The summer came. Clytie went abroad with the Farquharsons, through the
old towns of Normandy and Brittany. Kent joined them at St. Malo, and
spent his month's holiday with them. This was such a departure from his
usual habit of solitary pedestrian travel in the rough wilds of
Norway, whither he went every year, with little else than a stick and a
knapsack, that Wither had been quite alarmed.
“You'll be taking a holiday with me next,” he had said.
But knowing the terms of intimacy between his friend and Clytie, and
knowing Clytie herself,--he had accompanied Kent to the studio, at first
out of curiosity to see what kind of “being feminine” Kent had made
a friend of, and afterwards because he liked to go there,--whatever
sceptical imaginings might have exercised him, he forbore to give them
expression. He had only looked at Kent, on saying good-bye, in his odd,
half-mocking way, and had chuckled noiselessly to himself when the door
had closed upon Kent's broad shoulders.
Kent did not regret Norway. A charm, unknown to him before, filled all
the days. The Farquharsons were perfect travelling companions:
Caroline bright, satirical, helpful, learned in the ways of men; George
easy-going, happy either to lounge in the sun with a pipe and bandy
chaff with his wife, whilst Kent and Clytie went their own ways, or to
spend an antiquarian afternoon with Kent in some old Keltic village.
Clytie seemed also to him to expand under the sunny cheerful influences,
to grow more feminine, without falling in his estimation. No; he did
not regret Norway. He half formulated an intention of abandoning it
permanently and substituting Brittany as his habitual tramping-ground.
From the first morning, when his boat steamed slowly through the narrow
St. Malo docks, and he saw Clytie waiting there to meet him, he felt
friendly towards it. The high ramparted wall, with just the top-story
row of green shutters and roofs peeping above it, and beyond them the
spire of the cathedral; the glimpse through the sentry-guarded gate
up the narrow cobble-paved street, gaudy with blue blouses, red
handkerchiefs, and yellow oilskins exposed all along at shop doors; on
the quay itself the stalls of the hucksters under the lee of the
wall, and the busy crowd of swarthy Breton sailors, porters, and green
uniformed _douaniers_; and Clytie standing, fresh in her pure colouring
heightened by the light summer dress, in the midst of this mellow
setting--all the picture fixed itself as a whole indelibly upon his
mind, and caused a strange little thrill of pleasure to run through him.
They sat on the sands--the finest in the world, perhaps, when the tide
is low--that run in a broad, golden sweep from crag-bastioned, grim old
St. Malo to the white houses of Parame, amid the babel of bathers
and visitors, watching the types Parisian and English, Kent smoking
contentedly, while Clytie filled her sketch-book with oddities of
personality and costume. Three days slipped away there very pleasantly.
In spite of its banality as a pleasure resort there is a grim charm
about St. Malo that is never quite forgotten by those who have once
known it. It has an air of stability, of defiance. It is out of the
reach of the improver, extender, and suburb-maker. Its great walls guard
it as jealously on three sides as the sea does on the other. Almost
alone of populous cities, it can never grow. As he left with the party
to continue the tour Kent felt this charm, although his associations
with the city had been of the lighter kind. They idled through the old
towns: Dol, with its dark granite cathedral, looking rather hewn out of
the rock than built; Dinan on its granite steep above the Rance, where
the heart of du Guesclin is enshrined; Brieux, Paimpol, over which
Pierre Loti has thrown the glamour of his sentiment; Morlaix, and so to
Brest, with its great harbour and strong sea breeze from the Atlantic.
For Kent this journey was an uninterrupted pleasure. No country is
richer in things old, worn by weather and time, than Brittany: here an
old chapel built of rough unhewn granite; here a shapeless wayside cross
erected by some pious crusader on the ragged hill slope, railed round to
prevent the encroachments of the broom and heather; here a Druidic mass
of boulders; in the cottages curious smoke-dried strips of old Breton
work, ancestral oak carvings, rude brass repousée platters--a thousand
antiquarian interests in this gray land. But it is a bright one withal.
