The morning dip in the sea, the smiting of a white ball down a length of
green grass, marching into Sussex village with Mr. Tom Lavender, spring
woods and primrose time and the watching of birds; work in the office,
houses, favourite books, all the healthy ritual of a young man’s open
air life, gave place to a loitering at corners, a parading of the
seafront, the game of the moth and the candle. A girl had taken all the
colour of life for her eyes and her mouth and her clothes. She had put
on the veil of make-believe, and the real face of her soul was hidden.
Tod Western had ideals, very clean and sturdy ideals. There was nothing
mawkish or decadent about them, no ladylike pre-Raphaelite milk and
moonlight hyper-refinement. He had never had to analyse what he felt
about women; youth and instinct go hand in hand, and it may be that
instinct has the face of a boy’s mother. It is the man of forty who
stands and analyses, and has the subtle understanding of a mature
wisdom. Tod had a sort of soul-picture of the girl a man should love. He
wanted her to be beautiful and he expected her to be gentle, truthful,
not greedy about money, not cheap or noisy, no player of mean tricks.
All that is inside a man who has had a mother worth loving. It is part
of his blood and his brain. If love and youth did not wish to make
things better and finer than we know them to be, life would be a sorry
business. Christ was a young man. Happy is that man who rediscovers that
young Christ in himself when the hairs of his worldly head are turning
grey.
And “Giggles” played the part of my Lady Propriety, a pink and white
Chloe who exclaimed, “La, sir!” and who was serious, sedate and coy. In
her natural and unpremeditated moments she was one of those girls who
always had a finger in her mouth, or was patting her hair or looking
obliquely at mirrors, shop windows or men. In Millie Hornblower’s case
it was the little finger of her right hand that crooked itself into the
left corner of her red mouth and dragged the lower lip down very
slightly. She had very fat white hands with dimples where the knuckles
should be and fingers tapering to soft, blunt ends. She was very fond of
sweets and of strong scents, but her sensing of the man in Tod taught
her to suppress these predilections and to eschew too much colour.
Some things were not “naice.” She was using the word “nice”—or “naice,”
as she pronounced it—a great deal just then.
“I’d rather not sit on the stands, Mr. Tod.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not quite naice.”
And Tod found himself learning to make all sorts of subtle
discriminations, and the natural and sensitive decency of the lad made
him an apt learner. Miss Hornblower had a quick eye for all the proper
formalities. She liked Tod to wear gloves and a bowler hat, and to take
off his right hand glove before he shook hands with her. They walked
very sedately up and down the Parade, and if they sat on a seat it was
sure to be some very public seat, the sort of seat where a “naice girl”
would sit with a man and advertise the niceness of her virtue to
passers-by.
She softly but firmly suppressed any suggestion of walks in the country;
it was still primrose time, and not quite the month of June. She let Tod
take her once or twice to the pier concerts, but a girl friend went with
them, and on one particular evening Tod had a great experience in trying
to explain away a rather vulgar “turn” in a variety show that was
running there for a week.
Miss Hornblower got up and walked out, and Tod found that the
responsibility was his. She was on her dignity, a pretty prude who
accused him.
“I don’t think it was naice of you to take me to that.”
“How did I know?” said Tod, honestly upset.
“Do you mean that you thought I shouldn’t mind?”
“Good heavens, no, Millicent!”—she had ordered him to call her
Millicent—“I didn’t know there was anything in the show that would——”
“You ought to have known. A man oughtn’t to chance a thing being beastly
and vulgar.”
“I’m awfully sorry. I ought to have gone and seen it first. I’m awfully
sorry.”
She had impressed him. He had liked the way she had got up and walked
out, like a Christian martyr refusing to burn incense before the altar
of a pagan god.
Meanwhile, she was entangling him in a net of confidences—confidences
that make a passionate appeal to a generous boy. There were the
disasters that had fallen upon the Hornblower family. Millie’s father
had died of pneumonia, a drunkard’s pneumonia, but she did not tell Tod
that. He had left no money, and the family had scattered. One of the
boys had gone to sea; two of the girls were in London shops; Mrs.
Hornblower herself was living with a brother whom Millie described as a
gentleman in business. Millie had had to face the hard realities of
life, and to set about procuring herself food and clothes.
“I don’t think there is anything dishonourable in a girl having to
work,” she said to Tod, with touching simplicity.
“Dishonourable! I respect you so much for doing it.”
“And then, of course, there’s Mother,” she explained. “I have to help
Mother.”
She allowed Tod to understand that Mrs. Hornblower’s impecuniosity was
almost a joy to a loving daughter.
“I don’t grudge the little I can give her. Uncle Alfred is quite well
off, but Ma has her pride, and so have I.”
“I think you are splendid,” said Tod, with shining eyes.
