One drawback about Pullmans (Ruth was thinking) is that the separate
chairs make it difficult to talk. And she was getting restless: if she
didn’t say something pretty soon she would begin to feel uncertain of
herself. The long melancholy howl of the engine, the gritty boxed-up
air (still smelling of the vaults under the Grand Central Station), the
hot plushy feel of the cushion prickling under her knees, the roll and
swing of the car, the dark ridges of hills, everything was depressing
and tedious. Ben was still absorbed in the morning paper--already
stale, she thought, for the afternoon sheets were out by now. She had
skimmed the magazines, a little irritated by the pictures of interiors
of wealthy country houses. She wished that such articles would also
include photographs of the number of servants necessary to keep
things so perfect. Of course it was easy enough for people like that
to have a Home in Good Taste: they just call in a decorator and he
fixes everything. But you yourself: how are you going to know what is
really Good Taste? Styles change so. As for the fiction, it sounded
as though it was written by people with adenoids. You could hear the
author biting his nails and snuffling. She had cleaned out her vanity
box, thrown away some old clippings and a dusty peppermint and stubs of
theatre tickets. And still Ben was lurking behind a screen of print.
Certainly he was the most stay-put of men: place him anywhere and there
he would remain until it was time for the next thing to happen.
She began filing briskly at her nails. Presently the newspaper
rustled uneasily. She leaned forward and rasped sharply, her soft
hand moving as capably as a violinist’s. The little sickening buzz
continued, and Ben folded the paper lengthwise and looked round it
like a man at a half-open door. His brown eyes were large and clear
behind tortoise-shell glasses. His eyebrows were delicately poised,
ready to rise, like guests preparing to get up from their chairs. In
his waistcoat pocket were two fountain pens, one black and one with
silver filigree on it. He looked faintly annoyed. Whatever he looked,
he always looked it faintly: dimly, sluggishly, somewhat. He was a
little bit stout, a little bit bald, a little bit tired, a little bit
prosperous. _Littlebit_ had been his nickname when she fell in love
with him and thought him such a passionate fellow. She used to like
the name, but had put it out of her mind when she found it too true.
Everything about him was rather, except only his eyes. They were quite.
In them, sometimes, you saw a far-off defiance. Something that had
always retreated, slipped behind corners, stood warily at half-open
doors, but by caution and prudence, not by timidity. Something that
went while the going was good.
“Ben,” she said. “Did you see that girl sitting at the next table in
the diner? The one in the black hat. She came in just before we left.”
He thought a moment. “No,” he said. “I was looking at the bill.”
“She went through here a while ago. She’s in the day coaches, I guess,
because this is the last of the Pullmans.”
No, thought Ben, this isn’t the last of the Pullmans, there’s another
one ahead of it. I noticed it specially when we got on: it’s called
_Godiva_ and reminded me to ask Ruth if she’d brought her bathing
suit.--But he refrained from correcting her, waiting patiently to hear
what was coming.
“Of course, I’m not sure, it’s so long since I’ve seen her, ages and
ages, but I think it was Joyce Clyde.”
Ben made a polite murmur of interested surprise, allowing his eyebrows
to stretch themselves a little and pursing his lips gently to show
attention. But the name meant nothing to him.
“I shouldn’t wonder if she’s on her way to the Island too. You
remember, she was there one summer when we were all children. I
wouldn’t have known her, but I saw her picture in a magazine not long
ago. She’s some kind of artist, I think. She always was a queer kid.”
Ben’s recollection of old days on the Island was mostly limited to a
strip of yellow shore. He remembered catboats and knife-edged grasses,
a dock with barnacled piles, learning to make a half-hitch in wet
ropes, and the freckled, gap-toothed faces of some other small boys.
He remembered splintery plank walks among masses of poison ivy, the
puckered white feet of a man who had been drowned, the sour stink of
his aquarium of hermit crabs, dead because he forgot to change their
water. He remembered an older boy who taught the small fry obscene
rhymes. The cheerful disgusting hazards of being young were now
safely over, thank goodness. The orderly exacting routine of business
was enough to keep a man amused. Twenty-one years is a long time:
yet turning the focus of memory a little more sharply he caught an
unexpected glimpse of a friendly fat waitress at the old wooden hotel
who used to bring him bowls of clam chowder; and some of the grown-ups
were still visible. But the small girls seemed to have evaporated,
fogged out. Even Ruth herself. He could only recall a distant shrilling
of hide-and-seek played after dusk among the sand hills, the running
flutter of pink cotton dresses. Why don’t little girls wear pink
nowadays, he wondered.
