a lady, a handsome lady,” and then, still murmuring, he stumbled up the
stairs to the undertakers. His wife lay on the bed in a white gown. He
enveloped her stiff thin body in a blanket and carried it downstairs to
the parlour; the others, with much difficulty, carried down the coffin
and when they had fixed it upon some trestles they unwrapped Carrie
from the blankets and laid her in it.
Caroline and Carrie were buried on the same day in adjoining graves,
buried by the same men, and as the ironmonger was prevented by some
other misfortune from attending the obsequies there were no other
mourners than Pettigrove. The workshop sign of the Tull carpenter bore
the following notice:
Small
☞COMPLETE UNDERTAKER Hearse
Kept.
and therefore it was he who ushered the handsome lady from the station
on that bitter day. Frost was so heavy that the umbrage of pine and fir
looked woolly, thick grey swabs. Horses stood miserably in the frozen
fields, breathing into any friendly bush. Rooks pecked industriously at
the tough pastures, but wiser fowls, unlike the fabulous good child,
could be neither seen nor heard. And all day someone was grinding corn
at the millhouse; the engine was old and kept on emitting explosions
that shook the neighbourhood like a dreadful bomb. Pettigrove, who
had not provided himself with a black overcoat and therefore wore none
at all, shivered so intensely during the ceremony that the keen edge
of his grief was dulled, and indeed from that time onwards his grief,
whatever its source, seemed deprived of all keenness: it just dulled
him with a permanent dullness.
He caused to be placed on his wife’s grave a headstone, quite small,
not a yard high, inscribed to
CAROLINE
The beloved wife
of
John Pettigrove
Some days after its erection he was astonished to find the headstone
had fallen flat on its face. It was very strange, but after all it was
a small matter, a simple affair, so in the dusk he himself took a spade
and set it up again. A day or two later it had fallen once more. He
was now inclined to some suspicion, he fancied that mischievous boys
had done it; he would complain to the vicar. But Pettigrove was an
easy-going man, he did not complain; he replaced the stone, setting it
more deeply in the earth and padding the turf more firmly around it.
When it fell the third time he was astonished and deeply moved, but he
was no longer in doubt, and as he once more made a good upheaval by the
grave in the dusk he said in his mind, and he felt too in his heart,
that he understood.
“It will not fall again,” he said, and he was right: it did not.
Pettigrove himself lived for another score of years, during which the
monotony of his life was but mildly varied; he just went on registering
births and deaths and rearing little oaks and pines, firs and
sycamores. Sentimental deference to the oft-repeated wish of his wife
led him to join the church choir and sing its anthems and hymns with
a secular blitheness that was at least mellifluous. Moreover, after a
year or two, he _did_ become a parish councillor and in a modest way
was something of a “shining light.”
“If I were you,” observed an old countryman to him, “and I had my way,
I know what I would do: I would live in a little house and have a
quiet life, and I wouldn’t care the toss of a ha’penny for nothing and
nobody!”
In the time of May, always, Pettigrove would wander in Tull Great Wood
as far as the hidden pleasaunce where the hawthorn so whitely bloomed.
None but he knew of that, or remembered it, and when its dying petals
were heaped upon the grass he gathered handfuls to keep in his pocket
till they rotted. Sometimes he thought he would leave Tull and see
something of the world; he often thought of that, but it seemed as if
time had stabilized and contracted round his heart and he did not go.
At last, after twenty years of widowhood, he died and was buried, and
this was the manner of that.
Two men were digging his grave on the morning of the interment, a
summer’s day so everlasting beautiful that it was incredible anyone
should be dead. The two men, an ancient named Jethro and a younger
whom he called Mark, went to sit in the cool porch for a brief rest.
The work on the grave had been very much delayed, but now the old
headstone was laid on one side, and most of the earth that had covered
his wife’s body was heaped in untidy mounds upon the turf close by.
Otherwise there was no change in the yard or the trees that grew so
high, the grass that grew so greenly, the dark brick wall, or the door
of fugitive blue; there was even a dappled goat quietly cropping. A
woman came into the porch, remarked upon the grand day, and then passed
into the church to her task of tidying up for the ceremony. Jethro took
a swig of drink from a bottle and handed it to his mate.
“You don’t remember old Fan as used to clean the church, do you? No,
’twas ’fore you come about these parts. She was a smartish old gal.
