This was the event of his second day here. This was all. He had seen
her; the knowledge sang in his senses. Momentarily he felt that if his
visit yielded no more, it would have been bountiful enough. When her
glance lighted on him, he read her thought in it, and drew back ashamed.
He turned away ashamed, and afraid of seeming to intrude. In town he
had dared to picture himself sitting near her, watching her movements,
breaking the ice. In Godstone self-consciousness confounded him. She
appeared to him unapproachable; he had even been humiliated by her look.
Hilda said to Bee that afternoon: "There's another lodger here; he's
a nigger--or something of the sort. Isn't it a nuisance? I wonder the
Kemps take that kind of people in, with us in the house!"
"Oh, is he staying here?" said Bee; "I saw him coming out of Peters'.
Perhaps he is only down for the week-end. I don't suppose he'll be in
our way. If he does make himself objectionable, you had better come out
with me in the morning while he stops."
"I think I could keep him at a distance without that," returned Hilda
scornfully. "Besides, he would never have the impudence. What horrid
luck, though! If it had been a man come to stay here now, it would have
been rather nice."
But they had no reason to complain of his being "in their way"; the new
lodger did not attempt to scrape acquaintance with them, although in the
next two days they often passed him, idling in the garden, or sauntering
along the road. He refrained so punctiliously from staring at them, that
they were able to steal a few glances themselves. Bee observed that he
looked unhappy, and was fond of flowers; and Hilda remarked that he wore
a well-cut suit, and had a nice taste in neckties. "Evidently not a
common 'nigger,'" she said; "a medical student, or something!" She was
not concerned, though it was clear that he had come for longer than the
week-end.
On Tuesday she was obliged to acknowledge his existence. It was a stupid
incident--to happen with a "nigger." It might as easily have happened
with somebody worth meeting; say, with one of the young men who bowled
into the station-yard in dog-carts and looked as if they wished they
knew her. She had gone out to get a daily paper, and the lodger was in
the shop buying foolscap. She was told that the last of the newspapers
had just been sold to him. As soon as he heard that, he stammered
something about "not depriving" her of it. He stood before her with
his straw-hat in one hand, and the paper extended in the other. She
thanked him, but said that it really had no interest for her at all. He
persisted. She was firm--and left him overwhelmed by his gaucherie in
not persuading her to take it.
_Ten minutes later--Mrs. Kemp to Miss Hilda Sorrenford_: "Mr. Tremlett
has done with this paper, so 'e says you can 'ave it now if you like."
_Miss Hilda Sorrenford, understanding that the message has suffered in
delivery_: "Tell Mr. Tremlett I am much obliged to him." And in the
evening, when she saw him in the garden, she bowed and said that she
thought the weather was a little cooler.
David went back to his foolscap, having discovered that it is sometimes
much easier to write poetry about a girl than to talk to her. And
already he was reconciled to her voice because it was hers.
Prose was still a crutch that he couldn't afford to drop, and he had
hoped to transfer some of an essay from his head to the foolscap
by bedtime. His subject was before him, nothing less than an acorn,
sprouting a slender stem and a handful of leaves, in a tumbler of water.
Spying it in the woods, he had brought it home, and given it honour, to
Mrs. Kemp's diversion. He had enthroned it on the table, that little
acorn bursting with the ambition to be a tree, and as he sat wondering
at it, the slip of a stalk had grown to be gnarled and old, and the
bunch of leaves had towered above the centuries. Children came to play
beneath it who were chided for forgetting whether Elizabeth or Victoria
had reigned first over England in the long ago, and generations of
lovers had flitted past its shade, prattling of eternity. The story of
the acorn had clamoured in him to be written, but now he was too excited
and unhappy to work. Besides, how could he say it all in two or three
thousand words? It asked to be a book.
How clumsy he had been in the shop, stuttering and blundering like a
schoolboy; how absurd in the garden, with his fatuous mono-syllable!
Why couldn't he disguise his shyness? he had disguised it well enough
from the landlady when he paid her compliments on the doorstep; nobody
would have suspected how turbulent his nerves were then. At the time
he had been proud of his fluency--are not shy people always proud of
being fluent, even when they hear themselves saying things they don't
mean?--now he remembered it wistfully, jealous of himself. And his
letters! his letters mocked him. To write to a girl like that, and be
tongue-tied in her presence. The thing was laughable.