“Did she wear a pink dress?”
“Gracious, I don’t know. She had green eyes and was awfully shy. If
that _was_ her, she’s turned out more attractive than I would have
thought. Funny, she hasn’t bobbed her hair: I thought all artists were
supposed to do that.”
Ben wasn’t greatly interested. His private conviction was that the
party would be a bore anyhow: but he couldn’t very well return to the
newspaper while Ruth was talking. He took off his glasses and polished
them.
“What does her husband do?”
“Her husband? She hasn’t got one. I suppose she’s wedded to her art. I
don’t think she’s the type that’s attractive to men.”
Ruth regretted this when she had said it, because obviously a little
deduction on Ben’s part would have led him to her real thread of
thought. But he showed no sign of animation, patted her knee in a
soothing, proprietory way, and settled his coat round him like a dog
coiling for another nap.
“We’ll soon be there,” he said.
“I hope so. I’d forgotten it was such a long ride. It’ll be strange to
see the Island again. What a queer thing, George getting hold of the
old Richmond place. It’s been empty a long time, the family never went
back to it after the little girl (what was her name?) died.”
As though plunging into a tunnel the train drummed into a squall. Grey
slants of rain thrashed the windows, there were heavy explosions of
sound. Ruth was usually afraid of storms, but this one seemed to make
the long green car comfortable. The smooth hum of the train softened
the jagged edges of thunder. She would have liked a woman there to talk
to about Joyce. She had been cheerful in the certainty that her own hat
was the smartest on the train until Joyce (for certainly it was she)
entered the dining car. That curly black felt, with what an air she
carried it. There was something gipsyish about her: something finely
unconscious in her way of enjoying her lunch while every other woman
was watching her. Women run in a pack and hasten to ally themselves
against any other who seems to have secret funds of certainty. Those
who live from hand to mouth are always indignant at a private income.
Ruth knew Joyce at once as one of the lonely kind. While she had been
sitting there, apparently idle and half asleep, she had turned her
chair to command the aisle and was waiting intently to see her come
back through their car.
The delicious resentment that some women at once rouse in others! By
deep specialized instinct every woman in the car looked up as the girl
went by. Sitting there for several hours they had tacitly constituted
themselves a microcosm of Society, and now with professional shrewdness
took stock of the alien. No sculptor, no practised sensualist, could
have itemized her more fiercely. She was not “pretty,” but in some
strangely dangerous way she was foreign to their comfortable cowardice.
She was still untamed, unbroken. It was not fair, thought the plumper
ladies (though unaware they were thinking it), that a woman of nubile
age should still combine nymphlike grace with the gay insouciance of a
boy. She was carrying her hat in her hand, and the dark twist of her
uncropped hair annoyed them as much as, not long before, it would have
annoyed them to see it short. They marked the flexile straightness
of her figure, the hang and stuff of the skirt, the bend of foot and
ankle; exactly appraised, by the small visible slope of stocking, the
upper curves unseen. They noted the unbroken fall of her dark suit
from armpit to hem as she was swung sideways by a swerve of the train
and threw up one elbow to keep her balance. The ruddy young brakeman,
meeting her just then, steadied her politely with his hand. She smiled
as frankly as a lad. She didn’t even seem humiliated, Ruth thought, at
having to pass through all these Pullmans on her way to the day coaches.
But there was something deeper than that--something she couldn’t
profitably discuss with Ben. With the clairvoyance of woman she saw,
and resented, a creature somehow more detached and more determined
than herself. In a vague way, for which no words were possible, she
recognized a spirit not more happy but more finely unhappy; a spirit
concerned with those impassioned curiosities of life which Ruth knew
existed and yet knew not how to approach. She felt the shamed envy and
anger that some bitter listener in the audience always feels toward
the performer. There was something in that dark childish face and
alert reckless figure that made Ruth feel soft and frilly and powdered
with sugar. The girl was possessed by some essence, had some fatal
current passing through her--something which, if generally admitted,
would demand extensive revision of the comfortable world. That was
it, perhaps: she looked as though she knew that things most women
had agreed to regard as important, didn’t really matter. The Pullman
microcosm resented this, as an anthology of prose would resent a poem
that got into it by mistake. The only satisfaction it could have, and
the explanation of its pitiless appraisal, was the knowledge that this
poor creature too was mocked and fettered with a body, subject also to
the dear horrors of flesh.