Bother me if one of they goats didn’t follow her into the darn church
one day, ah, and wouldn’t be drove out on it, neither, no, and she
chasing of it from here to there and one place and another but out it
would not go, that goat. And at last it act-u-ally marched up into the
pulpit and putt its two forelegs on the holy book and said ’Baa-a-a!’”
Here Jethro gave a prolonged imitation of a goat’s cry. “Well, old Fan
had been a bit skeered but she was so overcome by that bit of piety
that, darn me, if she didn’t sit down and play the organ for it!”
Mark received this narration with a lack-lustre air and at once the
two men resumed their work. Meanwhile a man ascended the church tower;
other men had gone into the home of the dead man. Soon the vicar came
hurrying through the blue door in the wall and the bell gave forth its
first solemn toll.
“Hey, Jethro,” called Mark from the grave. “What d’you say’s the name
of this chap?”
“Pettigrove. Hurry up, now.”
Mark, after bending down, whispered from the grave: “What was his
wife’s name?”
“Why, man alive, that ’ud be Pettigrove, too.”
The bell in the tower gave another profoundly solemn beat.
“What’s the name on that headstone?” asked Mark.
“Caroline Pettigrove. What be you thinking on?”
“We’re in the wrong hole, Jethro; come and see for yourself, the plate
on this old coffin says Caroline Cronshaw, see for yourself, we’re in
the wrong hole.”
Again the bell voiced its melancholy admonition.
Jethro descended the short ladder and stood in the grave with Mark just
as the cortège entered the church by the door on the opposite side of
the yard. He knelt down and rubbed with his own fingers the dulled
inscription on the mouldering coffin; there was no doubt about it,
Caroline Cronshaw lay there.
“Well, may I go to glory,” slowly said the old man. It may have
occurred to Mark that this was an extravagantly remote destination to
prescribe; at any rate he said: “There ain’t no time, now, come on.”
“Who the devil be she? However come that wrong headstone to be putt on
this wrong grave?” quavered the kneeling man.
“Are you coming out?” growled Mark, standing with one foot on the
ladder, “or ain’t you? They’ll be chucking him on top of you in a
couple o’ minutes. There’s no time, I tell you.”
“’Tis a strange come-up as ever I see,” said the old man; striking one
wall of the grave with his hand: “that’s where we should be, Mark, next
door, but there’s no time to change it and it must go as it is, Mark.
Well, it’s fate; what is to be must be whether it’s good or right and
you can’t odds it, you darn’t go against it, or you be wrong.” They
stood in the grave muttering together. “Not a word, Mark, mind you!”
At last they shovelled some earth back upon the tell-tale name-plate,
climbed out of the grave, drew up the ladder, and stood with bent heads
as the coffin was borne from the church towards them. It was lowered
into the grave, and at the “earth to earth” Jethro, with a flirt of his
spade dropped in a handful of sticky marl, another at “ashes to ashes,”
and again at the “dust to dust.” Finally, when they were alone together
again, they covered in the old lovers, dumping the earth tightly and
everlastingly about them, and reset the headstone, Jethro remarking as
they did so: “That headstone, well, ’tis a mystery, Mark! And I can’t
bottom it, I can’t bottom it at all, ’tis a mystery.”
And indeed, how should it not be, for the secret had long since been
forgotten by its originator.
_The Fancy Dress Ball_
There was a young fellow named Bugloss. He wore cufflinks made of
agate with studs to match but was otherwise an agreeable person who
suffered much from a remarkable diffidence, one of nature’s minor
inconsistencies having been to endow him with a mute desire for
romantic adventure and an entire incapacity to inaugurate any such
thing.
It was in architecture that he found his way of life, quite a
profitable and genteel way; for while other hands and heads devised
the mere details of drainage, of window and wall, staircase, cupboard,
and floor, in fact each mechanical thing down to the hooks and bells
in every room, he it was who painted those entrancing draughts of
elevation and the general prospect (with a few enigmatic but graceful
trees, clouds in the offing, and a tiny postman plodding sideways up
the carriage drive) which lured the fond fly into the architectural
parlour. It must be confessed that he himself lived in rooms over the
shop of a hairdresser, whose window displayed the elegantly coiffed
head and bust of a wax lady suffering either from an acute attack of
jaundice or the effects of a succession of late nights: next door was
an establishment dealing exclusively, but not exhaustingly, in mangles
and perambulators. In Bugloss’s room there were two bell handles with
wires looking very handy and complete, yet whenever he desired the
attendance of the maid he had (_a_) to take a silver whistle from his
pocket; (_b_) to open the door; and (_c_) to blow it smartly in the
passage.
