VI

Off there on the bench of desolation a week later she made him a more

particular statement, which it had taken the remarkably tense interval

to render possible. After leaving her at the hotel that last Sunday he

had gone forth in his reaggravated trouble and walked straight before

him, in the teeth of the west wind, close to the iron rails of the

stretched Marina and with his telltale face turned from persons

occasionally met, and toward the surging sea. At the Land’s End, even in

the confirmed darkness and the perhaps imminent big blow, his immemorial

nook, small shelter as it yielded, had again received him; and it was

in the course of this heedless session, no doubt, where the agitated air

had nothing to add to the commotion within him, that he began to look

his extraordinary fortune a bit straighter in the face and see it

confess itself at once a fairy-tale and a nightmare That, visibly,

confoundingly, she was still attached to him (attached in fact was a

mild word!) and that the unquestionable proof of it was in this offered

pecuniary salve, of the thickest composition, for his wounds and sores

and shames--these things were the fantastic fable, the tale of money

in handfuls, that he seemed to have only to stand there and swallow

and digest and feel himself full-fed by; but the whole of the rest

was nightmare, and most of all nightmare his having thus to thank one

through whom Nan and his little girls had known torture.

He didn’t care for himself now, and this unextinguished and apparently

inextinguishable charm by which he had held her was a fact incredibly

romantic; but he gazed with a longer face than he had ever had for

anything in the world at his potential acceptance of a great bouncing

benefit from the person he intimately, if even in a manner indirectly,

associated with the conditions to which his lovely wife and his children

(who would have been so lovely too) had pitifully succumbed. He had

accepted the social relation--which meant he had taken even that on

trial--without knowing what it so dazzlingly masked; for a social

relation it had become with a vengeance when it drove him about the

place as now at his hours of freedom (and he actually and recklessly

took, all demoralised and unstrung and unfit either for work or for

anything else, other liberties that would get him into trouble) under

this queer torment of irreconcilable things, a bewildered consciousness

of tenderness and patience and cruelty, of great evident mystifying

facts that were as little to be questioned as to be conceived or

explained, and that were yet least, withal, to be lost sight of.

On that Sunday night he had wandered wild, incoherently ranging and

throbbing, but this became the law of his next days as well, since he

lacked more than ever all other resort or refuge and had nowhere to

carry, to deposit, or contractedly let loose and lock up, as it were,

his swollen consciousness, which fairly split in twain the raw shell of

his sordid little boarding-place. The arch of the sky and the spread of

sea and shore alone gave him space; he could roam with himself anywhere,

in short, far or near--he could only never take himself back. That

certitude--that this was impossible to him even should she wait there

among her plushes and bronzes ten years--was the thing he kept

closest clutch of; it did wonders for what he would have called his

self-respect. Exactly as he had left her so he would stand off--even

though at moments when he pulled up sharp somewhere to put himself an

intensest question his heart almost stood still. The days of the week

went by, and as he had left her she stayed; to the extent, that is, of

his having neither sight nor sound of her, and of the failure of

every sign. It took nerve, he said, not to return to her, even for

curiosity--since how, after all, in the name of wonder, had she invested

the fruits of her extortion to such advantage, there being no chapter

of all the obscurity of the years to beat that for queer-ness? But

he dropped, tired to death, on benches, half a dozen times an

evening--exactly on purpose to recognise that the nerve required was

just the nerve he had.

As the days without a token from her multiplied he came in as well for

hours--and these indeed mainly on the bench of desolation--of sitting

stiff and stark in presence of the probability that he had lost

everything for ever. When he passed the Royal he never turned an

eyelash, and when he met Captain Roper on the Front, three days after

having been introduced to him, he “cut him dead”--another privileged

consequence of a social relation--rather than seem to himself to make

the remotest approach to the question of whether Miss Cookham had left

Properley. He had cut people in the days of his life before, just as

he had come to being himself cut--since there had been no time for

him wholly without one or other face of that necessity--but had never

effected such a severance as of this rare connection, which helped to

give him thus the measure of his really precious sincerity. If he had

lost what had hovered before him he had lost it, his only tribute to

which proposition was to grind his teeth with one of those “scrunches,”

as he would have said, of which the violence fairly reached his ear. It

wouldn’t make him lift a finger, and in fact if Kate had simply

taken herself off on the Tuesday or the Wednesday she would have been

reabsorbed again into the darkness from which she had emerged--and

no lifting of fingers, the unspeakable chapter closed, would evermore

avail. That at any rate was the kind of man he still was--even after all

that had come and gone, and even if for a few dazed hours certain things

had seemed pleasant. The dazed hours had passed, the surge of the old

bitterness had dished him (shouldn’t he have been shamed if it hadn’t?),

and he might sit there as before, as always, with nothing at all on

earth to look to. He had therefore wrongfully believed himself to be

degraded; and the last word about him would be that he _couldn’t_ then,

it appeared, sink to vulgarity as he had tried to let his miseries make

him.

