THE month was June, the street was Gower Street, the room was an attic.
And in it a poet sat, struggling with the rebellious third act of the
poetic drama that was to set him in the immediate shadow of Shakespeare,
and on the level of those who ring Parnassus round just below the
summit. The attic roof sloped, the furniture was vilely painted in
grained yellow, the arm-chair's prickly horsehair had broken to let
loose lumps of dark-coloured flock. The curtains were dark and damask
and dusty. The carpet was Kidderminster and sand-coloured. It had holes
in it; so had the Dutch hearthrug. The poet's penholder was the kind at
twopence the dozen. The ink was in a penny bottle. Outside on a
blackened flowerless lilac a strayed thrush sang madly of spring and
hope and joy and love.
The clear strong June sunshine streamed in through the window and turned
the white of the poet's page to a dazzling silver splendour.
"Hang it all!" he cried, and he threw down the yellow-brown penholder.
"It's too much! It's not to be borne! It's not human!"
He turned out his pockets. Two-and-seven-pence. He could draw the price
of an ode and a roundelay from the _Spectator_--but not to-day, for this
was a Bank Holiday, Whit Monday, in fact. Then he thought of his tobacco
jar. Sure enough, there lurked some halfpence among the mossy shag,
and--oh, wonder and joy and cursed carelessness for ever to be
blessed--a gleaming coy half-sovereign. In the ticket-pocket of his
overcoat a splendid unforeseen shilling--a florin and a sixpence in the
velveteen jacket he had not worn since last year. Ten--and two--and
one--and two and sevenpence and sixpence--sixteen shillings and a penny.
Enough, more than enough, to take him out of this world of burst
horsehair chairs and greedy foolscap, of arid authorship and burst
bubbles of dreams to the real world, where spring, still laughing,
shrank from the kisses of summer, where white may blossomed and thrushes
sang.
"I'll have a holiday," he said, "who knows--I may get an idea for a
poem!"
He cleaned his boots with ink; they were not shiny after it, but they
were at least black. He put on his last clean shirt and the greeny-blue
Liberty tie that his sister had sent him for his April birthday. He
brushed his soft hat--counted his money again--found for it a pocket
still lacking holes--and went out whistling. The front door slammed
behind him with a cheerful conclusive bang.
From the top of an omnibus he noted the town gilded with June sunlight.
And it was very good.
He bought food, and had it packed in decent brown paper, so that it
looked like something superfluous from the stores.
And he caught the ten something train to Halstead. He only just caught
it.
He blundered into a third-class carriage, and nearly broke his neck over
an umbrella which lay across the door like an amateur trap for undesired
company.
By some extraordinary apotheosis of Bank Holiday mismanagement, there
was only one person in the carriage--the owner of the trap-umbrella. A
girl, of course. That was inevitable in this magic weather. He had
knocked her basket off the seat, and had only just saved himself from
buffeting her with his uncontrolled shoulder before he saw that she was
a girl. He took off his hat and apologised. She smiled, murmured, and
blushed.
He settled himself in his corner, and unfolded the evening paper of
yesterday which, by the most fortunate chance, happened to be in his
pocket.
Over it he glanced at her. She was pretty--with a vague unawakened
prettiness. Her eyes and hair were dark. Her hat seemed dowdy, yet
becoming. Her gloves were rubbed at the fingers. Her blouse was light
and bright. Her skirt obscure and severe. He decided that she was not
well off.
His eyes followed a dull leader on the question of the government of
India. But he did not want to read. He wanted to talk. On this June day,
when the life of full-grown spring thrilled one to the finger tips, how
could one feed one's vitality, one's over-mastering joy of life, with
printer's ink and the greyest paper in London?
He glanced at her again. She was looking out of the window at the sordid
little Bermondsey houses, where the red buds of the Virginia creeper
were already waking to their green summer life-work. He spoke. And no
one would have guessed from his speech that he was a poet.
