I
It was one of those golden evenings that sometimes follows a hot clear
day--one of those rare evenings which linger in the memory when summer
has slipped away and which come back into the mind like a smile, an
endearment or a broad sweet melody, renewing optimism and replenishing
faith. The sun had gone, but its warm glow lingered in a sky that was
utterly unspotted. The quiet unruffled trees in all the rich green of
early maturity stood out against it almost as though they were painted
on canvas. The light was so true that distances were brought up to the
eye. Far-away sounds came closely to the ear. The murmur from the earth
gathered like that of a multitude of voices responding to prayers.
Palgrave drove slowly. The God-given peace and beauty that lay over
everything quieted the stress and storm of his mind. Somehow, too, with
Joan at his side on the road to the cottage in which he was to play out
the second or the last act of the drama of his Great Emotion, life and
death caught something of the truth and dignity of that memorable
evening--the sounds of life and the distance of death. If he was not to
live with Joan he would die with her. There was, to him, in the state
of mind into which this absorbing passion had worked him, no
alternative. Love, that he had made his lodestar in early youth and
sought in vain, had come at last. Marriage, convention, obligations,
responsibility, balance and even sanity mattered nothing. They were
swept like chaff before this sex-storm. Ten years of dreams were
epitomized in Joan. She was the ideal that he had placed on the secret
altar of his soul. She struck, all vibrant with youth, the one poetic
note that was hidden in his character behind vanity and sloth, cynicism
and the ingrained belief that whatever he desired he must have. And as
he drove away from Easthampton and the Hosack house he left behind him
Alice and all that she was and meant. She receded from his mind like
the white cliffs of a shore to which he never intended to return. He
was happier than he had ever been. In his curious exaltation, life,
with its tips and downs, its pettiness, its monotony, lay far below
him, as the moving panorama of land does to a flying man. His head was
clear, his plan definite. He felt years younger--almost boyish.
Laughter came easy--the sort of reasonless laughter that comes to tired
men as they start out on a holiday. He saw the strangeness of it all
with some wonder and much triumph. The Gilbert Palgrave who had been
molded by money and inertia and autocracy was discarded, and the man
with Joan at his side was the young Gilbert whom he had caught sight of
that night in Paris, when, on his way home under the stars, Joan, with
her brown hair and laughing eyes, tip-tilted nose and the spirit of
spring in her breath, had come out of his inner consciousness and
established herself like a shape in a dream.
His heart turned when he looked at Joan's face. Was its unusual gravity
due to the fact that she had come to the end of fooling--that she, too,
had sensed the finality or the beginning? He thought so. He believed
so. She looked younger than ever, but sweeter, less flippant, less
triumphantly irresponsible. She sat, like a child, with her hands in
her lap, her mouth soft, an odd wistfulness in her eyes with their long
curling lashes. A black straight-brimmed straw hat sat well down on her
small head and put a shadow on her face. The slim roundness of her arms
showed through the white silk shirt, and her low collar proved all the
beauty of her throat and neck. She looked more than ever unplucked,
untouched, like a rosebud.
On the tip of his tongue there were words of adoration, not fastidious
and carefully chosen, but simple, elemental words such as a farmhand
might blunder out in the deep shadow of a lane, after dark. But he held
them back. He would wait until after they had dined together and all
round them there were silence and solitude. He drove still more slowly
in order to give the two Japanese servants time to carry out his
instructions and remove themselves. That cottage, which he had bought
on the spur of the moment, fitted out with elaborate care and used only
twice, for two weeks since, was to justify itself, after all. Who
knows? He might have bought it two years before under an inspiration.
Even then, months and months before he met Joan or knew of her
existence, this very evening might have been mapped out He was a
fatalist, and it fell into his creed to think so.
He didn't wonder why Joan was silent or ask himself jealously of what
she was thinking. He chose to believe that she had arrived at the end
of impishness, had grown weary of Harry Oldershaw and his cubbish ways
and had turned to himself naturally and with relief, choosing her
moment with the uncanny intuition that is the gift of women. She was
only just in time. To-morrow would have found him following the
faithful Alice on her forlorn hope--the incurable man.
It was only when they turned into the narrow sandy road that was within
a quarter of a mile of the club at Devon that Joan came out of the
numbness that had settled upon her and recognized things that were
stamped with the marks of an afternoon that was never to be forgotten.
Martin--Martin--and it was all her fault.
"But why are you coming this way?" she asked, drawing back into her
seat.
"Because my cottage is just here," said Gilbert.
"At Devon?"
"Yes. Why not? I had a fancy for playing hermit from time to time. I
saw the sun set behind the water,--a Byron sunset,--and in the hope of
seeing just such another I bought this shack. I did those things once
for want of something better. Look at it," he said, and turned the car
through a rustic gate, alive with honeysuckle.
It was a bungalow, put up on a space cleared among a wood of young
trees that was carpeted with ferns. It might have been built for a poet
or a novelist or just an ordinary muscular man who loved the water and
the silences and the sense of being on the edge of the world. It was a
bungalow of logs, roughly constructed and saved from utter banality by
being almost completely clothed in wisteria. It was admirably suited to
two men who found amusement in being primitive or to a romantic
honeymoon couple who wanted to fancy themselves on a desert island.
Better still, it might have been built for just that night, for
Palgrave and the girl who had taken shape in his one good dream.
Joan got out of the opulent car and watched Gilbert run it round to the
side of the house. There was no garage and not even a shed to give it
cover. Gilbert left it in the open, where it remained sulky and
supercilious, like a grand piano in an empty kitchen.
Joan had noticed this place twice that day--on the way out to find
Martin, and again on the way back from having heard the voice of the
girl with the white face and the red lips and the hair that came out of
a bottle. Martin--Martin--and it was all her fault.
