Three weeks later Tod met Millie Hornblower, the lady of the
German-silver ring.
It was a sunny February afternoon, with a cold north-east wind blowing,
the sea a deep blue ridged with white. Tod had been “writing up” a house
on the seafront, and he was walking back along the Colonnade, and had
stepped aside to let a perambulator pass, when some one spoke to him.
“I don’t suppose you remember me, Mr. Western?”
He turned and found himself looking into the china-blue eyes of a girl
who was wearing a set of black furs. Her gloves were black and so was
her hat, but beneath it her hair shone out like a red-gold wreath, a
flash of colour that made him forget her sombre clothes. The “Giggles”
of Pentworth had grown into a perilously handsome girl. She had one of
those soft, round, glowing faces, with a complexion that old-fashioned
ballad writers called “cream and roses”; moreover, it was natural. She
was of middle height, deep of bosom, with a beautiful plump throat and
well-shaped shoulders. But her mouth was the live flame of her beauty.
It was a disastrous mouth—beautifully sensual and provoking, very red,
the upper lip slightly lifted at the centre, a mouth that made men look
at her with eyes of desire.
“It’s Miss Hornblower,” said Tod.
He had given her a little grudging lift of the hat, and he stood
considering her with a shy reserve. Yes, he remembered her very well,
for had she not killed the wonder-heroine of those books of adventure
and most basely sold his love for a bag of chocolate creams?
“So you are at Craggs’,” said the girl, sensing those memories in the
stare of his eyes.
“Yes.”
“Quite the man-about-town.”
“Oh?” said Tod, abrupt and uneasy.
He could not think of anything to say to her, though he was acutely
conscious of her as a compellingly pretty girl. He thought that she had
changed, and that her face looked softer and pleasanter, and that the
memories of Pentworth were no longer fit to be remembered. Physical
beauty is so convincing to a young man whose ideals have not been
tarnished, and who does not know that a little harlot may have the face
of an angel.
“You have changed a good deal,” said the girl; “I wonder if you would
have spoken to me if you had seen me first?”
“Of course I should,” said Tod; “that’s to say if I——”
He got bogged there, and she did not try to help him out. His
awkwardness made him stiff and difficult, and she felt that he was
putting on side.
“Oh, don’t explain. You’re in a hurry, I expect. Of course, Wednesdays
don’t affect you.”
“So you’re in a shop?”
It was an innocent bit of blurting idiocy, and he knew at once that he
had said something disastrous, though to the self in him it had meant
nothing at all. She gave a little lift of the head, looked at him
queerly, lips pressed together, the pupils of her eyes small and very
black.
“Thank you. Good afternoon, Mr. Western,” and she set her face westwards
and walked on.
Tod saw that he had hurt her, and Tod had always hated hurting people.
He walked back to the office with a furious sense of soreness inside
him, and the growing realisation of the fact that the girl must have
assumed him to be a snob. A remark of Bob Twine’s recurred to him:
“Suppose you will be getting too big for us shoppies.” Tod had been
indignant, but his present indignation was a chivalrous rage. The mood
was miraculous. Miss Hornblower became in a moment a vision of softness,
accusation and pathos. He remembered noticing that her gloves were
shabby, and then he realised the suggestiveness of her black clothes and
hat.
And so Tod landed on Calypso’s island, and his Calypso had a tragic
mouth and grieved blue eyes.
He spent the whole of the following week in trying to cross paths with
Millie Hornblower, and to win a chance of wiping that rage out of his
heart. His chivalry went nightly down the parade into old Shaston town,
and into every likely and alluring street. He tried two churches on the
Sunday, and discovered no grieved and blue-eyed girl in either of them;
but Tod had a good deal of obstinacy, and the smart did not wear away
from him as quickly as it melted from the hearts of most people.
When at last he did meet her she was walking down Duke Street with a
girl friend, and though Tod lifted his hat and broke his step with the
hesitation of a man who wanted her to stop, she swept past him, a proud
young ship in full sail. She had given him a nod of the head and no
smile.
“Who’s that?” asked her friend.
“A boy I used to know.”
“He wanted you to stop.”
“He can want it a little more. I’m on my dignity, old thing.”
Tod was piqued and troubled. He was such an innocent man thing in the
Garden of Eden that, unlike Father Adam, he accused himself and not Eve;
and he behaved as though this particular Eve was made like a male.
Bertha Cragg had clouded his conception of the other sex. She played the
game of life like a good man, never cheated, and had hidden all her
subtlety, showing him only the face of a frank and straightforward boy.
If Tod had taken up his picture of Miss Hornblower where his Pentworth
memories had left it, and not let sex smudge it, he would not have been
the dear fool of a sensitive imagination. When a girl uses both her sex
and her wits, the only opponent who can do her justice is a cynic or a
_roué_.
Mr. Thomas Lavender had no Tod trudging with him over the Sussex hills
on that first warm Sunday in March. There was spring in the air, an
adventurous blueness in the sea, suggestion in the soft swish of the
waves along the shingle, a “Come and find me” in the mood of the day.