"What a beautiful day!" he said.
"Yes, very," said she, and her tone gave no indication of any exuberant
spring expansiveness to match his own.
He looked at her again. No. Yes. Yes, he would try the experiment he had
long wanted to try--had often in long, silent, tete-a-tete journeys
dreamed of trying. He would skip all the pitiful formalities of chance
acquaintanceship. He would speak as one human being to another--would
assume the sure bond of a common kinship. He said--
"It is such a beautiful day that I want to talk about it! Mayn't I talk
to you? Don't you feel that you want to say how beautiful it is--just
as much as I do?"
The girl looked at him. A scared fold in her brow warned him of the idea
that had seized her.
"I'm really not mad," he said; "but it does seem so frightfully silly
that we should travel all the way to--to wherever you are going, and not
tell each other how good June weather is."
"Well--it is!" she owned.
He eagerly spoke: he wanted to entangle her in talk before her
conventional shrinking from chance acquaintanceship should shrivel her
interest past hope.
"I often think how silly people are," he said, "not to talk in railway
carriages. One can't read without blinding oneself. I've seen women
knit, but that's unspeakable. Many a time in frosty, foggy weather, when
the South Eastern has taken two hours to get from Cannon Street to
Blackheath, I've looked round the carriage and wanted to say,
'Gentlemen, seeing that we are thus delayed, let us each contribute to
the general hilarity by telling a story--we might gather them into a
Christmas number afterwards--in the manner of the late Mr. Charles
Dickens,' then I've looked round the carriage full of city-centred
people, and wondered how they'd deal with the lunatic who ventured to
suggest such an All-the-year-round idea. But nobody could be
city-centred on such a day, and so early. So let's talk."
She had laughed, as he had meant her to laugh. Now she seemed to throw
away some scruple in the gesture with which she shrugged her shoulders
and turned to him.
"Very well," she said, and she was smiling. "Only I've nothing to say."
"Never mind; I have," he rejoined, and proceeded to say it. It seemed
amusing to him as an experiment to talk to this girl, this perfect
stranger, with a delicate candour that he would not have shown to his
oldest friend. It seemed interesting to lay bare, save for a veiling of
woven transparent impersonality, his inmost mind. It _was_ interesting,
for the revelation drew her till they were talking together in a world
where it seemed no more than natural for her to show him her soul: and
she had no skill to weave veils for it.
Such talk is rare: so rare and so keen a pleasure, indeed, as to leave
upon one's life, if one be not a poet, a mark strong and never to be
effaced.
The slackening of the train at Halstead broke the spell which lay on
both with a force equal in strength, if diverse in kind.
"Oh!" she said, "I get out here. Good-bye, good-bye."
He would not spoil the parting by banalities of hat-raising amid the
group of friends or relations who would doubtless meet her.
"Good-bye," he said, and his eyes made her take his offered hand.
"Good-bye. I shall never forget you. Never!"
And then it seemed to him that the farewell lacked fire: and he lifted
her hand to his face. He did not kiss it. He laid it against his cheek,
sighed, and dropped it. The action was delicate and very effective. It
suggested the impulse, almost irresistible yet resisted, the well-nigh
overwhelming longing to kiss the hand, kept in check by a respect that
was almost devotion.
She should have torn her hand away. She took it away gently, and went.
Leisurely he got out of the train. She had disappeared. Well--the bright
little interlude was over. Still, it would give food for dreams among
the ferny woods. The first lines of a little song hummed themselves in
his brain--
"Eyes like stars in the night of life,
Seen but a moment and seen for ever."
He would finish them and send them to the _Pall Mall Gazette_. That
would be a guinea.
He wished the journey had been longer. He would never see her again.
Perhaps it was just as well. He crushed that last thought. It would be
good to dwell through the day on the thought of her--the almost loved,
the wholly lost.
"That could but have happened once
And we missed it, lost it for ever!"