But she refused to be regarded as a heroine.
“It’s nothing to boast about. It’s little enough after all the years
Mother looked after me. But it’s beastly being poor.”
“How do you find it beastly?”
“Well, there’s Horrox’s—the shop. You don’t know perhaps how a girl can
get treated in a shop. A naice boy like you wouldn’t believe it.”
“What do they do?” Tod asked.
She looked at her shoes with an air of rich embarrassment.
“Oh, I couldn’t talk about it; it’s too beastly. Some of the men are
such cads; they expect a girl to let them do things.”
“What things?”
Tod was getting up on his horse, the same gallant war-horse that had
been ridden by his father.
“Oh, I couldn’t tell you. Sometimes the shopwalkers, or even the ‘heads’
want a girl to sell herself, and if she’s a naice girl and respectable,
she gets dismissed for putting a cad in his place.”
Tod flamed up.
“I’d like to talk to a cad like that. I’d give him such a thrashing!”
Her blue eyes held his.
“Would you?”
“I should think I would. I never knew there were such cads about.”
“And they are such liars, too. If a girl flouts them they tell all sorts
of horrid lies about her, and what can a girl do?”
“The cowards! But has it ever happened to you?”
She became confused—almost frightened.
“Don’t! Don’t talk about it, Tod. There was someone who—well, I don’t
think he’ll try it again.”
“If he does, you’ll tell me?”
“Perhaps.”
“Promise to tell me; a cad like that wants a lesson.”
“You’d thrash him?” she asked, with flattering simplicity and wonder.
“I’d tear the heart out of him,” said Tod.
Knowing that Mr. Robert Twine still served at Horrox’s Tod had referred
to him as a friend, but Miss Hornblower had spoken discouragingly of Mr.
Twine.
“That black man? Yes, he’s in the glove department, but he’s not my
style.”
“Bob’s not a bad sort.”
“I don’t like him,” she had insisted; “not that I know much about him,
but he is the kind of man a naice girl doesn’t trust.”
Tod had said no more. He remembered having felt that Bob Twine was
rather a coarse beast in his attitude towards women.
Tod was on the way to getting himself talked about in West Shaston. He
was breaking with his old haunts and habits. He had been seen but rarely
at the tennis club, and people noticed his absence from “Clovelly.”
“Bertha’s boy” had become a bandstand and seafront devotee, and the
inference was obvious. Some flapper soon discovered that Mr. Western was
always walking about with one of the girls from Horrox’s shop, a girl
whose beauty had made her undisguisable, for Millicent Hornblower was
one of those sun-women whom everybody notices and whom nobody forgets.
People wondered what the Craggs thought about it, and Bertha Cragg in
particular, Bertha who had been so conspicuously interested in Mr.
Burgetrode’s protégé, but the Craggs satisfied nobody’s curiosity. Tod
lapsed gradually from their circle—that was all.
Bertha Cragg dominated the family during that obscure social crisis, and
impressed her spirit upon them. She bathed and played tennis with more
than her old enthusiasm, and went about with such an air of healthy
cheerfulness that people had no excuse for referring to her as “poor
Bertha.” She snubbed her brother when he thought it his duty to be
confidential and impressive. After all, it was a very trivial matter, a
boy of twenty falling in love with a golden-haired shop-girl, very
trivial and very natural. You did not stand on the seafront and draw
everybody’s attention to the remarkable fact that the sea was coming in.
When she met Tod she showed him the same old frankness, and Tod’s eyes
were never opened to the woman in her. She forgave him because she
realised his innocence, and because she was rather unusual. The bitter
jest was against herself, and she accepted it, making no moan and
showing no malice; but she hated the girl who had captured Tod—hated
her almost as much as she hated her own plain face.
She had been ambitious for the boy—her boy.
“I think I could have made him happy, and I know I could have helped
him,” she said in her own heart.
But that other girl? What would she make of Tod?
So poignant and strong was her curiosity that she went more than once to
the shop of Horrox & Horrox, and contrived to be served by the girl with
the red mouth and the flamboyant hair, the girl whom she had seen
sitting with Tod in that shelter. These two women were antipathetic,
fire and snow, even across a haberdashery counter.
“I want a silk scarf, please.”
“Yes, madam. Any particular colour?”
“A soft yellow.”
Scarves were brought, and Miss Hornblower betrayed all the faults of the
bad saleswoman. She was casual, superior, ready with a vague sneer if a
purchaser asked for something that was less expensive. She was Venus
caged behind a counter, bored, absorbed in the cult of her own
comeliness.
“Madame should never wear yellow.”
Bertha Cragg flushed and let the impertinence pass.
“How much is this one?”
“Nineteen and sevenpence halfpenny.”
“Have you anything cheaper?”
Millie stared at the plain girl.
