CAMPING IN THE FIR WOODS
Lizzie Straker and Joan Gaunt were at supper when Eve walked into their
private sitting-room at the “Black Boar.” Eight o’clock had struck, but
the window of the room faced west, and the lamp on the table had not
been lit.
“You’re pretty late.”
Eve sat down without taking off her hat. She had a feeling that these
two had been discussing her just before she had come into the room, and
that things which she was not expected to see had been, so to speak,
pushed hurriedly under the sofa.
“I’ve had a long ramble, and I’m hungry.”
She found a round of cold beef, and a dish of young lettuces on the
table. Her companions had got as far as milk pudding and stewed rhubarb.
“You must have been walking about four solid hours. Did you get lost?”
“No. I used to live down here.”
They stared.
“Oh, did you!”
“You’ve got pretty hot, anyhow.”
“I walked fast. I went farther than I meant to.”
“Meet any friends?”
“One or two.”
She caught a pair of mistrustful eyes fixed on her. They belonged to
Joan Gaunt, who sat at the end of the table.
“I think we’ll have the lamp, Lizzie.”
“Right oh! or Eve won’t be able to hunt the slugs out of the lettuces.”
“Don’t be beastly.”
“You might cut me a piece of bread.”
The lamp was lit. The other two had finished their supper, but appeared
inclined to sit there and watch Eve eat.
“You met some old friends?”
“Yes.”
“I hope you were careful.”
“Of course. I told them I was on a walking tour. I dare say I shan’t see
them again.”
“No. I don’t think you’d better.”
Something in Joan Gaunt’s voice annoyed her. It was quietly but harshly
dictatorial, and Eve stiffened.
“I don’t think you need worry. I can look after my own affairs.”
“Did you live in Basingford?”
“No. Out in the country.”
Lizzie Straker and Joan Gaunt exchanged glances. Something had happened
to the woman in Eve, a something that was so patent and yet so
mysterious that even these two fanatics noticed it and were puzzled. Had
she looked into a mirror before entering the sitting-room, she would
have been struck by a physical transfiguration of which she was for the
moment unconscious. She had changed into a more spring-like and more
sensitive study of herself. There was the indefinable suggestion of
bloom upon fruit. Her face looked fuller, her skin more soft, her lips
redder, her eyes brighter yet more elusive. She had been bathing in deep
and magic waters and had emerged with a shy tenderness hovering about
her mouth, and an air of sensuous radiance.
Supper was cleared away. The lamp was replaced on the table. Joan Gaunt
brought out a note-book and her cypher-written itinerary. Lizzie Straker
lit a cigarette.
“Business!”
They exchanged glances.
“Come along, Eve.”
Somehow the name seemed to strike all three of them with symbolical
suggestiveness. Her comrades looked at her mistrustfully.
They sat down at the table.
“As you happen to know people here, you had better be on your guard.
There is work to be done here. I have just wired to Galahad.”
Eve met Joan Gaunt’s eyes.
“Are there black sheep in Basingford?”
“A particularly black one. An anti-suffrage lunatic. She has been on
platforms against us. That makes one feel bitter.”
“So it’s a she!”
“She’s a traitress—a fool.”
“I wonder if I know her name.”
“It’s Canterton—Mrs. James Canterton.”
Eve was leaning her elbows on the table, trying not to show how this
news affected her. And suddenly she began to laugh.
Joan Gaunt’s face stiffened.
“What are you laughing at?”
It was wholesome, helpless, exquisite laughter that escaped and bubbled
over from a delicious sense of fun. What an ironical comedy. Eve did not
realise the complete significance of what she said until she had said
it.
“Why, I should have thought she was one of us!”
Her two comrades stared. They were becoming more and more puzzled, by
this feminine thing that did not shape as they expected it to shape.
“I don’t see anything to laugh at.”
Eve did.
“But she ought to belong to us!”
“You seem to find it very funny. I don’t see anything funny about a
woman being a political pimp for the men, and a rotten sentimentalist.”
“I should never have called Mrs. Canterton a sentimentalist.”
“Of course, you know her!”
“A little.”
“Well, she’s marked down here with three asterisks. That means trouble
for her. Of course, she’s married.”
“Yes.”
“And dotes on her husband and children, and all that.”
Eve grew serious.
“No, that’s the strange part of it. She and her husband don’t run in
double harness. And she’s a fool with her own child.”
“But that’s absurd. I suppose her husband has treated her badly, as most
of them do.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.”
“In nine cases out of ten it’s the man’s fault.”
“Perhaps this is the tenth.”
“Oh, rot! There’s a man somewhere. There must be someone else besides
her husband, or she wouldn’t be talking for the men.”
“I don’t think so. If you knew Mrs. Canterton, you might understand.”
