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THE BLACK DOG
Tales
* * * * *
By the Same Author
ADAM AND EVE AND PINCH ME
CLORINDA WALKS IN HEAVEN
HIPS AND HAWS
* * * * *
THE BLACK DOG
And Other Stories by
A. E. COPPARD
[Illustration; Publisher's Device]
New York
Alfred A. Knopf
1923
Made and printed in Great Britain by Charles Whittingham
and Griggs (Printers), Ltd., London.
_to_
GAY
I record my acknowledgments to the Editors of the following journals in
which some of these tales first appeared:
_The Saturday Review_, _The Westminster Gazette_,
_The Sovereign Magazine_, _The English Review_,
_The Dial_, _The Metropolitan_, _The Double Dealer_.
A. E. C.
_Contents_
PAGE
THE BLACK DOG 13
ALAS, POOR BOLLINGTON! 50
THE BALLET GIRL 62
SIMPLE SIMON 79
THE TIGER 91
MORDECAI AND COCKING 107
THE MAN FROM KILSHEELAN 113
TRIBUTE 133
THE HANDSOME LADY 139
THE FANCY DRESS BALL 173
THE CAT, THE DOG, AND THE BAD OLD DAME 188
THE WIFE OF TED WICKHAM 195
TANIL 206
THE DEVIL IN THE CHURCHYARD 228
HUXLEY RUSTEM 236
BIG GAME 243
THE POOR MAN 252
LUXURY 286
THE BLACK DOG
_Tales_
_The Black Dog_
Having pocketed his fare the freckled rustic took himself and his
antediluvian cab back to the village limbo from which they had briefly
emerged. Loughlin checked his luggage into the care of the porter, an
angular man with one eye who was apparently the only other living being
in this remote minute station, and sat down in the platform shade. July
noon had a stark eye-tiring brightness, and a silence so very deep—when
that porter ceased his intolerable clatter—that Loughlin could hear
footsteps crunching in the road half a mile away. The train was late.
There were no other passengers. Nothing to look at except his trunks,
two shiny rails in the grim track, red hollyhocks against white palings
on the opposite bank.
The holiday in this quiet neighbourhood had delighted him, but its
crowning experience had been too brief. On the last day but one the
loveliest woman he had ever known had emerged almost as briefly as
that cabman. Some men are constantly meeting that woman. Not so the
Honourable Gerald Loughlin, but no man turns his back tranquilly on
destiny even if it is but two days old and already some half-dozen
miles away. The visit had come to its end, Loughlin had come to his
station, the cab had gone back to its lair, but on reflection he could
find no other reasons for going away and denying himself the delight of
this proffered experience. Time was his own, as much as he could buy of
it, and he had an income that enabled him to buy a good deal.
Moody and hesitant he began to fill his pipe when the one-eyed porter
again approached him.
“Take a pipe of that?” said Loughlin, offering him the pouch.
“Thanky, sir, but I can’t smoke a pipe; a cigarette I take now and
again, thanky, sir, not often, just to keep me from cussing and
damming. My wife buys me a packet sometimes, she says I don’t swear so
much then, but I don’t know, I has to knock ’em off soon’s they make me
feel bad, and then, dam it all, I be worsen ever....”
“Look here,” said the other, interrupting him, “I’m not going by this
train after all. Something I have forgotten. Now look after my bags and
I’ll come along later, this afternoon.” He turned and left the station
as hurriedly as if his business was really of the high importance the
porter immediately conceived it to be.
The Honourable Gerald, though handsome and honest, was not a fool.
A fool is one who becomes distracted between the claims of instinct
and common sense; the larger foolishness is the peculiar doom of
imaginative people, artists and their kind, while the smaller
foolishness is the mark of all those who have nothing but their
foolishness to endorse them. Loughlin responded to this impulse
unhesitatingly but without distraction, calmly and directly as became
a well-bred bachelor in the early thirties. He might have written
to the young beauty with the queer name, Orianda Crabbe, but that
course teemed with absurdities and difficulties for he was modest,
his romantic imagination weak, and he had only met her at old
Lady Tillington’s a couple of days before. Of this mere girl, just
twenty-three or twenty-four, he knew nothing save that they had been
immediately and vividly charming to each other. That was no excuse
for presenting himself again to the old invalid of Tillington Park,
it would be impossible for him to do so, but there had been one vague
moment of their recalled intercourse, a glimmering intimation, which
just now seemed to offer a remote possibility of achievement, and so he
walked on in the direction of the park.
Tillington was some miles off and the heat was oppressive. At the end
of an hour’s stroll he stepped into “The Three Pigeons” at Denbury and
drank a deep drink. It was quiet and deliciously cool in the taproom
there, yes, as silent as that little station had been. Empty the
world seemed to-day, quite empty; he had not passed a human creature.
Happily bemused he took another draught. Eighteen small panes of glass
in that long window and perhaps as many flies buzzing in the room. He
could hear and see a breeze saluting the bright walled ivy outside and
the bushes by a stream. This drowsiness was heaven, it made so clear
his recollection of Orianda. It was impossible to particularize but
she was in her way, her rather uncultured way, just perfection. He
had engaged her upon several themes, music, fishing (Loughlin loved
fishing), golf, tennis, and books; none of these had particularly
stirred her but she had brains, quite an original turn of mind. There
had been neither time nor opportunity to discover anything about her,
but there she was, staying there, that was the one thing certain,
apparently indefinitely, for she described the park in a witty detailed
way even to a certain favourite glade which she always visited in the
afternoons. When she had told him that, he could swear she was not
finessing; no, no, it was a most engaging simplicity, a frankness that
was positively marmoreal.