But he had learnt her name at last, for when he made Mrs. Kemp his
messenger, she had said: "Oh! you mean Miss 'Ilda."
Estimated by emotion it was ages before it happened, before their
relations advanced beyond "good-morning," or "good-evening," with a
platitude dropped in passing, and a commonplace returned with the
lifting of his hat. Yes, estimated by emotion it was ages before it
happened, but according to the almanac he had been here exactly nine
days. She was under the same tree, in the same chair. He had seen her
settle herself there half an hour ago, and for half an hour he had been
questioning how she would receive him if he joined her. What should he
say first; could he give to the indulgence a sufficiently casual air; in
fine, what sort of figure would he cut?
He ruffled his manuscript irresolutely. In a yard close by somebody was
hammering at a fence. It appeared to him that somebody began to hammer
at a fence as often as he tried to work. There was no possibility of his
writing even if he made another attempt, and inclination pulled him hard
towards the field. He gathered the papers up, and put them cautiously
away, as a criminal removes clues.
When he gained the path, she had risen from the chair, and was running
bareheaded in his direction. He did not for an instant see more than
that, more than that she was running; and he wondered. Then he saw her
face, and her voice reached him, and he realised that she was running
for help.
So they ran towards each other for five, perhaps ten seconds, she as if
pursued, and he seeking the cause.
"A wasp," she panted, "in my hair! A wasp! Get it out!"
"A wasp?" Why must one always echo in emergencies? He called himself a
fool. "Don't be frightened. Keep still. I'll get it out in a minute."
"Quick, quick!" she said, pulling at her hair frantically; "I shall go
mad!"
"Keep still," he repeated. "Take your hands down--it'll sting you."
He could hear the angry buzzing of the thing, but it was entangled,
hidden, and her hair dizzied him. She found the diffidence of his
touches exasperating.
"Take the pins out," she cried; "yes, yes, take them out. Oh! not like
that, be quick!"
Her impatience showed his breathlessness the way. He fought reverence
down, and tore them out as fast as she. Her hair rained over his hands,
and swept his arms. The wasp gave a last buzz venomously. "Oh, thank you
so much! I hope, I do hope, you aren't stung?" she said.
"Stung?" He was faint, shaken by a hurricane of new and strange emotion.
"It's all right, thanks."
"I've given you a lot of trouble," she said apologetically. "It was
silly of me to make such a fuss, I suppose; but I can't tell you what it
felt like."
"I can imagine."
"I've always been afraid it would happen one day; the place swarms with
them, doesn't it?"
"They come from the shops across the road," he said.
He was being stupid; he felt it. His little minute of authority was
over, and he was self-conscious again.
She began to pick up the hairpins from the grass. David stooped too. As
she looked at his hands she thought of the service they had rendered,
and shuddered slightly. Absorbed, he watched her lift her hair, and
twist it in a hasty coil, and stab it thrice with unconcern. In "The
People of the Dream Street" there is a line that was born at this
moment, though it was not written till long afterwards.
"You have been staying here for some time, haven't you?" he blurted.
"Yes, nearly a month," she said.
"How pretty it is!"
"Isn't it? We came here for my sister's work--she paints, you know."
"Yes, I know; I saw her before I saw you, though I didn't know she was
your sister then. She seems to work hard--I mean she is out a great
deal."
"Yes, it's just the sort of country she likes; I think she's sorry we're
going. She talks about coming back in the autumn to make some more
studies here."
"You're going?" he said blankly. "Are you? When?"
"Our month is up the day after to-morrow; we only came for a month."
There was the slightest pause, while he cursed himself for wasted weeks.
"And you," he asked, "do you paint too?"
"I? Oh no." She smiled her foolish smile, complacent in the
consciousness of youth and a profile. His eyes allayed her misgivings
about her hair. "I don't do anything; I'm quite ordinary," she said.
David smiled with her. There was a fascination in pretending to know
nothing of her mind when he believed he knew so much.
"It's original to be ordinary now that everybody is a genius."
"Is everybody a genius?" She looked a shade vacant. "Perhaps you live in
London? Our home is in Beckenhampton; in the provinces, I am afraid, we
are rather out of it."
