It is probably true that when things are at their worst they begin to
mend, but the little complications common to man sometimes exhibit a
ghastly ingenuity of contrivance before that most desirable point is
reached. As Manvers said, we are wonderful creatures, and beautifully
adapted for bearing things. But Nature has been merciful enough to give
most of us a weak point, and when the weak point is touched we are
privileged to break down.
Maud, whose moral nature was very robust, was not physically strong, and
that night she fainted incontinently in the middle of dinner. The doctor
came--a doctor whose words were literally words of gold--and said,
worry, overstrain, change of air, out of doors, sunshine; and Maud’s
determination to leave London was made easy for her.
Lady Ramsden had managed to survive her husband, and was continuing to
enjoy unagitated widowhood and her usual ill-health in her house on the
Norfolk coast. She had grown a little stouter, a shade duller, and a
trifle more monosyllabic, but otherwise time seemed to have let her be.
She replied to Lady Chatham’s letter that she would be delighted to see
Maud, but that her health was indifferent, and that Maud would probably
be rather lonely. But if she wanted sea air and sunshine, she could not
do better than come. She would be charmed to have her, and would she say
the day and hour of her arrival, and whether she was going to bring a
maid.
Lady Ramsden’s house stood on the edge of the short-turfed Norfolk
Downs, within a hundred yards of the sea. The sand-cliffs, nibbled off
short by the waves, rose some thirty feet from the beach, and the grass,
fine and smooth, covered them to the edge, fitting their mounds and
hollows so exactly that they looked as if they had been measured for a
green baize billiard cloth. A mile to the north the red-roofed little
town of Cromer went trooping down to the shore, with its tall grave
tower seeming to confer an air of safety to the whole, but not checking
a terrible tendency in the town to run to seed, as it were, on all sides
in rows of jerry-built villas. But at this time of the year the villas
were still unoccupied for the most part, and the town was a fishing
village once more.
Maud arrived in the afternoon, and she drew in long breaths of the fresh
sea air with a sense of relief, of struggle over. She was tired and
overdone--tired of life, of worry, of sensation, and she thought that
here perhaps she could stay still, being cut off from any thought of
agitating impossibilities, of fruitless self-restraint, and of thrice
fruitless desires. There was an air of complete, contented repose about
the big landscape and the wide flat sea. The tide was up, and the sea
looked full and prosperous. Little curling ripples washed up over the
sand, and now and then one more energetic than its fellows thrust out a
sharp tongue to the very base of the sandy cliffs and then drew back
again with a louder murmur of content.
Round the house were rambling, uneven lawns, only half broken in, as it
were, and retaining something of the freedom of the grass-clad
sandhills, and a satisfying medley of flower-beds, full of great hardy
plants which cared nothing for the brisk salt air--nasturtiums, great
flaring double poppies, the velvet tassels of love-lies-a-bleeding, and
thick-leaved stone-crops. Sturdy health seemed the key-note of the
place.
At tea she saw Lady Ramsden, who strove to convey to her that she was
glad to see her, and that her niece was also staying with her--her
coming had been very sudden and upsetting--but that she had gone over to
Cromer for a tennis party, and would be back before dinner, and as soon
as tea was over Maud went out again and struck for the edge of the sandy
cliffs.
Ah! the relief of getting away from London, away from the possibility of
seeing Tom, from the possibility of torturing herself, of leading
herself into temptation. Surely it was possible here, with this great
shining sea on one side, and the firm landscape on the other, to regain
her belief in serenity, to recapture an uncomplicated outlook.
She took off her hat, and let the bracing air from the sea blow her hair
about. A mile off shore the little fleet of herring-boats were tacking
with full, stiff sails down the coast to begin their strange adventure
of casting nets into that shifting immensity beneath the deep fathomless
sky above the deep fathomless sea. How did morning look to them as it
broke in thin red lines on the horizon? How interesting it would be to
be able to see the world just for a moment with other eyes, to be rid
for one deep-drawn breath of the weight of one’s own stale identity! It
was in that direction her salvation lay. She meant to cease focussing
her eyes on her own microscopic troubles, to gain a wider outlook. How
much more attainable such an idea seemed here, where there was some
breadth of vision, and a horizon not bounded by house-roofs! London was
a mere warren, full of silly gossiping rabbits. You could never see
beyond the street corner, nor through the smoke.