He would certainly write to her; yes, and he began to think of fine
phrases to put in a letter, but could there be anything finer, now,
just at this moment, than to be sitting with her in this empty inn. It
was not a fair place, though it was clean, but how she would brighten
it, yes! there were two long settles and two short ones, two tiny
tables and eight spittoons (he _had_ to count them), and somehow he
felt her image flitting adorably into this setting, defeating with its
native glory all the scrupulous beer-smelling impoverishment. And then,
after a while, he would take her, and they would lie in the grass under
a deep-bosomed tree and speak of love. How beautiful she would be. But
she was not there, and so he left the inn and crossed the road to a
church, pleasant and tiny and tidy, whitewalled and clean-ceilinged.
A sparrow chirped in the porch, flies hummed in the nave, a puppy was
barking in the vicarage garden. How trivial, how absurdly solemn,
everything seemed. The thud of the great pendulum in the tower had
the sound of a dead man beating on a bar of spiritless iron. He was
tired of the vapid tidiness of these altars with their insignificant
tapestries, candlesticks of gilded wood, the bunches of pale flowers
oppressed by the rich glow from the windows. He longed for an altar
that should be an inspiring symbol of belief, a place of green and
solemn walls with a dark velvet shrine sweeping aloft to the peaked
roof unhindered by tarnishing lustre and tedious linen. Holiness was
always something richly dim. There was no more holiness here than in
the tough hassocks and rush-bottomed chairs; not here, surely, the
apple of Eden flourished. And yet, turning to the lectern, he noted the
large prayer book open at the office of marriage. He idly read over
the words of the ceremony, filling in at the gaps the names of Gerald
Wilmot Loughlin and Orianda Crabbe.
What a fool! He closed the book with a slam and left the church.
Absurd! You _couldn’t_ fall in love with a person as sharply as all
that, could you? But why not? Unless fancy was charged with the
lightning of gods it was nothing at all.
Tramping away still in the direction of Tillington Park he came in the
afternoon to that glade under a screen of trees spoken of by the girl.
It was green and shady, full of scattering birds. He flung himself down
in the grass under a deep-bosomed tree. She had spoken delightfully of
this delightful spot.
When she came, for come she did, the confrontation left him very
unsteady as he sprang to his feet. (Confound that potation at “The
Three Pigeons”! Enormously hungry, too!) But he was amazed, entranced,
she was so happy to see him again. They sat down together, but he was
still bewildered and his confusion left him all at sixes and sevens.
Fortunately her own rivulet of casual chatter carried them on until he
suddenly asked: “Are you related to the Crabbes of Cotterton—I fancy I
know them?”
“No, I think not, no, I am from the south country, near the sea, nobody
at all, my father keeps an inn.”
“An inn! How extraordinary! How very ... very ...”
“Extraordinary?” Nodding her head in the direction of the hidden
mansion she added: “I am her companion.”
“Lady Tillington’s?”
She assented coolly, was silent, while Loughlin ransacked his brains
for some delicate reference that would clear him over this ... this ...
cataract. But he felt stupid—that confounded potation at “The Three
Pigeons”! Why, that was where he had thought of her so admirably, too.
He asked if she cared for the position, was it pleasant, and so on.
Heavens, what an astonishing creature for a domestic, quite positively
lovely, a compendium of delightful qualities, this girl, so frank, so
simple!
“Yes, I like it, but home is better. I should love to go back to my
home, to father, but I can’t, I’m still afraid—I ran away from home
three years ago, to go with my mother. I’m like my mother, she ran away
from home too.”
Orianda picked up the open parasol which she had dropped, closed it in
a thoughtful manner, and laid its crimson folds beside her. There was
no other note of colour in her white attire; she was without a hat. Her
fair hair had a quenching tinge upon it that made it less bright than
gold, but more rare. Her cheeks had the colour of homely flowers, the
lily and the pink. Her teeth were as even as the peas in a newly opened
pod, as clear as milk.
“Tell me about all that. May I hear it?”
“I have not seen him or heard from him since, but I love him very much
now.”
“Your father?”
“Yes, but he is stern, a simple man, and he is so just. We live at a
tiny old inn at the end of a village near the hills. ‘The Black Dog.’
It is thatched and has tiny rooms. It’s painted all over with pink,
pink whitewash.”
“Ah, I know.”
“There’s a porch, under a sycamore tree, where people sit, and an old
rusty chain hanging on a hook just outside the door.”
“What’s that for?”
“I don’t know what it is for, horses, perhaps, but it is always there,
I always see that rusty chain. And on the opposite side of the road
there are three lime trees and behind them is the yard where my father
works. He makes hurdles and ladders. He is the best hurdle maker in
three counties, he has won many prizes at the shows. It is splendid to
see him working at the willow wood, soft and white. The yard is full
of poles and palings, spars and fagots, and long shavings of the thin
bark like seaweed. It smells so nice. In the spring the chaffinches
and wrens are singing about him all day long; the wren is lovely, but
in the summer of course it’s the whitethroats come chippering, and
yellow-hammers.”
“Ah, blackbirds, thrushes, nightingales!”
“Yes, but it’s the little birds seem to love my father’s yard.”
“Well then, but why did you, why did you run away?”
“My mother was much younger, and different from father; she was
handsome and proud too, and in all sorts of ways superior to him. They
got to hate each other; they were so quiet about it, but I could see.
