Anthony had no inner egoism; he did not make pictures in his mind of
himself, nor did he try to make them to his advantage in the minds of
other people. He was without that key to character that the desire to
please others involves. Nobody had ever called him sympathetic or
confided to him picturesque and inaccurate accounts of their lives. His
desire to serve was evident; but it was roused only by those who were
courageous sufferers, at the mercy of a stronger force. He took no
interest in the aggrieved, and he always asked why a dog was lame before
attempting to help it over a stile.
But he had made no such researches into the causes of Kitty’s ostracism.
He swept into the back of his mind all adverse facts against her. Kitty
was not to blame; everybody else was to blame: her father, for her
upbringing, which was admittedly careless; the neighborhood, for its
blind-eyed strictness; and, above all, other women. The women of Rochett
became Anthony’s inveterate enemies. They were unappeasably at war with
Kitty; but it was difficult for Anthony to fight them, because they did
things which Anthony could not fight.
When they passed Mrs. Bucket, the clergyman’s wife, in the car, she
deliberately turned her back and gazed through the hedge.
One cannot get out of a motor-car and fight with a lady for looking at a
hedge; and yet Mrs. Bucket’s action was obviously hostile. There was
nothing in the hedge, or through it, to look at except the silhouette of
a preoccupied pig, and there was no dust in the road; there was only
Kitty.
“A woman of that type,” Anthony exclaimed angrily, “disgusts me. Their
religion is supposed to be love, and their practice is hate. They
wouldn’t have been seen in the New Testament except behind the portliest
of the Pharisees. None of them envisages a generous action, and they
haven’t enough courage to face one of their own ugly thoughts. If she
has anything against you, why doesn’t she stand up and say so? She
belongs to a race of jackals that eat other people’s kill.”
“Rubbish!” said Kitty, lightly. “Poor old thing, she isn’t a bit like a
jackal. She doesn’t like me, and I don’t like her; why should she bow to
me?”
“_You_ wouldn’t have cut her,” said Anthony, a little crestfallen at
this reception of his championship. “I saw you meant to bow to her.”
“It’s not in my interest to cut respectable women,” replied Kitty,
coolly. “I don’t often get the chance; they turn their backs before I
have time to do more than cock my tam-o’-shanter at them.”
“Even Daphne’s unfair to you,” went on Anthony, bitterly. “At least, I
suppose she is. If she wasn’t unfair, you’d surely come to Merry
Gardens.”
“Have you asked her why I don’t come?” replied Kitty, evasively, putting
on speed with a jerk.
“Oh, she only says, ‘She can come if she likes, Tony; I sha’n’t stop
her.’ But if she asked you, you’d come, wouldn’t you, Kitty? Not asking
you is stopping you.”
“She won’t ask me,” said Kitty, dryly. “I should leave it alone if I
were you, Anthony. I don’t believe Ishmael was a man. I believe he was a
lady of certain attractions, living in a suspicious country neighborhood
where nobody knew how to put on their clothes. But Daphne’s all right. I
told you why she’s down on me before, but I didn’t tell you what she’d
tried to do for me first.
“She came here to an awfully stiff and old-fashioned neighborhood, where
the people were all friends of Jim’s, and had wanted him to marry one of
their daughters, with her own way to make, and she tried to make mine
instead. She saw me left out at a silly, frumpish, old school treat
where they’d had to ask me to get a subscription; and from that moment
she fought my battles in season and out of season, and it was mostly out
of season with my battles. And what have I ever done for her? Nothing
except try to turn her husband’s head.”
“Kitty!” exclaimed Anthony, aghast. “Old Jim?”
“Oh, well,” said Kitty, indifferently, “I did; and no thanks to _his_
superior morals that I didn’t succeed. I got fed up with his explaining
potato crops to me, so I dropped him. Jim’s a nice fellow and he hates
me like poison now. He thinks it’s virtue, but it isn’t: it’s pure funk.
But Daphne was never afraid of me. She was nice to me, not pitying or
superior or ‘you-poor-thing-ish,’ just nice. She thought I’d had no
luck.”
“Perhaps she didn’t know about Jim,” suggested Anthony, who refused to
see his favorite sister justified at Kitty’s expense.
“Oh, she knew,” said Kitty, calmly, “as quickly as she would have known
if her first baby had cut a new tooth. Daphne’s no fool about men. She
knew she could really hold Jim, and she wasn’t afraid of me; but she
wasn’t going to be nasty either. She isn’t really nasty now; she’s
merely holding off because I’m not playing the game. She’d be nice again
to-morrow if I’d behave properly to you.”
“What do you call behaving properly to me?” asked Anthony, with
amusement. “I’ve not complained so far.”
“Never seeing you again would be behaving properly to you,” said Kitty,
with a curious gravity. “I see that now, but it’s too late.”
