_JOHN SHERMAN REVISITS BALLAH._
I.
The others had gone, and Sherman was alone in the drawing-room by
himself, looking through the window. Never had London seemed to him so
like a reef whereon he was cast away. In the Square the bushes were
covered with dust; some sparrows were ruffling their feathers on the
side-walk; people passed, continually disturbing them. The sky was full
of smoke. A terrible feeling of solitude in the midst of a multitude
oppressed him. A portion of his life was ending. He thought that soon
he would be no longer a young man, and now, at the period when the
desire of novelty grows less, was coming the great change of his life.
He felt he was of those whose granaries are in the past. And now this
past would never renew itself. He was going out into the distance as
though with strange sailors in a strange ship.
He longed to see again the town where he had spent his childhood: to
see the narrow roads and mean little shops. And perhaps it would be
easier to tell her who had been the friend of so many years of this
engagement in his own person than by letter. He wondered why it was so
hard to write so simple a thing.
It was his custom to act suddenly on his decisions. He had not made
many in his life. The next day he announced at the office that he would
be absent for three or four days. He told his mother he had business in
the country.
His betrothed met him on the way to the terminus, as he was walking,
bag in hand, and asked where he was going. “I am going on business to
the country,” he said, and blushed. He was creeping away like a thief.
II.
He arrived in the town of Ballah by rail, for he had avoided the slow
cattle steamer and gone by Dublin.
It was the forenoon, and he made for the Imperial Hotel to wait till
four in the evening, when he would find Mary Carton in the schoolhouse,
for he had timed his journey so as to arrive on Thursday, the day of
the children’s practice.
As he went through the streets his heart went out to every familiar
place and sight: the rows of tumble-down thatched cottages; the slated
roofs of the shops; the women selling gooseberries; the river bridge;
the high walls of the garden where it was said the gardener used to see
the ghost of a former owner in the shape of a rabbit; the street corner
no child would pass at nightfall for fear of the headless soldier;
the deserted flour store; the wharves covered with grass. All these
he watched with Celtic devotion, that devotion carried to the ends of
the world by the Celtic exiles, and since old time surrounding their
journeyings with rumour of plaintive songs.
He sat in the window of the Imperial Hotel, now full of guests. He
did not notice any of them. He sat there meditating, meditating. Grey
clouds covering the town with flying shadows rushed by like the old
and dishevelled eagles that Maeldune saw hurrying towards the waters
of life. Below in the street passed by country people, townspeople,
travellers, women with baskets, boys driving donkeys, old men with
sticks; sometimes he recognized a face or was recognized himself, and
welcomed by some familiar voice.
“You have come home a handsomer gentleman than your father, Misther
John, and he was a neat figure of a man, God bless him!” said the
waiter, bringing him his lunch; and in truth Sherman had grown
handsomer for these years away. His face and gesture had more of
dignity, for on the centre of his nature life had dropped a pinch of
experience.
At four he left the hotel and waited near the schoolhouse till the
children came running out. One or two of the elder ones he recognized
but turned away.
III.
Mary Carton was locking the harmonium as he went in. She came to meet
him with a surprised and joyful air.
“How often I have wished to see you. When did you come? How well you
remembered my habits to know where to find me. My dear John, how glad I
am to see you.”
“You are the same as when I left, and this room is the same, too.”
“Yes,” she answered, “the same, only I have had some new prints hung
up—prints of fruits and leaves and bird-nests. It was only done last
week. When people choose pictures and poems for children they choose
out such domestic ones. I would not have any of the kind; children are
such undomestic animals. But, John, I am so glad to see you in this old
schoolhouse again. So little has changed with us here. Some have died
and some have been married, and we are all a little older and the trees
a little taller.”
“I have come to tell you I am going to be married.”
She became in a moment perfectly white, and sat down as though attacked
with faintness. Her hand on the edge of the chair trembled.
Sherman looked at her, and went on in a bewildered, mechanical way—“My
betrothed is a Miss Leland. She has a good deal of money. You know my
mother always wished me to marry some one with money. Her father, when
alive, was an old client of Sherman and Saunders. She is much admired
in society.” Gradually his voice became a mere murmur. He did not seem
to know that he was speaking. He stopped entirely. He was looking at
Mary Carton.