Their only common interest was me, they both loved me very much. Three
years ago she ran away from him. Quite suddenly, you know; there was
nothing at all leading up to such a thing. But I could not understand
my father, not then, he took it all so calmly. He did not mention even
her name to me for a long time, and I feared to intrude; you see, I did
not understand, I was only twenty. When I did ask about her he told me
not to bother him, forbade me to write to her. I didn’t know where she
was, but he knew, and at last I found out too.”
“And you defied him, I suppose?”
“No, I deceived him. He gave me money for some purpose—to pay a
debt—and I stole it. I left him a letter and ran away to my mother. I
loved her.”
“O well, that was only to be expected,” said Loughlin. “It was all
right, quite right.”
“She was living with another man. I didn’t know. I was a fool.”
“Good lord! That was a shock for you,” Loughlin said. “What did you
do?”
“No, I was not shocked, she was so happy. I lived with them for a
year....”
“Extraordinary!”
“And then she died.”
“Your mother died!”
“Yes, so you see I could not stop with my ... I could not stay where I
was, and I couldn’t go back to my father.”
“I see, no, but you want to go back to your father now.”
“I’m afraid. I love him, but I’m afraid. I don’t blame my mother, I
feel she was right, quite right—it was such happiness. And yet I feel,
too, that father was deeply wronged. I can’t understand that, it sounds
foolish. I should so love to go home again. This other kind of life
doesn’t seem to eclipse me—things have been extraordinary kind—I don’t
feel out of my setting, but still it doesn’t satisfy, it is polite and
soft, like silk, perhaps it isn’t barbarous enough, and I want to live,
somehow—well, I have not found what I wanted to find.”
“What did you want to find?”
“I shan’t know until I have found it. I do want to go home now, but I
am full of strange feelings about it. I feel as if I was bearing the
mark of something that can’t be hidden or disguised of what my mother
did, as if I were all a burning recollection for him that he couldn’t
fail to see. He is good, a just man. He ... he is the best hurdle maker
in three counties.”
While listening to this daughter of a man who made ladders the
Honourable Gerald had been swiftly thinking of an intriguing phrase
that leaped into his mind. Social plesiomorphism, that was it! Caste
was humbug, no doubt, but even if it was conscious humbug it was
there, really there, like the patterned frost upon a window pane,
beautiful though a little incoherent, and conditioned only by the size
and number of your windows. (Eighteen windows in that pub!) But what
did it amount to, after all? It was stuck upon your clear polished
outline for every eye to see, but within was something surprising as
the sight of a badger in church—until you got used to the indubitable
relation of such badgers to such churches. Fine turpitudes!
“My dear girl,” he burst out, “your mother and you were right,
absolutely. I am sure life is enhanced not by amassing conventions, but
by destroying them. And your feeling for your father is right, too,
rightest of all. Tell me ... let me ... may I take you back to him?”
The girl’s eyes dwelt upon his with some intensity.
“Your courage is kind,” she said, “but he doesn’t know you, nor you
him.” And to that she added, “You don’t even know me.”
“I have known you for ten thousand years. Come home to him with me, we
will go back together. Yes, you can explain. Tell him”—the Honourable
Gerald had got the bit between his teeth now—“tell him I’m your
sweetheart, will you—will you?”
“Ten thousand ...! Yes, I know; but it’s strange to think you have only
seen me just once before!”
“Does that matter? Everything grows from that one small moment into a
world of ... well of ... boundless admiration.”
“I don’t want,” said Orianda, reopening her crimson parasol, “to grow
into a world of any kind.”
“No, of course you don’t. But I mean the emotion is irresistible, ‘the
desire of the moth for the star,’ that sort of thing, you know, and I
immolate myself, the happy victim of your attractions.”
“All that has been said before.” Orianda adjusted her parasol as a
screen for her raillery.
“I swear,” said he, “I have not said it before, never to a living soul.”
Fountains of amusement beamed in her brilliant eyes. She was exquisite;
he was no longer in doubt about the colour of her eyes—though he could
not describe them. And the precise shade of her hair was—well, it was
extraordinarily beautiful.
“I mean—it’s been said to me!”
“O damnation! Of course it’s been said to you. Ah, and isn’t that my
complete justification? But you agree, do you not? Tell me if it’s
possible. Say you agree, and let me take you back to your father.”
“I think I would like you to,” the jolly girl said, slowly.
II
On an August morning a few weeks later they travelled down together to
see her father. In the interim Orianda had resigned her appointment,
and several times Gerald had met her secretly in the purlieus of
Tillington Park. The girl’s cool casual nature fascinated him not less
than her appearance. Admiration certainly outdistanced his happiness,
although that also increased; but the bliss had its shadow, for the
outcome of their friendship seemed mysteriously to depend on the
outcome of the proposed return to her father’s home, devotion to that
project forming the first principle, as it were, of their intercourse.
Orianda had not dangled before him the prospect of any serener
relationship; she took his caresses as naturally and undemonstratively
as a pet bird takes a piece of sugar. But he had begun to be aware of a
certain force behind all her charming naivete; the beauty that exhaled
the freshness, the apparent fragility, of a drop of dew had none the
less a savour of tyranny which he vowed should never, least of all by
him, be pressed to vulgar exercise.
When the train reached its destination Orianda confided calmly that
she had preferred not to write to her father. Really she did not know
for certain whether he was alive or even living on at the old home she
so loved. And there was a journey of three miles or more which Orianda
proposed to walk. So they walked.
