and calling; then turning back to the house he sought her again in
every room, even up to the attic where Phoebe Batch, startled at his
intrusion and dishevelled appearance, gaped at her master and stammered
out her, “No, sir,”--she had seen nothing of Mrs. Calladine. Mrs.
Calladine! She was Clare, just Clare; Calladine with a bitter twist
could not at that moment associate her with the respectable title. He
turned away, downstairs again, and back to the front door, to stand on
the doorstep, gazing across the little garden, over the low wall, up to
the pale inhospitable hills.
She returned, of course; every time she duly returned; and he upbraided
her, and almost wept, but she said nothing, only looked at him with
wide eyes, indifferent and remote. He upbraided her more loudly, even
shook her on one occasion and “Don’t stand there,” he cried, “as though
you had left your wits out in the blizzard,” and he flacked his fingers
in his hysteria, and his voice grew shrill. But after a little while
he would quieten down, and his melancholy would return, and he would
sit with his head in his hands, saying that for his unhappiness he had
married an elf and not a woman.
Clare looked at him, sitting sunk in his chair, and presently she
would thaw, as though those wits which he said she had left out in the
blizzard were creeping back little by little into her body, and then
she would put her hand kindly on his head and tell him not to fret.
But that was all the explanation or comfort he ever got, to his great
exasperation, being a man who liked to know how his wife had occupied
every moment of her time,--to know, indeed, every thought which passed
through her head.
Fortunately for himself, he soon forgot; the next morning he would
descend, serene as ever, and set himself after his breakfast to his
usual mild pursuits. Only in a sudden suspicious glance shot at Clare
would his anxiety reawaken, and he would look at her feet, to see
whether she wore her black strapped shoes and white stockings, peeping
out under the fulness of her skirt. And sometimes, for a day or two
after one of her escapades,--her evasions, as he called them in his own
mind,--he would follow her upstairs if she went up to her bedroom.
Inquiringly she looked at him.
“Yes, Richard?”--for she was always gentle, save when she gazed past
him with that far-away look, that seemed to range the Downs though her
husband’s body and the walls of the house stood in her way,--“Yes,
Richard?”
He mumbled, half-ashamed.
“I came to see what you were doing....” He could not bring himself to
say, “I came to see whether you were changing your shoes,” for that
seemed ridiculous, beneath his dignity.
He had his happy moments. Sitting in his little room with her after
they had dined, in the firelight, he beheld the very picture he had so
often imagined. He had got her there, for his own; and his eyes rested
long upon her grace, travelling, with delicate sensuality, over her
young body and the little hands lying idle along the arms of her chair.
“You never sew, my Clare,” he observed to her once, regretting this,
for he luxuriated in all the pretty attributes of woman. She smiled at
him. “What are you thinking of?”--his favourite question, and he bent
forward to pick up her limp hand and fondle it. “Tell me what you were
thinking,” he repeated jealously.
For once she lifted frank eyes and gave a frank answer.
“I was wondering how much real need you had of me, Richard.”
“Remember the man I was before you came to me,” he said reproachfully,
yet with a certain pride in recalling the gloom which had been his to
discard.
Then she said no more,--a trick of hers, which irritated him when he
would fain have had her explain and amplify. He liked argument, he
liked analysis; and into neither could he draw her.
“How unwillingly,” he said, “do you dwell upon personal relationships!”
He had lost his gloom and melancholy,--or was it that he had begun
to think that hobby ridden to death, sometimes inconvenient to
himself and possibly diminishing in impressiveness to other people,
and had welcomed his marriage as a plausible reason for abjuring it?
His habitual manner he had not altered; he still maintained towards
her the same elaborate courtesy and his air of rather patronising
protectiveness, as though thanks to the one convention, he revered
her, and thanks to the other, condescended.
Yet, he had changed; changed from the very day of their marriage. He
had paraded her on his arm before their wedding-guests, the smile
had wandered perpetually over his lips, he had abandoned his slight
stoop, he had straightened himself up into a handsome and possessive
bridegroom. She had been too apathetic at heart to be nettled by his so
parading her in public: “My wife,” the formula constantly on his lips,
had not stirred her resentment; those were the outward shows,--they
could not touch her secret being. And, looking at him perhaps
nevertheless with a faint surprise, she had ascribed this new manner
to his natural triumph at getting her, and had expected a relapse as
soon as the novelty should have staled into habit. But there had been
no relapse. He had brought her home to Starvecrow, and then she had
realised how all the new chintzes, the curtains in the windows, the
works of art brought out from the drawers where all these years they
had lain concealed, had been but the preparation for this long-schemed
change in his mode of thought. They slipped now into their place, they
came into their own, small but significant. He had at last now an
excuse for shedding with relief the strenuous manner of years. There
remained no work for her to do.
