had taken against the little waves--cut lemons and flasks prevailed, one
lady lay full length in a deck chair with a handkerchief over her face,
and a very broad resolute man in a bright brown "touristy" suit walked all
the way from England to France along the deck, with his legs as widely
apart as Providence permitted. These were all excellent precautions, and
nobody was ill. The personally-conducted party pursued the conductor about
the deck with inquiries, in a manner that suggested to Helen's mind the
rather vulgar image of hens with a piece of bacon rind, until at last he
went into hiding below. And the young man with the thin volume of poetry
stood at the stern watching England receding, looking rather lonely and
sad to Miss Winchelsea's eye.
And then came Calais and tumultuous novelties, and the young man had not
forgotten Miss Winchelsea's hold-all and the other little things. All
three girls, though they had passed Government examinations in French to
any extent, were stricken with a dumb shame of their accents, and the
young man was very useful. And he did not intrude. He put them in a
comfortable carriage and raised his hat and went away. Miss Winchelsea
thanked him in her best manner--a pleasing, cultivated manner--and Fanny
said he was "nice" almost before he was out of earshot. "I wonder what he
can be," said Helen. "He's going to Italy, because I noticed green tickets
in his book." Miss Winchelsea almost told them of the poetry, and decided
not to do so. And presently the carriage windows seized hold upon them and
the young man was forgotten. It made them feel that they were doing an
educated sort of thing to travel through a country whose commonest
advertisements were in idiomatic French, and Miss Winchelsea made
unpatriotic comparisons because there were weedy little sign-board
advertisements by the rail side instead of the broad hoardings that deface
the landscape in our land. But the north of France is really uninteresting
country, and after a time Fanny reverted to Hare's _Walks_, and Helen
initiated lunch. Miss Winchelsea awoke out of a happy reverie; she had
been trying to realise, she said, that she was actually going to Rome, but
she perceived at Helen's suggestion that she was hungry, and they lunched
out of their baskets very cheerfully. In the afternoon they were tired and
silent until Helen made tea. Miss Winchelsea might have dozed, only she
knew Fanny slept with her mouth open; and as their fellow-passengers were
two rather nice, critical-looking ladies of uncertain age--who knew French
well enough to talk it--she employed herself in keeping Fanny awake. The
rhythm of the train became insistent, and the streaming landscape outside
became at last quite painful to the eye. They were already dreadfully
tired of travelling before their night's stoppage came.
The stoppage for the night was brightened by the appearance of the young
man, and his manners were all that could be desired and his French quite
serviceable.
His coupons availed for the same hotel as theirs, and by chance, as it
seemed, he sat next Miss Winchelsea at the _table d'hôte._ In spite
of her enthusiasm for Rome, she had thought out some such possibility very
thoroughly, and when he ventured to make a remark upon the tediousness of
travelling--he let the soup and fish go by before he did this--she did not
simply assent to his proposition, but responded with another. They were
soon comparing their journeys, and Helen and Fanny were cruelly overlooked
in the conversation.. It was to be the same journey, they found; one day
for the galleries at Florence--"from what I hear," said the young man, "it
is barely enough,"--and the rest at Rome. He talked of Rome very
pleasantly; he was evidently quite well read, and he quoted Horace about
Soracte. Miss Winchelsea had "done" that book of Horace for her
matriculation, and was delighted to cap his quotation. It gave a sort of
tone to things, this incident--a touch of refinement to mere chatting.
Fanny expressed a few emotions, and Helen interpolated a few sensible
remarks, but the bulk of the talk on the girls' side naturally fell to
Miss Winchelsea.
Before they reached Rome this young man was tacitly of their party. They
did not know his name nor what he was, but it seemed he taught, and Miss
Winchelsea had a shrewd idea he was an extension lecturer. At any rate he
was something of that sort, something gentlemanly and refined without
being opulent and impossible. She tried once or twice to ascertain whether
he came from Oxford or Cambridge, but he missed her timid opportunities.
She tried to get him to make remarks about those places to see if he would
say "come up" to them instead of "go down,"--she knew that was how you
told a 'Varsity man. He used the word "'Varsity"--not university--in quite
the proper way.