With a sense of weariness and self-pity Ruth turned to the window
and saw, far off, the hard blue line of sea. They were emerging
from the storm, the train hummed and rocketed over marshes and
beside reedy lagoons still prickled by the rain. On that horizon lay
the memory of childhood to which she was now returning. The chief
satisfaction of revisiting juvenile surroundings is to feel superior
to that pitiable era: to appear, before one’s old companions, more
prosperous, circumstantial, handsome, and enviable than they might
have expected. But now even her gay little woollen sports hat seemed
to have lost its assurance. What right had a mere illustrator (and
riding in a day coach) with something proud and eager in her face,
to start all these troublesome thoughts? She remembered that even
as a child Joyce never really joined in their games but watched
apart with a shy unwillingness: a shyness which, if rubbed too hard,
could turn into bewildered rebellion. Ruth was always so intensely
conscious of the existence of other people that a merely random
speculation as to what her friends were doing could prevent her all
day long from concentrating on her own affairs. Others were more real
to her than herself. Now she was painfully haunted by that look of
conviction and fulfilment on the girl’s face. Joyce looked unhappy (she
consoled herself a little with that); but it was a thrilling kind of
unhappiness: an unhappiness scarcely to be distinguished from ecstasy.
She pondered about this, wondering if _she_ had ever looked like that?
One of her secret anxieties was that she herself was not passionate.
Was that, she sometimes wondered, why she and Ben had never had
children? In her absorption she practised an expression on her face
... “rapt” was the word that occurred to her to describe it. Ben,
reappearing from behind the paper, was alarmed by her appearance and
offered her a soda-mint tablet from the little bottle in his waistcoat
pocket.
The dense air of the car began to be alive. After the barrens of
pinewood and long upgrades over stony pasture, now the train careered
gloriously in the salty northern air, along beaches crusted with stale
foam. It cried aloud, its savage despairing chord: as though the
fierce engine knew that after all its furious burning labours, the
flashing uproar of its toil, its human employers would descend at their
destinations unfreed, unaltered, facing there as elsewhere the clumsy
comedies of life. Angrily it exulted along the bright dwindle of rails
which spread wide under the great wheels and narrowed again before and
behind. The telegraph poles came racing toward it, leaping up like tall
threatening men; one by one they were struck down and fled away. With
swift elbowing pistons and jets of silver steam the engine roared,
glorious in its task; glorious in its blind fidelity and passion,
caring nothing that all must be retraced in the opposite direction
to-morrow.
* * * * *
Joyce was standing in the vestibule of _Godiva_, smoking a cigarette.
She had been there a great part of the journey; fast trains always made
her mind too busy for sitting still. She had pacified the at first
disapproving young brakeman by getting out her sketchbook and making a
quick cartoon of him.
Not for many weeks had she been so unconsideringly happy. She never
thought of trains as hurrying toward something but rather fleeing
wildly _from_. Those great eloquent machines (she hated to have to
board a train without seeing the engine first) crouched ready for
flight like huge beasts breathing panic. They were symbols of the
universal terror; she trembled with excitement to feel the thrill of
escape--escape from anything. Escape, for the moment, from Time and
Space. She wondered how any one could ever sleep or be bored in a
train. You’d think their faces would be transfigured when they got out.
She hummed to herself as she stood alone in the vestibule. Life seemed
to be beginning all over again: her mind was freshly sensitized to the
oddity of human faces, to the colour and vitality of the country, the
strong swelling curves of the hills. I am flying, flying, she chanted;
I am flying from a dream. I am a little mad. My mind is fuller than
it’ll hold: all sorts of thoughts are slopping over the brim, getting
lost because there isn’t room for them. I must let them flow faster so
I can be aware of them all. What happens to the thoughts that get spilt
before you can quite seize them? I must ask George.... I wonder which
George it will be?
Once she had startled him by giving him a book she found in a
second-hand store, _The Four Georges_. For it amused her to insist
that there were four of him: George the Husband, George the Father,
George the Publicity Man, and then George the Fourth--_her_ George, the
troubled and groping dreamer, framed in an open window....
