As Greenleaf looked up from the article on the "Rochdale Pioneers
and Co-operation" and glanced out of the window at the smoke-veiled,
soot-engrained Northern towns, and the bleak-green North country
hillsides which flashed past the express, he did not realise at all
clearly that he was going to see once more Miss Val Flodden, and see
her in the unexpected relations of hostess and guest.
She had indeed, during their last ramble through the British Museum,
said something vague about his coming to Yetholme if ever he came
North; but he had given the invitation no weight and had forgotten it
completely. His journey was due to a circumstance more important in his
eyes than the visit of a young lady to his studio, and would be crowned
by an event far more satisfactory than the meeting with a stray
acquaintance.
For Sir Percy Flodden had at last decided to sell the famous Yetholme
collection of majolica and Palissy ware; and the South Kensington
authorities had selected Leonard Greenleaf, potter and writer on
pottery, to verify the catalogue and conclude the purchase. It was one
of Greenleaf's socialist maxims that no important works of art should be
hidden from public enjoyment in the houses of private collectors; an Act
of Parliament, in his opinion, should force all owners to sell to the
nation, supposing that arguments in favour of true citizenship and
true love of art had failed to make them bestow their property gratis.
Greenleaf had agitated during several years to induce the public to make
the first bid for the Yetholme collection; difficulties of all kinds
had stood in the way, and the owner himself had become restive in the
negotiations; but now, at last, this immortal earthenware had been saved
from further private collections and secured for the enjoyment of
everybody.
This being the case, it was not wonderful if Miss Flodden was thrown
into the shade by her family collection; and if Greenleaf had gradually
got to think very little about her of late--I say of late, because until
the Yetholme sale had diverted his mind from theory to practice, Miss
Flodden had played a certain part in Greenleaf's thoughts. Her sudden
intrusion upon the monotony of his existence had made him ponder once
more upon his undergraduate's dream of reclaiming the upper as well as
the lower classes; a dream which had gradually vanished before practical
contact with the pressing want of the poor. He had forgotten, during the
last five or six years, that the leisured classes existed otherwise than
as oppressors of the overworked ones. But now there had returned to the
surface his constitutional craving for harmony, his horror of class
warfare, a horror all the greater that in this very gentle soul there
was a possibility of intense hatred. Why should not the whole of society
work out harmoniously a new and better social order? After all, he
and his chosen friends belonged to the privileged class, and only
the privileged class could give the generous initiative required to
counteract the selfish claiming of rights from below. Mankind was not
wicked and perverse; and the injustice, wantonness, and cruelty of the
rich were, doubtless, a result of their ignorance: they must be shown
that they could do without so many things and that other folk were
wanting those things so very much. And, half consciously, the image of
Val Flodden rose up to concentrate and typify the ideas she had evoked.
She was the living example of the ignorance of all higher right and
wrong, of all the larger facts of existence, in which the so-called
upper classes lived on no better than heathen blacks.
In these reflections Greenleaf had never claimed for Miss Flodden any
individual superiority: to do so would have been to diminish her value
as a type and an illustration. She had become, in his thoughts,
the natural woman as produced, or rather as destroyed, by the evil
constitution of idle society. She appeared, indeed, to have a personal
charm, but this was doubtless a class peculiarity which his inexperience
perceived as an individual one. It was the sole business of idle folk,
Greenleaf said to himself, to make themselves charming, and they
doubtless carried this quality as high as blacksmiths do strength of
arm, and sempstresses nimbleness of finger: for the occasional examples
of idle folk without any charm at all quickly faded from Greenleaf's
logical memory. Also, he forgot for the moment, that many women, neither
ignorant nor idle, the three Miss Carpenters for instance, who lived in
a servantless flat in Holborn and worked in the East End, had as much
charm, though not quite the same; and that there were tricks of manner
and speech, affectations of school-boy slang, yokel ways, about Miss
Flodden herself, which affected his sensitive nerves as ungraceful.
But, be this as it may, the acquaintance with Miss Flodden had set his
thoughts on the disadvantages of the upper classes, and he found it
convenient to use Miss Flodden as an illustration thereof.
Besides, every now and then, Greenleaf had felt, in those long talks
at the Museum, a curious pang of pity for her. In Greenleaf's nature,
more thoughtful than logical, the dominating forces were a kind of
transcendent aestheticism, and an extraordinary, also transcendent,
compassion--compassion which, coming upon him in veritable stabs, went
to his head and soon passed the boundaries of individual pain and wrong.
This man, who aspired towards the future and really hankered painfully
after the past, was like some mediaeval monk all quivering at the
sufferings of a far-distant, impersonal Godhead, for the sake of whose
wrongs he could even hate fiercely, and for the sake of whose more than
individual sufferings he could feel, every now and then, overwhelming
pity for some small, ill-treated bird, or beast, or man. That this
girl--intelligent and good--had been brought up not merely in utter
indifference to real evil (tempered only by a vague fear of a black man
who carried you to hell and a much blacker man who turned you out of
society) but in ignorance of every one of the nobler and more beautiful
activities of life; this perception of moral and intellectual starvation,
veiled his mind with tears and made him spiritually choke, like the
sight of a supperless ragged child, or of a dog that had lost its master.
Such impressions had been common enough in their two or three meetings.