They saw as much of Mr. Ruskin's Florence as the brief time permitted; he
met them in the Pitti Gallery and went round with them, chatting brightly,
and evidently very grateful for their recognition. He knew a great deal
about art, and all four enjoyed the morning immensely. It was fine to go
round recognising old favourites and finding new beauties, especially
while so many people fumbled helplessly with Baedeker. Nor was he a bit of
a prig, Miss Winchelsea said, and indeed she detested prigs. He had a
distinct undertone of humour, and was funny, for example, without being
vulgar, at the expense of the quaint work of Beato Angelico. He had a
grave seriousness beneath it all, and was quick to seize the moral lessons
of the pictures. Fanny went softly among these masterpieces; she admitted
"she knew so little about them," and she confessed that to her they were
"all beautiful." Fanny's "beautiful" inclined to be a little monotonous,
Miss Winchelsea thought. She had been quite glad when the last sunny Alp
had vanished, because of the staccato of Fanny's admiration. Helen said
little, but Miss Winchelsea had found her a trifle wanting on the
aesthetic side in the old days and was not surprised; sometimes she
laughed at the young man's hesitating, delicate jests and sometimes she
didn't, and sometimes she seemed quite lost to the art about them in the
contemplation of the dresses of the other visitors.
At Rome the young man was with them intermittently. A rather "touristy"
friend of his took him away at times. He complained comically to Miss
Winchelsea. "I have only two short weeks in Rome," he said, "and my friend
Leonard wants to spend a whole day at Tivoli looking at a waterfall."
"What is your friend Leonard?" asked Miss Winchelsea abruptly.
"He's the most enthusiastic pedestrian I ever met," the young man
replied--amusingly, but a little unsatisfactorily, Miss Winchelsea
thought.
They had some glorious times, and Fanny could not think what they would
have done without him. Miss Winchelsea's interest and Fanny's enormous
capacity for admiration were insatiable. They never flagged--through
pictures and sculpture galleries, immense crowded churches, ruins and
museums, Judas trees and prickly pears, wine carts and palaces, they
admired their way unflinchingly. They never saw a stone pine or a
eucalyptus but they named and admired it; they never glimpsed Soracte but
they exclaimed. Their common ways were made wonderful by imaginative play.
"Here Caesar may have walked," they would say. "Raphael may have seen
Soracte from this very point." They happened on the tomb of Bibulus. "Old
Bibulus," said the young man. "The oldest monument of Republican Rome!"
said Miss Winchelsea.
"I'm dreadfully stupid," said Fanny, "but who _was_ Bibulus?"
There was a curious little pause.
"Wasn't he the person who built the wall?" said Helen.
The young man glanced quickly at her and laughed. "That was Balbus," he
said. Helen reddened, but neither he nor Miss Winchelsea threw any light
upon Fanny's ignorance about Bibulus.
Helen was more taciturn than the other three, but then she was always
taciturn, and usually she took care of the tram tickets and things like
that, or kept her eye on them if the young man took them, and told him
where they were when he wanted them. Glorious times they had, these young
people, in that pale brown cleanly city of memories that was once the
world. Their only sorrow was the shortness of the time. They said indeed
that the electric trams and the '70 buildings, and that criminal
advertisement that glares upon the Forum, outraged their aesthetic
feelings unspeakably; but that was only part of the fun. And indeed Rome
is such a wonderful place that it made Miss Winchelsea forget some of her
most carefully prepared enthusiasms at times, and Helen, taken unawares,
would suddenly admit the beauty of unexpected things. Yet Fanny and Helen
would have liked a shop window or so in the English quarter if Miss
Winchelsea's uncompromising hostility to all other English visitors had
not rendered that district impossible.
The intellectual and aesthetic fellowship of Miss Winchelsea and the
scholarly young man passed insensibly towards a deeper feeling. The
exuberant Fanny did her best to keep pace with their recondite admiration
by playing her "beautiful" with vigour, and saying "Oh! _let's_ go,"
with enormous appetite whenever a new place of interest was mentioned. But
Helen developed a certain want of sympathy towards the end that
disappointed Miss Winchelsea a little. She refused to see "anything" in
the face of Beatrice Cenci--Shelley's Beatrice Cenci!--in the Barberini
Gallery; and one day, when they were deploring the electric trams, she
said rather snappishly that "people must get about somehow, and it's
better than torturing horses up these horrid little hills." She spoke of
the Seven Hills of Rome as "horrid little hills "!
