Chris told the story lingeringly, in loving detail. From Uncle Ambrose's
gates, it seems, one took the path across the meadow where Whiston's
cows are put to graze, passed through the second stile--the one between
the two big alders--into a long straight road that ran across the flat
lands to Bray. After a mile or so there branched from it a private road
that followed a line of noble poplars down to the ferry. Between two of
them--he described it meticulously, as though it were of immense
significance--there stood a white hawthorn. In front were the
dark-green, glassy waters of an unvisited back-water, and beyond them a
bright lawn set with many walnut-trees and a few great chestnuts, well
lighted with their candles, and to the left of that a low, white house
with a green dome rising in its middle, and a veranda with a roof of
hammered iron that had gone verdigris-color with age and the Thames
weather. This was the Monkey Island Inn. The third Duke of Marlborough
had built it for a "folly," and perching there with nothing but a line
of walnut-trees and a fringe of lawn between it and the fast, full,
shining Thames, it had an eighteenth-century grace and silliness.
Well, one sounded the bell that hung on a post, and presently Margaret
in a white dress would come out of the porch and would walk to the stone
steps down to the river. Invariably, as she passed the walnut-tree that
overhung the path, she would pick a leaf, crush it, and sniff the sweet
scent; and as she came near the steps she would shade her eyes and peer
across the water. "She is a little near-sighted; you can't imagine how
sweet it makes her look," Chris explained. (I did not say that I had
seen her, for, indeed, this Margaret I had never seen.) A sudden serene
gravity would show that she had seen one, and she would get into the
four-foot punt that was used as a ferry and bring it over very slowly,
with rather stiff movements of her long arms, to exactly the right
place. When she had got the punt up on the gravel her serious brow would
relax, and she would smile at one and shake hands and say something
friendly, like, "Father thought you'd be over this afternoon, it being
so fine; so he's saved some duck's eggs for tea."
And then one took the pole from her and brought her back to the island,
though probably one did not mount the steps to the lawn for a long time.
It was so good to sit in the punt by the landing-stage while Margaret
dabbled her hands in the black waters and forgot her shyness as one
talked. "She's such good company. She's got an accurate mind that
would have made her a good engineer, but when she picks up facts she
kind of gives them a motherly hug. She's charity and love itself."
(Again I did not say that I had seen her.) If people drifted in to tea,
one had to talk to her while she cut the bread and butter and the
sandwiches in the kitchen, but in this year of floods few visitors cared
to try the hard rowing below Bray Lock.
[Illustration: She would get into the four-foot punt that was used as a
ferry and bring it over very slowly]
So usually one sat down there in the boat, talking with a sense of
leisure, as though one had all the rest of one's life in which to carry
on this conversation, and noting how the reflected ripple of the water
made a bright, vibrant, mark upon her throat, and other effects of the
scene upon her beauty, until the afternoon grew drowsy, and she said,
"Father will be wanting his tea." And they would go up and find old
Allington, in white ducks, standing in the fringe of long grasses and
cow-parsley on the other edge of the island, looking to his poultry or
his rabbits. He was a little man, with a tuft of copper-colored hair
rising from the middle of his forehead like a clown's curl, who shook
hands hard and explained very soon that he was a rough diamond.
Then they all had tea under the walnut-tree where the canary's cage was
hanging, and the ducks' eggs would be brought out, and Mr. Allington
would talk much Thames-side gossip: how the lock-keeper at Teddington
had had his back broken by a swan, mad as swans are in May; how they
would lose their license at the Dovetail Arms if they were not careful;
and how the man who kept the inn by Surly Hall was like to die, because
after he had been cursing his daughter for two days for having run away
with a soldier from Windsor Barracks, he had suddenly seen her white
face in a clump of rushes in the river just under the hole in the
garden fence. Margaret would sit quiet, round-eyed at the world's ways,
and shy because of Chris.
So they would sit on that bright lawn until the day was dyed with
evening blue, and Mr. Allington was more and more often obliged to leap
into the punt to chase his ducks, which had started on a trip to Bray
Lock, or to crawl into the undergrowth after rabbits similarly
demoralized by the dusk.
