you—will you?”
“Ten thousand ...! Yes, I know; but it’s strange to think you have only seen me just once before!”
23
“Does that matter? Everything grows from that one small moment into a world of ... well of ... boundless admiration.”
“I don’t want,” said Orianda, reopening her crimson parasol, “to grow into a world of any kind.”
“No, of course you don’t. But I mean the emotion is irresistible, ‘the desire of the moth for the star,’ that sort of thing, you know, and I immolate myself, the happy victim of your attractions.”
“All that has been said before.” Orianda adjusted her parasol as a screen for her raillery.
“I swear,” said he, “I have not said it before, never to a living soul.”
Fountains of amusement beamed in her brilliant eyes. She was exquisite; he was no longer in doubt about the colour of her eyes—though he could not describe them. And the precise shade of her hair was—well, it was extraordinarily beautiful.
“I mean—it’s been said to me!”
“O damnation! Of course it’s been said to you. Ah, and isn’t that my complete justification? But you agree, do you not? Tell me if it’s possible. Say you agree, and let me take you back to your father.”
“I think I would like you to,” the jolly girl said, slowly.
II
On an August morning a few weeks later they travelled down together to see her father. In the interim Orianda had resigned her appointment, and several times Gerald had met her secretly in the purlieus of Tillington Park. The girl’s cool casual nature fascinated him not less than her appearance. Admiration certainly outdistanced his24 happiness, although that also increased; but the bliss had its shadow, for the outcome of their friendship seemed mysteriously to depend on the outcome of the proposed return to her father’s home, devotion to that project forming the first principle, as it were, of their intercourse. Orianda had not dangled before him the prospect of any serener relationship; she took his caresses as naturally and undemonstratively as a pet bird takes a piece of sugar. But he had begun to be aware of a certain force behind all her charming naivete; the beauty that exhaled the freshness, the apparent fragility, of a drop of dew had none the less a savour of tyranny which he vowed should never, least of all by him, be pressed to vulgar exercise.
When the train reached its destination Orianda confided calmly that she had preferred not to write to her father. Really she did not know for certain whether he was alive or even living on at the old home she so loved. And there was a journey of three miles or more which Orianda proposed to walk. So they walked.
The road lay across an expanse of marshy country and approached the wooded uplands of her home only by numerous eccentric divagations made necessary by culverts that drained the marsh. The day was bright; the sky, so vast an arch over this flat land, was a very oven for heat; there were cracks in the earth, the grass was like stubble. At the mid journey they crossed a river by its wooden bridge, upon which a boy sat fishing with stick and string. Near the water was a long white hut with a flag; a few tethered boats floated upon the stream. Gerald25 gave a shilling to a travelling woman who carried a burden on her back and shuffled slowly upon the harsh road sighing, looking neither to right nor left; she did not look into the sky, her gaze was fastened upon her dolorous feet, one two, one two, one two; her shift, if she had such a garment, must have clung to her old body like a shrimping net.
In an hour they had reached the uplands and soon, at the top of a sylvan slope where there was shade and cooling air, Gerald saw a sign hung upon a sycamore tree, The Black Dog by Nathaniel Crabbe. The inn was small, pleasant with pink wash and brown paint, and faced across the road a large yard encircled by hedges, trees, and a gate. The travellers stood peeping into the enclosure which was stocked with new ladders, hurdles, and poles of various sizes. Amid them stood a tall burly man at a block, trimming with an axe the butt of a willow rod. He was about fifty, clad in rough country clothes, a white shirt, and a soft straw hat. He had mild simple features coloured, like his arms and neck, almost to the hue of a bay horse.
“Hullo!” called the girl. The man with the axe looked round at her unrecognizingly. Orianda hurried through the gateway. “Father!” she cried.
“I did not know. I was not rightly sure of ye,” said the man, dropping the axe, “such a lady you’ve grown.”
As he kissed his daughter his heavy discoloured hands rested on her shoulders, her gloved ones lay against his breast. Orianda took out her purse.
26
“Here is the money I stole, father.”
She dropped some coins one by one into his palm. He counted them over, and saying simply “Thank you, my dear,” put them into his pocket.
“I’m dashed!”—thought Loughlin, who had followed the girl—“it’s exactly how she would take it; no explanation, no apology. They do not know what reproach means. Have they no code at all?”
She went on chatting with her father, and seemed to have forgotten her companion.
“You mean you want to come back!” exclaimed her father eagerly, “come back here? That would be grand, that would. But look, tell me what I am to do. I’ve—you see—this is how it is—”
He spat upon the ground, picked up his axe, rested one foot upon the axe-block and one arm upon his knee. Orianda sat down upon a pile of the logs.
“This is how it is ... be you married?”
“Come and sit here, Gerald,” called the girl. As he came forward Orianda rose and said: “This is my very dear friend, father, Gerald Loughlin. He has been so kind. It is he who has given me the courage to come back. I wanted to for so long. O, a long time, father, a long time. And yet Gerald had to drag me here in the end.”
“What was you afraid of, my girl?” asked the big man.
“Myself.”
The two visitors sat upon the logs. “Shall I tell you about mother?” asked the girl.
Crabbe hesitated; looked at the ground.
“Ah, yes, you might,” he said.
27
“She died, did you know?”
The man looked up at the trees with their myriads of unmoving leaves; each leaf seemed to be listening.
“She died?” he said softly. “No, I did not know she died.”
“Two years ago,” continued the girl, warily, as if probing his mood.
“Two years!” He repeated it without emotion. “No, I did not know she died. ’Tis a bad job.” He was quite still, his mind seemed to be turning over his own secret memories, but what he bent forward and suddenly said was: “Don’t say anything about it in there.” He nodded towards the inn.
“No?” Orianda opened her crimson parasol.
“You see,” he went on, again resting one foot on the axe-block and addressing himself more particularly to Gerald: “I’ve ... this is how it is. When I was left alone I could not get along here, not by myself. That’s for certain. There’s the house and the bar and the yard—I’d to get help, a young woman from Brighton. I met her at Brighton.” He rubbed the blade of the axe reflectively across his palm—“And she manages house for me now, you see.”