And the day they went on the Palatine--though Miss Winchelsea did not know
of this--she remarked suddenly to Fanny, "Don't hurry like that, my dear;
_they_ don't want us to overtake them. And we don't say the right
things for them when we _do_ get near."
"I wasn't trying to overtake them," said Fanny, slackening her excessive
pace; "I wasn't indeed." And for a minute she was short of breath.
But Miss Winchelsea had come upon happiness. It was only when she came to
look back across an intervening tragedy that she quite realised how happy
she had been pacing among the cypress-shadowed ruins, and exchanging the
very highest class of information the human mind can possess, the most
refined impressions it is possible to convey. Insensibly emotion crept
into their intercourse, sunning itself openly and pleasantly at last when
Helen's modernity was not too near. Insensibly their interest drifted from
the wonderful associations about them to their more intimate and personal
feelings. In a tentative way information was supplied; she spoke
allusively of her school, of her examination successes, of her gladness
that the days of "Cram" were over. He made it quite clear that he also was
a teacher. They spoke of the greatness of their calling, of the necessity
of sympathy to face its irksome details, of a certain loneliness they
sometimes felt.
That was in the Colosseum, and it was as far as they got that day, because
Helen returned with Fanny--she had taken her into the upper galleries. Yet
the private dreams of Miss Winchelsea, already vivid and concrete enough,
became now realistic in the highest degree. She figured that pleasant
young man lecturing in the most edifying way to his students, herself
modestly prominent as his intellectual mate and helper; she figured a
refined little home, with two bureaus, with white shelves of high-class
books, and autotypes of the pictures of Rossetti and Burne Jones, with
Morris's wall-papers and flowers in pots of beaten copper. Indeed she
figured many things. On the Pincio the two had a few precious moments
together, while Helen marched Fanny off to see the _muro Torto_, and
he spoke at once plainly. He said he hoped their friendship was only
beginning, that he already found her company very precious to him, that
indeed it was more than that.
He became nervous, thrusting at his glasses with trembling fingers as
though he fancied his emotions made them unstable. "I should of course,"
he said, "tell you things about myself. I know it is rather unusual my
speaking to you like this. Only our meeting has been so accidental--or
providential--and I am snatching at things. I came to Rome expecting a
lonely tour ... and I have been so very happy, so very happy. Quite
recently I have found myself in a position--I have dared to think----,
And----"
He glanced over his shoulder and stopped. He said "Demn!" quite
distinctly--and she did not condemn him for that manly lapse into
profanity. She looked and saw his friend Leonard advancing. He drew
nearer; he raised his hat to Miss Winchelsea, and his smile was almost a
grin. "I've been looking for you everywhere, Snooks," he said. "You
promised to be on the Piazza steps half-an-hour ago."
Snooks! The name struck Miss Winchelsea like a blow in the face. She did
not hear his reply. She thought afterwards that Leonard must have
considered her the vaguest-minded person. To this day she is not sure
whether she was introduced to Leonard or not, nor what she said to him. A
sort of mental paralysis was upon her. Of all offensive surnames--Snooks!
Helen and Fanny were returning, there were civilities, and the young men
were receding. By a great effort she controlled herself to face the
inquiring eyes of her friends. All that afternoon she lived the life of a
heroine under the indescribable outrage of that name, chatting, observing,
with "Snooks" gnawing at her heart. From the moment that it first rang
upon her ears, the dream of her happiness was prostrate in the dust. All
the refinement she had figured was ruined and defaced by that cognomen's
unavoidable vulgarity.
What was that refined little home to her now, spite of autotypes, Morris
papers, and bureaus? Athwart it in letters of fire ran an incredible
inscription: "Mrs. Snooks." That may seem a little thing to the reader,
but consider the delicate refinement of Miss Winchelsea's mind. Be as
refined as you can and then think of writing yourself down:--"Snooks." She
conceived herself being addressed as Mrs. Snooks by all the people she
liked least, conceived the patronymic touched with a vague quality of
insult. She figured a card of grey and silver bearing 'Winchelsea'
triumphantly effaced by an arrow, Cupid's arrow, in favour of "Snooks."