The light in the west flamed and paled, and Maud began to retrace her
steps. She felt better already. Oh, how right Miss Vanderbilt had been
about the seat of the emotions! She would dose herself with sea air, she
would bathe herself in sun and sea, she would get back her old serenity,
her interest in things, her uncomplicated outlook. How pretty the house
looked, standing out against the still ruddy sky, with the lights in its
windows! There was some one standing in the porch--a girl. It must be
Lady Ramsden’s niece. Maud felt quite pleased to have a companion. They
would walk and ride and bathe together. Lady Ramsden’s niece--on which
side, Carlingford or Ramsden?
The door was opened just before Maud got up to it, and the girl was
standing by the lamp in the hall, opening a note when she entered. As
she looked at her Maud’s heart suddenly stood still, and then jumped up
into her throat, poised and hammering. There was no need to ask on which
side she was Lady Ramsden’s niece, for as Maud came in she turned, and
for a moment--it came on her like a horrible dream--she almost thought
she stood face to face with Tom himself.
The girl looked up with that little raising of the eyebrows which Maud
had so often seen in Tom, and greeted her.
“You are surely Miss Wrexham, are you not?” she said, coming forward
with boyish frankness. “It is too delightful to meet you. I think you
know my cousin Tom? You have had tea? Yes? I wonder where my aunt is.”
Violet Carlingford led the way to the drawing-room, where Lady Ramsden
was lying on a sofa by a carefully shaded lamp. Her wheezy asthmatic pug
lay snoring at her feet. She looked the incarnation of incompetence.
“So you have met,” she said, “and introduced yourselves.”
Violet laughed.
“I don’t think we introduced ourselves much,” she said. “I said, ‘Aren’t
you Miss Wrexham?’ How are you, aunty?”
“Not very well, dear,” she said; “and Flo isn’t very well either. Listen
to her breathing.”
Violet smiled, and two dimples came into her face. They were hardly so
deep as Tom’s, but in exactly the same place.
“There’s no need to listen,” she said.
“I shall not come to dinner,” went on Lady Ramsden in a thin voice. “You
two will dine alone. What time do you like dinner, Maud? We usually have
it at eight. Will that suit you? Oh yes; and what is your maid’s name?”
Lady Ramsden got the bell rung for her, and got herself taken out of the
room. The pug was hoisted on to a velvet cushion and was carried before
her. In such manner did the Greeks carry the emblems of their gods
before their images.
As Maud looked at Violet she saw that the likeness was even more
extraordinary, and went deeper than she had noticed at first. Violet
could hardly have been more than twenty, and her features were still
unsexed. She was tall for a girl, and slightly built, and her walk and
way of sitting, or rather lolling, as she was lolling now, reminded Maud
exactly of what Tom had been when he came to stay with them once while
he was at Eton, and sat laughing and talking with them all at the end of
five minutes as naturally as if he had known them all his life. She had
Tom’s short square-tipped nose, his clear, open, brown eyes, with long
fine eyelashes and thin straight eyebrows. Her mouth, like his, was
rather full-lipped, and often even when she was not speaking the white
of her teeth showed between the lips in a straight narrow line. But her
manner was even more fundamentally his. She had Tom’s trick of wrinkling
his nose up slightly when he was amused, of putting his head slightly on
one side when he was listening or considering, and in speaking of just
perceptibly slurring his r’s, of separating his words one from the other
more like a foreigner with a perfect command of English than an
Englishman.
Violet strolled about the room just as he did, putting a book or two
straight, and making a little face at the pug’s saucer of tea with cream
in it which lay untasted in the corner. Violet disliked that pug; he was
fat, lazy, wheezy, and selfish, and she gave Maud a little sketch of
his character. Soon she sat down near her and began on more personal
topics.
“It is delightful to have you here,” she said. “I hope we shall make
great friends. I always want to be doing something all day, and if you
like playing golf and tennis, and bathing and riding, I’m sure we shall
get on.”
Maud was leaning back in her chair, feeling somehow unaccountably shy.
“I was quite startled when I came in,” she said; “you are so
extraordinarily like your cousin.”
Violet crossed one leg over the other and clasped her hands behind her
head.
“I haven’t seen Tom for an age,” she said; “but when we were younger we
were exactly alike. Tom--it was wicked of him--once dressed up in a
skirt and cloak, and hat of mine, and went into my mother’s room and
asked if she wanted anything in the town as he was going there with the
governess. My mother gave him all sorts of feminine commissions and
never suspected him till he burst out laughing. His mother and mine were
sisters, and our fathers brothers, you know. Has he changed much?”
“He is still exactly like you,” said Maud, who was beginning to feel
more at her ease.