The road lay across an expanse of marshy country and approached the
wooded uplands of her home only by numerous eccentric divagations made
necessary by culverts that drained the marsh. The day was bright; the
sky, so vast an arch over this flat land, was a very oven for heat;
there were cracks in the earth, the grass was like stubble. At the mid
journey they crossed a river by its wooden bridge, upon which a boy
sat fishing with stick and string. Near the water was a long white hut
with a flag; a few tethered boats floated upon the stream. Gerald gave
a shilling to a travelling woman who carried a burden on her back and
shuffled slowly upon the harsh road sighing, looking neither to right
nor left; she did not look into the sky, her gaze was fastened upon her
dolorous feet, one two, one two, one two; her shift, if she had such a
garment, must have clung to her old body like a shrimping net.
In an hour they had reached the uplands and soon, at the top of a
sylvan slope where there was shade and cooling air, Gerald saw a sign
hung upon a sycamore tree, _The Black Dog by Nathaniel Crabbe_. The inn
was small, pleasant with pink wash and brown paint, and faced across
the road a large yard encircled by hedges, trees, and a gate. The
travellers stood peeping into the enclosure which was stocked with new
ladders, hurdles, and poles of various sizes. Amid them stood a tall
burly man at a block, trimming with an axe the butt of a willow rod. He
was about fifty, clad in rough country clothes, a white shirt, and a
soft straw hat. He had mild simple features coloured, like his arms and
neck, almost to the hue of a bay horse.
“Hullo!” called the girl. The man with the axe looked round at her
unrecognizingly. Orianda hurried through the gateway. “Father!” she
cried.
“I did not know. I was not rightly sure of ye,” said the man, dropping
the axe, “such a lady you’ve grown.”
As he kissed his daughter his heavy discoloured hands rested on her
shoulders, her gloved ones lay against his breast. Orianda took out her
purse.
“Here is the money I stole, father.”
She dropped some coins one by one into his palm. He counted them over,
and saying simply “Thank you, my dear,” put them into his pocket.
“I’m dashed!”—thought Loughlin, who had followed the girl—“it’s exactly
how _she_ would take it; no explanation, no apology. They do not know
what reproach means. Have they no code at all?”
She went on chatting with her father, and seemed to have forgotten her
companion.
“You mean you want to come back!” exclaimed her father eagerly, “come
back here? That would be grand, that would. But look, tell me what I am
to do. I’ve—you see—this is how it is—”
He spat upon the ground, picked up his axe, rested one foot upon the
axe-block and one arm upon his knee. Orianda sat down upon a pile of
the logs.
“This is how it is ... be you married?”
“Come and sit here, Gerald,” called the girl. As he came forward
Orianda rose and said: “This is my very dear friend, father, Gerald
Loughlin. He has been so kind. It is he who has given me the courage
to come back. I wanted to for so long. O, a long time, father, a long
time. And yet Gerald had to drag me here in the end.”
“What was you afraid of, my girl?” asked the big man.
“Myself.”
The two visitors sat upon the logs. “Shall I tell you about mother?”
asked the girl.
Crabbe hesitated; looked at the ground.
“Ah, yes, you might,” he said.
“She died, did you know?”
The man looked up at the trees with their myriads of unmoving leaves;
each leaf seemed to be listening.
“She died?” he said softly. “No, I did not know she died.”
“Two years ago,” continued the girl, warily, as if probing his mood.
“Two years!” He repeated it without emotion. “No, I did not know she
died. ’Tis a bad job.” He was quite still, his mind seemed to be
turning over his own secret memories, but what he bent forward and
suddenly said was: “Don’t say anything about it in there.” He nodded
towards the inn.
“No?” Orianda opened her crimson parasol.
“You see,” he went on, again resting one foot on the axe-block and
addressing himself more particularly to Gerald: “I’ve ... this is how
it is. When I was left alone I could not get along here, not by myself.
That’s for certain. There’s the house and the bar and the yard—I’d
to get help, a young woman from Brighton. I met her at Brighton.” He
rubbed the blade of the axe reflectively across his palm—“And she
manages house for me now, you see.”
He let the axe fall again and stood upright. “Her name’s Lizzie.”
“O, quite so, you could do no other,” Gerald exclaimed cheerfully,
turning to the girl. But Orianda said softly: “What a family we are!
He means he is living with her. And so you don’t want your undutiful
daughter after all, father?” Her gaiety was a little tremulous.
“No, no!” he retorted quickly, “you must come back, you must come
back, if so be you can. There’s nothing I’d like better, nothing on
this mortal earth. My God, if something don’t soon happen I don’t know
what _will_ happen.” Once more he stooped for the axe. “That’s right,
Orianda, yes, yes, but you’ve no call to mention to her”—he glared
uneasily at the inn doorway—“that ... that about your mother.”
Orianda stared up at him though he would not meet her gaze.
“You mean she doesn’t know?” she asked, “you mean she would want you to
marry her if she did know?”
“Yes, that’s about how it is with us.”
Loughlin was amazed at the girl’s divination. It seemed miraculous,
what a subtle mind she had, extraordinary! And how casually she took
the old rascal’s—well, what could you call it?—effrontery, shame,
misdemeanour, helplessness. But was not her mother like it too? He had
grasped nothing at all of the situation yet, save that Nathaniel Crabbe
appeared to be netted in the toils of this housekeeper, this Lizzie
from Brighton. Dear Orianda was “dished” now, poor girl. She could not
conceivably return to such a menage.
Orianda was saying: “Then I may stay, father, mayn’t I, for good with
you?”
Her father’s eyes left no doubt of his pleasure.
“Can we give Gerald a bedroom for a few days? Or do we ask Lizzie?”
“Ah, better ask her,” said the shameless man. “You want to make a stay
here, sir?”