They had met several times in the Museum, and once at Messrs. Boyce's
works, the utter unworldliness of Greenleaf's mind preventing his asking
himself, even once, whether such proceedings did not display unusual
recklessness on the part of a girl belonging to Miss Flodden's set; so
much that he did not even take heed of Miss Flodden's occasional remarks
showing that this liberty, this familiarity with a man and a stranger,
were possible only because she had deliberately turned her back on her
former companions. Indifferent to personal matters, he had not even
understood very plainly (although he had a pleasant, vague sense of
something similar) that unfamiliarity with the class and type to which
he belonged had given the girl a sense of absolute safety which allowed
her to go about and discuss everything with this man from a different
sphere, as she might have done with another woman. This knowledge was
vague and scarce conscious, taking the form rather of indignation
with Miss Flodden's world and pity for Miss Flodden's self, whenever,
incidentally, she said things which revealed the habit of an opposite
state of things, the habit of a woman's liberty of action, speech and
feeling being cramped by disbelief in men's purity and honour, or rather
by knowledge of their thinly varnished baseness.
Thus it had come about during that dim and delicate London June that
the young lady from Eaton Square had become a familiar figure in
the mind, if not in the life, of the Socialist potter of Church Street,
Bloomsbury. There was, of course, a certain exotic strain in the matter;
and as they rambled among the solemn sitting Pharaohs, the Roman Emperors
and headless Greek demigods, and the rows of glass cases in the cool,
empty Museum, Greenleaf occasionally experienced, while discussing
various forms of art and describing dead civilisations, a little shock
of surprise on realising the nature of his companion, on catching every
now and then an intonation and an expression which told of ball-rooms
and shooting-houses, on perceiving suddenly, silhouetted against the
red wall, or reflected in a glass case, the slender, dapper figure in
its plain, tight clothes; the tight, straight-featured head beneath its
close little bonnet. But this sense of the unusual and the exotic was
subdued by the sense of the real, the actually present, just as, in some
foreign or Eastern town, our disbelief in the possibility of it all is
oddly moulded into a sort of familiarity by the knowledge that we are
our ourselves, and ourselves are on the spot.
It was different now; as his train jogged slowly along the banks of the
Tweed, between the bare, green hills and the leafy little ravines of
Northumberland. A couple of months' separation had gradually reduced
Miss Flodden to an unfamiliar, and almost an abstract being. She was
the subject no longer of impressions, but merely of reflections; and
of reflections which had grown daily more general, as the perfume of
individuality faded away. Greenleaf lived so much more in his thoughts
than in his life that creatures very speedily got to represent nothing
but problems to him. At this moment his main interest in life was to
secure the Yetholme collection of majolica and Palissy work; the fact
that he was going, in a few minutes, to meet Miss Flodden was not more
important than the fact that he would have to get his portmanteau out
of the van. And as to Miss Flodden, she represented to him, in a rather
rubbed-out way, the problem of upper class want of education and moral
earnestness.
It seemed to him also, as he shook hands with Miss Flodden, in her cart
at Yetholme station, and took his place beside her in the vehicle, that
not only all his own feelings about Miss Flodden, but Miss Flodden
herself had changed. She had grown so much more like everybody else, he
thought, or he had got to see her so much more in her reality. There was
nothing exotic about her now, wrapped in a big, fuzzy cloak, a big cap
drawn over her head, concealing the close, light-brown curls, and making
her face so very much less keen in feature. He wondered why he had seen
so much of the Celt in her, and such a far-fetched nervous fineness. She
seemed also, in her almost monosyllabic conversation, mainly preoccupied
with his portmanteau, the hours of his train, the names of the villages
and hills they passed, and similar commonplace matters; whereas, in
London he had noted the eager insistence with which she had immediately
set the conversation and firmly kept it on intellectual and artistic
problems.
The cart rolled away by high-lying fields of pale green barley and oats
shivering in the cold breeze, between the stunted hedges, whence an
occasional wind-warped thorn-tree rose black against the pale yellow
afternoon sky, with every now and then a bunch of blue cranesbill, or a
little fluttering group of poppies, taking the importance of bushes and
trees in this high, bleak, Northern country. Great savage dogs, with
chests and pointed ears like the antique Cerberus, came barking out of
the black stone cottages; and over the fields, from the tree-tops just
visible in the river valley below, circled innumerable rooks, loudly
cawing. The road made a sudden dip, and they were on a level with the
wide, shingly bed of the Tweed, scattered sheep grazing along the banks.
Then a black belfry appeared among black ash trees; a row of black
cottages bordered the road with their hollyhocks and asters; and the
cart rolled in between rows of rook-peopled trees, and stopped at last
before a long, black stone house, sunk, as in some parts of Scotland,
into a kind of trench. There was a frightful alarum of dogs of all
kinds, rushing up from all directions. But Miss Flodden led Greenleaf
into the house and through various passages, without any human being
appearing, save a boy, to whom she threw the reins at the door. At last,
in a big, dark drawing-room, a child was discovered helping herself to
milk and bread and jam at a solitary table.
"They're all out," she said, taking no notice of Greenleaf, although
scanning him with the critical eyes of six or seven. "Cut me a scone,
Val, and put butter on it, but not too much."
"This is a step-sister of mine," explained Miss Flodden, laconically,
nodding in the child's direction, as she threw aside her cloak, drew off
her gloves, and began pouring out tea. "I say, leave that scone alone
until I can cut it for you. It's rather hard lines on one for the family
to have its tea and leave us only the cold dregs."
She looked listless and calm and bored. Greenleaf wondered how he could
ever have romanced about this handsome, commonplace young woman. Then he
began to speculate as to where the famous collection was kept.