|SAM was vilely dull about it all at first: his comprehension, stuck in
the mud, failed utterly to rise to the occasion, but before long; he was
looking back with horror on his turgid mental processes when she told
him that they would come away together.
He had a shadow, not more than a shadow of excuse for his preposterous
misunderstanding of her ease. Sam followed the crowd, accepted readymade
their principles and their lack of principles, their morality and their
immorality, and to the crowd he followed the theory was faithfulness and
the practice as much licence as they could take without being found out.
They made a boast rather than a secret of their affairs with a shopgirl
or a typist, he had never had an affair and was flattered to think that
he was to have one now.
He thought that an affair was rather a manly thing to have.
When Effie spoke, he had a great surprise, then cheapened her
insultingly. He decided that he had been wrong about her. After all, she
was nothing more than a pretty typist with whom he was going to have his
first affair, who was going to give him the opportunity to join in that
sly boasting in hotel smoke-rooms which was the habit of his crowd. He,
too, would rank amongst the sportsmen.
But, even at his worst, he had the grace to doubt that this was of the
same kind as those other affairs. It had a lowest common measure with
them, but--Effie! Cheapen her as he would, he could not think of her as
cheap enough for that. When others did this thing it was, surely, that
they were giving rein to grossness: it was at least charitable to assume
that the women of their amours were of coarser grain than their wives,
and Effie’s was not the coarser grain. He drifted, acquiescing and
puzzled, through the fog of his perplexity.
Illumination came to him, not in the crowded railway carriage, but
in the trap which drove them from the station to the Inn. It came, he
thought, miraculously, but perhaps the miracle was nothing more than
that a man sees clearly in Westmoreland, and sees through dirt in
Manchester. He worshipped Effie who was sacrificing all to him, and
with abasement at the thought that he had meant, with his pitiful
achievements, to surprise her.
He, shepherded to joy at the Marbeck Inn had set out to surprise Effie!
That was what made it, from the first dawn of understanding, a perfect
wonder-tale. He had not calculated this; it happened, like a dream, in
the air, unrooted in prevision. But that was all it had, except its rapt
intensity, of the quality of dream. It was dreamlike because it was more
vivid than his experience of life, but it was life. Only, he had not
known these things about life before. He had underestimated life.
The Inn lay in a saucer of the hills at the end of a road which led to
nowhere. As a road, it finished at the Inn and went on only as a rough
cart-track which dwindled and divided into two trails across the passes.
The fells came down in grandeur to the Inn--it wasn’t a place from which
one looked at distant hills, but one where the hills were intimately
there--and half a mile away there was the Lake.
They were twelve miles from a station, at the end of the world, alone
with happiness. Of course, there were other people at the Inn, but Sam
and Effie were alone: they two with the heather and the bracken and the
pines: they two with love.
The crowd has not discovered Marbeck. The Inn, the Church, the Vicarage,
down by the Lake the Hall, a farmhouse or two along the road, and that
is all. Six miles away there is a post-office.
He had followed the crowd on his rare holidays. He knew Blackpool
Promenade and Morecambe and the things to do at Douglas. Here, one did
not do those things. One walked and climbed and lay extended on the
heather or in the perfect isolation of high bracken, and bathed in the
Lake or the streams or the tarns, haphazard, naked, where one liked and
when one liked; and all the time one breathed the air.
It needed no thunderous knocking on the door to get her out of bed into
the Marbeck air. Sam would go for an early dip in the pool below the Inn
where two streams cascaded into a swimmable basin, and when he returned
she would be up or ready to get up that he might brush her hair, or not
up that she might play at being peevish and be lifted out of bed by him.
And the food, the good rough plenty of the Marbeck Inn! They ate of it
prodigiously and carried to the hills parcels of sandwiches and cakes
and cheese, shamelessly large, which they emptied to the last crumb, and
eked out in the woods with raspberries and nuts.
She took him on the Lake, with a rod borrowed from the Inn, and showed
him how to fish. He relished it amazingly, catching little but the
spirit of the thing, happy because of the green reflection of the woods
in the water and because of her. His restlessness found pause in a boat
with Effie and she noted with a keen delight that he did not envy the
expert basket of the postman who cycled to Marbeck in the mornings
and fished till he cycled away with the letters in the afternoon. She
registered as a happy gain that he did not want to shine, or try to beat
that seasoned fisher at his game. Nor did the posts distract them. They
had no letters there.