He let the axe fall again and stood upright. “Her name’s Lizzie.”
“O, quite so, you could do no other,” Gerald exclaimed cheerfully, turning to the girl. But Orianda said softly: “What a family we are! He means he is living with her. And so you don’t want your undutiful daughter after all, father?” Her gaiety was a little tremulous.
“No, no!” he retorted quickly,28 “you must come back, you must come back, if so be you can. There’s nothing I’d like better, nothing on this mortal earth. My God, if something don’t soon happen I don’t know what will happen.” Once more he stooped for the axe. “That’s right, Orianda, yes, yes, but you’ve no call to mention to her”—he glared uneasily at the inn doorway—“that ... that about your mother.”
Orianda stared up at him though he would not meet her gaze.
“You mean she doesn’t know?” she asked, “you mean she would want you to marry her if she did know?”
“Yes, that’s about how it is with us.”
Loughlin was amazed at the girl’s divination. It seemed miraculous, what a subtle mind she had, extraordinary! And how casually she took the old rascal’s—well, what could you call it?—effrontery, shame, misdemeanour, helplessness. But was not her mother like it too? He had grasped nothing at all of the situation yet, save that Nathaniel Crabbe appeared to be netted in the toils of this housekeeper, this Lizzie from Brighton. Dear Orianda was “dished” now, poor girl. She could not conceivably return to such a menage.
Orianda was saying: “Then I may stay, father, mayn’t I, for good with you?”
Her father’s eyes left no doubt of his pleasure.
“Can we give Gerald a bedroom for a few days? Or do we ask Lizzie?”
“Ah, better ask her,” said the shameless man. “You want to make a stay here, sir?”
“If it won’t incommode you,” replied Loughlin.
29
“O, make no doubt about that, to be sure no, I make no doubt about that.”
“Have you still got my old bedroom?” asked Orianda, for the amount of dubiety in his air was in prodigious antagonism to his expressed confidence.
“Why yes, it may happen,” he replied slowly.
“Then Gerald can have the spare room. It’s all wainscot and painted dark blue. It’s a shrimp of a room, but there’s a preserved albatross in a glass case as big as a van.”
“I make no doubt about that,” chimed in her father, straightening himself and scratching his chin uneasily, “you must talk to Lizzie.”
“Splendid!” said Gerald to Orianda, “I’ve never seen an albatross.”
“We’ll ask Lizzie,” said she, “at once.”
Loughlin was experiencing not a little inward distress at this turn in the affair, but it was he who had brought Orianda to her home, and he would have to go through with the horrid business.
“Is she difficult, father?”
“No, she’s not difficult, not difficult, so to say, you must make allowance.”
The girl was implacable. Her directness almost froze the blood of the Hon. Loughlin.
“Are you fond of her. How long has she been here?”
“O, a goodish while, yes, let me see—no, she’s not difficult, if that’s what you mean—three years, perhaps.”
“Well, but that’s long enough!”
(Long enough for what—wondered Loughlin?)
30
“Yes, it is longish.”
“If you really want to get rid of her you could tell her ...”
“Tell her what?”
“You know what to tell her!”
But her father looked bewildered and professed his ignorance.
“Take me in to her,” said Orianda, and they all walked across to “The Black Dog.” There was no one within; father and daughter went into the garden while Gerald stayed behind in a small parlour. Through the window that looked upon a grass plot he could see a woman sitting in a deck chair under a tree. Her face was turned away so that he saw only a curve of pink cheek and a thin mound of fair hair tossed and untidy. Lizzie’s large red fingers were slipping a sprig of watercress into a mouth that was hidden round the corner of the curve. With her other hand she was caressing a large brown hen that sat on her lap. Her black skirt wrapped her limbs tightly, a round hip and a thigh being rigidly outlined, while the blouse of figured cotton also seemed strained upon her buxom breast, for it was torn and split in places. She had strong white arms and holes in her stockings. When she turned to confront the others it was easy to see that she was a foolish, untidy, but still a rather pleasant woman of about thirty.
“How do you do, Lizzie?” cried Orianda, offering a cordial hand. The hen fluttered away as, smiling a little wanly, the woman rose.
“Who is it, ’Thaniel?” she asked.
31
Loughlin heard no more, for some men came noisily into the bar and Crabbe hurried back to serve them.
III
In the afternoon Orianda drove Gerald in the gig back to the station to fetch the baggage.
“Well, what success, Orianda?” he asked as they jogged along.
“It would be perfect but for Lizzie—that was rather a blow. But I should have foreseen her—Lizzies are inevitable. And she is difficult—she weeps. But, O I am glad to be home again. Gerald, I feel I shall not leave it, ever.”
“Yes, Orianda,” he protested, “leave it for me. I’ll give your nostalgia a little time to fade. I think it was a man named Pater said: ‘All life is a wandering to find home.’ You don’t want to omit the wandering?”
“Not if I have found my home again?”
“A home with Lizzie!”
“No, not with Lizzie.” She flicked the horse with the whip. “I shall be too much for Lizzie; Lizzie will resume her wandering. She’s as stupid as a wax widow in a show. Nathaniel is tired of Lizzie, and Lizzie of Nathaniel. The two wretches! But I wish she did not weep.”
Gerald had not observed any signs of tearfulness in Lizzie at the midday dinner; on the contrary, she seemed rather a jolly creature, not that she had spoken much beyond “Yes, ’Thaniel, No, ’Thaniel,” or Gerald, or Orianda, as the case had been. Her use of his Christian name, which had swept him at once32 into the bosom of the family, shocked him rather pleasantly. But he did not know what had taken place between the two women; perhaps Lizzie had already perceived and tacitly accepted her displacement.