Oh, little objects of art and skill. What hours he must have spent
trifling with their suavity, taking them from their hiding-places of
an evening after he had heard Mrs. Quince go safely up to bed, and
knew that no one was looking, no one likely to break in upon him and
surprise him at his comfortable pottering; the hours of mansuetude he
must have spent turning and caressing them between his fine sensitive
hands! He had not brought out those little objects to show her the day
she had gone to tea with him at Starvecrow; oh no! the only thing he
had brought out had been the drawing of that woman’s head, which he had
so dramatically destroyed in her presence. She saw that destruction
now as the first step taken towards his emancipation. But the little
objects he had not shown her,--those delicate fraudulent statuettes
in terra cotta, those chiselled and prismatic crystals. How bare, how
cheerless she had thought his room! those heavy leather armchairs, now
so jaunty with chintz! She had pitied him, genuinely and kindly, even
through her impatience at his mismanagement of his life. She had chided
herself for any passing suspicions that his gloom might be deliberate.
And she had seen in her marriage with him an opportunity to perform,
supremely at her own expense, a task perhaps worth performing.
But what right had she to murmur, when she saw her intentions
crumble? She had, indeed, achieved her object, albeit in a manner so
disconcertingly unforeseen. She reproached herself, in her mind which
gave no quarter, any more than Lovel gave quarter; she reproached
herself for not rendering thanks that her task had been thus made easy.
What! she dare to murmur because she had been spared the strain of
months, even of years? because she had not been permitted to string
herself up to an effort daily renewed, an exertion in which her own
weariness must never for an instant be allowed to appear? because
Calladine had taken the law out of her hands, and had ordained for
himself the resurrection to which she had intended to force him? She
looked back with the smile of rueful irony to her brave and pitiful
plans for his redemption. She had intended,--so gallantly--to set her
back for ever towards her old life. She would have devoted herself,--so
sturdily,--to the man who had need of her. She would not have flagged.
The vision of her married life had disclosed itself during the weeks
of her engagement in detail to her anticipation. There was no detail
she had shirked,--not even the least picturesque. She had not tried to
idealise Calladine; no, rather she had tried to see him in the light
that Lovel’s careless scorn had thrown; not as a romantic figure,
blasted by the catastrophe of an early passion, but as an incompetent,
bungling, pitiable figure. Her pity, her charity, and her contempt
would between them have carried her through. But now that she found
herself forestalled, as it were,--found that Calladine had already
accomplished for himself precisely what she had intended to accomplish
for him,--she was disconcerted, almost angry. It was in vain that
she upbraided herself for her own ingratitude. The life that she had
planned for herself was not falling out according to her design. She
was cheated; a person who has tried to take in the dark a step that was
never there. Let her keep her sense of proportion,--her refuge now, her
only refuge,--and she would not even yet be wholly lost. Then she could
laugh at the futility of her plans; she could see, as from without,
their derision, and their full pitifulness. Her life at Starvecrow had
not fallen out according to her design. What of it?
A woman spending thirty, forty, wasted years in a forgotten corner of
the Downs. What of it?
Her memory would not cling about the place after she should be dead,
any more than the memory of victims clung about the sacrificial
stones. “Here blood was shed,” but that was a collective phrase; all
individuality had long since,--almost immediately,--been telescoped
into the clemency of perspective. So it would be with her, and she saw
herself already as part of that anonymous crowd, whether of the victims
of a savage creed, or of the women with the wasted lives,--no sublime
and legendary sorrow, except in so far that all sorrow shared in the
same great dignity,--women who had lost children or lovers, women who
had trailed ill-health about their daily business, women who had borne
the long, mute burden of uncertainty, all the grey, silent, muffled
women that whispered round her, and that had taken to their graves
unchronicled the blunt or the poignant sorrow of their hearts.