Then Chris would say he had to go, and they would stand in a communing
silence while the hearty voice of Mr. Allington shouted from midstream
or under the alder-boughs a disregarded invitation to stay and have a
bite of supper. In the liquefaction of colors which happens on a summer
evening, when the green grass seemed like a precious fluid poured out on
the earth and dripping over to the river, and the chestnut candles were
no longer proud flowers, but just wet, white lights in the humid mass
of the tree, when the brown earth seemed just a little denser than the
water, Margaret also participated.
Chris explained this part of his story stumblingly; but I, too, have
watched people I loved in the dusk, and I know what he meant. As she sat
in the punt while he ferried himself across it was no longer visible
that her fair hair curled differently and that its rather wandering
parting was a little on one side; that her straight brows, which were a
little darker than her hair, were nearly always contracted in a frown of
conscientious speculation; that her mouth and chin were noble, yet as
delicate as flowers; that her shoulders were slightly hunched because
her young body, like a lily-stem, found it difficult to manage its own
tallness. She was then just a girl in white who lifted a white face or
drooped a dull-gold head. Then she was nearer to him than at any other
time. That he loved her in this twilight, which obscured all the
physical details which he adored, seemed to him a guarantee that theirs
was a changeless love which would persist if she were old or maimed or
disfigured.
He stood beside the crazy post where the bell hung and watched the white
figure take the punt over the black waters, mount the gray steps, and
assume some of their grayness, become a green shade in the green
darkness of the foliage-darkened lawn, and he exulted in that guarantee.
How long this went on he had forgotten; but it continued for some time
before there came the end of his life, the last day he could remember. I
was barred out of that day. His lips told me of its physical
appearances, while from his wet, bright eyes and his flushed skin, his
beautiful signs of a noble excitement, I tried to derive the real story.
It seemed that the day when he bicycled over to Monkey Island, happy
because Uncle Ambrose had gone up to town and he could stay to supper
with the Allingtons, was the most glorious day the year had yet brought.
The whole world seemed melting into light. Cumulus-clouds floated very
high, like lumps of white light, against a deep, glowing sky, and
dropped dazzling reflections on the beaming Thames. The trees moved not
like timber, shocked by wind, but floatingly, like weeds at the bottom
of a well of sunshine. When Margaret came out of the porch and paused,
as she always did, to crush and smell the walnut-leaf and shade her eyes
with her hand, her white dress shone like silver.
[Illustration: He lay there in the confiding relaxation of a child]
She brought the punt across and said very primly, "Dad will be
disappointed; he's gone up to town on business," and answered gravely,
"That is very kind of you," when he took the punt-pole from her and
said laughingly: "Never mind. I'll come and see you all the same." (I
could see them as Chris spoke, so young and pale and solemn, with the
intense light spilling all around them.) That afternoon they did not sit
in the punt by the landing-stage, but wandered about the island and
played with the rabbits and looked at the ducks and were inordinately
silent. For a long time they stood in the fringe of rough grass on the
other side of the island, and Margaret breathed contentedly that the
Thames was so beautiful. Past the spit of sand at the far end of the
island, where a great swan swanked to the empty reach that it would
protect its mate against all comers, the river opened to a silver
breadth between flat meadows stretching back to far rows of pin-thick
black poplars, until it wound away to Windsor behind a line of high
trees whose heads were bronze with unopened buds, and whose flanks were
hidden by a head of copper-beech and crimson and white hawthorn.
Chris said he would take her down to Dorney Lock in the skiff, and she
got in very silently and obediently; but as soon as they were out in
midstream she developed a sense of duty, and said she could not leave
the inn with just that boy to look after it. And then she went into the
kitchen and, sucking in her lower lip for shyness, very conscientiously
cut piles of bread and butter in case some visitors came to tea. Just
when Chris was convincing her of the impossibility of any visitors
arriving they came, a fat woman in a luscious pink blouse and an old
chap who had been rowing in a tweed waistcoat. Chris went out, though
Margaret laughed and trembled and begged him not to, and waited on them.