He was wakened next morning by unusual sounds, chatter of magpies in the front trees, and the ching of hammers on a bulk of iron at the smithy. Below his window a brown terrier stood on its barrel barking at a goose. Such common simple things had power to please him, and for a few days everything at “The Black Dog” seemed planned on this scale of novel enjoyment. The old inn itself, the log yard, harvesting, the chatter of the evening topers, even the village Sunday delighted him with its parade of Phyllis and Corydon, though it is true Phyllis wore a pink frock, stockings of faint blue, and walked like a man, while Corydon had a bowler hat and walked like a bear. He helped ’Thaniel with axe, hammer, and plane, but best of all was to serve mugs of beer nightly in the bar and to drop the coins into the drawer of money. The rest of the time he spent with Orianda whom he wooed happily enough, though without establishing any marked progress. They roamed in fields and in copses, lounged in lanes, looking at things and idling deliciously, at last returning home to be fed by Lizzie, whose case somehow hung in the air, faintly deflecting the perfect stream of felicity.
In their favourite glade a rivulet was joined by a number of springs bubbling from a pool of sand and rock. Below it the enlarged stream was dammed into a small lake once used for turning a mill, but now,33 since the mill was dismantled, covered with arrow heads and lily leaves, surrounded by inclining trees, bushes of rich green growth, terraces of willow herb, whose fairy-like pink steeples Orianda called “codlins and cream,” and catmint with knobs of agreeable odour. A giant hornbeam tree had fallen and lay half buried in the lake. This, and the black poplars whose vacillating leaves underscored the solemn clamour of the outfall, gave to it the very serenity of desolation.
Here they caught sight of the two woodpeckers bathing in the springs, a cock and his hen, who had flown away yaffling, leaving a pretty mottled feather tinged with green floating there. It was endless pleasure to watch each spring bubble upwards from a pouch of sand that spread smoke-like in the water, turning each cone into a midget Vesuvius. A wasp crawled laboriously along a flat rock lying in the pool. It moved weakly, as if, marooned like a mariner upon some unknown isle, it could find no way of escape; only, this isle was no bigger than a dish in an ocean as small as a cartwheel. The wasp seemed to have forgotten that it had wings, it creepingly examined every inch of the rock until it came to a patch of dried dung. Proceeding still as wearily it paused upon a dead leaf until a breeze blew leaf and insect into the water. The wasp was overwhelmed by the rush from the bubbles, but at last it emerged, clutching the woodpecker’s floating feather and dragged itself into safety as a swimmer heaves himself into a boat. In a moment it preened its wings, flew back to the rock, and played at Crusoe again. Orianda picked the feather from the pool.
34
“What a fool that wasp is,” declared Gerald, “I wonder what it is doing?”
Orianda, placing the feather in his hat, told him it was probably wandering to find home.
One day, brightest of all days, they went to picnic in the marshes, a strange place to choose, all rank with the musty smell of cattle, and populous with grasshoppers that burred below you and millions, quadrillions of flies that buzzed above. But Orianda loved it. The vast area of coarse pasture harboured not a single farmhouse, only a shed here and there marking a particular field, for a thousand shallow brooks flowed like veins from all directions to the arterial river moving through its silent leagues. Small frills of willow curving on the river brink, and elsewhere a temple of lofty elms, offered the only refuge from sun or storm. Store cattle roamed unchecked from field to field, and in the shade of gaunt rascally bushes sheep were nestling. Green reeds and willow herb followed the watercourses with endless efflorescence, beautiful indeed.
In the late afternoon they had come to a spot where they could see their village three or four miles away, but between them lay the inexorable barrier of the river without a bridge. There was a bridge miles away to the right, they had crossed it earlier in the day; and there was another bridge on the left, but that also was miles distant.
“Now what are we to do?” asked Orianda. She wore a white muslin frock, a country frock, and a large straw hat with poppies, a country hat. They approached a column of trees. In the soft smooth35 wind the foliage of the willows was tossed into delicate greys. Orianda said they looked like cockshy heads on spindly necks. She would like to shy at them, but she was tired. “I know what we could do.” Orianda glanced around the landscape, trees, and bushes; the river was narrow, though deep, not more than forty feet across, and had high banks.
“You can swim, Gerald?”
Yes, Gerald could swim rather well.
“Then let’s swim it, Gerald, and carry our own clothes over.”
“Can you swim, Orianda?”
Yes, Orianda could swim rather well.
“All right then,” he said. “I’ll go down here a little way.”
“O, don’t go far, I don’t want you to go far away, Gerald,” and she added softly, “my dear.”
“No, I won’t go far,” he said, and sat down behind a bush a hundred yards away. Here he undressed, flung his shoes one after the other across the river, and swimming on his back carried his clothes over in two journeys. As he sat drying in the sunlight he heard a shout from Orianda. He peeped out and saw her sporting in the stream quite close below him. She swam with a graceful overarm stroke that tossed a spray of drops behind her and launched her body as easily as a fish’s. Her hair was bound in a handkerchief. She waved a hand to him. “You’ve done it! Bravo! What courage! Wait for me. Lovely.” She turned away like an eel, and at every two or three strokes she spat into the air a gay little fountain of water. How extraordinary she was.36 Gerald wished he had not hurried. By and by he slipped into the water again and swam upstream. He could not see her.
“Have you finished?” he cried.
“I have finished, yes.” Her voice was close above his head. She was lying in the grass, her face propped between her palms, smiling down at him. He could see bare arms and shoulders.
“Got your clothes across?”
“Of course.”
“All dry?”
She nodded.
“How many journeys? I made two.”
“Two,” said Orianda briefly.
“You’re all right then.” He wafted a kiss, swam back, and dressed slowly. Then as she did not appear he wandered along to her humming a discreet and very audible hum as he went. When he came upon her she still lay upon the grass most scantily clothed.
“I beg your pardon,” he said hastily, and full of surprise and modesty walked away. The unembarrassed girl called after him: “Drying my hair.”
“All right”—he did not turn round—“no hurry.”
But what sensations assailed him. They aroused in his decent gentlemanly mind not exactly a tumult, but a flux of emotions, impressions, and qualms; doubtful emotions, incredible impressions, and torturing qualms. That alluring picture of Orianda, her errant father, the abandoned Lizzie! Had the water perhaps heated his mind though it had cooled his body? He felt he would have to urge her, drag37 her if need be, from this “Black Dog.” The setting was fair enough and she was fair, but lovely as she was not even she could escape the brush of its vulgarity, its plebeian pressure.
