After lunch they went on the river. Mr. Costrelle excused himself. He
explained that only the very young or the exasperatingly dutiful ever
did things between the hours of two and four o’clock in the afternoon.
This was a time that should be dedicated to a reticent idleness. As he
was neither young nor dutiful, he intended to conceal himself until
tea-time.
Kitty reappeared in a dress that was the color of a Malmaison carnation.
She had a felt hat of the same shade, with a narrow black-velvet ribbon
round it, and she carried a rose-colored parasol.
“The ways of women,” observed Mr. Costrelle, regarding Kitty
thoughtfully through a single eyeglass, “are strange. They are not past
finding out, as we are told those of Providence are, but they have at
times the same deceptive sidewise movement, like a crab’s. Explain to
us, my dear child, why you refrained from showing us that very excellent
garment this morning. The pink topaz set in brilliants, which you wear
round your neck, is new to me and a good note.”
“Oh, this dress?” said Kitty, serenely. “I forgot I had it.”
A flicker of amusement passed over Mr. Costrelle’s heavy eyelids. He
knew now what he had wanted to find out. Kitty liked this new young man;
she liked him enough to reserve surprises for him, and then lie about
them. He let his eyeglass fall and retired into the house.
It was one of those early summer days which England occasionally drops
upon her appreciative, but unexpectant, inhabitants. May was at its
loveliest, the trees were all in blossom, the blackbird gave his deepest
under-water note, the thrush flung out his reiterated challenge of sheer
joy, and the young world was full of the surprises of its multitudinous
green shades. On the river the reeds and rushes lived a life of their
own; loose-strife and forget-me-nots grew out from the green banks;
yellow water lilies and lifted buds of coral set their small thick-set
flowers afloat upon the stream. Dragon-flies darted to and fro, shooting
blue and green flames between the fastnesses of the dark bulrushes,
small shocks of speed and color.
Kitty leaned back against the apple-green cushions of the punt,
supremely comfortable and at peace.
She was always capable of complete surrender to a sunny hour; her
conscience never interfered with either her own or other people’s
comfort. She had the disposition of ephemeral things to love the light
and play in it, however short it was.
Kitty crossed her slim ankles, and, opening a jeweled case, drew out a
cigarette and lit it. She narrowed her eyes and fixed them upon Anthony
with satisfaction.
Anthony’s head was bare and his shirt open at the throat; his figure
showed to better advantage in motion than at rest. Motion relieved and
freed him from his own watchfulness. He punted with long, sure strokes
and a steady eye.
Kitty had no need to think of her hat or fear the magnetism of
low-growing bushes. The motion of the boat was imperceptible and
noiseless; it seemed a part of the slow-moving stream. She yielded
herself completely to the serene compulsion of the sunny hour. She
smiled a little, but she had no thoughts; her mind melted into
sensation.
But Anthony could not let himself go. He, too, wanted to enjoy himself;
but he had an ulterior motive, and no one with an ulterior motive has
ever yet succeeded in sharing the joy of others.
He leaned forward suddenly, with his eyes intent upon Kitty’s face.
“What is the matter with that shoulder of yours?” he asked quickly.
Kitty turned her lazy eyes back to the stream. They rested on the quick
spurt of a dragon-fly between the hawthorn bushes.
“Oh,” she said carelessly, “didn’t I tell you? You were right, after
all. I’d caught up some ribbons I wear on a bodice underneath; they did
make an awful lump. Don’t tell papa. He’d think it so careless of me not
to have taken it off.”
“It was the only low-necked dress you tried on,” observed Anthony, with
the same intentness.
“Was it?” replied Kitty, indifferently. “I don’t think I have any other
decent ones. I must get some when I go to town. I hardly ever go out in
the evenings here.”
Kitty’s carelessness would have deceived the very elect, but she did not
quite succeed in deceiving Anthony. Added to the keenness of his
professional training was the instinctive watchfulness of love. Anthony
noticed that when Kitty had answered him she unconsciously straightened
herself a little, nor did she return to the same complete relaxation
again. She in her turn watched him.
