My showman, his hard face sleek with sweat, insisted on counting out
three huge platelike crown pieces into my lap--for a douceur. I brushed
them off on to the ground. "Only to clinch the bargain," he said. His
teeth grinned at me as if he would gladly have swallowed me whole.
"Pick up the money," said I coldly, determined once and for all to keep
him in his place. "It's early days yet." But when my back was turned,
covetous Adam took charge of it.
While we trudged along homeward--for in the deserted night the cage was
unnecessary, until I was too tired to go further--I listened to the
coins clanking softly together in Adam's pocket It was an intoxicating
lullaby. But such are the revulsions of success, for hours and hours
that night I lay sleepless. Once I got up and put my hand in where the
crowns were, to assure myself I was awake. But the dream which visited
me--between the watches of remorse--I shall keep to myself.
With next day's sun, the Signorina had become the talk of the
country-side, and Adam's vacant face must have stood him in good stead.
She had been such "a draw," he told me, that the showman had decided to
stay two more nights on the same pitch: which was fortunate for us both.
Especially as on the third afternoon heavy rain fell, converting the
green field into a morass. With evening the clouds lifted, and a fulling
moon glazed the puddles, and dimmed the glow-worm lamps. Impulse is a
capricious master. I did my best, for even when intuition fails my sex,
there's obstinacy to fall back upon; but all that I had formerly
achieved with ease had to be forced out of me that night with endless
effort. The Oracle was unwilling. When a genteel yet foxy looking man,
with whiskers and a high stiff collar under his chin, sneakishly invited
me to tell his fortune, and I replied that "Prudent chickens roost
high," the thrust was a little too deft. My audience was amused, but
nobody laughed.
He seemed to be well known, and the green look he cast me proved that
the truth is not always palatable or discreet. Unseduced by the lumps of
sugar which I had pilfered for him, my peevish mount jibbed and bucked
and all but flung the Princess of Andalusia into the sodden ring. He
succeeded in giving a painful wrench to her wrist, which doubled the
applause.
A strange thing happened to me, too, that night. When for the second or
third time the crowd was flocking in to view me, my eyes chanced to fall
on a figure standing in the clouded light a little apart. He was dressed
in a high-peaked hat and a long and seemingly brown cassock-like
garment, with buttoned tunic and silver-buckled leather belt. Spurs were
on his boots, a light whip in his hand. Aloof, his head a little bowed
down, his face in profile, he stood there, framed in the opening, dusky,
level-featured, deep-eyed--a Stranger.
What in me rushed as if on wings into his silent company? A passionate
longing beyond words burned in me. I seemed to be carried away into a
boundless wilderness--stunted trees, salt in the air, a low, enormous
stretch of night sky, space; and this man, master of soul and solitude.
He never heeded me; raised not an eyelid to glance into my tent. If he
had, what then? I was a nothing. When next, after the press of people, I
looked, he was gone; I saw him no more. Yet the girlish remembrance
remains, consoling this superannuated heart like a goblet of flowers in
that secret chamber of the mind we call the imagination.
The fall from that giddy moment into this practical world was abrupt.
Sulky, tired with the rain and the cumbersome cage and the showman's
insults, on our arrival at Monk's House Adam was completely unnerved
when he found our usual entry locked and bolted.
He gibbered at me like a mountebank in the windy moonlight, his conical
head blotting out half the cloud-wracked sky. These gallivantings were
as much as his place was worth. He would wring the showman's neck. He
had a nail in his shoe. He had been respectable all his life; and what
was I going to do about it? A nice kettle of fish. Oh, yes, he had had
"a lick or two of the old lady's tongue" already, and he didn't want
another. What's more, there was the mealy-mouthed Marvell to reckon
with.
Once free of the cage, I faced him and desired to know whether he would
be happier if I wrote at once to Mrs Monnerie and absolved him there and
then. "Look at yourself in your own mind," I bade him. "What a sight is
a coward!" And I fixed him with none too friendly an eye under the moon.