* * * * *
Go and see Granville, said the Advertising Agent to her. He’s getting
up a booklet for the L or somebody. He might be able to use some of
these drawings of yours. And because it was urgent he had given her the
address. Her knees were quivery as she turned the bend in the corridor,
looking for his number.
It was a sultry day, the door of the little office was open. There was
a window, high up at the back of the old building, looking over the
Brooklyn Bridge. He was leaning on the sill, the smoke of his pipe
drifted outward into that hot tawny light that hangs over the East
River on summer afternoons. At first he did not seem to hear her tap on
the glass panel; then he turned, glanced at her steadily and without
surprise. As he had no idea she was coming she thought perhaps he had
mistaken her for someone he knew.
“Look here,” he said, “I want to show you something.”
She put down her folder of drawings and crossed to the sill. He leaned
there in his shirt sleeves, pointing with the stem of his pipe, as
easily as though they were old friends.
“See those tall lance-headed openings in the piers of the Bridge? Did
you ever notice they look just like great cathedral windows? And that
pearl-blue light hanging in them, better than any stained glass.”
She was too surprised, too anxious about showing him her drawings, to
do more than murmur assent.
“I can tell you about it,” he said, “because I don’t know you. It isn’t
safe to tell people you know about beautiful things. Those are the
windows of my private cathedral.”
How often she had lived again that first encounter. The ring of feet
along the paved corridors, the blunt slam of elevator gates, the steady
tick of a typewriter in an adjoining office, telephones trilling here
and there in the big building like birds in an aviary, the murmur of
the streets rising up to them through warm heavy air. Always, in that
city, she was a little mad. Where such steep terraces cut stairways
on sky, where every tread falls upon some broken beauty poets are
too hurried to pick up, how can one be quite sane? God pity the man
(George said once) who has none of that madness in his heart.
I have a cathedral too, I have a cathedral too, she was repeating to
herself, but too excited to say it. With bungling fingers she untied
the portfolio, rummaged through the drawings, found the one of an aisle
of trees in Central Park where the wintry branches lace themselves into
an oriel.
He went through all the pictures. He only spoke twice.
“Who did these? You?” and then presently, “Here, this isn’t fair.
You’ve been trespassing in _my_ city.”
Then suddenly he paused, flushed, and became embarrassed. He became--as
she would have said afterward--George the Third. He spoke of the
Elevated Railroad’s limited appropriation for promotion, of the
peculiar problems of transportation publicity, asked what was her usual
price for art work, took her name and address.... Perhaps George the
Fourth would have died then and there, perished of cholera infantum at
the age of half an hour, never been heard of again except on a tablet
in the imaginary cathedral on Brooklyn Bridge ... but as she left the
office she shook so with purely nervous elation she had to stop by the
brass-rimmed letter chute in the hall. She was wishing she had the
courage to go back and ask him how soon the check could come through
(Will he mail it here? she thought. Oh, blessed chute!) ... and then he
came hurrying round the corner after her.
“Look here,” he said, with pink-browed uncertainty, “I can’t let you go
away like this. The family’s off in the country. I’m devilish lonely.
Will you have dinner with me and we can talk about New York?”
She was too amused and exultant to answer promptly. But George the
Fourth, looking anxiously from his bassinette, need not have been so
afraid she was going to refuse. Do artists who have just made their
first real sale decline a square meal?
“We’ll ride uptown in the L, to celebrate,” he pleaded. “There’s a bit
where it turns right into the sunset for a few blocks; if you stand on
the front platform it’s corking. And I know a place where we can get a
bottle of _asti spumante_....”
The lighted candles of the Italian basement where they dined. At first
his shyness had come back upon him: he seemed to feel that taking any
one but Phyllis out to dinner was an incredible truancy. Then, as they
looked anxiously at each other, some element in the blood broke free.
His mind came running to her like a child, like a boy lost in a world
of tall stone buildings and clamouring typewriters. His poor shivered
ideas just fitted into the fractured edges of her own. He had been well
drilled, but there was in him a little platoon that had broken away
from the draft and enlisted in the Foreign Legion.
“You know,” he said, “I never talked like this to any one before. What
is there about you that makes one say what he really thinks? My mind
feels as though someone had stolen its clothes while it was in bathing.
How will it be able to go back to work to-morrow?”
Warm golden candlelight and cold golden wine: the little table in the
corner was a yellow island in a sea of cigarette smoke, a sunny silence
in the comforting hum of other people’s chatter. In her own loneliness
she saw his mind like the naked footprint on Crusoe’s beach.