Her eyes were very pretty, especially when they opened themselves so
widely as she tried to express the thoughts that no one but he had ever
cared to hear expressed. The definite biography--dead father, ailing
mother--hard work--hard life--hard-won post as High School Mistress,
were but as the hoarding on which was pasted the artistic poster of
their meeting--their parting. He sighed as he walked along the platform.
The promise of June had fulfilled itself: he was rich in a sorrow that
did not hurt--a regret that did not sting. Poor little girl! Poor pretty
eyes! Poor timid, brave maiden-soul!
Suddenly in his walk he stopped short.
Obliquely through the door of the booking-office he saw her. She was
alone. No troops of friends or relations had borne her off. She was
waiting for someone; and someone had not come.
What was to be done? He felt an odd chill. If he had only not taken her
hand in that silly way which had seemed at the time so artistically
perfect. The railway carriage talk might have been prolonged prettily,
indefinitely. But that foolish contact had rung up the curtain on a
transformation scene, whose footlights needed, at least, a good make-up
for the facing of them.
She stood there--looking down the road; in every line of her figure was
dejection; hopelessness itself had drawn the line of her head's sideward
droop. His make-up need be but of the simplest.
She had expected to meet someone, and someone had not come.
His chivalric impulses, leaping to meet the occasion's call, bade him
substitute a splendid replacement--himself, for the laggard
tryst-breaker. Even though he knew that that touch of the hand must
inaugurate the second volume of the day's romance.
He came behind her and spoke.
"Hasn't he come?" He did not like himself for saying "he"--but he said
it. It belonged to the second volume.
She turned with a start and a lighting of eyes and lips that almost
taught him pity. Not quite: for the poet's nature is hard to teach.
"He?" she said, decently covering the light of lips and eyes as soon as
might be. "It was a friend. She was to come from Sevenoaks. She ought to
be here. We were to have a little picnic together." She glanced at her
basket. "I didn't know you were getting out here. Why--" The question
died on trembling lips.
"Why?" he repeated. There was a pause.
"And now, what are you going to do?" he asked, and his voice was full of
tender raillery for her lost tryst with the girl friend, and for her
pretty helplessness.
"I--I don't know," she said.
"But I do!" he looked in her eyes. "You are going to be kind. Life is so
cruel. You are going to help me to cheat Life and Destiny. You are going
to leave your friend to the waste desolation of this place, if she comes
by the next train: but she won't--she's kept at home by toothache, or a
broken heart, or some little foolish ailment like that,"--he prided
himself on the light touch here,--"and you are going to be adorably kind
and sweet and generous, and to let me drink the pure wine of life for
this one day."
Her eyes drooped. Fully inspired, he struck a master-chord in the
lighter key.
"You have a basket. I have a brown paper parcel. Let me carry both, and
we will share both. We'll go to Chevening Park. It will be fun. Will
you?"
There was a pause: he wondered whether by any least likely chance the
chord had not rung true. Then--
"Yes," she said half defiantly. "I don't see why I shouldn't--Yes."
"Then give me the basket," he said, "and hey for the green wood!"
The way led through green lanes--through a green park, where tall red
sorrel and white daisies grew high among the grass that was up for hay.
The hawthorns were silvery, the buttercups golden. The gold sun shone,
the blue sky arched over a world of green and glory. And so through
Knockholt, and up the narrow road to the meadow whose path leads to the
steep wood-way where Chevening Park begins.
They walked side by side, and to both of them--for he was now wholly
lost in the delightful part for which this good summer world was the
fitting stage--to both of them it seemed that the green country was
enchanted land, and they under a spell that could never break.
They talked of all things under the sun: he, eager to impress her with
that splendid self of his; she, anxious to show herself not wholly
unworthy. She, too, had read her Keats and her Shelley and her
Browning--and could cap and even overshadow his random quotations.
"There is no one like you," he said as they passed the stile above the
wood; "no one in this beautiful world."