“If it won’t incommode you,” replied Loughlin.
“O, make no doubt about that, to be sure no, I make no doubt about
that.”
“Have you still got my old bedroom?” asked Orianda, for the amount
of dubiety in his air was in prodigious antagonism to his expressed
confidence.
“Why yes, it may happen,” he replied slowly.
“Then Gerald can have the spare room. It’s all wainscot and painted
dark blue. It’s a shrimp of a room, but there’s a preserved albatross
in a glass case as big as a van.”
“I make no doubt about that,” chimed in her father, straightening
himself and scratching his chin uneasily, “you must talk to Lizzie.”
“Splendid!” said Gerald to Orianda, “I’ve never seen an albatross.”
“We’ll ask Lizzie,” said she, “at once.”
Loughlin was experiencing not a little inward distress at this turn in
the affair, but it was he who had brought Orianda to her home, and he
would have to go through with the horrid business.
“Is she difficult, father?”
“No, she’s not difficult, not difficult, so to say, you must make
allowance.”
The girl was implacable. Her directness almost froze the blood of the
Hon. Loughlin.
“Are you fond of her. How long has she been here?”
“O, a goodish while, yes, let me see—no, she’s not difficult, if that’s
what you mean—three years, perhaps.”
“Well, but that’s long enough!”
(Long enough for what—wondered Loughlin?)
“Yes, it is longish.”
“If you really want to get rid of her you could tell her ...”
“Tell her what?”
“You know what to tell her!”
But her father looked bewildered and professed his ignorance.
“Take me in to her,” said Orianda, and they all walked across to “The
Black Dog.” There was no one within; father and daughter went into
the garden while Gerald stayed behind in a small parlour. Through the
window that looked upon a grass plot he could see a woman sitting in a
deck chair under a tree. Her face was turned away so that he saw only
a curve of pink cheek and a thin mound of fair hair tossed and untidy.
Lizzie’s large red fingers were slipping a sprig of watercress into a
mouth that was hidden round the corner of the curve. With her other
hand she was caressing a large brown hen that sat on her lap. Her black
skirt wrapped her limbs tightly, a round hip and a thigh being rigidly
outlined, while the blouse of figured cotton also seemed strained upon
her buxom breast, for it was torn and split in places. She had strong
white arms and holes in her stockings. When she turned to confront the
others it was easy to see that she was a foolish, untidy, but still a
rather pleasant woman of about thirty.
“How do you do, Lizzie?” cried Orianda, offering a cordial hand. The
hen fluttered away as, smiling a little wanly, the woman rose.
“Who is it, ’Thaniel?” she asked.
Loughlin heard no more, for some men came noisily into the bar and
Crabbe hurried back to serve them.
III
In the afternoon Orianda drove Gerald in the gig back to the station to
fetch the baggage.
“Well, what success, Orianda?” he asked as they jogged along.
“It would be perfect but for Lizzie—that _was_ rather a blow. But
I should have foreseen her—Lizzies are inevitable. And she _is_
difficult—she weeps. But, O I am glad to be home again. Gerald, I feel
I shall not leave it, ever.”
“Yes, Orianda,” he protested, “leave it for me. I’ll give your
nostalgia a little time to fade. I think it was a man named Pater said:
‘All life is a wandering to find home.’ You don’t want to omit the
wandering?”
“Not if I have found my home again?”
“A home with Lizzie!”
“No, not with Lizzie.” She flicked the horse with the whip. “I shall be
too much for Lizzie; Lizzie will resume her wandering. She’s as stupid
as a wax widow in a show. Nathaniel is tired of Lizzie, and Lizzie of
Nathaniel. The two wretches! But I wish she did not weep.”
Gerald had not observed any signs of tearfulness in Lizzie at the
midday dinner; on the contrary, she seemed rather a jolly creature,
not that she had spoken much beyond “Yes, ’Thaniel, No, ’Thaniel,” or
Gerald, or Orianda, as the case had been. Her use of his Christian
name, which had swept him at once into the bosom of the family,
shocked him rather pleasantly. But he did not know what had taken place
between the two women; perhaps Lizzie had already perceived and tacitly
accepted her displacement.
He was wakened next morning by unusual sounds, chatter of magpies in
the front trees, and the ching of hammers on a bulk of iron at the
smithy. Below his window a brown terrier stood on its barrel barking
at a goose. Such common simple things had power to please him, and for
a few days everything at “The Black Dog” seemed planned on this scale
of novel enjoyment. The old inn itself, the log yard, harvesting, the
chatter of the evening topers, even the village Sunday delighted him
with its parade of Phyllis and Corydon, though it is true Phyllis wore
a pink frock, stockings of faint blue, and walked like a man, while
Corydon had a bowler hat and walked like a bear. He helped ’Thaniel
with axe, hammer, and plane, but best of all was to serve mugs of beer
nightly in the bar and to drop the coins into the drawer of money. The
rest of the time he spent with Orianda whom he wooed happily enough,
though without establishing any marked progress. They roamed in
fields and in copses, lounged in lanes, looking at things and idling
deliciously, at last returning home to be fed by Lizzie, whose case
somehow hung in the air, faintly deflecting the perfect stream of
felicity.
In their favourite glade a rivulet was joined by a number of springs
bubbling from a pool of sand and rock. Below it the enlarged stream was
dammed into a small lake once used for turning a mill, but now, since
the mill was dismantled, covered with arrow heads and lily leaves,
surrounded by inclining trees, bushes of rich green growth, terraces
of willow herb, whose fairy-like pink steeples Orianda called “codlins
and cream,” and catmint with knobs of agreeable odour. A giant hornbeam
tree had fallen and lay half buried in the lake. This, and the black
poplars whose vacillating leaves underscored the solemn clamour of the
outfall, gave to it the very serenity of desolation.