There must have been another footprint there too: the footprint of a
mischievous godling who runs the beaches of the world as naked as Man
Friday.
“The ideas I folded neatly and hid under a stone” (she could still hear
him saying it, there was something delightfully heavy in his way of
saying _stone_), “the ideas I thought you have to leave behind when you
go bathing in the river of life, I think maybe I shall go back and look
under that stone for them and see if they aren’t the most important of
all. I thought they were just clothes. Maybe they were my bathing suit.”
The figure of speech wasn’t quite limpid. There was perhaps a little
_asti spumante_ in it, and a few gassy bubbles of exaggeration. But she
understood what he meant. Ten, eleven years older than she, how young
he seemed.
He paused a while, getting younger every moment. He waved away a drift
of smoke.
“You must meet Phyllis,” he said.
Then he had found, later, that it wasn’t necessary, for she had known
Phyllis as a child. How small the world is, he said sadly. “Phyllis and
I were small, too,” she replied.
She wondered if there were four Phyllises also?
* * * * *
“Ten minutes to Dark Harbour,” said _Godiva’s_ porter, coming into
the vestibule with his whisk brush. She hardly noticed him dusting
her, she was thinking of George the Fourth, the perplexing phantom
she had accidentally startled into life. She felt for him a strange,
almost maternal tenderness; an amusement at some of his scruples, an
admiration at the natural grace of his mind when he allowed himself to
be imaginative. But behind these, a kind of fear: for George the Fourth
had grown gigantic in her dreams; sometimes, in panic, she realized how
much she thought about him. He was so completely hers because he was
hidden in the securest of hiding places--inside a person who belonged
to someone else. So she couldn’t resist the invitation to go down to
the Island, to renew memories of childhood ... and the most interesting
of those ghostly children, she thought, would be George the Fourth,
only twelve months old. She had had to remind herself, sometimes,
that the first three Georges did belong to others ... but if you have
to keep reminding yourself of a thing, perhaps it isn’t so. For the
amazement had been mutual. She had awakened George the Fourth, but he
had awakened someone too.... And frightened by these thoughts (it had
been her lonely pride to stand so securely on her own feet) she was
flying from the dream of George to George himself--and Phyllis.
Over the wide sea meadows the train sounded its deep bluster of
warning: a voice of triumph, a voice of pain, announcing reunions
that cannot unite, separations that cannot divide. And George
Granville--all four of him, at that moment--driving over the long
trestle to the mainland, heard it from afar, and in sheer bravado
echoed the cry with his horn.
X
In the bathtub Phyllis wondered, for the first time in her life,
whether she was “literary.” She sat soaping her knees and revelling in
coolness that came about her waist in a perfection of liquid embrace.
She found herself--perhaps because her eye had fallen on the volume
in the den, while she and George were bickering--thinking about
Shakespeare. Now, in an intimate understanding that many an erudite
scholar has never attained, she perceived what the man with a beard
was driving at. The plays, which she had always politely respected as
well-bred women do respect serious institutions, were something more
than gusts of fantastic tinsel interspersed with foul jokes--jokes she
knew were foul without understanding them. They were parables of the
High Cost of Living--the cost to brain and heart and spirit of this
wildly embarrassing barter called life. The tormented obstreperous
behaviour of his people was genuine, after all: they were creatures
in a dream, like herself; a dream more true than reality. She could
have walked on in any of the plays and taken a part without sense of
incongruity. She felt as if she were a phantom in one of the pieces: a
creature in the mind of some unguessable dramatist who had mysteriously
decided to make a change in the plot. She thought how she and her
friends had sometimes sat through Shakespeare matinées, subconsciously
comforting themselves with the notion that real people don’t behave
that way.
Why, Bill, you poor old devil (she said to him), how you must have
suffered to be able to write like that. It made her feel quite tranquil
by comparison. But of course her own particular absurdities had special
kinks in them that were unique: even He would have been surprised. But
he would have understood.
A soft flow of air had begun to move after the storm. The big maple
tree, just outside the bathroom window, was gold-plated in the dropping
sun. The window was above the bath and the ripple of those gilded
leaves reflected a gentle shimmer into the porcelain tub. Her shiny
knees were glossed with pale green light. Shakespeare would have liked
that. She fished for the soap, which slipped round behind her like a
young thought.