His exceeding shyness was humiliating to himself and annoying to people
of friendly disposition, it could not have been more preposterous had
he been condemned to wear a false nose; he might have gone (he may
even now be going) to his grave without once looking into a woman’s
eyes. What a pity! His own eyes were worth looking at; he was really
a nice young man, tall and slender with light fluffy hair, who if he
couldn’t hide his amiable light under a bushel certainly behaved as if
it wasn’t there. Things were so until one day he chanced to read with
envious pleasure but a good deal of scepticism a book called _Anatol_
by a Viennese writer; almost immediately the fascinating possibilities
of romantic infidelity were confirmed by a quarrel which began in
the hairdresser’s house between the young hairdresser and his wife,
Monsieur and Madame Rabignol, and lasted for a week in the course of
which Bugloss learned that the hairdresser was indulging in precisely
one of those intrigues with an unknown lady living somewhere near by;
Madame Rabignol, charming but virulent, protested a thousand times
that it must be a base woman who walked the streets at night, and that
Monsieur Rabignol was a low pig. The fair temptress, it appeared, was
given to the use of a toilet unguent with the beguiling misdescription
of “Vanishing Face Cream”; that was an unfortunate circumstance,
because the wife of the hairdresser, a very cute woman, on her
husband’s return from an evening’s absence, invariably kissed him and
smelt him.
“Evil communications,” saith St. Paul (borrowing the phrase from
Menander), “corrupt good manners,” and his notion must have something
of truth in it, for these domestic revelations produced an unusual
stir in the Bugloss bosom—he bought a ticket for a popular fancy dress
ball and made a mighty resolve to discard his pusillanimous self with
one grand gesture and there and then take the plunge. At a fancy dress
ball you could do that; everyone made a fool of himself more or less;
and Bugloss determined to plunge into whatever there was to plunge
in. This was desperately unwise, but you are not to suppose that he
harboured any looseness or want of principle; he was good and modest,
and virtuous as any young man could possibly be; he only hoped, at the
very least, to look some fair girl deep in the eyes. So he designed
an oriental costume, simple to make (being loose-fitting), and having
bought quantities of purple and crimson fabric he wrapped them up and
sent the office-boy with his design, materials, measurements, and
instructions to a dressmaker in the neighbourhood, whom he wisely
thought would make a better job of it than a tailor. When the costume
was finished he was delighted; it was magnificent, resplendent,
artistic, and the dressmaker’s charge was moderate.
On the night of the ball, a warm August night with soft thrilling air
and a sky of sombre velvet, he drove in a closed cab. Dancing was
in the open, the lawns of a mansion were lent for the occasion, and
Bugloss went rather late to escape notice—nearly eleven o’clock—but
in the cab his timorousness conspiring against him had deepened to
palpitating dejection; he was afraid again, the grand gesture was
forgotten, and his attire was fantastically guarded from the public
eye. From his window he had watched the arrival of the cab and had
slunk down to it secretly—not a word to the Rabignols!—in a bowler
hat and a mackintosh that reached to his feet; his fancy shoes were
concealed under a pair of goloshes, the bright tasselled cap was in his
pocket.
Heavens! It was too painful. This was no plunge, this miserable sink or
swim—it was delirium, hell—what a stupid man he had been to come—it was
no go, it was useless—and he was about to order the cabman to turn back
home when the cab stopped at the gates of the mansion, the door was
flung open and a big policeman almost dragged him out upon the carpeted
pavement. A knot of jocular bystanders caused him to scurry into the
grounds where three officials—good, bad, and indifferent—examined his
ticket and directed him onwards. But the cloak rooms were right across
the grounds, the great lawn was simply a bath of illumination, the band
played in the centre and the dancers, madly arrayed, were waltzing
madly. Bugloss, desiring only some far corner of darkness to flee into,
saw on all sides shadowy trees, dim shrubs, and walks that led to utter
gloom—thank God!—and there was a black moonless sky, though even that
seemed positively to drip with stars.
At this moment the big policeman, following after him, said: “What
about this cab, sir?”