Nameless, they lived for her now. For her now, the Downs, hitherto
so void and so spacious under the freedom of the winds and the cycle
of the seasons, for her now the Downs were peopled. Their dews were
brushed dark with footsteps. Their heights were scanned by searching
eyes. Their flanks were bruised by the stumble of weary limbs. Their
beech-clumps were threaded with the breath of secrets. She had not
known, at first, whether to resent or to welcome the looming-up of
this hushed population. It seemed to her that they rose up out of the
ground, stealthy, ashen, tall. They were everywhere about her. They had
known the Downs as she knew them, and the changing seasons had found as
they did for her either a significant echo or an incongruous irony in
their souls. Their presence did away with the loneliness, the untouched
and indifferent loneliness of the uplands, which in her egoism she had
seen as a background to her life and Lovel’s populated only, in so
far as they were populated at all, by the rough figures of the men of
barbarous ages, men who fought for the simple preservation of their own
existence, undivided by any shredding of their moods, whose religion
was one of fear and not of charity, the men who had set up the stones
and raised the barrows in order to propitiate the dark Unknown of
creation and of death with such rude pomp as they could devise. They
had been stark, striding elementary figures, one with the tree-trunks
and the sarsen stones. They had ennobled the Downs by the record of
their constructions. It had seemed to Clare that the intervening
centuries between their age and the present day had been blank,--that
she inherited the Downs direct from their hands,--those Downs which
revealed themselves to her eyes unchanged from the hour when the stone
men had passed away from them. The barrows, the dew-ponds, the Grey
Wethers, the green tracks, the hawks and the larks, the space,--all
unaltered; the stone men, returning, would find no change. What had she
said, long ago, to Calladine, “an old, hard country; and such ghosts as
there are, are bleached bones by now, dry and clean. I think,” she had
said, “that the ghosts that walk among the stones must be as stern as
the stones themselves; and that’s my fancy.”
And now there came to her this newly-realised population, bruised by
life down to the softness of humanity. As to her those dry, bleached
ghosts of the rude ages were masculine, so those more human ghosts that
rose up out of the centuries were feminine. Increasingly, they had
splintered their emotions; they had departed from the stark, simple
facts; they had become more complex and more wistful. The stars and the
stones had meant less and less to them; the Man of Sorrows, and not
the terrible orbs of heaven, had been their god. They were kneaded,
malleable. They had endured much, but in the full consciousness of
endurance; their spirit, even if not their voice, had groaned under
the load of life and its ironies; they had not accepted as a matter
of course, unquestioning, a lot that was hard. For all that, they had
not been the less courageous; perhaps even their courage had been of a
sublimer brand. And they were women, women, always women. The men had
remained nearer to the old, strong, practical stock,--the purveyors of
necessities. It was upon the women that civilisation had had the most
effect. Calladine himself, the most highly civilised man that Clare
knew, had always seemed to her instinct more like a woman,--sitting in
his house and picking his griefs into smaller and smaller pieces. But
Calladine’s griefs were not very real griefs,--she knew that now. She
knew that he was, really, quite negligible.
She had been almost afraid, for a brief period, to go out upon the
Downs,--afraid of forms rising up round her, of hands pulling at
her garments, and of eyes seeking hers until she was forced to look
into their depths. It was not that she any longer felt resentment
against the population her own imagination had evoked; no, the Downs
were enriched by their company, and the calm heights acquired a new
significance by contrast with their soft rustling tumult. It was that
she feared the knowledge which would come to her if she spent many
hours alone with those ghostly inhabitants whispering round her like
dead leaves; she feared what she would learn; she would not probe her
new half-guessed discovery. Things were a degree less terrible so long
as they remained without a name.
But she could not fear for long. She had pushed them back, averting
her head, into the shadows, and there they had taken up their abode.
They would not leave her again. Not even in the midst of joy,--if joy
should ever visit,--would they leave her, any more than the shadows
were ever completely absent even in the midst of sunshine on the Downs.
She was grateful to them for the way they had come, stealing in upon
her, silent and gradual, not in a sudden irruption that would have
broken her. But now that she no longer feared them, no longer feared
the learning that solitude might bring, it was for solitude that she
craved, and solitude, she found, was the thing that she might not have.
Calladine, who was so content in her company, expected that she should
be equally content in his. When she went out, he went with her; when he
was not inclined to go out, he begged that she would remain at home.
“It is a rough day, Clare; let us stay happily by the fire.” Or he
would consent to pace the garden, sheltered now by a little wall, and
together they would look at the bare winter beds, and he would talk
cheerfully of the flowers that would blow there in the spring.
