THE drive to London was a silent one. Mr. Basingstoke did not want to
talk; he had come on one of those spaces where the emotions sleep,
exhausted. He felt nothing any more, neither anxiety as to the future
nor pleasure at the nearness of the furry heap beside him under which,
presently, his companion slumbered peacefully as a babe in its cot. His
mind was blank, his heart was numbed; it was not till the car reached
the houses spilled over the pretty fields like ugly toys emptied out of
the play-box of a giant child, that mind or heart made any movement.
Then it happened that the breeze caught the edge of the fur and lifted
it, and he saw her little face softly flushed with sleep, lying very
near him, and his heart seemed all at once to come to life again with an
awakening stab of something that was not affection or even passion, but
a kind of protective exultation--a deep, keen longing to take care of,
to guard, to infold safely from all possible dangers and sorrows her who
slept so happy-helpless beside him. Then his mind awoke, too, and he
found himself wondering. The Schultz episode, his suspicions,
resentment--the explication--all this should, one would have thought,
have brushed, like a rough hand, the bloom from the adventure. And,
instead of taking anything away, it had, even as she had said, added a
soft touch of intimacy to their friendship. Further, he now in his heart
had the memory that, for an instant, his thoughts had wronged her, that
he had suspected her of wavering, almost of light-mindedness, though his
thought had taken no such definite lines even to itself in its secret
heart--and all the time there had only been thought for him, sincere,
delicate consideration, and, in the matter of that man's accepted help,
the trust of a child, and that innocence of Una before which even lions
like Schultz become shy and safe. Imagine a subject who has suspected
his princess of being, perhaps, not a princess at all, but one
masquerading in the robes and crown of a princess . . . when he shall
find her to be indeed royal, to what an ecstasy of loyalty will not his
heart attain? So it was now with Mr. Basingstoke. He caught the corner
of the fur and reverently covered the face of his princess.
And now the houses were thick and the shops began to score the streets
with lines of color. He stopped at one of those big shops where they
sell everything, and she awoke and said, "Are we there?"
"I thought," said he, "that you said something about a hat."
"Here?" she said, looking at the shop with strong distaste.
"Better here than really in London, I thought. And you'll want other
things. And do you mind buying a box or a portmanteau or something?
Because hotels like you to have luggage."
"I've been thinking--" she said, but he interrupted her.
"Forgive me," he said, "but even you cannot think your best thoughts
when you're asleep."
Then she laughed. "Well, you must give me the money," she said, holding
out a bare, unashamed hand, "because I haven't any."
He composed himself to wait, and he waited a long time, a very, very
long time. He cheered the waiting by the thought that she could not,
after all, have found the shop so unsuitable as it had, at the first
glance, seemed. He watched the doorway, and his eye became weary of the
useless snippets of lace and silk at something eleven-three with which
the windows at each side of the door were plastered. He noticed the
people who went in, and the many more who waited outside and longed for
these absurd decorations--longed with that passion which, almost alone
of the passions, a girl may display to the utmost immoderation without
fear of censure or of shame. He observed the longing in the eyes of
little, half-developed, half-grown girls for this or that bit of
worthless frippery; he would have liked to call to them and say, "My
dear children, do go in and buy yourself each a fairing, and let me
pay." But he knew that so straightforward and simple a kindness would
draw on him and on the children shame and censure almost immeasurable.
So he just sat and was sorry for them, till he saw two of them titter
together and look at him.
Then he got out of the car and went into the shop--they sold toys there
as well as everything else--to buy something himself. He could not find
exactly what he wanted--in shops crowded with glittering uselessnesses
it is rarely that you can find the particular uselessness on which you
have set your heart--but Tommy of the Five Bells had no fault to find
with the big, brown-papered parcel which reached him by the next day's
afternoon post. He could not imagine any soldiers more perfectly
satisfying than these, no bricks more solid and square, no drafts more
neatly turned, no dominoes more smoothly finished. To Mr. Basingstoke's
old nurse the world seemed to hold nothing fairer than the lace collar
and the violet-silk necktie. "Do me for Sundays for years," she said,
putting them back in their tissue-paper and turning her attention to the
box of sweets and the stockings for the children. The girl who sold Mr.
Basingstoke the lace collar sniggered apart with a kindred sniggerer as
she sold it to him, and delayed to make out his bill, but the other
girl, almost a child, with a black bow tying her hair, sold him the
stockings and was sympathetic and helpful.
"How many stockings ought a child to have, so as to have plenty?" he
asked her, confidentially. At the lace-counter he had made his own
choice, in stern silence.
"Three pairs," said the girl; "that's one in wear, one in the wash, and
one in case of accidents." She glanced through the glass door at the
motor, and decided that he could afford it. "But, of course, four would
be better."
"I should think six would be best," said he, "that's one for each day in
the week, and on Saturday they can stay in bed while their mother does
the washing."