And yet on the next Sunday morning, face to face with him again at the

Land’s End, what she very soon came to was: “As if I believed you didn’t

_know_ by what cord you hold me!” Absolutely too, and just that morning

in fact, above all, he wouldn’t, he quite couldn’t have taken his solemn

oath that he hadn’t a sneaking remnant, as he might have put it to

himself--a remnant of faith in tremendous things still to come of their

interview. The day was sunny and breezy, the sea of a cold purple; he

wouldn’t go to church as he mostly went of Sunday mornings, that being

in its way too a social relation--and not least when two-and-thruppenny

tan-coloured gloves were new; which indeed he had the art of keeping

them for ages. Yet he would dress himself as he scarce mustered

resources for even to figure on the fringe of Society, local and

transient, at St. Bernard’s, and in this trim he took his way westward;

occupied largely, as he went, it might have seemed to any person

pursuing the same course and happening to observe him, in a fascinated

study of the motions of his shadow, the more or less grotesque shape

projected, in front of him and mostly a bit to the right, over the

blanched asphalt of the Parade and dandling and dancing at such a rate,

shooting out and then contracting, that, viewed in themselves, its

eccentricities might have formed the basis of an interesting challenge:

“Find the state of mind, guess the nature of the agitation, possessing

the person so remarkably represented!” Herbert Dodd, for that matter,

might have been himself attempting to make by the sun’s sharp aid some

approach to his immediate horoscope.

It had at any rate been thus put before him that the dandling and

dancing of his image occasionally gave way to perfect immobility, when

he stopped and kept his eyes on it. “Suppose she should come, suppose

she _should!_” it is revealed at least to ourselves that he had at

these moments audibly breathed--breathed with the intensity of an arrest

between hope and fear. It had glimmered upon him from early, with the

look of the day, that, given all else that could happen, this would be

rather, as he put it, in her line; and the possibility lived for him, as

he proceeded, to the tune of a suspense almost sickening. It was, from

one small stage of his pilgrimage to another, the “For ever, never!”

of the sentimental case the playmates of his youth used to pretend

to settle by plucking the petals of a daisy. But it came to his truly

turning faint--so “queer” he felt--when, at the gained point of the

long stretch from which he could always tell, he arrived within positive

sight of his immemorial goal. His seat was taken and she was keeping it

for him--it could only be _she_ there in possession; whereby it shone

out for Herbert Dodd that if he hadn’t been quite sure of her recurrence

she had at least been quite sure of his. _That_ pulled him up to some

purpose, where recognition began for them--or to the effect, in other

words, of his pausing to judge if he could bear, for the sharpest note

of their intercourse, this inveterate demonstration of her making him do

what she liked. What settled the question for him then--and just

while they avowedly watched each other, over the long interval, before

closing, as if, on either side, for the major advantage--what settled it

was this very fact that what she liked she liked so terribly. If it were

simply to “use” him, as she had said the last time, and no matter to

the profit of which of them she called it, one might let it go for that;

since it could make her wait over, day after day, in that fashion, and

with such a spending of money, on the hazard of their meeting again. How

could she be the least sure he would ever again consent to it after the

proved action on him, a week ago, of her last monstrous honesty? It was

indeed positively as if he were now himself putting this influence--and

for their common edification--to the supreme, to the finest test. He had

a sublime, an ideal flight, which lasted about a minute. “Suppose, now

that I see her there and what she has taken so characteristically for

granted, suppose I just show her that she _hasn’t_ only confidently to

wait or whistle for me, and that the length of my leash is greater

than she measures, and that everything’s impossible always?--show it by

turning my back on her now and walking straight away. She won’t be able

not to understand _that!_”

Nothing had passed, across their distance, but the mute apprehension

of each on the part of each; the whole expanse, at the church hour, was

void of other life (he had scarce met a creature on his way from end

to end), and the sun-seasoned gusts kept brushing the air and all the

larger prospect clean. It was through this beautiful lucidity that

he watched her watch him, as it were--watch him for what he would do.