“Tom’s getting quite famous, isn’t he?” the girl went on. “That will
serve to differentiate us. And he’s got a baby. How funny it seems! We
always said he would never grow up.”
“He hasn’t grown up much,” said Maud. “He is just like a boy still in
many ways.”
“It’s such a pity one has to get older,” remarked Violet. “I’m sure I
shall never enjoy myself so much when I am old, and I shall get stuffy
and think about complications and worries. At present I never worry.”
Maud smiled.
“I am afraid I must be getting old,” she said; “in fact, I came here in
order to forget complications and worries.”
Violet sat up with an air of surprise.
“Oh, please don’t worry,” she said, “or you will spoil it all. And we
can have such a charming time if we like.”
Maud rose.
“I will do my best to worry no more,” she said. “And will you help me?”
Her voice had a wonderful sweetness and tenderness about it. Violet got
up too and stood close to her.
“Why, that’s charming of you,” she said. “I don’t think I could ever
help anybody; but I will promise never to worry, if that is any use,
Miss Wrexham.”
“The utmost use,” said Maud; “and I am not Miss Wrexham. I have left
Miss Wrexham in London. I have done with her. May you never see her: she
is a wicked little fool.”
“Well, Maud, then,” said the girl.
Maud woke next morning slowly and blissfully, conscious of a new
interest in life, of a step taken. To be quit of London and all its fuss
and worry was the step taken, but the new interest was the more vital of
the two.
She and Violet had sat up late the night before talking, and Maud found
something exquisitely sweet in being able to look at almost a facsimile
of all that had made life bitter to her, to be able to talk and almost
hear Tom answering, to be able to see his eyes looking into hers with
affection and tenderness. For Maud had told Violet, without of course
mentioning the name, the story of her worry and break-down; that she had
loved a man and that he had married another, and that the desire of
meeting him and the strain of doing so had made London unbearable and
had affected her health.
Maud was one of those people who do not often make friends of their own
sex, and the relief merely of telling some one about it was great. But
when she felt she was almost telling it to Tom, as Violet sat opposite
her, the bitterness and struggle she had been enduring so many months
seemed quenched at last. Already her perplexities seemed capable of a
solution which she could not have anticipated.
And the new interest was Violet. She felt as if Manvers had been wrong
when he remarked cynically that Nature did not happen to have given us
two people to love in case one got married. She felt as if she had
almost cheated Fate, as if a substitute had been provided for her to
love. “I shall be with her all day,” thought Maud, as she watched her
maid moving about the room, “and I must, I will make her fond of me. If
I can do that I shall feel as if at last Tom cared.”
Indeed this seemed no very hard task. Maud had a great power of
attraction when she cared to attract, and she had already won Violet’s
heart by her confidence of the night before. There is nothing so
exquisite as to feel that one is trusted.
The friendship a man may have for a man, or a woman for a woman, is
often closer and more intimate than even between husband and wife.
However close a man may be to a woman, there still stands between them
the barrier of sex, which no one has yet succeeded in annihilating.
Members of two different sexes must look at things with different eyes,
and the attempt of the woman to become like the man seems only to
emphasize the difference. Certainly Violet could do for Maud what no man
could possibly do. A girl can say to a girl what no wife could say to
her husband, for there are certain things a man can never understand,
simply because he is not a woman, nor a woman because she is a woman.
It would have been impossible for Maud to tell the story of her trouble
to any one but a girl, and it seemed to her that the very telling of it
had taken away half its burden. And the burden removed, her body was
able to recuperate itself, for when the body is hurt through the soul it
cannot be cured until the soul is convalescent. Living all day in the
open air drinking in the fresh saltness of the sea, returning to the
first principles of healing, began to have their legitimate effect. And
if the air was bracing, Violet was still more bracing. The convalescence
of her body and soul kept pace with each other.
They had been playing tennis one morning, and had gone down to bathe
afterwards, and the two were sitting on the edge of the beach, Violet
with her hat off trying to persuade her hair to behave reasonably. Maud
had already dried hers and was absorbed in attempting to hit the pug,
who had accompanied them down to the sea, but absolutely refused to
wash, with small pebbles and shells.
“I hate that dog,” remarked Violet. “I wish you could hit it.”
“I wish I could,” said Maud. “There! No, it went over it.”
“I think I can forgive any one anything,” said Violet, “except laziness
and want of interest. Not to be interested in things, not to be
thoroughly alive, is the only unpardonable sin.”