“Oh, that’s all right, then,” he answered in a tone of obvious relief,
which was more successful in blinding Kitty than she had been in
deceiving him. “I am going to stay here till you turn me out this
afternoon,” he added. “To-morrow I sha’n’t be able to see you. My
mother’s coming to Merry Gardens.”
“What’s she like?” asked Kitty, curiously.
Few men are capable of giving a comprehensive description of their
mothers offhand, and Anthony was no exception.
“Oh, well,” he said a little awkwardly, “I suppose she’s like other
people’s mothers.”
Kitty brushed aside this evasion.
“You must tell me about her,” she asserted. “I never met her, you know.
She came to see Daphne after Daphne first came here, but I was away. I
should like to see your mother, Tony.”
This was merely the expression of a pious hope on Kitty’s part. She was
not really desirous of meeting the mothers of her men friends, with whom
her one point of contact would have led to direct antagonism, and she
would have let the matter slide if Anthony had shown a little tact.
Tact with women is the knowledge of when to leave a subject alone, and
Anthony had not grasped this saving truth.
“Oh, no,” he remarked hurriedly, “you wouldn’t care about her in the
least. She’s not your sort, she wouldn’t entertain you.”
Kitty’s narrowed eyes grew slowly larger.
“You mean,” she said in a voice of deceptive gentleness, “that she
wouldn’t like me and would disapprove of me?”
This was, of course, what Anthony had meant, but the way was still open
to him to save the situation by a direct denial. The path of
transgressors is hard, but it is softness itself compared with the path
of a man who tells an adverse truth to a woman who loves him.
Kitty could stand criticism, but she could not stand Anthony’s
criticism.
“In a sense I do mean that,” agreed Anthony. “I mean both. It wouldn’t
be at all suitable.”
“I assure you,” said Kitty, with dangerous sweetness, “I have sometimes
had a ‘_succés fou_’ with old ladies.”
Anthony winced. He did not like hearing his mother called an old lady,
nor did he like to think of Kitty setting herself to win a delusive
popularity from his mother.
“It wouldn’t do at all,” he said decisively. “I told Daphne so this
morning.”
Kitty sat up perfectly straight. She threw her cigarette into the water;
her eyes literally blazed at Anthony.
“You did what?” she asked incredulously. “You told Daphne that I was
unsuitable to meet your mother?”
“Practically,” Anthony admitted.
“Then Daphne knows,” said Kitty in a cold, level voice, “that _you_ know
what I am.”
Anthony drew the punt into the nearest bank, shipped his pole, and sat
down opposite Kitty. He saw now that he was in for trouble, and he
prepared to face it.
“She only knows I didn’t think it suitable,” he replied doggedly. “I
can’t help it, Kitty, I don’t!”
“Suitable!” exclaimed Kitty, her voice lashing at the word. “No, I
suppose I’m _not_ suitable; that’s what you all are in your nice, safe,
tidy, unspeakably selfish world! Your mother’s _safe_, Daphne’s safe,
you’re safe—and, if you like, you can play with me outside it, and take
anything I care to give you, and _you’re_ all right! My father could
meet your mother,—you know his life, don’t you?—but that doesn’t
matter. He’s quite suitable. Only girls who have had bad times and been
broken by them aren’t suitable. They’re dangerous; they must be kept
down! They’d do elderly respectable married women harm! We’d shock them,
I suppose, by showing them what happens when things don’t go right in
this awfully easy, decent, bread-and-butter world!
“You refused to let Daphne invite me. Yesterday you fought my battles
and were keen to get me asked, but yesterday of course you thought I was
innocent—a little rapid—but innocent. To-day I’m not. I’m just a
graceless little pariah you can take out in a punt! You offered me your
friendship last night, and I was fool enough to think you meant
something rather fine by it. You didn’t; you meant just this—that I was
good enough to amuse you, but I mustn’t touch your precious family with
a forty-foot pole.
“Take me back, Tony. I wish I’d left you to Miss Mellicot. But you’re
worse than her, for she’d have had the sense to leave me alone.”