She wondered for a moment why no one came to open the door. Some one
was there because smoke was coming out of a chimney. But she refused to
be impatient. She had decided to give Gilbert one evening--to be nice
to him for one evening. He was terribly humble. Fate had dealt her a
smashing blow on the heart, and she had returned to consciousness
wistfully eager to make up at least to this man as well as she could
for the pain that she had caused. There was only this one evening in
which to do so because to-morrow she was going back to the old house,
the old people, the old servants and the old days, a failure, having
fallen off the Round-about, of which she had spoken so much. She was
going back a sort of cripple to the place from which she had escaped to
put the key into life; once more to read to her grandfather, to obey
the orders of her grandmother, to sleep in the warm kind arms of her
old bedroom, to go among the flowers and trees among which she had
grown up, herself old and tired and ashamed and broken-hearted, with
her gold ring burning into her finger and the constant vision of
Martin's shining armor lying bent and rusty before her eyes. What an
end to her great adventure!
Gilbert came up. He walked without his usual affectation of never
permitting anything to hurry him. All about him there was still a sort
of exaltation. His eyes were amazingly bright. His face had lost its
cynicism. Ten years seemed to have fallen from his shoulders like a
pack. He was a youth again, like Martin and Harry and Howard. Joan
noticed all this and was vaguely surprised--and glad, because obviously
she was giving him pleasure. He deserved it after her impish treatment
of him. What a fool she had been.
He said, bending down, "We keep the key here," and picked it up,
unlocked the door and stood back for her to pass.
"Oh, isn't this nice!" said Joan.
"Do you like it? It amused me to make it comfortable."
"Comfortable! But it's like a picture."
Gilbert laughed boyishly. Her enthusiasm delighted him. To make the
long low living room with its big brick chimney and open fireplace
absolutely right had dispelled his boredom--little as he had intended
to use it. The whole thing was carried out on the lines of the main
room in an English shooting box. The walls were matchboarded and
stained an oak color, and the floor was polished and covered with
skins. Old pewter plates and mugs, and queer ugly delightful bits of
pottery were everywhere--on shelves, on the wide mantelpiece, and
hanging from the beams. Colored sporting prints covered the walls,
among stuffed fish and heads of deer with royal antlers and beady eyes
with a fixed stare. The furniture was Jacobean--the chairs with ladder
backs and cane seats; a wide dresser, lined with colored plates; a long
narrow table with rails and bulging legs. Two old oak church pews were
set on each side of the fireplace filled with cushions covered with a
merry chintz. There were flowers everywhere in big bowls--red rambler
roses, primula, sweet williams, Shasta daisies, and scarlet poppies.
All the windows were open, and there was nothing damp or musty in the
smell of the room. On the contrary, the companionable aroma of tobacco
smoke hung in the air mixed with the sweet faint scent of flowers. The
place seemed "lived-in"--as well it might. The two Japs had played
gentlemen there for some weeks. The table was laid for two, and
appetizing dishes of cold food, salad and fruit were spread out on the
dresser and sideboard, with iced champagne and claret cup.
"The outside of the cottage didn't suggest all this comfort," said Joan.
"Comfort's the easiest thing in the world when you can pay for it.
There's one bedroom half the size of this and two small ones. A
bathroom and kitchen beyond. There's water, of course, and electric
light, and there's a telephone. I loathe the telephone, the destroyer
of aloofness, the missionary that breaks into privacy." He switched on
the lights in several old lanterns as he spoke. The day had almost
disappeared.
He went over to her and stood smiling.
"Well, isn't this better than a road-house reeking of food and flies
and made hideous by a Jazz band?"
"Much better," she said.
The delightful silence was broken by the crickets.
"Martin--Martin," she thought, "and it was all my fault."
A sort of tremble ran over Gilbert as he looked at her. Agony and joy
clashed in his heart. He had suffered, gone sleepless, worn himself out
by hard, grim exercise in order, who knew how many times, to master his
almost unendurable passion. He had killed long nights, the very thought
of which made him shudder, by reading books of which he never took in a
word. He had stood up in the dark, unmanned, and cursed himself and her
and life. He had denounced her to himself and once to her as a flapper,
a fool-girl, an empty-minded frivolous thing encased in a body as
beautiful as spring. He had thrown himself on his knees and wept like a
young boy who had been hurt to the very quick by a great injustice. He
had faced himself up, and with the sort of fear that comes to men in
moments of physical danger, recognized madness in his eyes. But not
until that instant, as she stood before him unguarded in his lonely
cottage, so slight and sweet and unexpectedly gentle, her eyes as
limpid as the water of a brook, her lips soft and kind and unkissed,
her whole young body radiating virginity, did he really know how
amazingly and frighteningly he loved her. But once again he held back a
rush of adoring words and a desire to touch and hold and claim. The
time had not come yet. Let her warm to him. Let him live down the
ugliness of the mood that she had recently put him into, do away with
the impression he must have given her of jealousy and petulance and
scorn. Let her get used to him as a man who had it in him to be as
natural and impersonal, and even as cubbish, as some of the boys she
knew. Later, when night had laid its magic on the earth, he would make
his last bid for her kisses--or take her with him across the horizon.
"How do you like that?" he asked, and pointed to a charmingly grotesque
piece of old Staffordshire pottery which made St. George a stunted
churchwarden with the legs of a child, his horse the kind of animal
that would be used in a green grocer's cart and the dragon a cross
between a leopard and a half-bred bulldog.
"Very amusing," she said, going over to it.
And the instant her back was turned, he opened a drawer in a sideboard
and satisfied himself that the thing which might have to put them into
Eternity together lay there, loaded.