And if all this has, or seems to have, nothing, or little enough to do with the drying of Orianda’s hair, it is because the Honourable Gerald was accustomed to walk from grossness with an averted mind.
“Orianda,” said he, when she rejoined him, “when are you going to give it up. You cannot stay here ... with Lizzie ... can you?”
“Why not?” she asked, sharply tossing back her hair. “I stayed with my mother, you know.”
“That was different from this. I don’t know how, but it must have been.”
She took his arm. “Yes, it was. Lizzie I hate, and poor stupid father loves her as much as he loves his axe or his handsaw. I hate her meekness, too. She has taken the heart out of everything. I must get her away.”
“I see your need, Orianda, but what can you do?”
“I shall lie to her, lie like a libertine. And I shall tell her that my mother is coming home at once. No Lizzie could face that.”
He was silent. Poor Lizzie did not know that there was now no Mrs. Crabbe.
“You don’t like my trick, do you?” Orianda shook his arm caressingly.
“It hasn’t any particular grandeur about it, you know.”
38
“Pooh! You shouldn’t waste grandeur on clearing up a mess. This is a very dirty Eden.”
“No, all’s fair, I suppose.”
“But it isn’t war, you dear, if that’s what you mean. I’m only doing for them what they are naturally loth to do for themselves.” She pronounced the word “loth” as if it rimed with moth.
“Lizzie,” he said, “I’m sure about Lizzie. I’ll swear there is still some fondness in her funny little heart.”
“It isn’t love, though; she’s just sentimental in her puffy kind of way. My dear Honourable, you don’t know what love is.” He hated her to use his title, for there was then always a breath of scorn in her tone. Just at odd times she seemed to be—not vulgar, that was unthinkable—she seemed to display a contempt for good breeding. He asked with a stiff smile “What is love?”
“For me,” said Orianda, fumbling for a definition, “for me it is a compound of anticipation and gratitude. When either of these two ingredients is absent love is dead.”
Gerald shook his head, laughing. “It sounds like a malignant bolus that I shouldn’t like to take. I feel that love is just self-sacrifice. Apart from the taste of the thing or the price of the thing, why and for what this anticipation, this gratitude?
“For the moment of passion, of course. Honour thy moments of passion and keep them holy. But O, Gerald Loughlin,” she added mockingly, “this you cannot understand, for you are not a lover; you are not, no, you are not even a good swimmer.” Her mockery was adorable, but baffling.
“I do not understand you,” he said. Now why in39 the whole world of images should she refer to his swimming? He was a good swimmer. He was silent for a long time and then again he began to speak of marriage, urging her to give up her project and leave Lizzie in her simple peace.
Then, not for the first time, she burst into a strange perverse intensity that may have been love but might have been rage, that was toned like scorn and yet must have been a jest.
“Lovely Gerald, you must never marry, Gerald, you are too good for marriage. All the best women are already married, yes, they are—to all the worst men.” There was an infinite slow caress in her tone but she went on rapidly. “So I shall never marry you, how should I marry a kind man, a good man? I am a barbarian, and want a barbarian lover, to crush and scarify me, but you are so tender and I am so crude. When your soft eyes look on me they look on a volcano.”
“I have never known anything half as lovely,” he broke in.
Her sudden emotion, though controlled, was unconcealed and she turned away from him.
“My love is a gentleman, but with him I should feel like a wild bee in a canary cage.”
“What are you saying!” cried Gerald, putting his arms around her. “Orianda!”
“O yes, we do love in a mezzotinted kind of way. You could do anything with me short of making me marry you, anything, Gerald.” She repeated it tenderly. “Anything. But short of marrying me I could make you do nothing.” She turned from him40 again for a moment or two. Then she took his arm and as they walked on she shook it and said chaffingly, “And what a timid swimmer my Gerald is.”
But he was dead silent. That flux of sensations in his mind had taken another twist, fiery and exquisite. Like rich clouds they shaped themselves in the sky of his mind, fancy’s bright towers with shining pinnacles.
Lizzie welcomed them home. Had they enjoyed themselves—yes, the day had been fine—and so they had enjoyed themselves—well, well, that was right. But throughout the evening Orianda hid herself from him, so he wandered almost distracted about the village until in a garth he saw some men struggling with a cow. Ropes were twisted around its horns and legs. It was flung to the earth. No countryman ever speaks to an animal without blaspheming it, although if he be engaged in some solitary work and inspired to music, he invariably sings a hymn in a voice that seems to have some vague association with wood pulp. So they all blasphemed and shouted. One man, with sore eyes, dressed in a coat of blue fustian and brown cord trousers, hung to the end of a rope at an angle of forty-five degrees. His posture suggested that he was trying to pull the head off the cow. Two other men had taken turns of other rope around some stout posts, and one stood by with a handsaw.
“What are you going to do?” asked Gerald.
“Its harns be bent, yeu see,” said the man with the saw, “they be going into its head. ’Twill blind or madden the beast.”
So they blasphemed the cow, and sawed off its crumpled horns.
41
When Gerald went back to the inn Orianda was still absent. He sat down but he could not rest. He could never rest now until he had won her promise. That lovely image in the river spat fountains of scornful fire at him. “Do not leave me, Gerald,” she had said. He would never leave her, he would never leave her. But the men talking in the inn scattered his flying fiery thoughts. They discoursed with a vacuity whose very endlessness was transcendent. Good God! Was there ever a living person more magnificently inane than old Tottel, the registrar. He would have inspired a stork to protest. Of course, a man of his age should not have worn a cap, a small one especially; Tottel himself was small, and it made him look rumpled. He was bandy: his intellect was bandy too.
“Yes,” Mr. Tottel was saying, “it’s very interesting to see interesting things, no matter if it’s man, woman, or a object. The most interesting man as I ever met in my life I met on my honeymoon. Years ago. He made a lifelong study of railways, that man, knew ’em from Alpha to ... to ... what is it?”