His clumsiness in opening a window disturbed Mrs French. She came to the
head of the staircase and leaned over, while we crouched in a recess
beneath. But while the beams of the candle she carried were too feeble
to pierce the well of darkness between us, by twisting round my head I
could see every movement and changing expression of the shape above
me--the frilled, red-flannel dressing-gown, the shawl over her head, and
her inflamed peering face surmounted with a "front" of hair in pins. She
was talking to herself in peculiar guttural mutterings. But soon, either
because she was too sleepy or too indolent to search further, she
withdrew again; and Adam and I were free to creep up the glooming
shallow staircase into safety.
Last but not least, when I came to undress, I found that my
grandfather's little watch was gone. In a fever I tumbled my clothes
over again and again. Then I sat down and in memory went over the events
of the evening, and came at last to the thief. There was no doubt of
him--a small-headed, puny man, who almost with tears in his eyes had
besought me to give him one of my buttons to take home to his crippled
little daughter. He had pressed close: my thoughts had been far away. I
confess this loss unnerved me--a haggard face looked out of my glass. I
scrambled into bed, and sought refuge as quickly as possible from these
heart-burnings.
After such depressing experiences Adam's resolution was at an even lower
ebb next morning. We met together under the sunny whispering pine-trees.
I wheedled, argued, adjured him in vain. Almost at my wits' end at last,
I solemnly warned him that if we failed the showman the following
evening, he would assuredly have the law against us. "A pretty pair we
shall look, Adam, standing up there in the dock--with the black cap and
the wigs and the policemen and everything. And not a penny for our
pains."
He squinted at me in unfeigned alarm at this; the lump in his throat
went up and down; and though possibly I had painted the picture in
rather sombre colours, this settled the matter. I hope it taught Adam
to fight shy ever afterwards of adventuresses. It certainly taught
_this_ adventuress that the mind may be "subdued to what it works in,
like the dyer's hand." I cast a look of hatred after the weak, silly man
as he disappeared between the trees.
The circus, so the showman had warned me, was moving on that day to
another market town, Whippington--six miles or so from its present
pitch, though not more than four miles further away from Croomham. This
would mean a long and wearisome trudge for us the next evening, as I
found on consulting an immense map of Kent. Yet my heart sighed with
delight at the discovery that, as the dove flies, we should be a full
five miles nearer to Beechwood. If this little church on the map was St
Peter's, and this faint shading the woody contour of the Hill, why,
then, that square dot was Wanderslore. I sprawled over the outspread
county with sublime content. My very "last appearance" was at hand;
liberty but a few hollow hours away.
It is true I had promised my showman to think over his invitation to me
to "sign on" as a permanent member of his troupe of clowns, acrobats,
wild beasts, and monstrosities. He had engaged in return to pay me in
full, "with a bit over," at the close of the last performance. But I had
merely laughed and nodded. Not that I was in any true sense ashamed of
what I had done. Not _ashamed_.
But you cannot swallow your pride and your niceness without any
discomfort. I was conscious of a hardening of the skin, of a grimness
stealing over my mouth, and of a tendency to stare at the world rather
more boldly than modesty should. At least, so it seemed. In reality it
may have been that Life was merely scraping off the "cream." Quite a
wholesome experience.
On the practical side, all was well. Two pounds to Adam, which I had
promised to make three if he earned it, would leave me with thirteen or
twelve pounds odd, apart from my clumsy "douceur." I thirsted for my
wages. With that sum--two five-pound notes and say, four
half-sovereigns--sewn up, if possible, in my petticoat, I should once
more be my own mistress; and I asked no more for the moment. The future
must take care of itself. On one thing I was utterly resolved--never,
never to return to Monk's House, or to No. 2--to that old squalid
luxury, dissembling and humiliation.
No: my Monnerie days were over; even though it had taken a full pound
of their servile honey to secrete this ounce of rebellious wax.
How oddly chance events knit themselves together. That very morning I
had received a belated and re-addressed letter which smote like sunbeams
on my hopes and plans. It was from Mrs Bowater:--
"DEAR MISS M.,--I send this line to say that I am still in the land
of the living. I have buried my poor husband but have hopes some
day of bringing him home. England is England when all's said and
done, and I can't say I much approve of foreign parts. It's a fine
town and not what you might call foreign to look at the buildings,
but moist and flat and the streets like a draughtboard. And the
thought of the cattle upsets me. Everything topsy-turvy too with
Spring coming along and breaking out and we here on the brink of
September. It has been an afflicting time though considering all
things he made a peaceful end, with a smile on his face as you
would hardly consider possible.