“You’re hopelessly unfair,” said Anthony, steadying himself against his
rising anger. “You want both to eat your cake and have it. You went off
the track of your own free will, then why don’t you stay off it? I
didn’t make the damned rules that keep people on it; but I know they’re
there, and if you break them—and you have a perfect right to break them
if you want to—you ought to be prepared to pay for it and not hold me
accountable. If people take the trouble to keep a few plain rules in
order to make a good, clean place for bringing up their children, why
should they let in those who haven’t controlled themselves to spoil it?”
“You’ve said enough,” said Kitty, white to the lips. “Take me home.”
“No, I haven’t said enough,” said Anthony, firmly, “and I want you to
listen to me, because I want to stand by you through anything except
unfairness. But it’s no use expecting me to agree to a lot of
sentimental cant about the kindness and unkindness of a perfectly
obvious fact. It isn’t a question of my mother only. Of course it
wouldn’t hurt her to meet you, and of course if you wanted to charm her,
you’d charm her, then she’d ask you to Pannell.”
“That,” interrupted Kitty, viciously, “_would_ bring the world to an
end, wouldn’t it? How I should contaminate Pannell! You’d have to have
the whole place disinfected afterward!”
“That’s not the point,” replied Anthony, pitilessly. “The point is that
you would be there on false pretenses, because my people wouldn’t let
you come, of course, if they knew what I know about you. Do you like
going about on false pretenses? But of course you do. I’m a fool to
suppose you have any honor; you’re going to London now on false
pretenses.”
“Ah,” interrupted Kitty, with a cruel little laugh, “I see. You object
to my going to London. That’s your real trouble, isn’t it? I might meet
a man there who wouldn’t be as selfish as a dog in the manger and as
moral as a curate. I might meet a _real_ man.”
Anthony’s impulse was to spring out of the punt on to the bank and leave
Kitty.
She sat there looking at him with a little derisive smile on her lips.
There was no light in her small, white face; it was fixed and implacable
and as set against him as an iron door.
Anthony felt every passion he thought he had conquered rise up in him,
and they were all ugly, greedy, cruel passions without intermixture or
relief. The green trees met over their heads; the high, pale clouds
sailed by on idle wings; the whole lovely summer world about them was as
unreal as a painted screen. Only their anger was real; their unsparing
desire to hurt each other was real; their foolish, ineffectual combat,
which took for both of them the light out of the day.
Kitty held herself as still as a trapped bird. Her heart beat painfully
in her throat, but she met Anthony’s angry eyes with her level, light
gaze, and kept her smiling lips unshaken.
“D’you mean that, Kitty?” Anthony asked slowly. “D’you mean I don’t seem
like a real man to you because I want to make love to you and haven’t?
By God! I’ll make love to you now if you do.”
“If you dare to touch me,” said Kitty, quietly, “I’ll upset the boat. Of
course I shall never speak to you again in any case.”
“Oh, all right,” said Anthony, “only in the future when you feel
inclined to cry down the justice of good people you might remember with
what kind of fairness you’ve treated me. I’m off. You can punt back by
yourself, can’t you?”
“No, I can’t,” said Kitty.
There was something in the way in which she said these three little
words that shook Anthony.
He could not have said what it was that shook him, but there was a
controlled helplessness in Kitty’s voice which prevented him from
leaving her.
“I’ll take you back, then,” he said stiffly.
It occurred to him afterward that he might have punted back and let
Kitty walk home, but it did not occur to him then, and it never crossed
his mind that it had occurred to Kitty already, but that she knew she
could not walk.
He took up the pole suddenly and rose to his feet.
Kitty watched him for a few moments in silence, then she said in a small
contrite voice:
“Tony, I was angry; I didn’t mean that—not the horrid thing I said
about your not being a man. It’s just because you are I mind so awfully.
Of course it’s silly. One really likes one’s own world best and one
shouldn’t poach. I expect you did mean all you said, didn’t you?”
Anthony considered. He could not honestly say that he had not meant what
he said, but he wished very much he had not said it. There are probably
few regrets more keen than those we feel when we have been righteous
over much.