“Abednego,” said someone.
42
“Yes, the trunk lines, the fares, the routs, the junctions of anywheres in England or Scotland or Ireland or Wales. London, too, the Underground. I tested him, every station in correct order from South Kensington to King’s Cross. A strange thing! Nothing to do with railways in ’imself, it was just his ’obby. Was a Baptist minister, really, but still a most interesting man.”
Loughlin could stand it no longer, he hurried away into the garden. He could not find her. Into the kitchen—she was not there. He sat down excited and impatient, but he must wait for her, he wanted to know, to know at once. How divinely she could swim! What was it he wanted to know? He tried to read a book there, a ragged dusty volume about the polar regions. He learned that when a baby whale is born it weighs at least a ton. How horrible!
He rushed out into the fields full of extravagant melancholy and stupid distraction. That! All that was to be her life here! This was your rustic beauty, idiots and railways, boors who could choke an ox and chop off its horns—maddening doubts, maddening doubts—foul-smelling rooms, darkness, indecency. She held him at arm’s length still, but she was dovelike, and he was grappled to her soul with hoops of steel, yes, indeed.
But soon this extravagance was allayed. Dim loneliness came imperceivably into the fields and he turned back. The birds piped oddly; some wind was caressing the higher foliage, turning it all one way, the way home. Telegraph poles ahead looked like half-used pencils; the small cross on the steeple glittered with a sharp and shapely permanence.
When he came to the inn Orianda was gone to bed.
IV
The next morning an air of uneasy bustle crept into the house after breakfast, much going in and out and up and down in restrained perturbation.
43
Orianda asked him if he could drive the horse and trap to the station. Yes, he thought he could drive it.
“Lizzie is departing,” she said, “there are her boxes and things. It is very good of you, Gerald, if you will be so kind. It is a quiet horse.”
Lizzie, then, had been subdued. She was faintly affable during the meal, but thereafter she had been silent; Gerald could not look at her until the last dreadful moment had come and her things were in the trap.
“Good-bye, ’Thaniel,” she said to the innkeeper, and kissed him.
“Good-bye, Orianda,” and she kissed Orianda, and then climbed into the trap beside Gerald, who said “Click click,” and away went the nag.
Lizzie did not speak during the drive—perhaps she was in tears. Gerald would have liked to comfort her, but the nag was unusually spirited and clacked so freshly along that he did not dare turn to the sorrowing woman. They trotted down from the uplands and into the windy road over the marshes. The church spire in the town ahead seemed to change its position with every turn of that twisting route. It would have a background now of high sour-hued down, now of dark woodland, anon of nothing but sky and cloud; in a few miles further there would be the sea. Hereabout there were no trees, few houses, the world was vast and bright, the sky vast and blue. What was prettiest of all was a windmill turning its fans steadily in the draught from the sea. When they crossed the river its slaty slow-going flow was broken into blue waves.
44
At the station Lizzie dismounted without a word and Gerald hitched the nag to a tree. A porter took the luggage and labelled it while Gerald and Lizzie walked about the platform. A calf with a sack over its loins, tied by the neck to a pillar, was bellowing deeply; Lizzie let it suck at her finger for a while, but at last she resumed her walk and talked with her companion.
“She’s a fine young thing, clever, his daughter; I’d do anything for her, but for him I’ve nothing to say. What can I say? What could I do? I gave up a great deal for that man, Mr. Loughlin—I’d better not call you Gerald any more now—a great deal. I knew he’d had trouble with his wicked wife, and now to take her back after so many years, eh! It’s beyond me, I know how he hates her. I gave up everything for him, I gave him what he can’t give back to me, and he hates her; you know?”
“No, I did not know. I don’t know anything of this affair.”
“No, of course, you would not know anything of this affair,” said Lizzie with a sigh. “I don’t want to see him again. I’m a fool, but I got my pride, and that’s something to the good, it’s almost satisfactory, ain’t it?”
As the train was signalled she left him and went into the booking office. He marched up and down, her sad case affecting him with sorrow. The poor wretch, she had given up so much and could yet smile at her trouble. He himself had never surrendered to anything in life—that was what life demanded of you—surrender. For reward it gave you love, this45 swarthy, skin-deep love that exacted remorseless penalties. What German philosopher was it who said Woman pays the debt of life not by what she does, but by what she suffers? The train rushed in. Gerald busied himself with the luggage, saw that it was loaded, but did not see its owner. He walked rapidly along the carriages, but he could not find her. Well, she was sick of them all, probably hiding from him. Poor woman. The train moved off, and he turned away.
But the station yard outside was startlingly empty, horse and trap were gone. The tree was still there, but with a man leaning against it, a dirty man with a dirty pipe and a dirty smell. Had he seen a horse and trap?
“A brown mare?”
“Yes.”
“Trap with yaller wheels?”
“That’s it.”
“O ah, a young ooman druv away in that....”
“A young woman!”
“Ah, two minutes ago.” And he described Lizzie. “Out yon,” said the dirty man, pointing with his dirty pipe to the marshes.
Gerald ran until he saw a way off on the level winding road the trap bowling along at a great pace; Lizzie was lashing the cob.
“The damned cat!” He puffed large puffs of exasperation and felt almost sick with rage, but there was nothing now to be done except walk back to “The Black Dog,” which he began to do. Rage gave place to anxiety, fear of some unthinkable disaster, some tragic horror at the inn.
46
“What a clumsy fool! All my fault, my own stupidity!” He groaned when he crossed the bridge at the half distance. He halted there: “It’s dreadful, dreadful!” A tremor in his blood, the shame of his foolishness, the fear of catastrophe, all urged him to turn back to the station and hasten away from these miserable complications.
But he did not do so, for across the marshes at the foot of the uplands he saw the horse and trap coming back furiously towards him. Orianda was driving it.
“What has happened?” she cried, jumping from the trap. “O, what fear I was in, what’s happened?” She put her arms around him tenderly.
“And I was in great fear,” he said with a laugh of relief. “What has happened?”