“You couldn’t, I fancy, even the two of you, dispose of me quite so
easily,” observed Anthony.
Kitty made no answer to this statement. She said after a pause:
“Women are all right. Look at Peckham. Peckham would be cut into little
bits to prevent my having a chilblain. I don’t quite know a man who
would be, not even you, Tony. Oh, actual bits, perhaps. But you wouldn’t
always want to take a back seat so as to give me a front one, would you?
That’s what old Peckham wants: she’d be willing to be jolted off on to
the road to see me safe and sound on the front seat.”
Anthony said something about the maternal instinct.
“You can call it what you like,” said Kitty, indifferently. “All I’m
saying is, women do more for you than men sometimes, and don’t get
anything out of it. There was a woman once who did a thing for me—an
angel from heaven would have turned its nose up at—and she made no more
fuss about it than if she had lent me a pocket-handkerchief. I
appreciate that you’re paying me a left-handed compliment by having a
shy at women; but you can take my word for it, there’s nothing in it.”
“You dislike them yourself,” urged Anthony, hotly; “you told me so.”
“Of course I do,” said Kitty. “Why not? I dislike them because they’re
not anxious for me to amuse myself at their expense, and that’s the only
form of amusement that happens to appeal to me. I dare say you like
burglars—I don’t blame you for it—but it’s a peculiar taste that the
police don’t share. As far as other women are concerned, I’m a burglar
and, they’re the police. It’s not much use your trying to reconcile us,
is it?”
Anthony ignored this metaphor. He did not believe that Kitty broke laws.
She merely ignored conventionalities.
“What happened to the woman you say helped you?” he asked, instead, a
little resentfully. “If she was really a good sort, why didn’t you keep
hold of her and have a friend to fall back on?”
“We couldn’t meet again,” said Kitty, briefly. “That’s the hill over
there beyond the windmill, with the row of beeches on the top. We get
out there.”
Anthony frowned at the windmill. He hated mysteries, and above all he
hated coming on a mystery in Kitty’s life. He suspected that there were
things he would dislike to know in Kitty’s career, but he disliked even
more not knowing them.
“I haven’t the right to ask you any questions, of course,” he said
stiffly.
“No,” agreed Kitty, “you haven’t; but don’t let that worry you. I
wouldn’t answer you even if you had. I don’t believe in rights about
questions. Live and let live, that’s my motto. We dump the car here and
climb up. Rather a nice hill, isn’t it?”
Anthony stood looking up at the soft, green incline above them. There
were thickets of young hazel-bushes on the slopes, hollows full of
may-blossom, and the sharpened green of very young leaves.
“‘The new-born leaves,’” Kitty quoted softly, touching them with her
bared fingers. “That’s Dante, isn’t it? The woman I told you about said
that to me once. Of course I never read myself except when it’s wet, and
I shouldn’t read Dante in a blizzard. I prefer D’Annunzio.”
“I don’t believe you’ve read a word of D’Annunzio in your life,” said
Anthony, crossly. “You just say that to tease me, because you know I
hate decadent stuff, full of moonshine and mud. Why do you always try to
make yourself out what you know I don’t like, Kitty?”
“Well, it does tease you, doesn’t it?” laughed Kitty. “Poor old Tony!
You’re awfully easily teased. Never mind; that’s because you like me. I
like you to like me, you know.”
“I wish you did,” said Anthony under his breath. He held a bramble back
to let her pass. Kitty saw his arm tremble as she touched it.
“Oh, not like that,” she said lightly; “that’s a stupid, solemn way.
Like me as if liking were a joke, not as if it were a state funeral and
I were the corpse.”
Anthony stopped suddenly. He felt as if something had literally moved in
his heart.
“For God’s sake! don’t talk like that!” he exclaimed harshly. “You’re
not ill, are you?”
Kitty turned her head and opened wide eyes at him in which astonishment
mixed with a curious look of resentment.
“Ill?” she said. “Why should I be ill? How just like a doctor! Of all
the nonsense, Anthony!”
It wasn’t in the least like a doctor; it was the kind of statement that
any doctor would have laughed at, and of course it was nonsense, only
some stubborn instinct in Anthony remained unrelieved. He had felt one
of those moments of panic that the heart never forgets.
Kitty’s lithe young figure stepped steadily on in front of him. She was
beyond the copse of young trees and out on the open hillside. Anthony
called to her to stop and watch the beauty of the expanding world at
their feet, the line of may-blossoms like the crest of a breaking wave,
beyond it the orchards, and a common covered with a burnished shield of
gorse, flame upon golden flame.
But Kitty refused to do more than glance at it over her shoulder.
“It’s the same old view I’ve seen for years,” she said impatiently.