I suppose that as long as I was 99 and 44/100 pure I never could
appreciate him. But I don’t know whether I altogether enjoy people
who understand so well. That’s the trouble about George: he’s
getting weirdly acute, poor soul. Now, Mr. Martin: he looks divinely
sympathetic, but I don’t think he quite.... People wonder why one
always confides in those who don’t understand. But of course! To
confide in people who _do_ is too terrible. Giving yourself away--yes,
exactly: you no longer are keeper of your own gruesome self. That’s why
the Catholic notion is so sound: confession to God is nothing at all,
you know He doesn’t care. But to confess to a priest ... golly, that
must take courage.
She lay down for one last lustral wallow, closing her eyes with a calm
sensation of new dignity and refreshment. The cool water held her in
peaceful lightness, lifting away whatever was agitated and strange. For
a moment body and spirit were harmoniously one, floating in a pure eddy
of Time. I feel like a nun, she thought. She rose, trickling, threw the
big towel round her shoulders, and studied herself in the long mirror.
Really, I’m not much more than a child, she mused happily, admiring the
slender, short-haired figure in the glass. Or perhaps I feel like a
harlot ... a courtesan, nicer-sounding word. Discarding the towel she
struck a humorous parody of the Venus Aphrodite attitude, and then felt
a little shocked. She could feel her cheeks warming. She remembered
George’s coarse remark when they saw the statue. “It’s no use,” he
said. “Two hands can’t do it. Any one as timid as that needs three.”
She sang a little refrain, trying different tunes for it. She couldn’t
remember whether she had heard it, or just made it up:
_What did Mrs. Shakespeare do
When William went away?_
The soft flutter of maple leaves outside the window was like a soothing
whisper. From the other side of the house she could hear the click of
croquet mallets and balls. Time for the children to have their supper,
or they won’t be finished before the others get here. Thank goodness it
was cooler, Lizzie wouldn’t be so harassed. Wrapping her silk kimono
round her, she looked out of the window. Lizzie’s flag was still
flying. With a rough delicacy of her own, the cook did not like to run
out her private washing on the family line, so she had strung a cord
from the kitchen door to a branch of the maple tree. There, floating
like a hoist of signal buntings, were Lizzie’s personalia: all the more
conspicuous for her mistaken modesty. They were indeed (it was George
who had said it) like a string of code flags: a blue apron, a yellow
shirt, a pair of appalling red breeches. George always wanted to know
to whom Lizzie might be signalling with these homely pennants. They
_are_ a kind of signal, Phyllis thought. A signal that life goes on,
notifying any other household within eyeshot that here too the humble
routine of kitchen and washtub and ironing board, of roof and meat and
sleep, triumphs in the end over the wildest poet’s dream. Shakespeare
would have relished them, and been pleased to see these bright ensigns
hoisted so frankly in the yellow air.
Dressed in a gauzy drift of white and silver, she paused at the
cushioned bay windows by the head of the stair. Her body enjoyed that
mixed feeling of snug enclosure and airy freedom which is the triumph
of feminine costume. Even her inward self shared something of this
sensation: within the softly sparkling raiment of thought she was
aware of her compact kernel of identity--tranquil for the moment, but
privately apprehensive and alert. On the oval grass plot Martin was
playing croquet with the children. Janet, nicely adjusting two tangent
balls with a bare brown foot, gave them a well-aimed swipe. Phyllis
heard the sharp wooden impact and Martin’s cry of good-humoured dismay
as his globe went spinning across the turf, leaving a darker stripe on
the wet lawn. It bounded over the gravel and into the bushes, right by
the corner where she had first seen him. She watched him chase it, lay
it on the edge of the turf, and drive it back. How graceful he was! He
raised his head with a little unconscious lift of satisfaction as he
watched the ball roll where he wanted it to lie.
A film seemed to have been skimmed from her eyes. Perhaps it was that
level stream of evening light: the figures moved in a godlike element
of lustre: every motion was perfect, expressed the loveliness for
which life was intended, was unconscious and exact as the movements
of animals. They were immersed in their game as though there were no
past, no future: she felt she could watch them for ever. Martin’s face,
gravely intent, bent over his ball. She saw the straight slope of his
back against the screen of shrubs. The mallet clicked, there was a
sharp tinkle as the ball went through the middle hoop, touching the
little bell that hung there. How can any one look so charming and yet
be so hard to talk to?