“What—yes—this cab!” repeated Bugloss, and to his agonized imagination
every eye in the grounds became ironically fixed upon him alone;
even the music ceased, and there resounded a flutter of coruscating
amiability.
“D’ye want him to wait?” the policeman was grinning—“He ain’t got any
orders.”
“O, O dear, how much, what’s his fare? I don’t want him again
and—gracious! I haven’t a cent on me—what, what—O, please tell him to
call at my house to-morrow. Pay him then I will. Please!”
“Righto, my lord!” said the big policeman, saluting—he was a regular
joker that fellow. Then Bugloss, trembling in every limb, almost leapt
towards one of the dark walks, away from those grinning eyes. The
shrubs and trees concealed him, though even here an odd paper lantern
or two consorted with a few coloured bulbs of light. Shortly he began
his observations.
The cloak rooms, he found, could be approached only by crossing the
lawn. In a mackintosh, goloshes, and a bowler hat, that was too
terrific an ordeal; the trembling Israelite during that affrighting
passage of the Red Sea had all the incitements of escape and the
comfort of friends, but this more violent ordeal led into captivity,
and Bugloss was alone. What was to be done? The music began again
and it was agreeable, the illuminations were lustrous and pretty,
the dancers gay, but Bugloss was neither agreeable nor gay, and his
prettiness was not yet on the surface. He was in a highly wrought
condition, he was limp, and he remained in what seclusion he could
find in the garden, peering like a sinner at some assembly of the
blest. At last he snatched off his goloshes and stuffed them in his
pocket. “So far,” he murmured, “so good. I will hide the mackintosh
among the bushes, I can’t face that dressing room.” Just then the band
gave a heightened blare, drum and cymbals were rapidly beaten and the
music ceased amid clapping and polite halloing. “Dash it, I must wait
till the next dance,” said Bugloss, “and, O lord, there’s a lot of
them coming this way.” He turned to retreat into deeper darkness when
suddenly, near the musicians, he saw a fascinating girl, a dainty but
startling figure skimming across the lawn as if to overtake a friend.
Why—yes—she had a wig of bright green hair, green; a short-waisted
cherry silk jacket and harlequin pantaloons, full at the hips but
narrowing to the ankles, where white stockings slipped into a pair of
gilded leather shoes with heels of scarlet. Delicately charming were
her face and figure, entrancing were her movements, and she tinkled all
over with hidden bells.
“Sweet God, what beauty!” thought Bugloss, “this is She, the Woman to
know, I must, I must ... but how?”
She disappeared. For the moment he could not rid himself of the bowler
hat and mackintosh, so many couples roamed in the dark glades; wherever
he went he could see the glow of cigarettes, generally in twos, and
there were whispering or silent couples standing about in unexpected
places. Retiring to the darkest corner he had previously found he was
about to discard his mackintosh when he was startled by a cry at his
elbow: “Lena, where are you, what’s that?” and a girl scuttled away,
calling “Lena! Lena!” Her terror dismayed him, the little shock itself
brought the sweat to his brow, but the music beginning again drew all
the stragglers back to the lawn. There, from his gloomy retreat, he
beheld the green-haired beauty in the arms of a pirate king who was
adorned with an admiral’s hat and a dangerous moustache. “If,” thought
Bugloss, still in his mufti, “I couldn’t have discovered a better
get-up than that fellow, I’d have stayed away. There’s no picture in
it, it’s just silly, I couldn’t wear a thing like that, I couldn’t
wear it, I’d have perished rather than come.” And indeed there was an
absence of imagination about all the male adornment; many of the ladies
were right enough, but some were horrors, and most of the men were
horrors; there was justification for Bugloss’s subsequent reflection:
“I’ll show them, a little later on, what can be done when an artist
takes the thing in hand; now after this dance is over.... etc., etc.”
Two lovers startled him by beginning to quarrel. They were passing
among the trees behind him and talking quite loudly, both with a slight
foreign accent. “But I shall not let you go, Johannes,” said the lady
with a fierce little cry. Bugloss turned and could just discern a lady
costumed as a vivandière; her companion was in the uniform Of a Danish
soldier.
“If you forced me to stop I would kill you,” retorted the man.
“O, you would kill me!”
“If you forced me to stop.”
“You would kill me ... so!”
“Yes, I would kill you.”
“But you have told me that if I _can_ keep you here in England I may do
it. You know. If I can. You know that, Johannes!”