Everything around him was as it had been some three years before. The
table was covered with cups and the floor with crumbs. Perhaps the
mouse pulling at a crumb under the table was the same mouse as on that
other evening. The only difference was the brooding daylight of summer
and the ceaseless chirruping of the sparrows in the ivy outside. He had
a confused sense of having lost his way. It was just the same feeling
he had known as a child, when one dark night he had taken a wrong
turning, and instead of arriving at his own house, found himself at a
landmark he knew was miles from home.
A moment earlier, however difficult his life, the issues were always
definite; now suddenly had entered the obscurity of another’s interest.
Before this it had not occurred to him that Mary Carton had any
stronger feeling for him than warm friendship.
He began again, speaking in the same mechanical way—“Miss Leland
lives with her mother near us. She is very well educated and very well
connected, though she has lived always among business people.”
Miss Carton, with a great effort, had recovered her composure.
“I congratulate you,” she said. “I hope you will be always happy. You
came here on some business for your firm, I suppose? I believe they
have some connection with the town still.”
“I only came here to tell you I was going to be married.”
“Do you not think it would have been better to have written?” she
said, beginning to put away the children’s tea-things in a cupboard by
the fireplace.
“It would have been better,” he answered, drooping his head.
Without a word, locking the door behind them, they went out. Without
a word they walked the grey streets. Now and then a woman or a child
curtseyed as they passed. Some wondered, perhaps, to see these old
friends so silent. At the rectory they bade each other good-bye.
“I hope you will be always happy,” she said. “I will pray for you and
your wife. I am very busy with the children and old people, but I shall
always find a moment to wish you well in. Good-bye now.”
They parted; the gate in the wall closed behind her. He stayed for a
few moments looking up at the tops of the trees and bushes showing over
the wall, and at the house a little way beyond. He stood considering
his problem—her life, his life. His, at any rate, would have incident
and change; hers would be the narrow existence of a woman who, failing
to fulfil the only abiding wish she has ever formed, seeks to lose
herself in routine—mournfulest of things on this old planet.
This had been revealed: he loved Mary Carton, she loved him. He
remembered Margaret Leland, and murmured she did well to be jealous.
Then all her contemptuous words about the town and its inhabitants came
into his mind. Once they made no impression on him, but now the sense
of personal identity having been disturbed by this sudden revelation,
alien as they were to his way of thinking, they began to press in on
him. Mary, too, would have agreed with them, he thought; and might it
be that at some distant time weary monotony in abandonment would have
so weighed down the spirit of Mary Carton, that she would be merely
one of the old and sleepy whose dulness filled the place like a cloud?
He went sadly towards the hotel; everything about him, the road, the
sky, the feet wherewith he walked seeming phantasmal and without
meaning.
He told the waiter he would leave by the first train in the morning.
“What! and you only just come home?” the man answered. He ordered
coffee and could not drink it. He went out and came in again
immediately. He went down into the kitchen and talked to the servants.
They told him of everything that had happened since he had gone. He was
not interested, and went up to his room. “I must go home and do what
people expect of me; one must be careful to do that.”
Through all the journey home his problem troubled him. He saw the
figure of Mary Carton perpetually passing through a round of
monotonous duties. He saw his own life among aliens going on endlessly,
wearily.
From Holyhead to London his fellow-travellers were a lady and her three
young daughters, the eldest about twelve. The smooth faces shining with
well-being became to him ominous symbols. He hated them. They were
symbolic of the indifferent world about to absorb him, and of the vague
something that was dragging him inch by inch from the nook he had made
for himself in the chimney corner. He was at one of those dangerous
moments when the sense of personal identity is shaken, when one’s past
and present seem about to dissolve partnership. He sought refuge in
memory, and counted over every word of Mary’s he could remember. He
forgot the present and the future. “Without love,” he said to himself,
“we would be either gods or vegetables.”
The rain beat on the window of the carriage. He began to listen;
thought and memory became a blank; his mind was full of the sound of
rain-drops.