“The horse came home, just trotted up to the door and stood still. Covered with sweat and foam, you see. The trap was empty. We couldn’t understand it, anything, unless you had been flung out and were bleeding on the road somewhere. I turned the thing back and came on at once.” She was without a hat; she had been anxious and touched him fondly. “Tell me what’s the scare?”
He told her all.
“But Lizzie was not in the trap,” Orianda declared excitedly. “She has not come back. What does it mean, what does she want to do? Let us find her. Jump up, Gerald.”
Away they drove again, but nobody had seen anything of Lizzie. She had gone, vanished, dissolved, and in that strong warm air her soul might indeed have been blown to Paradise. But they did not know47 how or why. Nobody knew. A vague search was carried on in the afternoon, guarded though fruitless enquiries were made, and at last it seemed clear, tolerably clear, that Lizzie had conquered her mad impulse or intention or whatever it was, and walked quietly away across the fields to a station in another direction.
V
For a day or two longer time resumed its sweet slow delightfulness, though its clarity was diminished and some of its enjoyment dimmed. A village woman came to assist in the mornings, but Orianda was now seldom able to leave the inn; she had come home to a burden, a happy, pleasing burden, that could not often be laid aside, and therefore a somewhat lonely Loughlin walked the high and the low of the country by day and only in the evenings sat in the parlour with Orianda. Hope too was slipping from his heart as even the joy was slipping from his days, for the spirit of vanished Lizzie, defrauded and indicting, hung in the air of the inn, an implacable obsession, a triumphant forboding that was proved a prophecy when some boys fishing in the mill dam hooked dead Lizzie from the pool under the hornbeam tree.
Then it was that Loughlin’s soul discovered to him a mass of feelings—fine sympathy, futile sentiment, a passion for righteousness, morbid regrets—from which a tragic bias was born. After the dread ordeal of the inquest, which gave a passive verdict of Found Drowned, it was not possible for him to stem this disloyal tendency of his mind. It laid that drowned48 figure accusatively at the feet of his beloved girl, and no argument or sophistry could disperse the venal savour that clung to the house of “The Black Dog.” “To analyse or assess a person’s failings or deficiencies,” he declared to himself, “is useless, not because such blemishes are immovable, but because they affect the mass of beholders in divers ways. Different minds perceive utterly variant figures in the same being. To Brown Robinson is a hero, to Jones a snob, to Smith a fool. Who then is right? You are lucky if you can put your miserable self in relation at an angle where your own deficiencies are submerged or minimized, and wise if you can maintain your vision of that interesting angle.” But embedded in Loughlin’s modest intellect there was a stratum of probity that was rock to these sprays of the casuist; and although Orianda grew more alluring than ever, he packed his bag, and on a morning she herself drove him in the gig to the station.
Upon that miserable departure it was fitting that rain should fall. The station platform was piled with bushel baskets and empty oil barrels. It rained with a quiet remorselessness. Neither spoke a word, no one spoke, no sound was uttered but the faint flicking of the raindrops. Her kiss to him was long and sweet, her good-bye almost voiceless.
“You will write?” she whispered.
“Yes, I will write.”
But he does not do so. In London he has not forgotten, but he cannot endure the thought of that countryside—to be far from the madding crowd is to be mad indeed. It is only after some trance of49 recollection, when his fond experience is all delicately and renewingly there, that he wavers; but time and time again he relinquishes or postpones his return. And sometimes he thinks he really will write a letter to his friend who lives in the country.
But he does not do so.
50
Alas, Poor Bollington!
“I walked out of the hotel, just as I was, and left her there. I never went back again. I don’t think I intended anything quite so final, so dastardly; I had not intended it, I had not thought of doing so, but that is how it happened. I lost her, lost my wife purposely. It was heartless, it was shabby, for she was a nice woman, a charming woman, a good deal younger than I was, a splendid woman, in fact she was very beautiful, and yet I ran away from her. How can you explain that, Turner?”
Poor Bollington looked at Turner, who looked at his glass of whiskey, and that looked irresistible—he drank some. Bollington sipped a little from his glass of milk.
I often found myself regarding Bollington as a little old man. Most of the club members did so too, but he was not that at all, he was still on the sunny side of fifty, but so unassertive, no presence to speak of, no height, not enough hair to mention—if he had had it would surely have been yellow. So mild and modest he cut no figure at all, just a man in glasses that seemed rather big for him. Turner was different, though he was just as bald; he had stature and bulk, his very pince-nez seemed twice the size of Bollington’s spectacles. They had not met each other for ten years.
“Well, yes,” Turner said, “but that was a serious thing to do.”
“Wasn’t it!” said the other, “and I had no idea of the enormity of the offence—not at the time.51 She might have been dead, poor girl, and her executors advertising for me. She had money you know, her people had been licensed victuallers, quite wealthy. Scandalous!”
Bollington brooded upon his sin until Turner sighed: “Ah well, my dear chap.”
“But you have no idea,” protested Bollington, “how entirely she engrossed me. She was twenty-five and I was forty when we married. She was entrancing. She had always lived in a stinking hole in Balham, and it is amazing how strictly some of those people keep their children; licensed victuallers, did I tell you? Well I was forty, and she was twenty-five; we lived for a year dodging about from one hotel to another all over the British Isles, she was a perfect little nomad. Are you married, Turner?”
No, Turner was not married, he never had been.
“O, but you should be,” cried little Bollington, “it’s an extraordinary experience, the real business of the world is marriage, marriage. I was deliriously happy and she was learning French and Swedish—that’s where we were going later. She was an enchanting little thing, fair, with blue eyes; Phoebe her name was.”
Turner thoughtfully brushed his hand across his generous baldness, then folded his arms.