“Oh, yes, madam, we have a cheap line for customers who don’t want the
best article, but the colours are not so naice.”
“Will you show me some, please?”
Miss Hornblower’s languor was extreme. She went in search of the
“cheaper line,” chattered for a half a minute to another assistant, gave
the glad eye to a shopwalker, and then returned to her customer. Bertha
had been watching the girl, and watching her with a jealous intentness,
and her imagination saw Tod lying in the lap of this glowingly selfish
and red sexed thing, this little haberdashery Delilah whose soul was a
box of sweets and a sealskin coat. Bertha Cragg was too subtle a woman
to be deceived. The scent was so pronounced, the colour so vivid. This
was no case of a pretty, wholesome, commonplace girl transfigured and
become an angel in the eyes of a boy, a little romance that makes the
world a little cleaner and less mercenary, a romance that ends in a
beautiful comradeship and children. There was a glint of green in the
goddess’s eyes, and that soft red mouth could scream and utter
soul-killing blasphemies. The plain woman saw it all so clearly.
Yet she was quite helpless, and she knew it. A sensitive girl cannot go
and tell a man that he is in love with a trashy woman, especially if she
happens to be in love with him herself. It was possible that Tod might
save himself. The affair might prove to be a mere incident, one of those
chapters in a young man’s life that is written in a summer night and
soon forgotten. Tod was so clean and wholesome, and, in spite of his
innocence, so shrewd, that she saw him tiring of this passion in a
petticoat and rushing off to wash himself in the sea. This was a girl
who held a man for a day, a month or a year, and Tod was a man who would
want to be held for life.
Someone else in Horrox’s shop was interested in Tod’s love affair.
Horrox’s junior employees lived in. The girls slept over the main shop,
the men over a sort of annexe across an alley; they met for meals in the
big dining room under the furniture department. Horrox’s had its
etiquette and its autocrats. The autocracy of Miss Harbord, the
housekeeper, dominated all the lesser tyrannies. She was a big woman
with a swollen, waxy face, a black moustache and a merciless and moral
eye; and Horrox’s—with some irony—had nicknamed her “Mother.” Her
duties were that of a Watch Committee, of a supervisor of morals. There
had been scandals in Horrox’s, and one of the partners, who subsidised
Missionary Societies and loved the Memorial Hall, had fallen into such a
pious and quite honest rage over it that Miss Harbord had been imported
to act as mother superior. Miss Harbord saw to it that the sex adventure
was not cultivated in the establishment. She was fearless and devilishly
sly, yet no unkind friend to girls and men who did not try to fool her.
Miss Harbord was at her best when someone was ill.
Miss Harbord and Millicent Hornblower did not appreciate each other.
There had been a breeze, and something more than a breeze.
“If this happens again, Miss Hornblower, I’ll report you.”
“It wasn’t my fault. Why don’t you speak to the man? It’s always the
girl who gets the blame.”
“She needn’t do, my dear. And the man hasn’t got off without hearing
about it.”
This breeze had blown over months ago, but it had been so blusterous and
menacing that the man in question had given up walking recklessly round
exposed corners, and he was no longer the lover of Millie Hornblower.
Another storm had blown them apart. But he was not the utter cad that
Miss Harbord thought him; he was just the warm-blooded, reckless sort of
being who took what he could from a woman who chose to give it, but the
sort of man who would have given a wounded pal the last drop of water in
a desert. A man will be straight and generous with men and crooked with
women. You can’t trust him in the sweetshop, but in the street he will
get knocked over stopping a runaway horse.
“Say!”
It was rather dark at the head of the stairs leading down to the dining
room.
“I told you not to speak to me.”
“That’s true,” said Bob Twine, “but it’s got to be. I’ll meet you down
beyond the White Cliff at nine.”
“I shan’t go.”
“Yes you will. It’s about young Tod.”
She went.
Sitting on the shingle under the shelter of an old black fishing boat,
they fought each other with words while the dusk came down.
“What are you doing playing with young Tod?” asked the man.
“I’m not playing with him. Besides, it’s no business of yours.”
“Oh, isn’t it?”
“You’re jealous, I suppose?”
Bob Twine kept throwing stones at an old tin that the sea had left on
the shingle. He was dour and menacing, but curiously cool.
“Nothing of the kind. I don’t care a snap of the fingers for you now,
and you know it.”
“Thank you.”
“Look here”—and he turned to her with a kind of pleading solemnity—“I
taught that kid to swim just here. I taught him to box. He’s a good kid,
one of the best. You let him alone.”
The girl looked at him haughtily. “What d’you mean?”
“Don’t put on airs; you know what I mean. You are not the girl for that
kid. He’s not like me, the sort of chap that knocks about the
seafront——”
“How dare you!” she said.