Anthony shut his lips. The view meant nothing to him if she would not
share it. Kitty’s impatience stripped the woods of bloom and disallowed
the beauty of the day. He wondered if he had been stupid to talk against
women; perhaps Kitty had not realized that it was because she was
different from all other women that all the other women must be in the
wrong. Anthony couldn’t explain this to Kitty; he couldn’t really
explain anything. For moment by moment he felt more aware of her and
less aware of everything else.
He did not dream that Kitty was intentionally blinding him to everything
but herself. She did not speak again until she had reached the group of
beeches at the top of the hill. They stood silent and massive above her,
as if their big brown trunks were the columns of a cathedral aisle.
“There’ll be thunder soon,” said Kitty under her breath. “I love
storms.”
Anthony stood beside her as motionless as one of the tree trunks. He
thought she did not realize what he was feeling. Perhaps she was
thinking of the coming rain, while he stood tense with his struggle not
to take her in his arms.
She turned and looked at him with eyes in which laughter brimmed over,
seized him by the shoulders, and swiftly drawing his head down to hers,
kissed him full on the lips.
Her action took Anthony completely by surprise. He caught her so close
to him that she could not speak, and covered her face and eyes and hair
with kisses. It was as if they ceased to be human beings, and became two
wild creatures in the woods, full of magic and madness. Anthony slipped
beyond her control and beyond his own.
All the years of his intense restraint fell from him; his whole being
seemed to alter in her arms. He did not know what was left of him or
what was Kitty.
Kitty said his name at last, over and over, very softly and steadily.
“Anthony! Anthony!” It seemed to him as if he were being called back out
of another world. He let her go at last, forcing his will to answer
hers.
She leaned, with her back against a tree, breathless and white, but
laughing a little.
[Illustration: _He did not know what was left of him or what was
Kitty._]
“I won’t scold you, Tony,” she said. “It was all my fault. I took you by
surprise, and that was a little the way you took me. I didn’t know, you
see, you would be that kind of lover.”
“I didn’t frighten you, did I?” he asked anxiously. “I’ll take the
greatest care of you always, Kitty; I’ll never let anything hurt or
frighten you again. I never dreamed you could, I never thought I
might—”
“Don’t put too much weight on anything I do,” Kitty interrupted him
quickly. “The woods are full of mischief. Poor old Anthony! You do look
done. That’s because you think I am, isn’t it? Well, I’ll race you to
the bottom of the hill to show you I’m not.”
She was off like a flash between the trunks of the trees, and Anthony
after her. It was a breathless, absurd, confusing race.
Anthony felt as if he had got into a nightmare. He did not know the
path, and Kitty was mercilessly aware of it. She took short cuts and
avoided rough places, leaving him to stumble into pitfalls and be caught
by unexpected brambles. He broke free at last, and before they reached
the car he had caught her and seized her by the shoulders.
“Kitty, you’re a little devil,” he said breathlessly. “Are you all
right?”
Kitty ignored his question.
“That’s better,” she said, with approving eyes. “I’m a little devil, and
you’re no better than you should be—now. You can come home and dine
with me—no, I won’t be kissed on the roadside; but just bear those two
facts in mind, won’t you?”
She sprang away from him into the car. Anthony swung himself up beside
her, taking the steering-wheel out of her hands.
“No, you don’t,” he said fiercely. “I’ve had enough of your initiative
for one afternoon. I’m going to do the driving from now on.”
Kitty yielded lightly, with smiling eyes. She watched Anthony’s face as
he steered the car out of the narrow lane and road by the windmill. His
eyes had a queer, odd light in them—a light of intense, controlled
excitement, and his rather heavy jaws were set firmly. She would not be
able to take him by surprise so easily again. The clouds had darkened
rapidly, and just as they turned into the open road the rain began.
Thunder rolled down on them from the low hills, and all the may-trees
and the golden gorse were blotted out in storm.
Kitty leaned back in the car and shut her eyes; a little smile still
lingered round her lips. Anthony glanced at her from time to time to see
that she was properly wrapped up and did not look as if she was too
exhausted by her race.
He swore to himself that he would never again leave her to her own
discretion or let her do things for which she had to pay.
He would pay for whatever she did himself, and guide those small, wilful
hands of hers, and put his heart under her feet. He could not tell if he
was happy or sad, but he was settled; he knew what he had to do.
She was his life now; there was no other uncertainty. Nothing that
people said of her could alter his judgment. Daphne and Jim, his people
at Pannell, must accept her or be blotted out.
There was nothing left but Kitty. Kitty, too, was silent. She sat
muffled up in her Burberry, with the rain lashing against her face. She
was quite comfortable and content, but she made no resolutions. Only, as
they flashed past the wet fields and round the familiar corners, she
remembered Peckham’s phrase, “A hair will turn him.” A hair had turned
Anthony. That was why Kitty was smiling.