They bathed continually, for it was hot, and here again he made no
effort to excel, but let it be admitted that she was the better swimmer.
How much the better she did not let him know. She knew that he found the
water here a purer element than in the old Blackfriars Baths where he
had learnt when he was at school, and she tired less rapidly than he
did. But he was wondrously content to own inferiority.
She had a deep symbolic faith in bathing. They were here to wash his mud
away, and water was cleaner than talk. Talk, indeed, was but a surface
pattern of their time. They hardly needed it, except as levity to
mitigate a deep communion which sometimes grew almost intolerably sweet.
It was Blea Tarn, one of the many of that name, which they made
peculiarly theirs, their favourite bathing-place, their best lunch-room.
Effie stretched herself luxuriously on the close-cropped turf, at peace
in mind and body.
“Sam,” she asked, “have you noticed that Frump at the Inn? She sits
behind me at dinner.”
“No,” said Sam truthfully. “When I’m with you I notice nobody else. And
I don’t know how you saw her if she sits behind you.”
“Eyes in the back of my head,” she explained. “You have them when you’re
a woman. Do you mind if I give her a shock?”
“You would if she could see you now,” he said. “Yes, but she doesn’t
deserve it,” said Effie complacently. She surveyed herself and Sam did
the same. She pleased them both, taking her sun-bath there on the mossy
turf. “But I may shock her?”
“You may do anything,” he said.
“Thank God for that,” said Effie joyously, and something glittered in
the sun and fell with a splash far into the tarn. “Too deep to dive
for it,” she decided. “Bang goes a shilling and I’m glad. I never liked
pretence.”
“I say!” Sam protested, and then fell silent comprehendingly.
She looked at him and greeted his silence with a nod. “I shan’t catch
cold,” she said, holding up her finger where the wedding ring had been.
“I feel better now I’m rid of that.”
The remarkable fact was that Sam understood. His education had
progressed and he knew that it was not for the Frump at the Inn that she
shed the imitation wedding ring which for form’s sake he had suggested
she should wear: it was for him. The ring was counterfeit, it was a
false symbol of something which was not true: it had no place in the
Marbeck scheme.
She curled up happily like a stroked cat, partly in sheer physical
well-being, partly in gladness at her scheme’s success. “And to think,”
she crooned, “that I am a wicked woman!”
“Effie,” he pleaded, taking her hand. “Don’t.”
“As if I care,” she said, rolling over on to her back and taking his
hand with her to shade her eyes. “I might have been doing this all
my life.” Indeed, in her perfect absence of embarrassment, she might.
“Wicked!” She shied a stone after the wedding ring into the tarn and
laughed at a world well lost. “The Frump won’t understand, my dear, but
I think you do.”
“I think I do,” said Sam, but the fullness of understanding had not come
to him yet.
Something, indeed, of her fineness he did perceive, but not its whole,
its utter selflessness. He saw, roughly, what she was after: that it
was here, in Westmoreland when she made her sacrifice, here when she
lay beside him in the sun that she expressed in deed what she had been
baffled to express in Manchester. She had brought him away from the murk
and the fog and the place where they rather like dirt than otherwise
because dirt means money, to where nature was beautiful. She had shown
him beauty there, her beauty and the beauty of sacrifice and the beauty
of things. She had taught him that there was beauty in the world. “We’ll
never go back,” he cried.
“No. Not back,” she said. “But we will go to Manchester.”
“No. No. We’ll build a tabernacle here.”
“Here? No. We’ve been lawless here. We’ll go to Manchester.”
It rang in his ears like the trump of doom. So far they had marched in
thought together, and he imagined that in her scheme they were to be
together to the end. He thought her purpose was that they two were
to work together to give shape to beauty--and no bad exercise in
perception, either, for Sam Branstone.
That was her purpose, but, as she saw it, they were not to work together
in the sense he meant. Her spirit was to go on with him, but she herself
would stand aside, denying herself the right and the joy of sharing his
work with him in physical partnership. She would have done her share at
Marbeck: she was a sign-post whose direction he was to follow but which
he left behind, not a guide to go with him on his way: and she thought
she was content with that.