"Oh, one can be quite as much out of it in London. What can be more
'provincial' than the life of the average Londoner? He goes to his
business after breakfast, and he goes back to his villa after tea. The
few friends he makes are, naturally, in the same groove, and talk about
the same things. Why," he went on, overjoyed to have found his tongue,
"he has no more acquaintance with artistic London, or political London,
or fashionable London than the people with businesses and villas in
the other towns. I don't understand the average Londoner's idea that,
because his own particular hencoop is in the capital, he must have a
wider range of vision than all the other hens in the kingdom; I don't
know what it's based on. One would suppose that the sight of the General
Post Office from the top of a bus every day converted people into a kind
of intellectual aristocracy. The suburbs snigger at the provinces, and
Bloomsbury sneers at the suburbs, and the truth is that, outside a few
exclusive circles, Londoners get all their knowledge of London from the
newspapers--which the provincials are reading at the same time."
She was not interested in the subject; it struck her only as a strange
one for him to discuss.
"I suppose so," she said. "Still in London one sees things and one can
get books to read. It's as difficult to get a new book in Beckenhampton
as it is to get cream in the country."
"Is that difficult?" he asked, thinking of Keats's "tight little fairy."
"Oh, you don't know the country very well. Try! They look at you amazed
when you ask for it." She laughed. "Last year when we went away we took
a new American tinned thing in the shape of a breakfast food with us.
I forget what it was called; a sort of porridge. They told you on the
tin that it was to be eaten with cream. Carelessly, 'cream'! I believe
in America cream isn't a curiosity. Our efforts to get threepennyworth!
There was only one place for miles round where there was the slightest
chance of it--a dairy belonging to a great lady who supplied the
public with milk as a favour. I don't mean that she didn't take their
money, but that the customers had to call for the milk and carry it
away. We used to go there two or three times a week and kow-tow to a
consequential dairy woman. We almost thought at first she must be the
great lady, but when she accepted our tips we concluded she wasn't. She
unbent so far as to promise 'to try to manage it for us one morning.'
After about a fortnight we reckoned it would have cost us two shillings
by the time it was 'managed.' I daresay it would have cost more, but we
decided that we couldn't afford the price of threepennyworth of cream
in the country, and we never got any. I can't say I'm very fond of the
country on the whole."
"Why, I imagined you loved it. That is"--he corrected himself
hastily--"you've the air of being so contented out here."
"Have I? Oh, I do gush about it sometimes, but"--she shrugged her
shoulders--"country walks are rather tiresome after you've got used to
them, don't you think so?"
He hesitated. "I think they must have been pleasanter before bicycles
were invented," he said; "it's difficult to enjoy a stroll along a
country lane when you have to keep skipping into a hedge to save
yourself from being cut in halves. Men who drive realise their
responsibility, but every counter-jumper seems to ride a bicycle, and
the cad in power is always dangerous. The most exasperating thing about
the country to me is the blindness and deafness of the people to all the
beauties round them. I'll except Mr. Kemp because I've discovered that
he notices the birds--they steal his grain, and he shoots them--but I've
been trying to learn the names of the wild-flowers ever since I've been
here, and it's impossible; one might as well inquire at Bethnal Green."
"I didn't know that," she said; "I haven't tried to find out. But
certainly everybody is very stupid."
There was a moment's silence. His glance wandered, and reverted to her.
She made a delightful picture; she was as lovely a philistine as ever
looked to the main chance with the gaze of a goddess, and for him she
had the magic of letters that she had never written, the seduction of
thoughts that she had never known. He would not admit to himself that a
shade of disappointment was clouding his mood.
Her name was cried before he spoke again.
"Hilda! where are you?"
"Hark! my sister's calling," she said; "I expect dinner's ready."
She moved towards the house, David beside her, and met Bee coming down
the path.
"Mr. Tremlett has been saving my life, Bee! I've been attacked while you
were out."
"Mr. Tremlett was very kind," answered Bee, smiling. "How did he do it?"
The three loitered in the doorway, talking, and she thanked him
seriously when she understood what had happened. He noted that her tones
were grave and sweet, and pitied her; and his gaze kept straying to the
beautiful face. After a minute he turned away, and the sisters went
inside.
"He's quite a gentleman," said the girl; "and I'm sure he must have been
stung, though he pretended he wasn't. It would have been quite romantic
if he had been another colour."
"She loved me for the dangers I had--averted," murmured Bee.
"What's that--a quotation?" asked Hilda,