Degrading confession of feminine weakness! She imagined the terrible
rejoicings of certain girl friends, of certain grocer cousins from whom
her growing refinement had long since estranged her. How they would make
it sprawl across the envelope that would bring their sarcastic
congratulations. Would even his pleasant company compensate her for that?
"It is impossible," she muttered; "impossible! _Snooks!_"
She was sorry for him, but not so sorry as she was for herself. For him
she had a touch of indignation. To be so nice, so refined, while all the
time he was "Snooks," to hide under a pretentious gentility of demeanour
the badge sinister of his surname seemed a sort of treachery. To put it in
the language of sentimental science she felt he had "led her on."
There were, of course, moments of terrible vacillation, a period even when
something almost like passion bid her throw refinement to the winds. And
there was something in her, an unexpurgated vestige of vulgarity that made
a strenuous attempt at proving that Snooks was not so very bad a name
after all. Any hovering hesitation flew before Fanny's manner, when Fanny
came with an air of catastrophe to tell that she also knew the horror.
Fanny's voice fell to a whisper when she said _Snooks_. Miss
Winchelsea would not give him any answer when at last, in the Borghese,
she could have a minute with him; but she promised him a note.
She handed him that note in the little book of poetry he had lent her, the
little book that had first drawn them together. Her refusal was ambiguous,
allusive. She could no more tell him why she rejected him than she could
have told a cripple of his hump. He too must feel something of the
unspeakable quality of his name. Indeed he had avoided a dozen chances of
telling it, she now perceived. So she spoke of "obstacles she could not
reveal"--"reasons why the thing he spoke of was impossible." She addressed
the note with a shiver, "E.K. Snooks."
Things were worse than she had dreaded; he asked her to explain. How
_could_ she explain? Those last two days in Rome were dreadful. She
was haunted by his air of astonished perplexity. She knew she had given
him intimate hopes, she had not the courage to examine her mind thoroughly
for the extent of her encouragement. She knew he must think her the most
changeable of beings. Now that she was in full retreat, she would not even
perceive his hints of a possible correspondence. But in that matter he did
a thing that seemed to her at once delicate and romantic. He made a
go-between of Fanny. Fanny could not keep the secret, and came and told
her that night under a transparent pretext of needed advice. "Mr. Snooks,"
said Fanny, "wants to write to me. Fancy! I had no idea. But should I let
him?" They talked it over long and earnestly, and Miss Winchelsea was
careful to keep the veil over her heart. She was already repenting his
disregarded hints. Why should she not hear of him sometimes--painful
though his name must be to her? Miss Winchelsea decided it might be
permitted, and Fanny kissed her good-night with unusual emotion. After she
had gone Miss Winchelsea sat for a long time at the window of her little
room. It was moonlight, and down the street a man sang "Santa Lucia" with
almost heart-dissolving tenderness... She sat very still.
She breathed a word very softly to herself. The word was "_Snooks_."
Then she got up with a profound sigh, and went to bed. The next morning he
said to her meaningly, "I shall hear of you through your friend."
Mr. Snooks saw them off from Rome with that pathetic interrogative
perplexity still on his face, and if it had not been for Helen he would
have retained Miss Winchelsea's hold-all in his hand as a sort of
encyclopaedic keepsake. On their way back to England Miss Winchelsea on
six separate occasions made Fanny promise to write to her the longest of
long letters. Fanny, it seemed, would be quite near Mr. Snooks. Her new
school--she was always going to new schools--would be only five miles from
Steely Bank, and it was in the Steely Bank Polytechnic, and one or two
first-class schools, that Mr. Snooks did his teaching. He might even see
her at times. They could not talk much of him--she and Fanny always spoke
of "him," never of Mr. Snooks--because Helen was apt to say unsympathetic
things about him. Her nature had coarsened very much, Miss Winchelsea
perceived, since the old Training College days; she had become hard and
cynical. She thought he had a weak face, mistaking refinement for weakness
as people of her stamp are apt to do, and when she heard his name was
Snooks, she said she had expected something of the sort. Miss Winchelsea
was careful to spare her own feelings after that, but Fanny was less
circumspect.