The fields of yellow colza stretch over the landscape in broad patches
of glory; the red-cheeked cider apples glow in the orchards. The
chestnut-trees in the grounds of the old feudal château, its fleched
gables dimly visible, hang gratefully over the high bounding wall,
above the roadway. The peasants still wear the picturesque Breton dress,
tasselled hats, embroidered short jackets, and knee-breeches for the
men, great white caps and elaborate kirtles for the women. Along the
coast the surf beats in a line of angry light upon the rocks, and shows
white, in the midst of the blue, around the islets out at sea. And the
old fishing villages look as if they were but flotsam and jetsam cast up
by Providence around the gray, weather-worn church that has taken them
to its bosom.
For a few days after they left Dinan Kent noticed a change in Clytie.
She was reserved, thoughtful. It was not until she appeared to have
thrown off the weight of an obsessing idea that she grew buoyant and
frank again. An incident unknown to him had occurred at Dinan, shaking
the girl's heart to its depths.
Her bedroom in the hotel opened, like the others on the same floor, on
to a small balcony, the spaces in front of each room being separated by
a light iron bar. She was dressing one morning when her attention was
aroused by voices in the next room, near the balcony. Her own French
window was open. The air was sunny and still, and the voices struck
clear.
“And that is your last word?” asked a woman's voice in French. She used
the familiar _ton_. Her accents were tearful and pleading.
“Yes,” replied a man's voice brutally. “There, there! Do not make any
scenes. I go because it is my good pleasure. What have you to say
against it?”
“But I love you, I love you, Armand!”
“Bah!” laughed the man, “they say that always. Here are the thousand
francs.”
Clytie, who had involuntarily overheard this scrap of the conversation,
hastened to shut the window. The sounds died away into murmurs dimly
perceptible through the partition wall. Then she heard the room door
slam violently and a heavy step tramp down the passage.
Some two hours later she was sitting in the salon of the hotel, reading
the papers and looking idly out upon the market-booths in the little
_place_. Kent and Farquharson had gone out together to devote a
scientific forenoon to the monuments of the town, and Caroline was
writing letters in her own room. Clytie was alone. Suddenly the
door opened and a woman, scarcely more than a girl, appeared on the
threshold. She made a step forward, but perceiving Clytie by the window,
she hesitated, irresolute whether to advance or retire. Clytie looked up
quickly, caught a glance which she interpreted as one of appeal.
“Oh, enter, mademoiselle,” she said, with a smile.
The newcomer murmured a “_Merci_,” entered, closed the door, and sitting
down on the faded sofa by the wall, commenced turning over the pages of
an old illustrated paper. Clytie went on with her _Figaro_. Presently
her ear caught a little sniffling sob. She turned round. Her companion
was squeezing a wet rag of a handkerchief in her hand, her head turned
away towards the paper; she was crying. Clytie rose, moved softly across
the room. But as she was going through the doorway she saw the girl,
abandoning herself to her misery, bury her face upon the sofa cushion.
Clytie was touched. She went back to the girl, laid her hand softly on
her shoulder.
“Mademoiselle!”
The girl started, raised a pretty, tear-stained face, looked at Clytie
wistfully out of her light blue eyes, her lips quivering.
“You are in trouble,” said Clytie.
“Oh, mademoiselle, you are very good,” cried the other--“_oui; je suis
bien malheureuse_. But you must leave me. You are a young girl well
brought up, whilst I----_Merci_, mademoiselle; you can do nothing.”
The voice struck a chord of association. Where had she heard it
recently? Quickly it flashed upon her, the scrap of dialogue she had
overheard that morning. The girl again hid her face. The low-cut dress,
beloved by Frenchwomen, disclosed a shapely neck, on which clustered
coquettishly a few tiny madcap curls below the smooth, upbrushed, fair
hair. Her figure was young and graceful, relaxed now in the attitude of
abandonment.
Clytie looked down upon her wonderingly, her heart beating. Her
maidenhood urged her to fly; a higher sense of life bade her stay a
moment by the sobbing figure. She had never, to her knowledge, been near
to one of the great unclassed--still less spoken. She remembered the few
cynical words of the man; they seemed to give her a pain at the heart
akin to nausea. She remembered the pleading tones: “_Je t'aime Je t'aime
bien!_” and her pity went forth upon the woman.
“I don't ask you to tell me,” she said very gently. “But we may talk
a little, mayn't we? Perhaps it may ease you--a woman--the same
age,”--Clytie stumbled in the foreign language,--“and perhaps not so
well brought up--after all, a woman.”