Bugloss was persuaded that he had heard her voice before, though he
could not recognize the speaker.
“Be quiet, you are a fool,” the man said. That was all Bugloss heard.
It was brutal enough. If only a woman, any woman, had wanted _him_ like
that!
He wandered about during other dances. The green-haired girl was always
with that idiotic pirate, and it made things very difficult, because
although Bugloss had fallen desperately in love with her he could not,
simply could not, march up and drag her away from her companion. He
could not as yet even venture from his ambush among the trees, and they
never wandered in the gloom—they were always dancing together or eating
together. He, Bugloss, had no interest in any other woman there, no
spark of interest whatsoever. That being so, why go to all the fuss of
discarding the mackintosh and making an exhibition of himself? Why go
bothering among that crowd, he was not a dancer at all, he didn’t want
to go! But still ... by and by perhaps ... when that lovely treasure
was not so extraordinarily engaged. Sweet God! she was just ... well,
but he could not stand much more of that infernal pirate’s antics with
her. Withdrawing his tantalized gaze he sat down in darkness behind a
clump of yew trimmed in the shape of some fat animal that resembled a
tall hippopotamus. Here he lit his tenth cigarette. At once a dizziness
assailed him, he began to see scarlet splashes in the gloom, to feel
as if he were being lacerated with tiny pins. Throwing the cigarette
away he stretched himself at full length under the bush. Scarcely had
he done so when he became aware that two others were sitting down on
the other side of it, the same foreign couple, the vivandière and her
threatening cavalier.
“Listen to me, Hélène,” the man was saying in a soft consoling voice,
“you shall trust to me and come away. Together we will go. But here
I cannot stay. It is fate. You love, eh? Come then, we will go to
Copenhagen, I will take you to my country. Now, Hélène!”
The lady made no reply; Bugloss felt that she must be crying. The Dane
continued to woo and the Frenchwoman to murmur back to him: “Is it not
so, Johannes?” “No, Hélène, no.” But at last he cried angrily: “Pah!
Then stop with your bandit, that pig! Pah!” and chattering angrily in
his strange language he sprang up and stalked away. Hélène rose too and
followed him beseechingly into the gloom: “No, no, Johannes, no!”
Bugloss got up from the grass; his dizziness was gone. He knew that
voice, it seemed impossible, but he knew her, and he had half a mind
to rush home: but being without his watch and unable to discover what
o’clock it was, he did not care to walk out into the streets with the
chance of being guyed by any half-drunken sparks passing late home.
He would wait, he was sure it was past midnight now, there would be a
partial exodus soon, and he would go off unnoticed in the crowd. There
was no more possibility now of him shedding his coat and joining the
revellers than there was of that beauteous girl flying into his arms;
his inhibition possessed him with tenfold power, he was an imbecile.
Sad, pitiful, wretched, outcast! Through the screen of foliage the
music floated with exquisite faintness, luminous cadenzas from a
gleaming but guarded Eldorado whose light was music, whose music was
all a promise and a mockery; he was a miserable prisoner pent in his
own unbearable but unbreakable shackles and dressed up like a doll in a
pantomime! Many people had come in their ordinary clothes; why, O why
had he put on this maddening paralysing raiment? Why had he come at all?
Some of the lights had begun to fade; at one end of the lawn most of
the small lamps had guttered out, leaving a line of a dozen chairs in
comparative obscurity. Weary of standing, he slunk to the corner chair
and sat down with a sigh. Just beside him was a weeping ash that he
supposed only looked happy when it rained, and opposite was a poplar
straining so hard to brush the heavens that he fancied it would be
creaking in every limb. By and by an elderly decorous lady, accompanied
by two girls not so decorous—the one arrayed as a Puritan maiden and
the other as a Scout mistress—came and sat near him, but he did not
move. They did not perceive the moody Bugloss. The elderly lady spoke:
“Do go and fetch her here; no, when this waltz is over. She is very
rude, but I want to see her. I can’t understand why she avoids us, and
how she is getting on is a mystery to everybody. Bring her here.”
The puritan maiden and the scout mistress, embracing each other,
skipped away to the refreshment booth. Glorious people sat about
there drinking wine as if they disliked it, sipping ices as if it were
a penance, and eating remarkable food or doing some other reasonable
things, but Bugloss dared not join them although he was very hungry. It
was not hunger he wanted to avert, but an impending tragedy.