"You don't wash on Saturdays," said the girl, her little, plain face
lighting up with a smile. She saw the eye of the shop-walker on her and
added, nervously, "Shall we say six, then, sir; and what size? I mean
what aged child? About what price?"
"Three to eleven," said he.
"They're one and eleven-three," said she.
"I mean the children, not the stockings--there are five of them--what's
five sixes?"
"Thirty," the girl told him, with a glance at the shop-walker that was
almost defiant in its triumph.
"That's it, then," said he, "and sort out the sizes properly, please,
will you? Three six, two sevens, ten and eleven. And put in some
garters--children's stockings are always coming down, you know--"
The girl had not before sold garters to insane but agreeable gentlemen.
She hesitated and said in a low voice, "I don't think garters, sir.
Suspenders are more worn now--"
"Well, suspenders then. The means doesn't matter--it's the keeping up
that's the important thing." He laid a five-pound note on the counter,
just as the shop-walker came up to her with a slightly insolent,
"Serving, Miss Moore?"
"Sign, sir," said Miss Moore, defending herself from his displeasure
with the bill. "Anything more, sir?"
"I want some sweets," said Edward, and was directed to "the third shop
on the left, through there."
It was not till two weeks later that a satined and beribboned box of
sweets arrived by post for Miss Moore. "From Mary," said the legend
within, and the postmark was Warwick. Mr. Basingstoke counted on every
one's having at least one relation or friend bearing that commonest and
most lovely of all names. And he was right. A distant cousin got the
credit of the gift, which made the little apprentice happy for a day and
interested for a week--exactly as Mr. Basingstoke had intended. His
imagination pleased him with the picture of the sudden surprise of a
gift, in that drab and subordinated life. By such simple means Mr.
Basingstoke added enormously to his own agreeable sensations. And by
such little exercises of memory as that which registered Miss Moore's
name and the address of the shop he made those pleasures possible for
himself. The sweets he bought on that first day of his elopement went to
his nurse. He might have added more gifts, for the pleasure of spending
money was still as new as nice, but the voice of Charles without drew
him from the shop to settle a difference of opinion between that
tethered dog and the chauffeur.
"Wanted to hang hisself over the side of the car," the man explained,
"and no loss to his mourning relations, if you ask me," he added,
sourly.
Edward had hardly adjusted the situation before she came out--and he
felt the sight of her was worth waiting for. She wore now a white coat
with touches of black velvet, and the hat was white, too, with black and
a pink rose or two.
"It looks more like Bond Street than Peckham," he said as she got in.
"It surpasses my wildest dreams."
"I had to make them trim it," she said, "that's why I was such ages. All
the ones they had were like Madge Wildfire--insane, wild, unrelated
feathers and bows born in Bedlam."
Her eyes, under the brim of the new hat, thrilled him, and when Charles,
leaping on her lap, knocked the hat crooked, scattered the mound of
parcels, and made rosetted dust-marks on the new cloak, her reception of
these clumsy advances would have endeared her to any one to whom she was
not already dear.
"Well," she said, tucking Charles in between them, setting the hat
straight, and dusting the coat, all in one competent movement, "have you
had time yet to think what you're going to do with me?"
"I have had time," he said, rearranging the mound.
"I'm so sorry I was so long, but. . . ."
"It was worth it," he said, looking at the hat. "Well, what I propose is
that you should go, not to Claridge's, which is just the place where
your relations will look for you, but to one of those large, comfortable
hotels where strictly middle-class people stay when they come up to
London on matters connected with their shops or their farms. I will give
you as long as you like to unpack your new portmanteau and your parcels.
Then I'll call for you and take you out to dinner."
"But I thought we were going on tramp," she objected.
"Dinner first, tramping afterward," he said, "a long while afterward. I
don't propose to let you tramp in those worldly shoes." They were new
and brown and soft to look at--as soft as other people's gloves, he
thought.
"Don't dress for dinner," he said as they drew up in front of the
Midlothian Hotel. "And, I say, I expect it would be safer to dine here;
it's absolutely the last place where any of your people would look for
you."
The dress in which she rejoined him later was a walking-dress of dark
blue melting to a half transparency at neck and sleeves.
"I bought it at that shop," she said. "It isn't bad, is it? They said it
was a Paris model--and, anyhow, it fits."