“Oh, mademoiselle, you do not understand. This life!” her shoulders
shivered expressively. “After all, it is bearable; but when, with all
that, one loves--ah!”
“He is not worth it,” cried Clytie. “He is a scoundrel--I know what he
is!”
The girl raised her face quickly.
“You know him? You know Armand? Ah, no; you spoke at random. Yes, he is
base, cruel, but that does not prevent it. Mademoiselle, you are good,
you are sweet. It is not many who would have spoken. You will let me sit
here near you for a little? Ah, _mon Dieu_,” she went on rapidly, “you
cannot imagine what it is--never, never to talk to a woman whom one can
respect, and who may not betray you; and then the only persons one can
respect are the men, who despise one. And even they--one can love them,
but they are cowardly, hard, selfish!”
“There are some good men,” observed Clytie.
“That may be,” returned the other, finally drying her eyes, and putting
up her hand to her hair in tidying touches--“that may be, but we don't
often see them. Oh, mademoiselle, I know well that I should be ashamed
of showing you what I am, but when you touched my shoulder it was like
a good sister of the convent,”--Clytie smiled in spite of herself at the
comparison,--“and it touched my heart.”
“And I too have a confession to make,” said Clytie, gently interrupting.
“This morning--I overheard--my room is next to yours----”
“Ah, it was you who shut the window?”
“Yes. So I know, mademoiselle--at least I can judge. And are you quite
alone now?”
The girl shrugged her shoulders.
“What would you have? He has gone, and I must go too. One does not amuse
oneself here alone.”
“And where are you going?”
“To Paris. In the middle of summer. It is not gay. Everyone will know
_qu'il via plantée là_. But one must live. Ah! you are happy, you other
honest women!” She talked on, in half-cynical, half-artless confidence,
as is the way of her race, forgetting in her need of expansion that her
hearer was the English girl well brought up. She dilated on her present
trouble, her life in Paris, her creditors, the spitefulness of women,
the brutality of men. Clytie listened with mingled feelings of horror
and pity. She was so young, this girl, so fresh for all the soil of
Paris, and yet taking, from use, the whole horror of her life as a
matter of course, realising it only in rare emotional moments. Here was
a rejecter of formulas, of a race that has thrown off convention ever
since Rahab harboured the spies! Too fragile, delicate she looked for
this social warfare. Whither was she tending? Clytie had a supreme,
lurid moment of introspection. Only two or three such come in a
lifetime.
At last the girl rose from the sofa in the quick French way.
“Forgive me, mademoiselle, for talking like this. I had forgotten. You
see well that you could not have helped me otherwise than you have
done by sitting by my side. I must not encroach upon your time. Adieu,
mademoiselle, and thank you; oh, a thousand times, thanks. I shall not
forget you.”
She was going. Clytie rose and went towards her, her face a little
flushed, but kindness in her eyes.
“You will shake hands, _à l'Anglaise?_” she said.
The girl looked her quickly in the face, and then impulsively seized the
proffered hand in both hers and kissed it twice rapidly. Then she ran
from the room.
Clytie went back to her seat by the window and looked out upon the
market-sellers. But she did not see much, as tears stood in her eyes and
rolled down her cheeks.
She did not tell Mrs. Farquharson of this incident, but kept it in her
heart as a secret and strange revelation of life--something precious,
mysterious, awful. During her drive with the others in the afternoon she
was strangely silent. Kent rallied her on her depression in his bluff,
kind-hearted manner. She smiled absently, complained of a headache, then
shivered with a wave of recollection. For days the spectre haunted her,
sometimes looking at her through the light blue eyes of the girl, and
sometimes taking a dual form, in which the coarse drudge features of the
mother of Jack, the model, were dimly visible. And a question hummed in
her ears: “Was this the aspect of life that men kept so jealously hidden
from women?”
But Clytie was young and vigorous, with fresh bright blood leaping in
her veins. The thrill of the salt breeze and the whole-hearted laughter
of her friends soon prevented these imaginings from becoming morbid,
and gradually the first sharp impression dulled more or less down to the
level of her other experiences of things. She gave herself up again to
the freedom and gaiety of the trip, to the unfeigned delight of Kent,
who had been beginning to wonder whether, for unknown reasons, some
coolness had arisen between them.