“You really should,” repeated Bollington, “you ought to, really. But I remember we went from Killarney to Belfast, and there something dreadful happened. I don’t know, it had been growing on her I suppose, but she took a dislike to me there, had52 strange fancies, thought I was unfaithful to her. You see she was popular wherever we went, a lively little woman, in fact she wasn’t merely a woman, she was a little magnet, men congregated and clung to her like so many tacks and nails and pins. I didn’t object at all—on the contrary, ‘Enjoy yourself, Phoebe,’ I said, ‘I don’t expect you always to hang around an old fogey like me.’ Fogey was the very word I used; I didn’t mean it, of course, but that was the line I took, for she was so charming until she began to get so bad tempered. And believe me, that made her angry, furious. No, not the fogey, but the idea that I did not object to her philandering. It was fatal, it gave colour to her suspicions of me—Turner, I was as innocent as any lamb—tremendous colour. And she had such a sharp tongue! If you ventured to differ from her—and you couldn’t help differing sometimes—she’d positively bludgeon you, and you couldn’t help being bludgeoned. And she had a passion for putting me right, and I always seemed to be so very wrong, always. She would not be satisfied until she had proved it, and it was so monstrous to be made feel that because you were rather different from other people you were an impertinent fool. Yes, I seemed at last to gain only the pangs and none of the prizes of marriage. Now there was a lady we met in Belfast to whom I paid some attention....”
“O, good lord!” groaned Turner.
“No, but listen,” pleaded Bollington, “it was a very innocent friendship—nothing was further from my mind—and she was very much like my wife, very much, it was noticeable, everybody spoke of it53— I mean the resemblance. A Mrs. Macarthy, a delightful woman, and Phoebe simply loathed her. I confess that my wife’s innuendoes were so mean and persistent that at last I hadn’t the strength to deny them, in fact at times I wished they were true. Love is idolatry if you like, but it cannot be complete immolation—there’s no such bird as the ph?nix, is there, Turner?”
“What, what?”
“No such bird as the ph?nix.”
“No, there is no such bird, I believe.”
“And sometimes I had to ask myself quite seriously if I really hadn’t been up to some infidelity! Nonsense, of course, but I assure you that was the effect it was having upon me. I had doubts of myself, frenzied doubts! And it came to a head between Phoebe and me in our room one day. We quarrelled, O dear, how we quarrelled! She said I was sly, two-faced, unfaithful, I was a scoundrel, and so on. Awfully untrue, all of it. She accused me of dreadful things with Mrs. Macarthy and she screamed out: ‘I hope you will treat her better than you have treated me.’ Now what did she mean by that, Turner?”
Bollington eyed his friend as if he expected an oracular answer, but just as Turner was about to respond, Bollington continued:54 “Well, I never found out, I never knew, for what followed was too terrible. ‘I shall go out,’ I said, ‘it will be better, I think.’ Just that, nothing more. I put on my hat and I put my hand on the knob of the door when she said most violently: ‘Go with your Macarthys, I never want to see your filthy face again!’ Extraordinary you know, Turner. Well, I went out, and I will not deny I was in a rage, terrific. It was raining but I didn’t care, and I walked about in it. Then I took shelter in a bookseller’s doorway opposite a shop that sold tennis rackets and tobacco, and another one that displayed carnations and peaches on wads of coloured wool. The rain came so fast that the streets seemed to empty, and the passers-by were horridly silent under their umbrellas, and their footsteps splashed so dully, and I tell you I was very sad, Turner, there. I debated whether to rush across the road and buy a lot of carnations and peaches and take them to Phoebe. But I did not do so, Turner, I never went back, never.”
“Why, Bollington, you, you were a positive ruffian, Bollington.”
“O, scandalous,” rejoined the ruffian.
“Well, out with it, what about this Mrs. Macarthy?”
“Mrs. Macarthy? But, Turner, I never saw her again, never, I ... I forgot her. Yes, I went prowling on until I found myself at the docks and there it suddenly became dark; I don’t know, there was no evening, no twilight, the day stopped for a moment—and it did not recover. There were hundreds of bullocks slithering and panting and steaming in the road, thousands; lamps were hung up in the harbour, cabs and trollies rattled round the bullocks, the rain fell dismally and everybody hurried. I went into the dock and saw them loading the steamer, it was called s.s. Frolic, and really, Turner, the things they put into55 the belly of that steamer were rather funny: tons and tons of monstrous big chain, the links as big as soup plates, and two or three pantechnicon vans. Yes, but I was anything but frolicsome, I assure you, I was full of misery and trepidation and the deuce knows what. I did not know what I wanted to do, or what I was going to do, but I found myself buying a ticket to go to Liverpool on that steamer, and, in short, I embarked. How wretched I was, but how determined. Everything on board was depressing and dirty, and when at last we moved off the foam slewed away in filthy bubbles as if that dirty steamer had been sick and was running away from it. I got to Liverpool in the early morn, but I did not stay there, it is such a clamouring place, all trams and trollies and teashops. I sat in the station for an hour, the most miserable man alive, the most miserable ever born. I wanted some rest, some peace, some repose, but they never ceased shunting an endless train of goods trucks, banging and screeching until I almost screamed at the very porters. Criff was the name on some of the trucks, I remember, Criff, and everything seemed to be going criff, criff, criff. I haven’t discovered to this day what Criff signifies, whether it’s a station or a company, or a manufacture, but it was Criff, I remember. Well, I rushed to London and put my affairs in order. A day or two later I went to Southampton and boarded another steamer and put to sea, or rather we were ignominiously lugged out of the dock by a little rat of a tug that seemed all funnel and hooter. I was off to America, and there I stopped for over three years.”
56
Turner sighed. A waiter brought him another glass of spirit.
“I can’t help thinking, Bollington, that it was all very fiery and touchy. Of course, I don’t know, but really it was a bit steep, very squeamish of you. What did your wife say?”
“I never communicated with her, I never heard from her, I just dropped out. My filthy face, you know, she did not want to see it again.”
“Oh come, Bollington! And what did Mrs. Macarthy say?”
“Mrs. Macarthy! I never saw or heard of her again. I told you that.”
“Ah, yes, you told me. So you slung off to America.”