Through the scooped hollow of the dunes, catching tawny sparks from the
sand, violet dazzles from the sea, the cleansed radiance of sunset
came pouring in. The children’s bare legs splashed in brightness as
though they were paddling; honey-coloured light parted and closed again
about their ankles, the wet shadows dripped and trailed under their
feet. The house, growing dusky, was a dyke stemmed in the onset of that
pure flood. It caught and held as much darkness as it could; the rest
went whirling out. As if in answer to the little croquet bell, the old
clock in the hall whirred and jangled six hoarse clanking strokes. They
eddied a moment and then were whiffed away by the strong, impalpable
current that seemed to be sweeping through. You could tell, by the dull
sound, that the gong was rusty. No wonder, a house by the seashore,
empty so long.
After the cough of the clock silence came up the shaft of the stairway.
Not themselves alone, but the house too, had its part in everything.
She could feel its whole fabric attentive and watchful, and wondered
how she could have been heedless of this before. A house of ugly
pattern, with yellow wainscots and fretsawed mantels and panes of
gaudy glass: but she guessed now, what one can only learn under
strange roofs, how precious houses are. And how wary they have to be,
fortresses against fierce powers, sunshine, darkness, gale. Life has
flowed through them: clocks have chimed, logs crumbled, stairs creaked
under happy feet. These whispers are all they have to treasure: if you
leave them alone too long they get morbid, full of sullen fancies. She
remembered herself, visiting that house as a child, once seated at this
same window, watching others play croquet ... _was_ it memory, or only
the trick of the mind that splits the passing instant and makes one
live it twice?
“Come, children!” she called from the window. “Time for your supper.”
She went slowly down the stairs. Be calm, be calm, she said to herself;
this too will pass; this isn’t Shakespeare but only the children’s
supper time. But the flow of her blood warmed and quickened as water
grows hot while you wait with your hand under the bathroom faucet.
On the landing, where a shot of sunlight came arrowing through from
the sitting-room window, she waited to adjust a slipper. She could
hear them on the gravel outside. If he came in now he would find her
just so, gilded and silvered like a Christmas card. But their voices
remained on the veranda where the children’s meal was laid. She could
not afford to wait long. Now, now, were a few precious moments. This
was a dream: and dreams must be recorded at once or they vanish for
ever.
She heard one of them sneeze. It was Janet: she knew all their sneezes
and coughs by ear. Yes, they probably _have_ caught cold, bathing
in that storm. And they have to sleep outdoors to-night, too: on
the porch, because of this infernal Picnic. It’s much colder; the
thermometer must have dropped twenty degrees. She hurried to get the
sweaters from the cupboard under the stairs.
They were sitting at the veranda table, with milk and bread and jam.
Mr. Martin was in the fourth chair. He looked as though he too was
ready for supper.
“Well, chickabiddies, did you have a good bathe? I hope you didn’t
catch cold. Here, put on your sweaters.”
They looked up at her gaily. Their upper lips were wet and whitish.
“How pretty you look!” exclaimed Janet.
She had meant to toss him a brief, clear, friendly little gaze; an
orderly hostess-to-pleasant-guest regard; but this from Janet startled
her. She could see that he was holding her in his eye, meditating the
accuracy of Janet’s comment. She did not feel ready to face him.
“Thank you,” she said lightly. And added, “Wipe your mouths after
drinking.”
“He says that’s a milk moustache,” cried Rose, gesturing to the
visitor. “It makes you healthy.”
Phyllis made a clucking reproach with her tongue.
“You mustn’t point. It’s not polite to say _he_. Say ‘Mr. Martin.’ Jay
dear, after supper run and put away the mallets. I’ve told you, I don’t
know how often, not to leave them lying on the lawn.... Oh, not _you_,
Mr. Martin. Janet’ll do it after her supper.”
But he was up already and gone to get them. I suppose this perpetual
correcting sounds silly to him, she thought. But how can I help it?
George never disciplines them.
“It makes him hungry to watch us eat,” said Sylvia. “He wants some
supper.”
“He’s joking with you. We’ll have ours by and by.”
She followed him into the garden. As she put her crisp silver slipper
on the tread of the veranda steps she saw how the foot widened slightly
to carry her weight. How terribly I’m noticing things. Something
flickered at the corner of her eye: she suspected it was Lizzie, at the
pantry window, trying to attract her attention. A throng of trifles
jostled at the door of her mind, tapping for admission. Probably the
ice has given out, after such heat. Well, then, they’ll have to do
without cocktails. I can fix the sandwiches to-night when everyone’s in
bed. If it turns chilly there won’t be enough blankets. Nounou won’t be
back until late, I must get the children started to bed before.... I
_won’t_ think of these things.