He forbore to allude to the subject until the night when they were all
returning together from St. Malo to Southampton. He had found her
a sheltered corner of the upper deck, rigged up a screen of rugs,
comfortably established her in a canvas chair with many wraps. Most of
the passengers had gone below. They were almost alone. The voices of
two men in an opposite corner came vaguely out of the darkness. All
was still save for the continuous rattle and wash, which at sea forms a
strange kind of silence in itself.
“Aren't you sorry it is over?” asked Clytie from the dimness of her
wraps. “We did nothing very wonderful, but it has been very pleasant--a
thing to look back upon.”
“'A garnered joy for after-time.'”
“You are waxing poetical.”
“Oh, that's Wither. He was poetical in his youth. You would hardly think
it of him. I have always thought that line rather pretty. Anyhow, it is
true in the present case.”
“And we haven't quarrelled,” said Clytie, “in spite of the maxim, 'If
you want to lose a friend, travel with him.' But I don't think I could
quarrel with you. You wrap yourself round with such imperturbable
superiority.”
“The metaphor is mixed, but proceed,” interrupted Kent.
“Well, it's not worth while playing to such a bad house.”
“I don't see what we should have to quarrel about,” returned Kent,
laughing. “We each give the other credit for independent opinions; and
as for action, if you wanted to go to the right and I to the left,
I suppose I should give in and let you have your way--if it were not
contrary to common sense.”
“And if it were? If it were simply idiotic?”
“Perhaps I should go with you then, to keep you out of harm's way.”
“Thank you,” murmured Clytie rather touched, looking up restfully at the
stars.
There was a little silence. Kent puffed at his pipe. The glow attracted
George Farquharson, who had just come up on the deck and was groping
about for them in the darkness.
“Going to stay here all night?” he asked.
“Most of it,” replied Clytie.
“Kent making you comfortable?”
Clytie murmured an easeful affirmative, and Farquharson, nodding a
good-night, disappeared into the darkness.
“Apropos of quarrelling,” said Kent after a while. “Do you know,
I thought once, for a few days, you were vexed with me for
something--after we left Dinan. Were you?”
Clytie felt the words like a touch of ice. Why had Kent blundered so
tactlessly?
“Oh, why do you mention that?” she cried. “The only painful thing in
all the trip. Something that I saw at Dinan--I was put out. Was I very
disagreeable? It did not refer to you in any way, dear friend.”
“Pardon me if I have touched on a sore place,” replied Kent. “I find I
have a good deal to learn in these matters. Will you make a compact
with me to tell me if ever I offend you? Your friendship has grown so
valuable and dear a thing to me that the idea of running the risk of
losing it makes me--what shall I say? Well, I couldn't bear it. I don't
often talk like this,--sentiment comes out of me very awkwardly,--but
when I do say anything of the sort I mean it. Believe me.”
Clytie put out her gloved hand and touched him lightly on the arm.
She, too, felt that she had certain need of him. A little thrill of
tenderness passed through her as she turned her head towards him to
reply.
“Didn't I call you 'dear friend' just now? And I meant it, too. You are
too honest, too single-hearted, ever to offend me, as you say. If I am
ever rebellious with you it will be my own fault, and I shall know it.
And as I really have got some common sense, I shall be sorry for it. But
you won't expect me to tell you so every time, will you? You will have
to take it for granted.”
“You always make yourself out worse than you are,” replied Kent. “Very
few people know you. The Farquharsons, myself, Winifred, do. I should
like to go with you wherever you go, and tell folks not to believe you,
to prove to them what a----”
“Oh, stop! stop!” cried Clytie, with a little laugh. “This sojourn in
the land of compliments has infected you. Oh, no; I am ordinary; not
bad, not good. You see, if I had had anybody to care for specially, and
who cared for me, I might have shown up differently. I have hardly had a
chance of seeming otherwise than selfish. Opportunity makes the saint as
much as it makes the thief.”
Kent meditated, framing a reply. The right words would not come until
it seemed that too long an interval had elapsed. There was another
silence--one of those pleasant ones between friends when they feel in
sympathy. Clytie at last broke it.
“Would you have had such a conversation as this with a man friend?”
“No--at least--well, no. Why?”
“Oh, nothing. The idea occurred to me,” replied Clytie.