Here they caught sight of the two woodpeckers bathing in the springs, a
cock and his hen, who had flown away yaffling, leaving a pretty mottled
feather tinged with green floating there. It was endless pleasure to
watch each spring bubble upwards from a pouch of sand that spread
smoke-like in the water, turning each cone into a midget Vesuvius. A
wasp crawled laboriously along a flat rock lying in the pool. It moved
weakly, as if, marooned like a mariner upon some unknown isle, it could
find no way of escape; only, this isle was no bigger than a dish in an
ocean as small as a cartwheel. The wasp seemed to have forgotten that
it had wings, it creepingly examined every inch of the rock until it
came to a patch of dried dung. Proceeding still as wearily it paused
upon a dead leaf until a breeze blew leaf and insect into the water.
The wasp was overwhelmed by the rush from the bubbles, but at last it
emerged, clutching the woodpecker’s floating feather and dragged itself
into safety as a swimmer heaves himself into a boat. In a moment it
preened its wings, flew back to the rock, and played at Crusoe again.
Orianda picked the feather from the pool.
“What a fool that wasp is,” declared Gerald, “I wonder what it is
doing?”
Orianda, placing the feather in his hat, told him it was probably
wandering to find home.
One day, brightest of all days, they went to picnic in the marshes,
a strange place to choose, all rank with the musty smell of cattle,
and populous with grasshoppers that burred below you and millions,
quadrillions of flies that buzzed above. But Orianda loved it. The
vast area of coarse pasture harboured not a single farmhouse, only a
shed here and there marking a particular field, for a thousand shallow
brooks flowed like veins from all directions to the arterial river
moving through its silent leagues. Small frills of willow curving on
the river brink, and elsewhere a temple of lofty elms, offered the only
refuge from sun or storm. Store cattle roamed unchecked from field to
field, and in the shade of gaunt rascally bushes sheep were nestling.
Green reeds and willow herb followed the watercourses with endless
efflorescence, beautiful indeed.
In the late afternoon they had come to a spot where they could see
their village three or four miles away, but between them lay the
inexorable barrier of the river without a bridge. There was a bridge
miles away to the right, they had crossed it earlier in the day; and
there was another bridge on the left, but that also was miles distant.
“Now what are we to do?” asked Orianda. She wore a white muslin frock,
a country frock, and a large straw hat with poppies, a country hat.
They approached a column of trees. In the soft smooth wind the foliage
of the willows was tossed into delicate greys. Orianda said they looked
like cockshy heads on spindly necks. She would like to shy at them, but
she was tired. “I know what we _could_ do.” Orianda glanced around the
landscape, trees, and bushes; the river was narrow, though deep, not
more than forty feet across, and had high banks.
“You can swim, Gerald?”
Yes, Gerald could swim rather well.
“Then let’s swim it, Gerald, and carry our own clothes over.”
“Can you swim, Orianda?”
Yes, Orianda could swim rather well.
“All right then,” he said. “I’ll go down here a little way.”
“O, don’t go far, I don’t want you to go far away, Gerald,” and she
added softly, “my dear.”
“No, I won’t go far,” he said, and sat down behind a bush a hundred
yards away. Here he undressed, flung his shoes one after the other
across the river, and swimming on his back carried his clothes over in
two journeys. As he sat drying in the sunlight he heard a shout from
Orianda. He peeped out and saw her sporting in the stream quite close
below him. She swam with a graceful overarm stroke that tossed a spray
of drops behind her and launched her body as easily as a fish’s. Her
hair was bound in a handkerchief. She waved a hand to him. “You’ve done
it! Bravo! What courage! Wait for me. Lovely.” She turned away like
an eel, and at every two or three strokes she spat into the air a gay
little fountain of water. How extraordinary she was. Gerald wished he
had not hurried. By and by he slipped into the water again and swam
upstream. He could not see her.
“Have you finished?” he cried.
“I have finished, yes.” Her voice was close above his head. She was
lying in the grass, her face propped between her palms, smiling down at
him. He could see bare arms and shoulders.
“Got your clothes across?”
“Of course.”
“All dry?”
She nodded.
“How many journeys? I made two.”
“Two,” said Orianda briefly.
“You’re all right then.” He wafted a kiss, swam back, and dressed
slowly. Then as she did not appear he wandered along to her humming a
discreet and very audible hum as he went. When he came upon her she
still lay upon the grass most scantily clothed.
“I beg your pardon,” he said hastily, and full of surprise and modesty
walked away. The unembarrassed girl called after him: “Drying my hair.”
“All right”—he did not turn round—“no hurry.”
But what sensations assailed him. They aroused in his decent
gentlemanly mind not exactly a tumult, but a flux of emotions,
impressions, and qualms; doubtful emotions, incredible impressions, and
torturing qualms. That alluring picture of Orianda, her errant father,
the abandoned Lizzie! Had the water perhaps heated his mind though it
had cooled his body? He felt he would have to urge her, drag her if
need be, from this “Black Dog.” The setting was fair enough and she was
fair, but lovely as she was not even she could escape the brush of its
vulgarity, its plebeian pressure.
And if all this has, or seems to have, nothing, or little enough to do
with the drying of Orianda’s hair, it is because the Honourable Gerald
was accustomed to walk from grossness with an averted mind.
“Orianda,” said he, when she rejoined him, “when are you going to give
it up. You cannot stay here ... with Lizzie ... can you?”