He had put away the croquet implements.
“Thank you. We’ve just time for a little stroll before the others get
here.--I hope you’ll like Mr. and Mrs. Brook. They’re extremely nice,
really, but a bit heavy.”
“Perhaps they eat too much.” He said it with the air of one courteously
offering a helpful suggestion.
She had wanted, wanted so to be alone with him: she had a desperate
feeling that there were urgent things to be said, and now she could
utter nothing. Her mind ran zigzagging beside her, like a questing dog,
while she tried to steer their talk into some channel of reality. Her
thoughts kept crowding massively under her uneasy words, pushing them
out before they were ready, cutting into her speech like italics in a
page of swarthy Roman type.
“We all eat too much in hot weather, I dare say. _Oh, if I could only
write him a letter I could make him understand. He’s so sophisticated,
I suppose the quaint things he says are his way of making fun of me.
Why did I suggest our walking like this? You can’t see a person’s face
when you’re walking side by side. And if we go round the path again,
Lizzie will get me from the pantry._ Let’s sit down on the bench.”
“It’s wet, it’ll spoil your pretty skirt.”
Skirt!... What a word for this mist of silvery tissue she had put on
specially for him....
“So it is. Well, let’s see what the storm has done to the roses.”
The little walk under the trellis was flaked with wet petals.
“Poor darlings, there’s not much left of them now. _If Shakespeare was
here I should feel the same way. Speechless. Why, he’s like a god:
lovely to think about, impossible to talk to. He doesn’t give anything,
just absorbs you: you feel like a drop of ink on a blotter._ I have a
horrid suspicion that the ice has given out, you mustn’t mind if your
cocktail is warm.”
He kept looking at her in brief glances. Each time she met them it was
like getting a letter in some familiar handwriting but stamped with a
strange postmark.
“Are they better cold?”
_I give up, I give up. It’s no use. I can’t even think. There’s some
sort of veil, mist, between us. He_ is _a kind of god. He’s brightness,
beauty. Every movement he makes is a revelation and a question. How can
I speak to him when all I want is to love him. There’s nothing earthy,
nothing gross about this. It’s lovelier than anything I ever dreamed
of. And if I tried to tell any one it would sound like tawdry farce...._
Dimly she divined what lay between them, what always lies between
men and gods, making them such embarrassed companions--the whole of
life, the actual functions of living; the sense of absurdity (enemy of
all tender beauty); trained necessities for silence, that darken the
intuitions of the soul.
_It’s as impossible as--as the New Testament. I feel like Christmas
Eve: there’s a new Me being born. You can’t have a Nativity without
pangs. And not even any one to bring me frankincense and myrrh...._
She stopped, picked one of the late rosebuds, and put it in his
lapel. She checked a frightened impulse to tell him that she named
the baby Rose because it was her favourite flower and she looked so
like a rosebud when she was born. This was courage, because to say it
would have carried on the doomed conversation one paragraph farther
in safety. To any one else she would have said it. But now she spoke
shakenly, from far within.
“You’re not easy to talk to--Martin.”
His face changed, he looked less anxious. He took her hand. She found
herself not surprised: it seemed entirely natural. She felt his fingers
lace into hers. Just as Janet does, she thought.
“I get frightened when people talk to me,” he said.
She looked at him, worshipping. The bad spell was broken. Instantly
she felt they could communicate. He was frightened too--the precious!
Over his shoulder she caught sight of the little old-fashioned weather
vane on the stable, a gilded galloping horse with flowing tail. Always
racing in blue emptiness and never getting anywhere. Like Time itself;
like this marvellous instant, so agonizingly reached, that could never
come again. No one who knew her in her daily rote would quite have
recognized her then as she looked into his eyes. She was completely
herself, born again in innocence, in the instinctive yearning for what
she knew was good. The unknown ripeness of woman woke for an instant
from its long drug of peevish days, small decisions, goaded nothings.
Humbled, purified, bewildered, she saw the dark face of Love, the god
too errant for heaven and who suffers on earth like a man.
“Martin, I love you.”
“I love you too,” he said politely.
Beyond the stable she heard the sound of the car.