Neither moved at this high tension; Kate Cookham, her face fixed on

him, only waited with a stiff appearance of leaving him, not for dignity

but--to an effect of even deeper perversity--for kindness, free to

choose. It yet somehow affected him at present, this attitude, as a gage

of her _knowing too_--knowing, that is, that he wasn’t really free, that

this was the thinnest of vain parades, the poorest of hollow heroics,

that his need, his solitude, his suffered wrong, his exhausted rancour,

his foredoomed submission to any shown interest, all hung together too

heavy on him to let the weak wings of his pride do more than vaguely

tremble. They couldn’t, they didn’t carry him a single beat further

away; according to which he stood rooted, neither retreating nor

advancing, but presently correcting his own share of the bleak exchange

by looking off at the sea. Deeply conscious of the awkwardness this

posture gave him, he yet clung to it as the last shred of his honour,

to the clear argument that it was one thing for him to have felt beneath

all others, the previous days, that she was to be counted on, but quite

a different for her to have felt that _he_ was. His checked approach,

arriving thus at no term, could in these odd conditions have established

that he wasn’t only if Kate Cookham had, as either of them might have

said, taken it so--if she had given up the game at last by rising, by

walking away and adding to the distance between them, and he had then

definitely let her vanish into space. It became a fact that when she did

finally rise--though after how long our record scarce takes on itself to

say--it was not to confirm their separation but to put an end to it; and

this by slowly approaching him till she had come within earshot He had

wondered, once aware of it in spite of his averted face, what she would

say and on what note, as it were, she would break their week’s

silence; so that he had to recognise anew, her voice reaching him, that

remarkable quality in her which again and again came up for him as her

art.

“There are twelve hundred and sixty pounds, to be definite, but I have

it all down for you--and you’ve only to draw.”

They lost themselves, these words, rare and exquisite, in the wide

bright genial medium and the Sunday stillness, but even while that

occurred and he was gaping for it she was herself there, in her battered

ladylike truth, to answer for them, to represent them, and, if a further

grace than their simple syllabled beauty were conceivable, almost

embarrassingly to cause them to materialise. Yes, she let her smart and

tight little reticule hang as if it bulged, beneath its clasp, with the

whole portentous sum, and he felt himself glare again at this vividest

of her attested claims. She might have been ready, on the spot, to open

the store to the plunge of his hand, or, with the situation otherwise

conceived, to impose on his pauperised state an acceptance of alms on

a scale unprecedented in the annals of street charity. Nothing so much

counted for him, however, neither grave numeral nor elegant fraction,

as the short, rich, rounded word that the breeze had picked up as it

dropped and seemed now to blow about between them. “To draw--to draw?”

Yes, he gaped it as if it had no sense; the fact being that even while

he did so he was reading into her use of the term more romance than any

word in the language had ever had for him. He, Herbert Dodd, was to live

to “draw,” like people, scarce hampered by the conditions of earth,

whom he had remotely and circuitously heard about, and in fact when he

walked back with her to where she had been sitting it was very much, for

his strained nerves, as if the very bench of desolation itself were to

be the scene of that exploit and he mightn’t really live till he reached

it.

When they had sat down together she did press the spring of her

reticule, from which she took, not a handful of gold nor a packet of

crisp notes, but an oblong sealed letter, which she had thus waited on

him, she remarked, on purpose to deliver, and which would certify, with

sundry particulars, to the credit she had opened for him at a London

bank. He received it without looking at it--he held it, in the same

manner, conspicuous and unassimilated, for most of the rest of the

immediate time, appearing embarrassed with it, nervously twisting and

flapping it, yet thus publicly retaining it even while aware, beneath

everything, of the strange, the quite dreadful, wouldn’t it be?

engagement that such inaction practically stood for. He could accept

money to that amount, yes--but not for nothing in return. For what then

in return? He kept asking himself for what, while she said other things

and made above all, in her high, shrewd, successful way the point that,

no, he needn’t pretend that his conviction of her continued personal

interest in him wouldn’t have tided him oyer any question besetting

him since their separation. She put it to him that the deep instinct of

where he should at last find her must confidently have worked for him,

since she confessed to her instinct of where she should find _him_;

which meant--oh it came home to him as he fingered his sealed

treasure!--neither more nor less than that she had now created

between them an equality of experience. He wasn’t to have done all the

suffering, _she_ was to have “been through” things he couldn’t even

guess at; and, since he was bargaining away his right ever again to

allude to the unforgettable, so much there was of it, what her tacit

proposition came to was that they were “square” and might start afresh.