Yet she doubted whether they would have understood, for busybodies and
extremists generally detest each other, especially when they are arguing
from opposite sides of the table.
Eve wanted to be alone, to think things out, to face this new crisis
that had opened before her so suddenly. It was the more dangerous and
problematical since the strong current of her impulses flowed steadily
towards Fernhill. She went to bed early, leaving Joan Gaunt and Lizzie
Straker writing letters.
When the door had closed on Eve, they put down their pens and looked at
each other.
“Something funny.”
“What’s happened to her?”
Lizzie Straker giggled.
“She’s met someone, a man, I suppose. That’s how it struck me.”
Joan looked grim.
“Don’t giggle like that. She has been puzzling me for a long time. Once
or twice I have almost suspected her of laughing at us.”
This sobered Lizzie Straker.
“What! I should like to see her laugh at me! I’ve learnt jiu-jitsu. I’d
suppress her!”
“The question is, is she to be trusted? I’m not so sure that our Horsham
friend wasn’t right.”
“Well, don’t tell her too much. And test her. Make her fire the next
place. Then she’ll be compromised.”
“That’s an idea!”
“She has always hung back and let us do the work.”
They looked at each other across the table.
“All right. We had better go and scout by ourselves to-morrow.”
“Galahad ought to be here by lunch time.”
“We can make our arrangements. Leave after tea, hide in the woods, and
do the job after dark.”
Eve slept well, in spite of all her problems. She woke to the sound of a
blackbird singing in the garden, and the bird’s song suited her waking
mood, being just the thing that Nature suggested. She slipped out of
bed, drew back the chintz curtains, and looked out on a dewy lawn all
dappled with yellow sunlight. The soul of the child and of the artist in
her exulted. She wanted to play with colours, to express herself, to
make pictures. Yes; but she wanted more than that, and she knelt down in
her nightdress before the looking-glass, and leaning her elbows on the
table, stared into her own eyes.
She questioned herself.
“Woman, can you trust yourself? It is a big thing, such a big thing,
both for him, and for you.”
It was a sulky breakfast table that morning. Lizzie Straker had the
grumps, and appeared to be on the watch for something that could be
pounced on. She was ready to provoke Eve into contradicting her, but the
real Eve, the Eve that mattered, was elsewhere. She hardly heard what
Lizzie Straker said.
“We move on this evening!”
“Oh!”
“Does that interest you?”
“Not more than usual.”
A telegram lay half hidden under Joan Gaunt’s plate.
“Lizzie and I are going off for a ramble.”
The hint that Eve was not wanted was conveyed with frankness.
“You had better stay in.”
“Dear comrade, why?”
“Well, you are known here.”
“That doesn’t sound very logical. Still, I don’t mind.”
The dictator in Joan Gaunt was speaking, but Eve was not irked by her
tyranny on this particular morning. She was ready to laugh gently, to
bear with these two women, whose ignorance was so pathetic. She would be
content to spend the day alone, sitting under one of the elms at the end
of the bowling green, and letting herself dream. The consciousness that
she was on the edge of a crisis did not worry her, for somehow she
believed that the problem was going to solve itself.
Joan Gaunt and Lizzie Straker started out from Basingford soon after
nine, and chartered a small boy, who, for the sum of a penny, consented
to act as guide to Fernhill. But all this was mere strategy, and when
they had got rid of the boy, they turned aside into the fir woods
instead of presenting themselves at the office where would-be visitors
were supposed to interview one of the clerks. Joan Gaunt had a rough map
drawn on a piece of note-paper, a map that had been sent down from
headquarters. They explored the fir woods and the heath lands between
Fernhill and Orchards Corner, and after an hour’s hunt they discovered
what they had come in search of—Canterton’s new cottage standing with
white plaster and black beams between the garden of rocks and the
curtained gloom of the fir woods.
Joan Gaunt scribbled a few additional directions on the map. They struck
a rough sandy road that was used for carting timber, and this woodland
road joined the lane that ran past Orchards Corner. It was just the
place for Galahad’s car to be hidden in while they made their night
attack on the empty cottage.
In the meanwhile Eve was sitting under one of the elms at the end of the
bowling green with a letter-pad on her knees. She had concluded that her
comrades had designs upon Canterton’s property, that they meant to make
a wreck of his glass-houses and rare plants, or to set fire to the sheds
and offices, and she had not the slightest intention of suffering any
such thing to happen. She was amused by the instant thoroughness of her
own treachery. Her impulses had deserted without hesitation to the
opposite camp.
She wrote:
“I am writing in case I should not see you to-day. My good
comrades are Militants, and your name is anathema. I more than
suspect that some part of your property will be attacked
to-night. I send you a warning. But I do not want these comrades
of mine to suffer because I choose to play renegade. Balk them
and let them go.