“Don’t put on airs. I know you a bit too well, old girl. You let Tod
alone, or I shall tell him.”
“Tell him?”
“Yes.”
“You cad!”
And then she burst into tears and sat leaning against the boat’s black
timbers, while Bob Twine threw stones at the tin and never hit it.
“What beasts men are! You—you made a—a fool of me, you—you know you
did. I had to find out what—what a cad you were, and now, when I’ve met
a naice boy, you want to drag me down in the—the mud.”
“Bosh!” said the man, affected in spite of himself.
“Yes, you do. It’s mean and beastly. He’s not like you; he’s a little
gentleman.”
Bob Twine leant over and grabbed savagely at her wrist.
“Look here, I know all that; but I’m not going to let you play with that
kid.”
“I’m not playing with him.”
“Sure?”
“I’m—I’m in love with him. I want him to marry me.”
Bob Twine twisted away from her, and sat with his knees drawn up,
staring at the sea. She was drying her eyes and smothering an occasional
sob, and waiting watchfully upon his silence. The man’s face looked
swarthy and dark and troubled.
“Yes, and what sort of wife will you make him?” he said at last.
“I’m in love with him,” she repeated, “and I know he’s in love with me.”
Twine picked up a handful of shingle and sent the stones scattering
savagely over the beach.
“Damn! Suppose I’m a silly fool! But, look here, if I ever catch you
running crooked——”
“Thank you,” she said haughtily, “you taught me the difference between a
cad and a gentleman.”
But Millie Hornblower was in a panic mood, and she was afraid of this
swashbuckler of a man with his swarthy passions and his moments of
generous rage. It was possible that he might change his mind, tell Tod
that most disastrous tale, and the stars would fall out of the sky of
her new romance. She wanted Tod. She was very much in love with him, and
the indiscipline of her love was growing greater than her shyness. She
had got to slip into Tod’s arms before Bob Twine or any other man could
interfere.
She met him next evening at the St. Margarets’ end of the Parade, a
rather anxious Tod who had watched for her in vain the night before.
“I missed you last night.”
He was concerned, tender, just a little shy.
“I wasn’t very well,” she said; “something happened, and I stayed in.”
It struck him that she looked strange and unhappy, and his heart was out
to discover the reason.
“I’m sorry. Perhaps you don’t care to walk far?”
“It’s not that. I’d like a walk; I’d like to get away from all these
people.”
“What about Summer Valley? The wild roses are out in the hedges.”
“Yes, let’s go there,” she said.
But she was not herself. She did not talk much, and was quiet and
strange and unsmiling, and now and again she would give Tod a shrinking,
yet half-appealing look. Something had happened, and in the Summer
Valley Tod watched her face and the sunset. It was very sweet and still
there, the wild roses white in the hedges, the long grass full of dim
light, the woods on the ground growing black against the yellow sky. A
June evening, soft, mysterious and fragrant, a lover’s evening, subtle
and strange and sad.
“I wish you would tell me,” said Tod.
“Tell you what, Tod dear?”
He groped shyly for her hand.
“What’s worrying you. You know I——”
She looked frightened, piteous.
“I—I can’t. It’s all so horrid. It has made me feel so cheap and
beastly, and not fit to talk to a naice man.”
Tod put a sudden arm round her.
“But I’m just the man you have got to tell. Let’s sit down here under
this may tree.”
She let him have his way, and, unpinning her hat, she sat and pulled
bits of grass to pieces, while Tod worshipped and waited for her to
trust in him.
“Tell me, dear.”
“It’s all that horrid shop life. A pretty girl gets persecuted in a
shop.”
“Some man has been saying beastly things to you,” flamed Tod.
She turned her head away.
“Yes.”
“Just tell me his name.”
“I can’t, Tod. It’s better that I shouldn’t.”
“I’ll kill him.”
“Oh, don’t! I don’t want it spread about that I’m the sort of girl men
say vile things to. Besides, I gave him his answer, the best answer a
girl could give.”
Tod was bending towards her, his young face stern yet glowing.
“What did you tell him?”
“I said I was—oh, I can’t! I can’t tell you what I told him.”
“Yes you can, because I love you, dear; I’ve loved you for weeks and
weeks.”
She gave him one quick look, and then hung her head.
“Oh, Tod, I told him——”
“Well?”
“That I was in love with a dear, naice boy, and that I didn’t want a cad
to make love to me.”
“Millie, is it me you love?”
“Tod, dear Tod, perhaps.”
His arms went round her, and her arms folded about his neck. They clung
close and kissed, looked in each other’s eyes, and kissed again.
“You’ll marry me?” said Tod, with his eyes alight and his heart beating
fast and hard.
“Yes, dear.”
“Then we’re engaged. You are coming out of that shop.”