She renounced and she imagined that of the two of them it was she who
was the realist and he who was romantic, he was romantic because he
wanted her with him and she the realist because she remembered Ada. She
was not jealous of Ada no’; if she could not bless Ada, neither did she
damn her. Ada had never held him as Effie held him now. She thought it
satisfied her to know that she held him, and to let the days slip
past uncounted. Nothing is infinite except our human capacity for
self-deception.
For the present, for the Marbeck heyday, it did satisfy her, and she
went about the business of her tutelage with the unruffled serenity of
fulfilled purpose, almost involuntarily now, thinking little, feeling
everything in the passionate intensity of her sacramental love. It would
end and she would suffer: meantime there were only so many days and
it was no use impairing finite days with regrets that they were not
infinite.
Thought was for before and afterwards, not for now when she crusaded for
the soul of Sammy Branstone with the mystic rapture of a trance, joyful
like the other sorts of true religion. She would wake up, but she would
have taught Sam his lesson; she would have given him his gleam; and she
was selfless after that....
Of course she may have deceived herself. There is spiritual love, but
Effie was flesh and blood.
Sam, at any rate, was not etherealizing things. He did not appreciate
the happiness of renouncing happiness. He wanted it to last, to go on
with the gay days on the hills when she put health into his body and
health into his mind, when it was all a high-spirited riot without
an undertow. For hours on end, they lived their lives unclouded by a
thought... rude, rough, exhilarating exercise on the glamorous fells
like that illustrious day when they climbed the Pike and lost themselves
in mist and found themselves again just where they wished to be, on the
downward trail by Corner Tarn to Yorkdale: then on the steamer down the
Lake, and the lonely moonlight walk across the Moor to Branley, where
the trap from the Inn met them and took them, comfortably tired, to
Marbeck and a giant’s feast. And there were other days, more leisured,
on their Lake or in the woods when more seemed to happen in his soul and
less in his body; and their day of Bathes, in five well separated tarns,
with a makeweight bathe in the Marsland Beck for luck. He wanted it to
last. He had intoxication of the hills, of her, of everything.
He had not seen, he would not and he could not, see the possibility of
her leaving him. He did not know that leaving him was as fundamental a
part of her plan as coming to him.
“We’ll go hack to Manchester,” she said, and it seemed to him that he
was ordered hack to hell. “That’s where your business is,” she added, a
little wickedly.
Business! Hadn’t she shown him the ugliness of his business, and the
beauty of Marbeck? Why should they ever leave the hills? He had all the
extremity of a convert.
Effie would say no more, and now, as the end of their time grew near,
the magic seemed to him less magical, because he had to leave it,
because she would not stay for ever in that lonely place, but wanted him
to go where other men lived, in an ugly town, where he had a business
she had taught him to despise, and responsibilities, and Ada.
He plunged to gloom. What was the use of knowing that there was light if
he must go back to darkness? Was it not treachery in her to come so far
with him, then leave him to himself?
“Effie!” he pleaded, and she consented to make things clear.
“Don’t you see, Sam? We’ve done what we came here to do. You’ve seen,
you know, and you will not slide back. I won’t allow you to.”
“You won’t allow! Then you’ll be there?”
“I hope my spirit will be always there,” she said. “Do you doubt that?”
“Spirit?” he said. “You’re overrating me. You’re asking more than I can
give. I cannot give what isn’t there.”
“I’ve put it there,” she said. “You cannot fail. You can’t forget.”
* “I’d not forget, but I should fail. It’s we, my dear. Not I alone, but
you and I. Without you I am lost.”
She made a great concession. “Then, if you’re sure----”
“Quite sure,” he said, and she decided to indulge his weakness.
“Then don’t dismiss your secretary. Then I’ll be there.”
“As secretary?”
“Of, of course.” She spoke impatiently. All else was at the end.
That only made it more impossible than ever. She was to be there--and
not to be there. There, in his office where he would see her every day,
where he had only to stretch out his hand to touch her, and where he was
not to touch, where he was to forget that he had ever touched. He
wanted her, all of her, the touch, the glow, the life of her, and she
offered--what? A sexless wraith, a spiritual guide, her presence in
asceticism.