“Why not?” she asked, sharply tossing back her hair. “I stayed with my
mother, you know.”
“That was different from this. I don’t know how, but it must have been.”
She took his arm. “Yes, it was. Lizzie I hate, and poor stupid father
loves her as much as he loves his axe or his handsaw. I hate her
meekness, too. She has taken the heart out of everything. I must get
her away.”
“I see your need, Orianda, but what can you do?”
“I shall lie to her, lie like a libertine. And I shall tell her that my
mother is coming home at once. No Lizzie could face that.”
He was silent. Poor Lizzie did not know that there was now no Mrs.
Crabbe.
“You don’t like my trick, do you?” Orianda shook his arm caressingly.
“It hasn’t any particular grandeur about it, you know.”
“Pooh! You shouldn’t waste grandeur on clearing up a mess. This is a
very dirty Eden.”
“No, all’s fair, I suppose.”
“But it isn’t war, you dear, if that’s what you mean. I’m only doing
for them what they are naturally loth to do for themselves.” She
pronounced the word “loth” as if it rimed with moth.
“Lizzie,” he said, “I’m sure about Lizzie. I’ll swear there is still
some fondness in her funny little heart.”
“It isn’t love, though; she’s just sentimental in her puffy kind of
way. My dear Honourable, you don’t know what love is.” He hated her to
use his title, for there was then always a breath of scorn in her tone.
Just at odd times she seemed to be—not vulgar, that was unthinkable—she
seemed to display a contempt for good breeding. He asked with a stiff
smile “What _is_ love?”
“For me,” said Orianda, fumbling for a definition, “for me it is a
compound of anticipation and gratitude. When either of these two
ingredients is absent love is dead.”
Gerald shook his head, laughing. “It sounds like a malignant bolus that
I shouldn’t like to take. I feel that love is just self-sacrifice.
Apart from the taste of the thing or the price of the thing, why and
for what this anticipation, this gratitude?
“For the moment of passion, of course. Honour thy moments of passion
and keep them holy. But O, Gerald Loughlin,” she added mockingly, “this
you cannot understand, for you are not a lover; you are not, no, you
are not even a good swimmer.” Her mockery was adorable, but baffling.
“I do not understand you,” he said. Now why in the whole world of
images should she refer to his swimming? He _was_ a good swimmer.
He was silent for a long time and then again he began to speak of
marriage, urging her to give up her project and leave Lizzie in her
simple peace.
Then, not for the first time, she burst into a strange perverse
intensity that may have been love but might have been rage, that was
toned like scorn and yet must have been a jest.
“Lovely Gerald, you must never marry, Gerald, you are too good for
marriage. All the best women are already married, yes, they are—to all
the worst men.” There was an infinite slow caress in her tone but she
went on rapidly. “So I shall never marry you, how should I marry a kind
man, a good man? I am a barbarian, and want a barbarian lover, to crush
and scarify me, but you are so tender and I am so crude. When your soft
eyes look on me they look on a volcano.”
“I have never known anything half as lovely,” he broke in.
Her sudden emotion, though controlled, was unconcealed and she turned
away from him.
“My love is a gentleman, but with him I should feel like a wild bee in
a canary cage.”
“What are you saying!” cried Gerald, putting his arms around her.
“Orianda!”
“O yes, we do love in a mezzotinted kind of way. You could do anything
with me short of making me marry you, anything, Gerald.” She repeated
it tenderly. “Anything. But short of marrying me I could make you do
nothing.” She turned from him again for a moment or two. Then she took
his arm and as they walked on she shook it and said chaffingly, “And
what a timid swimmer my Gerald is.”
But he was dead silent. That flux of sensations in his mind had taken
another twist, fiery and exquisite. Like rich clouds they shaped
themselves in the sky of his mind, fancy’s bright towers with shining
pinnacles.
Lizzie welcomed them home. Had they enjoyed themselves—yes, the day
had been fine—and so they had enjoyed themselves—well, well, that was
right. But throughout the evening Orianda hid herself from him, so he
wandered almost distracted about the village until in a garth he saw
some men struggling with a cow. Ropes were twisted around its horns and
legs. It was flung to the earth. No countryman ever speaks to an animal
without blaspheming it, although if he be engaged in some solitary work
and inspired to music, he invariably sings a hymn in a voice that seems
to have some vague association with wood pulp. So they all blasphemed
and shouted. One man, with sore eyes, dressed in a coat of blue fustian
and brown cord trousers, hung to the end of a rope at an angle of
forty-five degrees. His posture suggested that he was trying to pull
the head off the cow. Two other men had taken turns of other rope
around some stout posts, and one stood by with a handsaw.
“What are you going to do?” asked Gerald.
“Its harns be bent, yeu see,” said the man with the saw, “they be going
into its head. ’Twill blind or madden the beast.”
So they blasphemed the cow, and sawed off its crumpled horns.
When Gerald went back to the inn Orianda was still absent. He sat down
but he could not rest. He could never rest now until he had won her
promise. That lovely image in the river spat fountains of scornful fire
at him. “Do not leave me, Gerald,” she had said. He would never leave
her, he would never leave her. But the men talking in the inn scattered
his flying fiery thoughts. They discoursed with a vacuity whose very
endlessness was transcendent. Good God! Was there ever a living person
more magnificently inane than old Tottel, the registrar. He would have
inspired a stork to protest. Of course, a man of his age should not
have worn a cap, a small one especially; Tottel himself was small, and
it made him look rumpled. He was bandy: his intellect was bandy too.