She renounced the Downs. Since she might not wander there alone, she
restricted herself to the house and the square of garden, or to the
green track that led to King’s Avon when she went to see her father.
Even on this expedition Calladine accompanied her. He did not notice
that she walked with her eyes bent upon the ground, never allowing
them to lift and stray over the rolling country; or if he noticed he
gave no sign. All the time he talked of minor things, and to his talk
she made adequate response. Arrived at King’s Avon she would quicken
her steps and pass rapidly down the village street, glancing about
her only sufficiently to acknowledge the greetings of her humble
acquaintances, and only when safe within the Manor House gates would
she relax a little, and show herself gentle and affectionate towards
her father, who, absent as ever, would presently forget that she was
married and would invite Calladine to remain to dinner, “Clare and I,
my dear friend, may so rarely welcome a visitor.” Through her laughter
she looked at him wistfully; he was dear and familiar, his old beehive
hat as wide and as shabby as ever, his spectacles still on his nose
and his mild blue eyes looking out through them. She wondered how he
got on without her, but Martha told her he did not seem to notice her
absence much; only once, she had found him in Miss Clare’s old bedroom,
wandering round, and touching everything in a gently puzzled way. Clare
was glad that he should continue his busy, happy existence. Martha
she could trust, “To be sure, Miss Clare, I look after him as though
he was your own baby. It’s all I can do, not to powder him after his
bath.” But she sometimes fancied that his eyes followed her a little
sorrowfully down the avenue when she went away, as he stood watching
their departure and waving his big silk handkerchief.
And they would set off on their homeward journey up the village
street, along the road through the cut in the embankment, and along
the road until it dissolved into the green track that led across the
Downs. Still with her eyes upon the ground she walked rapidly, as
though anxious to find herself once more safe within the shelter of
Starvecrow. Calladine’s long legs easily kept pace with her; and she
had the impression that, even were she to run, she could never escape
from him. He strode beside her, talking of her father, talking of those
minor things which, she had found, occupied so much of his attention,
and always with the assumption that her interest equalled his own. Once
or twice he wanted to leave the track and make their way home across
country, but when he suggested this she always pretexed her anxiety to
be once more ensconced in their own room. This invariably pleased him,
and he acquiesced. She could not, no, she could not, stray across the
Downs with him.
She renounced the Downs. She could not share them with Calladine; not
even with his mere physical presence could she share them. She cramped
herself within the house and the little garden. The moment came when
Calladine commented upon it. “Don’t you want to go for a walk, Clare?”
She did not;--she clung to their meagre patch of cultivation. “You are
grown quite stay-at-home,” he prodded, fondly.
The great Downs,--that stealthy population out on the Downs. Waiting
for her,--the call of nature, always, and now the call of humanity. Out
there, she could respond, she could feel, she could learn. Once she had
not wanted to learn. She had shirked knowledge. Now, she had acquired
knowledge, and could bear a yet deeper learning. She was avid, indeed,
for the deepest draught of knowledge. Those bare great Downs, they were
not bare; they were peopled. She might learn the first lesson from
their storm, and the ultimate lesson from their serenity. But it was
not in Calladine’s company that she would learn it. Such lessons were
learnt in the severest solitude, with the senses of the soul stripped
to flagellation.
Therefore she clung to Starvecrow. “An uncouth name,” said Calladine
discontentedly, after relishing it for years; “shall we change it?”
But she begged him not to, without clearly knowing why. “Very well, we
keep it,” said Calladine, smiling down at her, “as a contrast to the
snug life we live beneath that uncomfortable label.” She smiled back;
she could smile, always; it had become mechanical, costing her little.
She clung to Starvecrow, without affection, but also without anything
so precise as distaste; it, like Calladine, was negligible really, and
she had never gone back on her first opinion of it,--that it was not
austere enough to excuse its barrenness, and merely mean in its lack
of comfort. It was no different from the Manor House, which, although
at first sight incongruous perhaps in the midst of the village and its
barbarous temple, was in truth no more incongruous than her old father,
who pottered in his big hat about the garden, or peered through his big
spectacles at the shards set out upon his desk.
But still she clung to Starvecrow; it was just bleak enough to match
the bleak, small disaster of her life; just comfortless enough to
accord with the blank at the root of her life with Calladine.