This time they played in the morning. They had a simple lunch of boiled
eggs such as the Club provided. It was a common occurrence for Mary to
stay on the links all day.
Hannah thought nothing of her absence at the mid-day meal. Fanny
thought a great deal, but said no word. Jane, thinking little, casually
questioned why it was always married men who came to Bridnorth.
"And invariably married men who play golf," she added. Indeed in those
days the younger men somewhat left the game to their elders. "I believe
Mary's a bit of a fool," she went on. "If she really wanted to marry,
she'd play tennis or sit on the beach at bathing time. That girl Hyland
got married last year throwing pebbles at an old bottle. We've all
thought marriage was a serious business. That was the way they brought
us up." She looked at her mother's portrait. "That's what's been all
wrong with us. It isn't the one who sits quietest who's chosen. It's
the one who fusses about and chooses for herself. You've got to be able
to throw pebbles at glass bottles now. Crochet hooks aren't any good.
All our chances have been lost in two purl and one plain. It's their
fault, both of them--it's their fault."
Jane spoke so terribly near the truth sometimes that it was agony for
those others to listen to her. To Hannah it was sacrilege almost,
against the spirit of those still ruling in that house. To Fanny it was
no sacrilege. She too knew it had been their fault. But the truth of
it was a whip, driving her, not that she forgot her fatigue, but so as
to urge her on, stumbling, feeling the hope in her heart like harness
wearing into the flesh.
Almost visibly she aged as she listened. Her expression drooped. Her
eyes fixed in a steady gaze upon Jane's face while she was speaking as
though the weight of lead were holding them from movement.
"Don't speak like that, Jane!" Hannah exclaimed. "How can you say it's
their fault? They did the very best they knew for us. Wouldn't you
sooner be as you are than like that girl Hyland?"
"She's got a baby now," Jane replied imperturbably. "She'll steady down.
She's contributed more than we have. It isn't much when all you can say
is that you've given a few old clothes to jumble sales."
"I know what Jane means," said Fanny. Her memory had caught her back to
that late evening on the cliffs when she felt again, like an internal
wound, that spareness of her body in the arms which for those few
moments had held her close. "I know what Jane means," she repeated, and
rose from the table, leaving the room, not waiting for her coffee.
At the Golf Club over their boiled eggs and the gritty coffee while
Liddiard smoked, they talked of Wenlock Hall, the history of it, the
farm and lands surrounding it, the meaning that it had for him.
"How many children have you?" asked Mary.
"None," said he.
It was a question as to whether they should play the final match that
afternoon. Each had won a game.
"Why get through good things all at once?" said he. "That's a sky for
sketching--my sort of amiable sketching. The view across the bay from
that Penlock hill will be wonderful."
Her readiness to part with his company for the afternoon was simple and
genuine.
"Of course," she said, "you're here for a holiday. I was getting
selfish. I don't often get a good game, you see. We've plenty of
opportunity if, as you say, you don't go till next week."
"Oh, I meant you to come if you would," he explained quickly. "Not much
fun, I know. But there's the walk out there and back and I like being
talked to while I'm painting. Not much of a conversationalist then, I
admit. I'm doing all the selfishness--but one doesn't often get the
chance of being talked to--as you talk."
It was the first time she had ever been told that any power of
interesting conversation was hers. She felt a catch of excitement in
her breath. When she answered him, she could not quite summon her voice
to speak on a casual note. It sounded muffled and thick, as though her
heart were beating in her throat and she had to speak through it. Yet
she was not conscious that it was.
"I'll come if you really want me to," she said, and her acceptance was
neither eager nor restrained. She went as freely as she walked and she
walked with a loose, swinging stride. It became a mental observation
with him as they climbed the cliff path, that their steps fell together
with even regularity.
His sketch was a failure. The atmosphere defied him, or the talk they
made distracted his mind. He threw the block face downwards on the
grass.
"Oh! why do you do that?" she asked, regretting consciously that which
she did not know she was glad of--"It looked as if it were going to be
so nice."
"It had got out of hand," said he. "They do, so often. I know when I
can't pull 'em together. Besides, talking's better, isn't it? You can't
give your whole interest to two things at once."
How long had they known each other? Two days--less! He felt he had been
talking to her constantly, over a long period of time. She knew he felt
that and was kept in wonder as to what her interest could be to him.
Once definitely having put his sketch out of his mind, he lay back on
the close, sharp-bitten grass, looking no more across the bay, but
talking to Mary about herself. Tentative and restrained as his questions
were, they sought her out. She felt no desire for concealment, but sat
there, upright, as one would most times find her, drawing a thread of
sea grass backwards and forwards through her fingers, answering the
questions he asked, sometimes briefly, sometimes with far excursion into
her mind, expressing thoughts she scarcely had been conscious of till
then.
