Which was the way, of course, he talked to Nan Drury--as he had felt the
immediate wild need to do; for he should perhaps be able to bear it
all somehow or other with _her_--while they sat together, when time and
freedom served, on one of the very last, the far westward, benches
of the interminable sea-front. It wasn’t every one who walked so far,
especially at that flat season--the only ghost of a bustle now, save for
the gregarious, the obstreperous haunters of the fluttering, far-shining
Pier, being reserved for the sunny Parade of midwinter. It wasn’t every
one who cared for the sunsets (which you got awfully well from there
and which were a particular strong point of the lower, the more
“sympathetic,” as Herbert Dodd liked to call it, Properley horizon) as
he had always intensely cared, and as he had found Nan Drury care; to
say nothing of his having also observed how little they directly spoke
to Miss Cookham. He had taught this oppressive companion to notice
them a bit, as he had taught her plenty of other things, but that was
a different matter; for the reason that the “land’s end” (stretching a
point it carried off that name) had been, and had had to be, by their
lack of more sequestered resorts and conveniences, the scene of so much
of what she styled their wooing-time--or, to put it more properly, of
the time during which she had made the straightest and most unabashed
love to _him_: just as it could henceforth but render possible, under
an equal rigour, that he should enjoy there periods of consolation from
beautiful, gentle, tender-souled Nan, to whom he was now at last, after
the wonderful way they had helped each other to behave, going to make
love, absolutely unreserved and abandoned, absolutely reckless and
romantic love, a refuge from poisonous reality, as hard as ever he
might.
The league-long, paved, lighted, garden-plotted, seated and refuged
Marina renounced its more or less celebrated attractions to break off
short here; and an inward curve of the kindly westward shore almost made
a wide-armed bay, with all the ugliness between town and country, and
the further casual fringe of the coast, turning, as the day waned, to
rich afternoon blooms of grey and brown and distant--it might fairly
have been beautiful Hampshire--blue. Here it was that, all that blighted
summer, with Nan--from the dreadful May-day on--he gave himself up to
the reaction of intimacy with the _kind_ of woman, at least, that he
liked; even if of everything else that might make life possible he was
to be, by what he could make out, forever starved. Here it was that--as
well as on whatever other scraps of occasions they could manage--Nan
began to take off and fold up and put away in her pocket her pretty,
dotty, becoming veil; as under the logic of his having so tremendously
ceased, in the shake of his dark storm-gust, to be engaged to another
woman. Her removal of that obstacle to a trusted friend’s assuring
himself whether the peachlike bloom’ of her finer facial curves bore
the test of such further inquiry into their cool sweetness as might
reinforce a mere baffled gaze--her momentous, complete surrender of so
much of her charm, let us say, both marked the change in the situation
of the pair and established the record of their perfect observance of
every propriety for so long before. They afterward in fact could have
dated it, their full clutch of their freedom and the bliss of their
having so little henceforth to consider save their impotence, their
poverty, their ruin; dated it from the hour of his recital to her
of the--at the first blush--quite appalling upshot of his second and
conclusive “scene of violence” with the mistress of his fortune,
when the dire terms of his release had had to be formally, and oh!
so abjectly, acceded to. She “compromised,” the cruel brute, for Four
Hundred Pounds down--for not a farthing less would she stay her strength
from “proceedings.” No jury in the land but would give her six, on the
nail (“Oh she knew quite where she was, thank you!”) and he might feel
lucky to get off with so whole a skin. This was the sum, then, for which
he had grovellingly compounded--under an agreement sealed by a supreme
exchange of remarks.
“‘Where in the name of lifelong ruin are you to _find_ Four Hundred?’”
Miss Cookham had mockingly repeated after him while he gasped as from
the twist of her grip on his collar. “That’s _your_ look-out, and I
should have thought you’d have made sure you knew before you decided on
your base perfidy.” And then she had mouthed and minced, with ever
so false a gentility, her consistent, her sickening conclusion. “Of
course--I may mention again--if you too distinctly object to the trouble
of looking, you know where to find _me_.”
“I had rather starve to death than ever go within a mile of you!”