“Yes,” Mr. Tottel was saying, “it’s very interesting to see interesting
things, no matter if it’s man, woman, or a object. The most interesting
man as I ever met in my life I met on my honeymoon. Years ago. He made
a lifelong study of railways, that man, knew ’em from Alpha to ... to
... what is it?”
“Abednego,” said someone.
“Yes, the trunk lines, the fares, the routs, the junctions of
anywheres in England or Scotland or Ireland or Wales. London, too,
the Underground. I tested him, every station in correct order from
South Kensington to King’s Cross. A strange thing! Nothing to do with
railways in ’imself, it was just his ’obby. Was a Baptist minister,
really, but still a most interesting man.”
Loughlin could stand it no longer, he hurried away into the garden. He
could not find her. Into the kitchen—she was not there. He sat down
excited and impatient, but he must wait for her, he wanted to know, to
know at once. How divinely she could swim! What was it he wanted to
know? He tried to read a book there, a ragged dusty volume about the
polar regions. He learned that when a baby whale is born it weighs at
least a ton. How horrible!
He rushed out into the fields full of extravagant melancholy and stupid
distraction. That! All that was to be her life here! This was your
rustic beauty, idiots and railways, boors who could choke an ox and
chop off its horns—maddening doubts, maddening doubts—foul-smelling
rooms, darkness, indecency. She held him at arm’s length still, but she
was dovelike, and he was grappled to her soul with hoops of steel, yes,
indeed.
But soon this extravagance was allayed. Dim loneliness came
imperceivably into the fields and he turned back. The birds piped
oddly; some wind was caressing the higher foliage, turning it all one
way, the way home. Telegraph poles ahead looked like half-used pencils;
the small cross on the steeple glittered with a sharp and shapely
permanence.
When he came to the inn Orianda was gone to bed.
IV
The next morning an air of uneasy bustle crept into the house after
breakfast, much going in and out and up and down in restrained
perturbation.
Orianda asked him if he could drive the horse and trap to the station.
Yes, he thought he could drive it.
“Lizzie is departing,” she said, “there are her boxes and things. It is
very good of you, Gerald, if you will be so kind. It is a quiet horse.”
Lizzie, then, had been subdued. She was faintly affable during the
meal, but thereafter she had been silent; Gerald could not look at her
until the last dreadful moment had come and her things were in the trap.
“Good-bye, ’Thaniel,” she said to the innkeeper, and kissed him.
“Good-bye, Orianda,” and she kissed Orianda, and then climbed into the
trap beside Gerald, who said “Click click,” and away went the nag.
Lizzie did not speak during the drive—perhaps she was in tears. Gerald
would have liked to comfort her, but the nag was unusually spirited and
clacked so freshly along that he did not dare turn to the sorrowing
woman. They trotted down from the uplands and into the windy road
over the marshes. The church spire in the town ahead seemed to change
its position with every turn of that twisting route. It would have a
background now of high sour-hued down, now of dark woodland, anon of
nothing but sky and cloud; in a few miles further there would be the
sea. Hereabout there were no trees, few houses, the world was vast and
bright, the sky vast and blue. What was prettiest of all was a windmill
turning its fans steadily in the draught from the sea. When they
crossed the river its slaty slow-going flow was broken into blue waves.
At the station Lizzie dismounted without a word and Gerald hitched the
nag to a tree. A porter took the luggage and labelled it while Gerald
and Lizzie walked about the platform. A calf with a sack over its
loins, tied by the neck to a pillar, was bellowing deeply; Lizzie let
it suck at her finger for a while, but at last she resumed her walk and
talked with her companion.
“She’s a fine young thing, clever, his daughter; I’d do anything for
her, but for him I’ve nothing to say. What can I say? What could I do?
I gave up a great deal for that man, Mr. Loughlin—I’d better not call
you Gerald any more now—a great deal. I knew he’d had trouble with his
wicked wife, and now to take her back after so many years, eh! It’s
beyond me, I know how he hates her. I gave up everything for him, I
gave him what he can’t give back to me, and he hates her; you know?”
“No, I did not know. I don’t know anything of this affair.”
“No, of course, you would not know anything of this affair,” said
Lizzie with a sigh. “I don’t want to see him again. I’m a fool,
but I got my pride, and that’s something to the good, it’s almost
satisfactory, ain’t it?”
As the train was signalled she left him and went into the booking
office. He marched up and down, her sad case affecting him with sorrow.
The poor wretch, she had given up so much and could yet smile at her
trouble. He himself had never surrendered to anything in life—that was
what life demanded of you—surrender. For reward it gave you love, this
swarthy, skin-deep love that exacted remorseless penalties. What German
philosopher was it who said Woman pays the debt of life not by what
she does, but by what she suffers? The train rushed in. Gerald busied
himself with the luggage, saw that it was loaded, but did not see its
owner. He walked rapidly along the carriages, but he could not find
her. Well, she was sick of them all, probably hiding from him. Poor
woman. The train moved off, and he turned away.
But the station yard outside was startlingly empty, horse and trap were
gone. The tree was still there, but with a man leaning against it, a
dirty man with a dirty pipe and a dirty smell. Had he seen a horse and
trap?
“A brown mare?”
“Yes.”
“Trap with yaller wheels?”
“That’s it.”
“O ah, a young ooman druv away in that....”
“A young woman!”
“Ah, two minutes ago.” And he described Lizzie. “Out yon,” said the
dirty man, pointing with his dirty pipe to the marshes.
Gerald ran until he saw a way off on the level winding road the trap
bowling along at a great pace; Lizzie was lashing the cob.