“I am thinking hard,
“EVE.”
She wrote “Important ” and “Private” on the envelope, and appealed to
the proprietor of the “Black Boar” to provide her with a reliable
messenger to carry her letter to Fernhill. An old gentleman was taking a
glass of beer in the bar, and this same old gentleman lived as a
pensioner in one of the Fernhill cottages. He was sent out to see Eve,
who handed him a shilling and the letter.
“I want Mr. Canterton to get this before twelve o’clock, and I want you
to make sure he has it.”
“I’ll make sure o’ that, miss. I ain’t likely to forget.”
He toddled off, and before twelve o’clock Eve knew that her warning had
carried, for a boy on a bicycle brought her a note from Canterton.
“Many thanks indeed. I understand. Let nothing prejudice you.”
Joan Gaunt and Lizzie Straker returned about half-past twelve, and five
minutes later a big grey motor pulled up outside the inn. Mr. Lawrence
Kentucky climbed out, and went in to order lunch.
From her room Eve had a view of the bowling green and of the doorway of
a little summer-house that stood under the row of elms. She saw Lizzie
Straker walk out into the garden and arrive casually at the door of the
summer-house. Two minutes later Lawrence Kentucky wandered out with
equal casualness, appeared drawn by some invisible and circuitous thread
to the summer-house, and vanished inside.
Eve smiled. It was a comedy within a comedy, but there was no cynical
edge to her amusement. She felt more kindly towards Lizzie Straker, and
perhaps Eve pitied her a little because she seemed so incapable of
distinguishing between gold and brass.
Lawrence Kentucky did not stay more than five minutes in the
summer-house. He had received his instructions, and Joan Gaunt’s map,
and a promise from Lizzie Straker that she would keep watch in the lane
up by Orchards Corner, so that he should not lose himself in the
Fernhill woods. Lawrence Kentucky went in to lunch, and drove away soon
afterwards in his big grey car.
She found that Lizzie Straker was in a bad temper when they sat down to
lunch. The _tête-à-tête_ in the summer-house had been too impersonal to
please her, and Lawrence Kentucky had shown great tactlessness in asking
questions about Eve. “Is Miss Carfax here? Where did you pick her up?
Oh, one of Pallas’s kittens! Jolly good-looking girl.”
Lizzie was feeling scratchy, and she sparred with Eve.
“You’re a puzzler. I don’t believe you’re a bit keen, not what I call
keen. I can’t sleep sometimes before doing something big.”
“I’m quite keen enough.”
“I don’t think you show it. You’ll have to buck up a bit, won’t she,
Joan? We have to send in sealed reports, you know. Mrs. Falconer expects
to know the inside of everybody.”
“Perhaps she expects too much.”
“Anyhow, it’s her money we’re spending.”
Eve flushed.
“I shall pay her back some day before very long.”
“You needn’t think I called you a sponger—I didn’t.”
“Oh, well, would it have mattered?”
They spent the afternoon in the garden, and had tea under the may tree.
Joan Gaunt had asked for the bill, and for three packets of sandwiches.
They paid the one, and stowed the sandwiches away in their knapsacks,
and about five o’clock they resumed their walking tour.
A march of two miles brought them into the thick of the fir woods, and
they had entered them by the timber track without meeting a soul. Joan
Gaunt chose a spot where a clump of young firs offered a secret camping
ground, for the lower boughs of the young trees being still green and
bushy, made a dense screen that hid them admirably.
Eve understood that a night attack was imminent, and realised that no
individual rambles would be authorised by Joan Gaunt. She was to be
penned in with these two fanatics for six long hours, an undenounced
traitor who had betrayed them into the enemy’s hands. Canterton would
have men on guard, and for the moment she was tempted to tell them the
truth and so save them from being fooled.
But some subtle instinct held her back. She felt herself to be part of
the adventure, that she would allow circumstances to lead, circumstances
that might prove of peculiar significance. She was curious to see what
would happen, curious to see how the woman in her would react.
So Eve lay down among the young firs with her knapsack under her head,
and watched the sunlight playing in the boughs of the veterans overhead.
They made a net of sable and gold that stretched out over her, a net
that some god might let fall to tangle the lives of women and of men.
She felt the imminence of Nature, felt herself part of the mysterious
movement that could be sensed even in this solemn brooding wood.
Her two comrades lay on their fronts, each with a chin thrust out over a
book. But Lizzie Straker soon grew restless. She kept clicking her heels
together, and picking up dry fir cones and pulling them to pieces. Eve
watched her from behind half closed lids.
She felt sorry for Lizzie Straker, because she guessed instinctively
that Nature was playing her deep game even with this rebel.
* * * * *