“I dare say,” he admitted, “that what made me so nasty _was_ partly your
going to London. We were having—at least I thought we were—rather a
good time here, and all of a sudden you seemed to forget all about it
and only to think of clothes and nothing else, like a gnat in the air
turning people’s heads and all that London rubbish, and I felt I’d been
a fool to care so much when you evidently couldn’t have cared at all.”
“I see,” said Kitty.
She leaned back against the cushions with the lightness of a fallen
leaf. She turned her head away so that the brim of her hat shaded her
from Anthony’s persistent eyes.
“I do want to go to London, Tony,” she said slowly, “only I liked this,
too. You make a mistake if you thought I didn’t care. I do care for all
this. What you said about false pretenses, you know, I’ve always thought
of differently. I never really believed I owed it to the world not to
score off it when I could. I felt I had been downed. If Aunt Augusta had
cared a button for me, I’d have told her the truth and taken the
consequences; but she is getting something by having me up or she
wouldn’t ask me. I don’t know how to explain quite. I’ve cared for
awfully few people and I’ve never tried to explain unless I’ve cared,
and I haven’t felt as if I owed anybody anything; but though I honestly
chose my own line, and ought to face it, I would have kept my—my
self-control, as you call it, and made the effort, if I’d been even a
little happy or had had any one who cared a pin whether I kept straight
or not. Of course there was Peckham, but she wasn’t with me then. I was
awfully lonely, and then I knew how. Lots of other girls are quite as
lonely, but a good many of them keep out of my little bothers because,
you see, they don’t know how. Not all, of course; they’re real good ones
too, only it’s not as different as you think. Awfully few people are
_really_ different; things that push them about are different.”
Anthony acknowledged this possibility. He didn’t want to hurt Kitty now;
he wanted to spare her, but he was uncertain of the best way of sparing
her. Facts had not spared her, and Anthony still believed in the wisdom
of facts.
“Still,” he explained, “if people have met hard times by keeping
straight, it doesn’t seem quite fair for those who have chosen what is,
I suppose, after all, the easier way, to come down on the straight ones
for not wanting to share their privileges with them. There is something,
isn’t there, in paying for your fun?”
Kitty smiled her little twisted smile.
“Oh, yes, Tony,” she said; “I know, and it’s more sensible to be good,
and you get an awful lot of things thrown in—coals and blankets, you
know. The fun doesn’t keep you half as warm as the coals and blankets,
but I expect it’s quite fair really.”
“Sometimes it’s the other way round,” objected Anthony. “I don’t think
being good or bad is advantageous in itself; it depends on what you’re
out for. If you’re out for an easy time, I think the chances are that
you get what you want more easily by being lawless. Only if you have to
pay for it afterward, as I’m bound to admit in a carefully policed world
the lawless usually do, you mustn’t squeal, must you? That’s my idea.”
“No, I won’t squeal,” said Kitty in a low voice. “I think I see what you
mean, Tony. We’ll go home now.”
“Must we?” pleaded Anthony. “I’ve been such a brute and I’ve given you
such a loathsome time, and I think I wanted to be particularly nice. I
don’t know how it happened.”
“I do,” said Kitty, laughing; “I know exactly how it happened. It was
all my fault. I wanted to be wicked, but now I want to go in. I’m not
really feeling quite good yet. I’ve climbed down, and that’s made me
awfully anxious for my tea. I’ve never climbed down for any one in my
life before, Tony; so when I’m particularly tiresome you’ll remember
that,—won’t you?—and in return I’ll try to forgive you for being in
the right.”
“I don’t know that I was in the right,” said Anthony, uncertainly making
for the landing-stage.
“That’ll make it all the easier to forgive you,” said Kitty, lightly.
“You’ll put the cushions away, won’t you, while I go up to the house?”
She slipped out of the punt and up the narrow wooden steps before
Anthony could help her, but she did not go straight back to the house.
It was some time before she rejoined Anthony, and her father, on the
lawn.
“If I were you,” said Mr. Costrelle as she approached the tea-table, “I
should send for some more of that face cream from Paris. You’ve sat out
too long in the sun.”