"The next fortnight will see me on board the steamer again, which I
can scarcely support the thought of, though, please God, I shall
see it through. I have spent many days alone here and the
strangeness of it all and the foreign faces bring up memories which
are happier forgotten. But I'm often thinking what fine things you
must be doing in that fine place. Not as I think riches will buy
everything in this world--and a mercy too--or that I'm not anxious
at times you don't come to harm with that delicate frame and all.
Wrap up warm, miss, be watchful of your victuals and keep early
hours. Such being so, I'm still hoping when I come home, if I'm
spared, you may be of a mind to come to Beechwood Hill again and
maybe settle down.
"I may say that I had my suspicions for some time that that young
Mr Anon was consumptive in the lungs. But from what I gathered he
isn't, only suffering from a stomach cough--bad cooking and
exposing himself in all weathers. I will say nothing nearer. I
shall be easier off as money goes, but you and me needn't think of
that. Fanny doesn't write much and which I didn't much expect. She
is of an age now which must reap as it has sown, though even
allowing for the accident of birth, as they say, a mother's a
mother till the end of the chapter. I must now close. May the Lord
bless you, miss, wherever you may be.
Yours truly,
"E. BOWATER (MRS)."
Surely this letter was a good omen. It cheered me, and yet it was
disquieting, too. That afternoon I spent in the garden, wandering
irresolutely up and down under the blue sky, and fretting at the
impenetrable wall of time that separated me from the longed-for hour of
freedom. On a sunny stone near a foresty bed of asparagus I sat down at
last, tired, and a little dispirited. I was angry with myself for the
last night's failure, and for a kind of weakness that had come over me.
Yet how different a creature was here to-day from that of only a week
ago. From the darkened soil the stalks sprang up, stiffened and green
with rain. A snail reared up her horns beneath my stone. An azure
butterfly alighted on my knee, slowly fanning its turquoise wings,
patterned with a delicate narrow black band on the one side, and spots
of black and orange like a Paisley shawl beneath. Between silver-knobbed
antennae its furry perplexed face and shining eyes looked out at me,
sharing my warmth. I watched it idly. How long we had been strangers.
And surely the closer one looked at anything that was not of man's
making.... My thoughts drifted away. I began day-dreaming again.
And it seemed that life was a thing that had neither any plan nor any
purpose; that I was sunk, as if in a bog, in ignorance of why or where
or who I truly was. The days melted on, to be lost or remembered, the
Spring into Summer, and then Winter and death. What was the meaning of
it all--this enormous ocean of time and space in which I was lost? Never
else than a stranger. That couldn't be true of the men and women who
really keep the world's "pot boiling." All _I_ could pray for was to sit
like this for a while, undisturbed and at peace with my own heart.
Peace--did I so much as know the meaning of the word? How dingy a
patchwork I had made of everything. And how customary were becoming
these little passing fits of repining and remorse. The one sole thing
that comforted me--apart from my blue butterfly--was an echo in my head
of those clapping hands, whoops and catcalls--and the white staring
faces in the glare. And a few months ago this would have seemed an
incredible degradation.
There stole into memory that last evening at Wanderslore. What would he
think of me now? I had done worse than forget him, had learned in one
single instant that for ever and ever, however dearly I liked and valued
him and delighted in his company, I could not be "in love" with him. I
hid my face in my hands. Yet a curious quiet wish for his company sprang
up in me. How stiff-necked and affected I had been. Love was nothing but
cheating. Let me but confess, explain, ask forgiveness, unburden myself.
Those hollow temples, that jutting jaw, the way he stooped on his hands
and coughed. My great-aunt, Kitilda, had died in her youth of
consumption. A sudden dread, like a skeleton out of the sky, stood up in
my mind. There was no time to delay. To-morrow night, Adam or no Adam, I
would set off to find him: all would be well.
As if in response to my thought, a shadow stole over the stones beside
me. I looked up and--aghast--saw Fanny.