He didn’t take up her charge, as his so compromised “pride” yet in a

manner prompted him, that he had enjoyed all the week all those elements

of ease about her; the most he achieved for that was to declare, with an

ingenuity contributing to float him no small distance further, that of

course he had turned up at their old place of tryst, which had been,

through the years, the haunt of his solitude and the goal of his walk

any Sunday morning that seemed too beautiful for church; but that he

hadn’t in the least built on her presence there--since that supposition

gave him, she would understand, wouldn’t she? the air, disagreeable to

him, of having come in search of her. Her quest of himself, once he

had been seated there, would have been another matter--but in short

“Of course after all you did come to me, just now, didn’t you?” He felt

himself, too, lamely and gracelessly grin, as for the final kick of his

honour, in confirmation of the record that he had then yielded but to

her humility. Her humility became for him at this hour and to this tune,

on the bench of desolation, a quantity more prodigious and even more

mysterious than that other guaranteed quantity the finger-tips of his

left hand could feel the tap by the action of his right; though what was

in especial extraordinary was the manner in which she could keep making

him such allowances and yet meet him again, at some turn, as with her

residuum for her clever self so great.

“Come to you, Herbert Dodd?” she imperturbably echoed. “I’ve been coming

to you for the last ten years!”

There had been for him just before this sixty supreme seconds of

intensest aspiration--a minute of his keeping his certificate poised

for a sharp thrust back at her, the thrust of the wild freedom of his

saying: “No, no, I _can’t_ give them up; I can’t simply sink them deep

down in my soul forever, with no cross in all my future to mark _that_

burial; so that if this is what our arrangement means I must decline to

have anything to do with it.” The words none the less hadn’t come, and

when she had herself, a couple of minutes later, spoken those

others, the blood rose to his face as if, given his stiffness and her

extravagance, he had just indeed saved himself.

Everything in fact stopped, even his fidget with his paper; she imposed

a hush, she imposed at any rate the conscious decent form of one, and

he couldn’t afterward have told how long, at this juncture, he must have

sat simply gazing before him. It was so long, at any rate, that Kate

herself got up--and quite indeed, presently, as if her own forms were

now at an end. He had returned her nothing--so what was she waiting for?

She had been on the two other occasions momentarily at a loss, but never

so much so, no doubt, as was thus testified to by her leaving the bench

and moving over once more to the rail of the terrace. She could carry

it off, in a manner, with her resources, that she was waiting with so

little to wait for; she could face him again, after looking off at

the sea, as if this slightly stiff delay, not wholly exempt from

awkwardness, had been but a fine scruple of her courtesy. She had

gathered herself in; after giving him time to appeal she could take

it that he had decided and that nothing was left for her to do. “Well

then,” she clearly launched at him across the broad walk--“well then,

good-bye.”

She had come nearer with it, as if he might rise for some show of

express separation; but he only leaned back motionless, his eyes on her

now--he kept her a moment before him. “Do you mean that we don’t--that

we don’t--?” But he broke down.

“Do I ‘mean’--?” She remained as for questions he might ask, but it

was wellnigh as if there played through her dotty veil an irrepressible

irony for that particular one. “I’ve meant, for long years, I think, all

I’m capable of meaning. I’ve meant so much that I can’t mean more. So

there it is.”

“But if you go,” he appealed--and with a sense as of final flatness,

however he arranged it, for his own attitude--“but if you go sha’n’t I

see you again?”

She waited a little, and it was strangely for him now as if--though at

last so much more gorged with her tribute than she had ever been with

his--something still depended on her. “Do you _like_ to see me?” she

very simply asked.

At this he did get up; that was easier than to say--at least with

responsive simplicity; and again for a little he looked hard and in

silence at his letter; which at last, however, raising his eyes to her

own for the act, while he masked their conscious ruefulness, to his

utmost, in some air of assurance, he slipped into the inner pocket of

his coat, letting it settle there securely. “You’re too wonderful.” But

he frowned at her with it as never in his life. “Where does it all come

from?”

“The wonder of poor me?” Kate Cookham said. “It comes from _you_.”

He shook his head slowly--feeling, with his letter there against his

heart, such a new agility, almost such a new range of interest. “I mean

so _much_ money--so extraordinarily much.”

Well, she held him a while blank. “Does it seem to you extraordinarily

much--twelve-hundred-and-sixty? Because, you know,” she added, “it’s

all.”

“It’s enough!” he returned with a slight thoughtful droop of his head to

the right and his eyes attached to the far horizon as through a shade of

shyness for what he was saying. He felt all her own lingering nearness

somehow on his cheek.