"You make me a great egotist," she said presently, with a laugh.
"Isn't yours the age for egotism?" he answered. "Why shouldn't you think
about yourself when you're young, and all's in front of you? When you
come up with it you'll have no time."
"When I'm young," she laughed. "You'd better guess how old I am," and
she laughed again, knowing what Hannah or Jane would think to hear her.
"I don't want to guess," said he. "Suppose you were twenty-eight--or
even thirty, I say all's in front of you. That's your age. That's the
impression you give me."
"I'm twenty-nine," said she, and her eyebrow lifted with suppressed
laughter as he sat up in his surprise to look at her.
"Twenty-nine?" he repeated. "What have you been doing with your life?
Why are you here, playing an occasional game of golf, attending mothers'
meetings, going to your little church every Sunday to listen to that
fool of a parson you have? It's waste--waste--utter waste!"
"Have you ever thought how many women do waste in the world?" she asked
and then of a sudden felt the hot sweep of blood into her face. How had
it happened she had come to talk to a man and a stranger like this? Yet
wasn't it true, and wasn't there some sort of exciting satisfaction in
saying it? She could not have said that to Hannah, to Jane, not even to
Fanny. Why was it possible to exchange such intimate thoughts with a man
and he, an utter stranger she had met only the day before?
Suddenly, in the speaking of that thought, she had learnt something
about herself and not herself only but about all women and the whole of
life. All that her mother had taught her was wrong. Concealment,
deception, fraud, these were not the outward symbols of modesty. Just
as for the ailments of her body she could not have gone to a woman
doctor, so with the smoldering fever of her inmost thoughts, it was only
to a man she could speak.
Then did men understand? With the rest of her sex she had always argued
that they did not. If it was not for understanding, then why had she
spoken? It must be that they understood; but not with their minds, not
cruelly, scorchingly, calculatingly, as women did, judging shrewdly the
relation between character and the fact confided, but more spiritually
than this; the inner meaning, the deeper purpose, relating that
confidence to the soul of the woman who made it, rather than to her
conduct.
In that moment she had learnt the indefinable complement between the
sexes. In that moment, Mary Throgmorton had for the first time in her
life answered to the cry of Nature calling mate to mate.
The heat of the blood lifted in temperature in her cheeks as she came
upon her knowledge, but he said nothing of the flush that lingered in
them. A woman would have noticed that and to her shrewd observation
they would have burnt the more. As he sat there, not looking at her,
but staring through the pine trees across the bay, she found a feeling
of comfort in being with him as her cheeks grew cool again.
Never looking at her, he asked if women were conscious of that sense of
waste, and the tone of his voice was neither searching nor inquisitive.
It had no suggestion of personal curiosity behind it. He spoke from
inside himself, from inner purposes and from the inner purposes within
herself she answered him, feeling no sense of restraint.
"Do you imagine they wouldn't be?" she replied. "Not perhaps in their
everyday life, but in moments in those days when even in a crowd you
suddenly drop out of existence, like a star falling, and find yourself
alone. Of course they feel it. Every energy of man it seems to me has
been to keep women from the touch of life. But sometimes they find a
loophole and get out and find the sense of it, if it's only in the tips
of their fingers. They may be only moments, but every woman has them."
She had never talked like this to any one before. Had there been any one
to talk to? Would she have spoken to them in such a fashion if there
had? It was only since that sermon, the Christmas before, she had been
aware such thoughts were in the composition of her mind and never had
they expressed themselves so definitely as this.
Yet her wonder was more of him than of herself. Until that moment she
could never have believed a man could have understood. And it was not
from what he said that she felt he did. He was sitting up now and he
was nursing his knees as he gazed out across the bay towards Kingsnorth.
It was in the abstract penetration of his gaze, the silence about him as
he listened that she sensed his understanding.
Yet had she known it, he was thinking more of himself than of her.
Something echoed in him with all she had said. It was not that he had
never gained, but that he had lost his touch with life. The spirit in
him was wandering and alone and it had chanced upon hers, wandering
also.
This sense of mutual understanding was merely the call of Nature. The
hazard of all things had tumbled them together in the crowd of the
world. Something had touched. They knew it that second day. She was
answering some purpose in him--he in her. And the explanation that
Nature vouchsafed to her was that he understood women; and the
explanation that Nature vouchsafed to him was that he was beginning to
understand himself, and that there was much in him that needed much in
her.
It was too soon to think that. It was too upheaving.
He rose quickly to his feet, saying, half under his breath, but loud
enough for her to hear, "It's odd--it's all odd."
And she knew what he meant.