He wanted to tell her that she looked adorable in it, and that she would
look adorable not only in a Paris model, but in a Whitechapel one. But
he didn't tell her this. Nor did he tell her much else. The dinner owed
to her any brightness that it showed when shelved as a memory. She
exerted herself to talk. And it was the talk of a lady to her dinner
partner--light, gay, and sparkling, anything but intimate--hardly
friendly, even; polite, pleasant, indifferent. He did not like it; he
did not like, either, his own inability to carry on the duet in the key
she had set, and at the same time he knew that he could not change the
key. The surge of the world was round them again, even though it was
only the world of the provincial haberdasher and the haberdasher's
provincial wife. The smooth, swift passage of laden waiters across the
thick carpets of the dining-room; the little tables gay with pink
sweet-peas and rosy-hued lamps; the women in smart blouses, most of them
sparkling beadily; the rare evening toilettes, worn in every case with
an air of conscious importance, as of one to whom wearing evening dress
was a rare and serious exception to the rule of life; the buzz of
conversation curiously softer and lower in pitch than the talk at the
Ritz and the Carlton--all made an atmosphere of opposition, an
atmosphere in which all that appeared socially impossible--which, under
the stars last night, had seemed natural, inevitable--the only thing to
do. This world to which he had brought her had, at least, this in common
with the world which dines at the Carlton and the Ritz, that it bristled
with the negation of what last night had seemed the simplest solution in
the world. But it had only seemed simple, as he now saw, because the
solution had been arrived at out of the world. Here, beyond any doubt,
was the antagonism to all that he and she had planned. This was the
world where the worst scandal is the unusual--where it would be less
socially blighting to steal another man's wife than to set off on a
tramp with a princess to whom you were tied neither by marriage nor by
kinship.
It was a lengthy silence in which he thought these things. She, in the
silence, had been making little patterns with bread-crumbs till the
waiter swept all away, made their table tidy, and brought the dessert.
She looked up from the table-cloth just in time to see Edward smile
grimly.
"What is it?" she asked, a little timidly.
"I was only thinking," he said, "what a two-penny halfpenny business
we've made of life, with our electric light and our motors and our ugly
houses and our civilization generally. A civilization replete with every
modern inconvenience! In the good old days nobody would have minded a
knight and a princess traveling through the world together, or even
around the world, for that matter. Whereas now. . . ."
She looked at him, gauging this thought. And he knew that he had said
enough to make a stupid woman say, "I thought you would want to back out
of it." What would she say? For a moment she said nothing. Then, sure of
herself as of him, she smiled and said:
"We're going to teach Nobody to mind . . . its own business."
And then he said what he had come near to being afraid she would say.
"You don't want to back out of it, then?" he said, and she shook her
head.
"No," she answered, slowly, and then, after a pause, again, "No."
"You are willing to go through the wood with your faithful knight,
Princess? He will be a faithful knight."
"Yes," she said, "I know."
And then suddenly he perceived what before had not been plain to
him--that the elopement that had seemed to offer so royal a road to all
that he really desired was not a road, but a barrier. That he was now in
a position far less advantageous than that of a man who meets a girl all
hedged around with the machinery of chaperonage, since, whereas the
courtship may, where there is chaperonage, evade and escape it, where
there is none the lover must himself supply its need--must, in fine, be
lover and chaperon in one. Far from placing himself in a position where
love-making would be easy, he had set himself where it was well-nigh
impossible. He who courts a lady in her own home, surrounded by all the
fences set up by custom and convention, can, at least, be sure that if
his courtship be unwelcome it will be rejected. The lady need not listen
unless she will. But when the princess rides through the wood with the
knight whom she has chosen to be her champion she must needs listen if
he chooses to speak. She can, of course, leave him and his championing,
but what sort of championship is it which drives the princess back to
the very dragon from which it rescued her? Edward saw, with dismal
exactness, the intolerable impossibilities of the situation. They would
go on--supposing her friends didn't interfere--as friends and comrades,
brother and sister, she more and more friendly, he more and more
tongue-tied, till at last every spark of the fire of the great
adventure was trampled out by the flat foot of habit.
She might--and probably would, since men and women invariably
misunderstand one another--believe his delicate reticences to be merely
the indications of a waning interest, and construe knightly chivalry
into mere indifference. If he made love to her--who could not get away
from the love-making without destroying that which made it possible--he
would be a presuming cad. If he didn't, what could she think but that he
regretted his bargain? As he sat there opposite his princess, alone with
her among the thickly thinning crowd, he wondered whether out of this
any happiness could come to them.
When he had proposed the elopement he had meant marriage; the incurable
temperamental generosity which had prompted him to offer her the help of
the escape, on her own terms, now seemed to him the grossest folly. Yet
how could he have held the pistol to her head, saying, "No marriage, no
elopement."
Her voice broke his reverie. "I am very tired," she said. "I think I'll
say good night. Do you mind?"
He almost fancied that her lip trembled a little, like a child's who is
unhappy.
"Of course you're tired," he said, "and, I say, you don't mind my not
having talked for the last few minutes? I've been thinking of
you--nothing else but you."
"Yes," said she, "it all looks very different here, as you say. Perhaps
it will look more different even than this to-morrow. Shall we start on
our tramp to-morrow--or shall I just go back and let's forget we ever
tried to do something out of a book? I think you will tell me honestly
to-morrow whether you think I had better go back."
"To-morrow," he said, looking into her eyes, "I will tell you everything
you wish to hear. We'll spend to-morrow in telling each other things.
Shall we? Good night, Princess. Sleep well, and dream of the open road."
"I shall probably," said the princess, "dream of my aunts."