“It’s enough? Thank you then!” she rather oddly went on.

He shifted a little his posture. “It was more than a hundred a year--for

you to get together.”

“Yes,” she assented, “that was what year by year I tried for.”

“But that you could live all the while and save that--!” Yes, he was

at liberty, as he hadn’t been, quite pleasantly to marvel. All his

wonderments in life had been hitherto unanswered--and didn’t the change

mean that here again was the social relation?

“Ah, I didn’t live as you saw me the other day.”

“Yes,” he answered--and didn’t he the next instant feel he must fairly

have smiled with it?--“the other day you _were_ going it!”

“For once in my life,” said Kate Cookham. “I’ve left the hotel,” she

after a moment added.

“Ah, you’re in--a--lodgings?” he found himself inquiring as for positive

sociability.

She had apparently a slight shade of hesitation, but in an instant it

was all right; as what he showed he wanted to know she seemed mostly to

give him. “Yes--but far of course from here. Up on the hill.” To which,

after another instant, “At The Mount, Castle Terrace,” she subjoined.

“Oh, I _know_ The Mount. And Castle Terrace is awfully sunny and nice.”

“Awfully sunny and nice,” Kate Cookham took from him.

“So that if it isn’t,” he pursued, “like the Royal, why you’re at least

comfortable.”

“I shall be comfortable anywhere now,” she replied with a certain

dryness.

It was astonishing, however, what had become of his own. “Because I’ve

accepted----?”

“Call it that!” she dimly smiled.

“I hope then at any rate,” he returned, “you can now thoroughly rest” He

spoke as for a cheerful conclusion and moved again also to smile, though

as with a poor grimace, no doubt; since what he seemed most clearly to

feel was that since he “accepted” he mustn’t, for his last note, have

accepted in sulkiness or gloom. With that, at the same time, he couldn’t

but know, in all his fibres, that with such a still-watching face as the

dotty veil didn’t disguise for him there was no possible concluding, at

least on his part On hers, on hers it was--as he had so often for a week

had reflectively to pronounce things--another affair. Ah, somehow,

both formidably and helpfully, her face concluded--yet in a sense so

strangely enshrouded in things she didn’t tell him. What _must_ she,

what mustn’t she, have done? What she had said--and she had really told

him nothing--was no account of her life; in the midst of which conflict

of opposed recognitions, at any rate, it was as if, for all he could

do, he himself now considerably floundered. “But I can’t think--I can’t

think----!”

“You can’t think I can have made so much money in the time and been

honest?”

“Oh, you’ve been _honest!_” Herbert Dodd distinctly allowed.

It moved her stillness to a gesture--which, however, she had as promptly

checked; and she went on the next instant as for further generosity to

his failure of thought. “Everything was possible, under my stress, with

my hatred.”

“Your hatred--?” For she had paused as if it were after all too

difficult.

“Of what I should for so long have been doing to you.”

With this, for all his failures, a greater light than any yet shone upon

him. “It made you think of ways----?”

“It made me think of everything. It made me work,” said Kate Cookham.

She added, however, the next moment: “But that’s my story.”

“And I mayn’t hear it?”

“No--because I mayn’t hear yours.”

“Oh, mine--!” he said with the strangest, saddest, yet after all most

resigned sense of surrender of it; which he tried to make sound as if he

couldn’t have told it, for its splendor of sacrifice and of misery, even

if he would.

It seemed to move in her a little, exactly, that sense of the invidious.

“Ah, mine too, I assure you----!”

He rallied at once to the interest. “Oh, we _can_ talk then?”

“Never,” she all oddly replied. “Never,” said Kate Cookham.

They remained so, face to face; the effect of which for him was that he

had after a little understood why. That was fundamental. “Well, I see.”

Thus confronted they stayed; and then, as he saw with a contentment that

came up from deeper still, it was indeed she who, with her worn fine

face, would conclude. “But I can take care of you.”

“You _have!_” he said as with nothing left of him but a beautiful

appreciative candour.

“Oh, but you’ll want it now in a way--!” she responsibly answered.

He waited a moment, dropping again on the seat. So, while she still

stood, he looked up at her; with the sense somehow that there were too

many things and that they were all together, terribly, irresistibly,

doubtless blessedly, in her eyes and her whole person; which thus

affected him for the moment as more than he could bear. He leaned

forward, dropping his elbows to his knees and pressing his head on his

hands. So he stayed, saying nothing; only, with the sense of her own

sustained, renewed and wonderful action, knowing that an arm had passed

round him and that he was held. She was beside him on the bench of

desolation.