The girls parted in London, and Miss Winchelsea returned, with a new
interest in life, to the Girls' High School in which she had been an
increasingly valuable assistant for the last three years. Her new interest
in life was Fanny as a correspondent, and to give her a lead she wrote her
a lengthy descriptive letter within a fortnight of her return. Fanny
answered, very disappointingly. Fanny indeed had no literary gift, but it
was new to Miss Winchelsea to find herself deploring the want of gifts in
a friend. That letter was even criticised aloud in the safe solitude of
Miss Winchelsea's study, and her criticism, spoken with great bitterness,
was "Twaddle!" It was full of just the things Miss Winchelsea's letter had
been full of, particulars of the school. And of Mr. Snooks, only this
much: "I have had a letter from Mr. Snooks, and he has been over to see me
on two Saturday afternoons running. He talked about Rome and you; we both
talked about you. Your ears must have burnt, my dear..."
Miss Winchelsea repressed a desire to demand more explicit information,
and wrote the sweetest, long letter again. "Tell me all about yourself,
dear. That journey has quite refreshed our ancient friendship, and I do so
want to keep in touch with you." About Mr. Snooks she simply wrote on the
fifth page that she was glad Fanny had seen him, and that if he
_should_ ask after her, she was to be remembered to him _very
kindly_ (underlined). And Fanny replied most obtusely in the key of
that "ancient friendship," reminding Miss Winchelsea of a dozen foolish
things of those old schoolgirl days at the Training College, and saying
not a word about Mr. Snooks!
For nearly a week Miss Winchelsea was so angry at the failure of Fanny as
a go-between that she could not write to her. And then she wrote less
effusively, and in her letter she asked point-blank, "Have you seen Mr.
Snooks?" Fanny's letter was unexpectedly satisfactory. "I _have_ seen
Mr. Snooks," she wrote, and having once named him she kept on about him;
it was all Snooks--Snooks this and Snooks that. He was to give a public
lecture, said Fanny, among other things. Yet Miss Winchelsea, after the
first glow of gratification, still found this letter a little
unsatisfactory. Fanny did not report Mr. Snooks as saying anything about
Miss Winchelsea, nor as looking a little white and worn, as he ought to
have been doing. And behold! before she had replied, came a second letter
from Fanny on the same theme, quite a gushing letter, and covering six
sheets with her loose feminine hand.
And about this second letter was a rather odd little thing that Miss
Winchelsea only noticed as she re-read it the third time. Fanny's natural
femininity had prevailed even against the round and clear traditions of
the Training College; she was one of those she-creatures born to
make all her _m'_s and _n'_s and _u'_s and _r'_s and _e'_s
alike, and to leave her _o'_s and _a'_s open and her _i'_s
undotted. So that it was only after an elaborate comparison of word with
word that Miss Winchelsea felt assured Mr. Snooks was not really "Mr.
Snooks" at all! In Fanny's first letter of gush he was Mr. "Snooks," in
her second the spelling was changed to Mr. "Senoks." Miss Winchelsea's
hand positively trembled as she turned the sheet over--it meant so much to
her. For it had already begun to seem to her that even the name of Mrs.
Snooks might be avoided at too great a price, and suddenly--this
possibility! She turned over the six sheets, all dappled with that
critical name, and everywhere the first letter had the form of an
_e_! For a time she walked the room with a hand pressed upon her
heart.
She spent a whole day pondering this change, weighing a letter of inquiry
that should be at once discreet and effectual; weighing, too, what action
she should take after the answer came. She was resolved that if this
altered spelling was anything more than a quaint fancy of Fanny's, she
would write forthwith to Mr. Snooks. She had now reached a stage when the
minor refinements of behaviour disappear. Her excuse remained uninvented,
but she had the subject of her letter clear in her mind, even to the hint
that "circumstances in my life have changed very greatly since we talked
together." But she never gave that hint. There came a third letter from
that fitful correspondent Fanny. The first line proclaimed her "the
happiest girl alive."