“I’ve been sinning unpardonably for the last six months. What a fool I
have been making of myself!”
Violet wrinkled her nose.
“You poor darling! I didn’t refer to you. All the same it was foolish of
you.”
“But the world is so hard,” said Maud.
Violet held up a forefinger warningly.
“Now you know that is one of the things you are not allowed to say. How
old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
“For how many years did you say you had been completely happy?”
“Twenty-three and a half.”
Violet flicked the warm sea-scented air with the end of her towel.
“Well, then, I should be ashamed, Maud, I should be ashamed, especially
when you know you are beginning to be happy again.”
“That’s your doing.”
“We are talking about you, not me”--Violet’s voice came out of the
middle of the towel--“and you’ll please keep to the subject. Just fancy
my ever being good for anybody. How funny it seems!”
Maud lay back on her rug tilting her hat over her eyes.
“It’s a very nice, warm, kind world just now,” she added; “but oh,
Violet, will it last? Man is a creature of moods, especially woman!”
“Especially you, you mean. I never had a mood in my life.”
“But what would you do supposing something went wrong, supposing
something happened to you like what happened to me?”
“I should send for you to come and stay with me at Aunt Julia’s,” said
Violet, “and I should throw pebbles at that loathsome dog, and I should
hit it too.”
Violet’s towel flapped through the air and descended on Flo’s head.
Maud laughed as the dog got up, shook herself free of the towel, and
then lay down pathetically on the top of it.
“But seriously,” she went on, “if you wanted something very badly and
couldn’t get it, what would you do?”
Violet rescued the towel and resumed her seat.
“I haven’t got many wants, you know,” she said, “so I can’t tell. But I
hope I should be reasonable. I hope I should make a real effort to cease
to want it. And then, you know, one gets over things; it takes time, no
doubt, but everything worth doing takes time.”
“Ah, but that’s so terrible,” said Maud. “It just shows how limited we
are. If we were only stronger we should never get used to being without
the things we want. It is because we are weak and feeble that we begin
to forget. I want to know how we are to be strong and yet to forget.”
Violet stared absently at the sea.
“I understand what you mean,” she said, “but I think you are wrong.
After all we are human; we can’t get over that; and I think the woman
who can’t make an effort to forget, who goes on nursing her sorrow, is
feebler than the one who can. Of course time helps both. Oh yes, of
course I am right. I am very old-fashioned, you know. I don’t care about
dissecting myself and analyzing my tendencies, and thinking about
limitations and aspirations. It seems to me that if you are
inexperienced as I am you may kill yourself, as it were, in your
analysis, or blind yourself altogether by peering too closely.”
“Go on,” said Maud, “you are so healthy.”
Violet turned to her and lay down close beside her.
“Yes, I want to be healthy anyhow,” she said, “and that is the main
point. I think the way people dissect their own morbid selves, and put
themselves in three-volumed pickle-jars, so to speak, for their friends
to look at, is simply indecent. If you have a decayed tooth you don’t
show it to all your friends and say, ‘It is much worse since last week’;
you go to the dentist and have it stopped.”
“You dear dentist,” said Maud, “I’m so glad I came to you!”
“To tell yourself that life is hard and complicated,” continued Violet,
“is to make it so, because one always believes one’s self. To say that
it is simple simplifies it. Of course some people like it complicated,
and so I suppose they are right to tell themselves that it is. But to
tell yourself that it is complicated, and then be sorry for it, is
foolishness.”
“I hate complications,” said Maud. “I hate them as much as you hate that
pug. But supposing you find simple things dull; at least, supposing
after your complications you find the simple things which you liked
before bore you? Complications change one, you know.”
“I don’t know,” remarked Violet. “Do you mean that you are bored with
this place?”
“I mean nothing of the sort,” said Maud. “I was only speculating. And
the bell for lunch went ten minutes ago.”
“The simplest lunch wouldn’t bore me to-day,” said Violet.
“Nor me.”
Violet whistled to the pug and stood for a moment with her head a little
on one side looking at him disgustedly.
“You are most astonishingly like Tom,” said Maud; “he looked just like
that when he was examining Mr. Manvers’ statuette.”
“And how did Mr. Manvers look when he looked at Tom’s statue?” she
asked.
“He looked as the pug looks--rather hurt, but able to do without Tom’s
appreciation.”
“How utterly different they must be!”
“All the difference in the world,” said Maud. Then to herself: “One is
the man who loves me, the other”--she pulled herself up--“the man I used
to love.”