It should have been a great lark, but suddenly he hated them, and when
they offered him a tip for pushing the boat off, he snarled absurdly
and ran back, miraculously relieved, to the bar-parlor.
Still Margaret would not leave the island. "Supposing," she said, "that
Mr. Learoyd comes for his ale." But she consented to walk with him to
the wild part of the island, where poplars and alders and willows grew
round a clearing in which white willow-herb and purple figwort and here
and there a potato-flower, last ailing consequence of one of Mr.
Allington's least successful enterprises, fought down to the fringe of
iris on the river's lip. In this gentle jungle was a rustic seat, relic
of a reckless aspiration on the part of Mr. Allington to make this a
pleasure-garden, and on it they sat until a pale moon appeared above the
green corn-field on the other side of the river. "Not six yet," he said,
taking out his watch. "Not six yet," she repeated. Words seemed to bear
more significance than they had ever borne before. Then a heron flapped
gigantic in front of the moon, and swung in wide circles round the
willow-tree before them. "Oh, look!" she cried. He seized the hand she
flung upward and gathered her into his arms. They were so for long,
while the great bird's wings beat about them.
Afterward she pulled at his hand. She wanted to go back across the lawn
and walk round the inn, which looked mournful, as unlit houses do by
dusk. They passed beside the green-and-white stucco barrier of the
veranda and stood on the three-cornered lawn that shelved high over the
stream at the island's end, regarding the river, which was now something
more wonderful than water, because it had taken to its bosom the rose
and amber glories of the sunset smoldering behind the elms and Bray
church-tower. Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as
the black notes sit on a staff of music. Then she went to the window of
the parlor and rested her cheek against the glass, looking in. The
little room was sad with twilight, and there was nothing to be seen but
Margaret's sewing-machine on the table and the enlarged photograph of
Margaret's mother over the mantel-piece, and the views of Tintern Abbey
framed in red plush, and on the floor, the marigold pattern making
itself felt through the dusk, Mr. Allington's carpet slippers. "Think of
me sitting in there," she whispered, "not knowing you loved me." Then
they went into the bar and drank milk, while she walked about fingering
familiar things with an absurd expression of exaltation, as though that
day she was fond of everything, even the handles of the beer-engine.
When there had descended on them a night as brilliant as the day he drew
her out into the darkness, which was sweet with the scent of
walnut-leaves, and they went across the lawn, bending beneath the
chestnut-boughs, not to the wild part of the island, but to a circle of
smooth turf divided from it by a railing of wrought iron. On this stood
a small Greek temple, looking very lovely in the moonlight. He had never
brought Margaret here before, because Mr. Allington had once told him,
spatulate forefinger at his nose, that it had been built for the "dook"
for his excesses, and it was in the quality of his love for her that he
could not bear to think of her in association with anything base. But
to-night there was nothing anywhere but beauty. He lifted her in his
arms and carried her within the columns, and made her stand in a niche
above the altar. A strong stream of moonlight rushed upon her there; by
its light he could not tell if her hair was white as silver or yellow as
gold, and again he was filled with exaltation because he knew that it
would not have mattered if it had been white. His love was changeless.
Lifting her down from the niche, he told her so.
And as he spoke, her warm body melted to nothingness in his arms. The
columns that had stood so hard and black against the quivering tide of
moonlight and starlight seemed to totter and dissolve. He was lying in a
hateful world where barbed-wire entanglements showed impish knots
against a livid sky full of blooming noise and splashes of fire and
wails for water, and his back was hurting intolerably.
Chris fell to blowing out the candles, and I, perhaps because the
egotistical part of me was looking for something to say that would make
him feel me devoted and intimate, could not speak.
Suddenly he desisted, stared at a candle-flame, and said:
"If you had seen the way she rested her cheek against the glass and
looked into the little room you'd understand that I can't say, 'Yes,
Kitty's my wife, and Margaret somehow just nothing at all.'"
"Of course you can't," I murmured sympathetically.
We gripped hands, and he brought down on our conversation the finality
of darkness.