And Tod went forth like a pagan, with no thoughts of Miss Truebody and
church bells, and the blood of St. Alban the Martyr, a young man
patrolling the parade with a vague foresense of adventure tingling in
his spine. In one of the glass shelters half hidden behind a hedge sat
my Lady Propriety, reading a book with an air of careful and ladylike
isolation. Her blue eyes looked vague and inattentive, and virginal as
the sea and the sky. She was aware of nothing and of everything, and she
did not appear to see Tod until his shadow was at her feet.
“Good morning!”
“Good morning!”
Her upward glance was surprised and critical. She waited, her book open
on her lap, a virgin fortress with gates closed and flag flying.
Tod had to attack.
“May I sit down a moment?”
“It’s not my seat.”
He sat down a good yard away, very uneasy, the young male thing
unconsciously full of its maleness.
“I’m afraid I offended you the other day?”
Her blue eyes held him baffled with the opaque and defensive stare of a
moment.
“Oh?”
“If I did, it was quite——”
“Unimportant.”
She supplied him with the word, and then returned rather obviously to
her book. A moment later, like the _retiarius_ of old, she made a quick
throw of the net.
“I work in a shop, you know.”
“So do I,” said Tod.
“That’s news. I shouldn’t have called an estate office a shop. St.
Margarets rather fancies itself.”
“Do you mean I’m a snob?”
He had said it. He had sounded his trumpet, marched out his men and
offered battle. The field was his.
“One can’t help one’s impressions, Mr. Western. I have learnt to take
people as I find them. After all, it doesn’t matter.”
“Yes it does,” said Tod obstinately.
She gave him an ironical glance.
“Oh, why?”
“Because I’m not a snob.”
“Am I to take your word for it? I suppose I was a silly, impulsive ass
to speak to you that afternoon.”
“It was very nice of you to speak to me. And you went off in such a
hurry.”
She turned over a page and smiled.
“Perhaps I’m rather touchy. I just did the natural thing, and you looked
over your collar like a shocked curate. I’m not used to being snubbed.”
“But I didn’t mean to snub you.”
“Well, I felt snubbed, anyhow. And a girl’s rather touchy when things
have gone wrong, and she is beastly poor.”
Tod sat there in silence for a while, tapping the toe of a boot with his
cane, a very serious and generously sentimental Tod. She had set the
youth alight in him, and though he was still unconscious of the fire
that was to be, he had no suspicion that all this was strategy and part
of the campaign. Millie Hornblower had seen Tod in Shaston long before
he had seen her, and the promise of the man in Tod had pleased her. He
was a brown, strong, quick-moving youngster, with alert eyes and an air
of adventure. And there was a glamour about Tod. He was supposed to have
a little money, and what was more important, inside influence. He was
going up. Millie Hornblower had learnt quite a number of things about
men and life, and the sort of future a girl in a shop might expect. She
intended to get out of that shop with éclat and romance, and not as the
wife of some dull and semi-paternal middle-class husband vaguely fat and
forty.
“I’ve been trying to see you ever since that day,” said Tod at last.
“Have you?”
“You wouldn’t stop that afternoon in Duke Street.”
“Did you want me to stop?”
“Yes, I felt I’d offended you—hurt your feelings.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know that I’m asking for anybody’s
pity.”
Tod fought stubbornly, like a man who was being outboxed and punished in
every round.
“It’s not pity. And I’m not a snob. I was in two shops before I went to
the Craggs. Besides——”
“Well?”
“I want to be friends.”
She gave him a quick side-glance, and then looked out to sea. She had
her suppliant obstinately chastened, but those Pentworth memories needed
final contradiction, and her desire was to appear somewhat
unapproachable and proud, no casual girl to be picked up just as a man
pleased.
“We’re not a couple of kids—now,” she said seriously.
“Of course not.”
“I was a mischievous little wretch at Pentworth, wasn’t I? I don’t make
friends now in five minutes; if a girl has any self-respect she keeps
herself to herself, especially if she’s in a shop.”
Tod’s answer came like an echo.
“That’s it,” he said; “that’s why I feel that it’s awfully good of you
to let me sit here and talk. I’m not a cad, you know, and I’m grateful.”
She let herself smile at him.
“You used to be rather a nice boy—Mr. Western, otherwise I shouldn’t
have let you—— Oh, well, I’m not very fond of men; they are such mean
beasts.”
“I should not have thought anyone could be mean to you,” said Tod.
So Tod was forgiven and his conscience satisfied. He sat there with blue
sea in front of him and the blue eyes beside him, and made polite
conversation that tended towards the inevitably personal plane. Miss
Hornblower put her book aside and allowed Tod to possess all her
attention, but she was tantalisingly cool and correct, the very
antithesis of the “Giggles” of Pentworth. Tod was not to be allowed to
think that he could open the gate and walk into the garden just as he
chose.
By one of those curious coincidences Bertha Cragg, the elder Miss Horrox
and Frederick Cragg passed that shelter while Tod was absorbed in
propitiating Millie Hornblower. Tod did not see them, nor did he guess
what was happening in another woman’s heart. Bertha had glanced at the
other girl’s eyes and mouth, that mouth that was like the red mouth of
the woman in Rossetti’s picture of “Fazio’s Mistress.” The thing had
happened. Tod had met that other sort of woman, the woman who did not
rush about in the sun, but who just sat and waited for young Adam to
steal her the apples.