“No,” he said. “No. I’d rather die than that.”
“Oh, death is a good arrangement, Sam, but well be brave.”
“There are limits even to bravery.”
“No,” said the realist. “There are none.”
So she sent him, though he did not know that the suggestion came from
her, to gather strength in the peace of the everlasting hills. She
sent him to Hartle Pike to think, to see that she was right. He would
remember Ada there.
He did remember Ada, but it seemed to him, when he tried to sum up his
recollections, that Ada was not the woman who counted in his life. The
women who counted were before Ada and after Ada. They were Anne and
Effie.
In the gathering dusk on Hartle Pike he tried to be cool about it and to
see things in proportion. Effie had the supreme advantage of immediacy.
It wasn’t easy, whilst he lived encircled by her glamour, to see Ada at
all.
But he had been Ada’s husband for ten years, a long time, more than a
quarter of his life. In all those years there must be something which
he could positively remember of her, some definite characteristic;
something, at any rate, which was individual to her. He searched
and found nothing. She had less individuality in his mind than his
sideboard. He supposed that she kept house, or did she? Didn’t he
recall that the cook’s wages went up one year, and that the cook became
cook-housekeeper? In that case, and he felt certain of it now, Ada did
nothing. He was equally certain that she was nothing. Since he had grown
accustomed to her demands for money, she was not even an irritant. She
was a standing charge, like the warehouse rent.
Quite suddenly, as he lingered over that definition of his wife, “a
standing charge,” he saw that it was double-edged. It cut at him, and
shrewdly.
Ada, like Effie, was a woman, and he knew from Effie what a woman could
be. There must, at least, have been possibilities in Ada. Dear God, what
had he done with them if she was nothing now? That was the charge--that
he had married her and that she was nothing: that he had permitted
her to become nothing. He could summon no witness for his defence, he
remembered no occasion when he had fought for Ada, as Effie had fought
for him. And as to sacrifice----! Yet he was supposed to have loved Ada.
He could have howled for very shame, he could not, in fairness, think
that Ada had given him anything, but writhed that he had thought just
now of Anne and Effie as the two women who counted in his life. They
were the women who gave. Was he to take all from women and render
nothing to a woman in return? If he could say of Ada, his wife these
last ten years, that she did not count, then he was very much to blame
and the path was clear before him. He saw to where the gleam that Effie
gave him pointed. To Ada. It annoyed him desperately that it should
point to Ada.
He began to descend the hill in a cold fury. The world was hideous,
Marbeck an illusion, Effie a fool. No: Effie was right. One could not
run away from facts and hide one’s head amongst the hills, and say there
were no facts. She had not brought him there to obscure facts, but to
reveal them.
It remained to face them, to return to Manchester with new knowledge and
new courage. It needed courage to turn his back on Marbeck, to go away
from happiness to Ada.
He stamped upon that thought, as on a snake. It was disloyalty to Effie
who had sacrificed to him and shown him all the beauty of her sacrifice.
He, too, would sacrifice and find a beauty in it.
He found it extraordinarily difficult to meet Effie, and spent an
unnecessarily long time with the landlord of the Inn. Then he went in to
her.
“I’m leaving,” he stammered. “I couldn’t stay another night. By driving
fifteen miles I can catch the South Mail at midnight. I’ve arranged for
you to come to-morrow.”
He jerked each sentence out painfully.
Effie met his eyes with her serene gaze. “That’s infinitely best,” she
said. “I’m proud of you.”
He had seen! It was her victory, complete and unequivocal, and she
was proud of him and of herself. He had got rid of mud and he had seen
beauty. Now he was facing the facts as she would have him face them,
clear-eyed, without romance. Like her, he was a realist, and she was
glad... glad.
But when he went up to their room to pack his bag, Effie left the Inn
quickly and walked hard. She must put space between them: space, that
she might cry unheard. It seemed to her that if he heard her crying he
would not go, and she wanted him to go. She was a realist. She was...
stifling her sobs amongst the heather; triumphing in victory on Marbeck
Ridge.
She won, as she had said that she would win. But there were limits to
her bravery.