“I was intensely miserable there for a long while. Of course I loved Phoebe enormously, I felt the separation, I.... O, it is impossible to describe. But what was worst of all was the meanness of my behaviour, there was nothing heroic about it, I soon saw clearly that it was a shabby trick, disgusting, I had bolted and left her to the mercy of ... well, of whatever there was. It made such an awful barrier—you’ve no idea of my compunction—I couldn’t make overtures—‘Let us forgive and forget.’ I was a mean rascal, I was filthy. That was the barrier—myself; I was too bad. I thought I should recover and enjoy life again, I began to think of Phoebe as a cat, a little cat. I went everywhere and did everything. But America is a big country, I couldn’t get into contact, I was lonely, very lonely, and although two years went by I longed for Phoebe. Everything I did I wanted57 to do with Phoebe by my side. And then my cousin, my only relative in the world—he lived in England—he died. I scarcely ever saw him, but still he was my kin. And he died. You’ve no comprehension, Turner, of the truly awful sensation such a bereavement brings. Not a soul in the world now would have the remotest interest in my welfare. O, I tell you, Turner, it was tragic, tragic, when my cousin died. It made my isolation complete. I was alone, a man who had made a dreadful mess of life. What with sorrow and remorse I felt that I should soon die, not of disease, but disgust.”
“You were a great ninny,” ejaculated his friend. “Why the devil didn’t you hurry back, claim your wife, bygones be bygones; why bless my conscience, what a ninny, what a great ninny!”
“Yes, Turner, it is as you say. But though conscience is a good servant it is a very bad master, it overruled me, it shamed me, and I hung on to America for still another year. I tell you my situation was unbearable, I was tied to my misery, I was a tethered dog, a duck without water—even dirty water. And I hadn’t any faith in myself or in my case; I knew I was wrong, had always been wrong, Phoebe had taught me that. I hadn’t any faith, I wish I had had. Faith can move mountains, so they say, though I’ve never heard of it actually being done.”
“No, not in historical times,” declared Turner.
“What do you mean by that?”
58
“O well, time is nothing, it’s nothing, it comes and off it goes. Has it ever occurred to you, Bollington, that in 5,000 years or so there will be nobody in the world speaking the English language, our very existence even will be speculated upon, as if we were the Anthropophagi? O good lord, yes.”
And another whiskey.
“You know, Bollington, you were a perfect fool. You behaved like one of those half-baked civil service hounds who lunch in a dairy on a cup of tea and a cream horn. You wanted some beef, some ginger. You came back, you must have come back because there you are now.”
“Yes, Turner, I came back after nearly four years. Everything was different, ah, how strange! I could not find Phoebe, it is weird how people can disappear. I made enquiries, but it was like looking for a lost umbrella, fruitless after so long.”
“Well, but what about Mrs. Macarthy?”
Mr. Bollington said, slowly and with the utmost precision: “I did not see Mrs. Macarthy again.”
“O, of course, you did not see her again, not ever.”
“Not ever. I feared Phoebe had gone abroad too, but at last I found her in London....”
“No,” roared Turner, “why the devil couldn’t you say so and done with it? I’ve been sweating with sympathy for you. O, I say, Bollington!”
“My dear Turner, listen. Do you know, she was delighted to see me, she even kissed me, straight off, and we went out to dine and had the very deuce of a spread and we were having the very deuce of a good time. She was lovelier than ever, and I could see all her old affection for me was returning, she was so ... well, I can’t tell you, Turner, but she had no59 animosity whatever, no grievance, she would certainly have taken me back that very night. O dear, dear ... and then! I was anxious to throw myself at her feet, but you couldn’t do that in a public café, I could only touch her hands, beautiful, as they lay on the white linen cloth. I kept asking: ‘Do you forgive me?’ and she would reply: ‘I have nothing to forgive, dear, nothing.’ How wonderful that sounded to my truly penitent soul—I wanted to die.
“‘But you don’t ask me where I’ve been!’ she cried gaily, ‘or what I’ve been doing, you careless old Peter. I’ve been to France, and Sweden too!’
“I was delighted to hear that, it was so very plucky.
“‘When did you go?’ I asked.
“‘When I left you,’ she said.
“‘You mean when I went away?’
“‘Did you go away? O, of course, you must have. Poor Peter, What a sad time he has had.’
“I was a little bewildered, but I was delighted; in fact, Turner, I was hopelessly infatuated again, I wanted to wring out all the dregs of my detestable villainy and be absolved. All I could begin with was: ‘Were you not very glad to be rid of me?’
“‘Well,’ she said, ‘my great fear at first was that you would find me again and make it up. I didn’t want that then, at least, I thought I didn’t.’
“‘That’s exactly what I felt,’ I exclaimed, ‘but how could I find you?’
“‘Well,’ Phoebe said,60 ‘you might have found out and followed me. But I promise never to run away again, Peter dear, never.’
“Turner, my reeling intelligence swerved like a shot bird.
“‘Do you mean, Phoebe, that you ran away from me?’
“‘Yes, didn’t I?’ she answered.
“‘But I ran away from you,’ I said. ‘I walked out of the hotel on that dreadful afternoon we quarrelled so, and I never went back. I went to America. I was in America nearly four years.’
“‘Do you mean you ran away from me?’ she cried.
“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘didn’t I?’
“‘But that is exactly what I did—I mean, I ran away from you. I walked out of the hotel directly you had gone—I never went back, and I’ve been abroad thinking how tremendously I had served you out, and wondering what you thought of it all and where you were.’
“I could only say ‘Good God, Phoebe, I’ve had the most awful four years of remorse and sorrow, all vain, mistaken, useless, thrown away.’ And she said: ’And I’ve had four years—living in a fool’s paradise after all. How dared you run away, it’s disgusting!’
“And, Turner, in a moment she was at me again in her old dreadful way, and the last words I had from her were: ‘Now I never want to see your face again, never, this is the end!’
“And that’s how things are now, Turner. It’s rather sad, isn’t it?”
61
“Sad! Why you chump, when was it you saw her?”
“O, a long time ago, it must be nearly three years now.”
“Three years! But you’ll see her again!”
“Tfoo! No, no, no, Turner. God bless me, no, no, no!” said the little old man.