Herbert described himself as having sweetly answered; and that was
accordingly where _they_ devotedly but desperately were--he and she,
penniless Nan Drury. Her father, of Drury & Dean, was, like so far
too many other of the anxious characters who peered through the dull
window-glass of dusty offices at Properley, an Estate and House Agent,
Surveyor, Valuer and Auctioneer; she was the prettiest of six, with two
brothers, neither of the least use, but, thanks to the manner in which
their main natural protector appeared to languish under the accumulation
of his attributes, they couldn’t be said very particularly or positively
to live. Their continued collective existence was a good deal of a
miracle even to themselves, though they had fallen into the way of not
unnecessarily, or too nervously, exchanging remarks upon it, and had
even in a sort, from year to year, got used to it. Nan’s brooding
pinkness when he talked to her, her so very parted lips, considering her
pretty teeth, her so very parted eyelids, considering her pretty eyes,
all of which might have been those of some waxen image of uncritical
faith, cooled the heat of his helplessness very much as if he were
laying his head on a tense silk pillow. She had, it was true, forms
of speech, familiar watchwords, that affected him as small scratchy
perforations of the smooth surface from within; but his pleasure in
her and need of her were independent of such things and really almost
altogether determined by the fact of the happy, even if all so lonely,
forms and instincts in her which claimed kinship with his own. With
her natural elegance stamped on her as by a die, with her dim and
disinherited individual refinement of grace, which would have made any
one wonder who she was anywhere--hat and veil and feather-boa and smart
umbrella-knob and all--with her regular God-given distinction of type,
in fine, she couldn’t abide vulgarity much more than he could.
Therefore it didn’t seem to him, under his stress, to matter
particularly, for instance, if she _would_ keep on referring so many
things to the time, as she called it, when she came into his life--his
own great insistence and contention being that she hadn’t in the least
entered there till his mind was wholly made up to eliminate his other
friend. What that methodical fury was so fierce to bring home to him was
the falsity to herself involved in the later acquaintance; whereas just
his precious right to hold up his head to everything--before himself at
least--sprang from the fact that she couldn’t make dates fit anyhow.
He hadn’t so much as heard of his true beauty’s existence (she had come
back but a few weeks before from her two years with her terribly trying
deceased aunt at Swindon, previous to which absence she had been an
unnoticeable chit) till days and days, ever so many, upon his honour,
after he had struck for freedom by his great first backing-out
letter--the precious document, the treat for a British jury, in which,
by itself, Miss Cookham’s firm instructed her to recognise the prospect
of a fortune. The way the ruffians had been “her” ruffians--it appeared
as if she had posted them behind her from the first of her beginning
her game!--and the way “instructions” bounced out, with it, at a touch,
larger than life, as if she had arrived with her pocket full of them!
The date of the letter, taken with its other connections, and the date
of _her_ first give-away for himself, his seeing her get out of the
Brighton train with Bill Frankle that day he had gone to make the row
at the Station parcels’ office about the miscarriage of the box from
Wales--those were the facts it sufficed him to point to, as he had
pointed to them for Nan Drury’s benefit, goodness knew, often and often
enough. If he didn’t seek occasion to do so for any one else’s--in open
court as they said--that was his own affair, or at least his and Nan’s.
It little mattered, meanwhile, if on their bench of desolation, all that
summer--and it may be added for summers and summers, to say nothing of
winters, there and elsewhere, to come--she did give way to her artless
habit of not contradicting him enough, which led to her often trailing
up and down before him, too complacently, the untimely shreds and
patches of his own glooms and desperations. “Well, I’m glad I _am_ in
your life, terrible as it is, however or whenever I did come in!” and
“_Of course_ you’d rather have starved--and it seems pretty well as if
we shall, doesn’t it?--than have bought her off by a false, abhorrent
love, wouldn’t you?” and “It isn’t as if she hadn’t made up to you the
way she did before you had so much as looked at her, is it? or as if you
hadn’t shown her what you felt her really to be before you had so much
as looked at _me_, is it either?” and “Yes, how on earth, pawning the
shoes on your feet, you’re going to raise another shilling--_that’s_
what you want to know, poor darling, don’t you?”