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I POSE
[Illustration]
The Macmillan Company
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I POSE
by
STELLA BENSON
New York
The Macmillan Company
1916
All rights reserved
Copyright 1916
by the Macmillan Company
Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1916.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
My eyes are girt with outer mists,
My ears sing shrill—and this I bless,
My finger-nails do bite my fists
In ecstasy of loneliness.
This I intend, and this I want,—
That, passing, you may only mark
A dumb soul and its confidante
Entombed together in the dark.
The hoarse church-bells of London ring,
The hoarser horns of London croak,
The poor brown lives of London cling
About the poor brown streets like smoke;
The deep air stands above my roof,
Like water to the floating stars;
My Friend and I—we sit aloof,
We sit and smile, and bind our scars.
For you may wound and you may kill—
It’s such a little thing to die—
Your cruel God may work his will,
We do not care—my Friend and I,—
Though, at the gate of Paradise,
Peter the Saint withhold his keys,
My Friend and I—we have no eyes
For Heaven ... or Hell ... or dreams like these....
PREFACE
Sometimes I pose, but sometimes I
pose as posing.
I POSE
CHAPTER I
There was once a gardener. Not only was, but in all probability is, for
as far as I know you may meet him to this day. There are no death-bed
scenes in this book. The gardener was not the sort of person to bring a
novel to a graceful climax by dying finally in an atmosphere of elevated
immorality. He was extremely thin, but not in the least unhealthy. He
never with his own consent ran any risk of sudden death. Nobody would
ever try to introduce him into a real book, for he was in no way
suitable. He was not a philosopher. Not an adventurer. Not a gay dog.
Not lively: but he lived, and that at least is a great merit.
In appearance the gardener was a fairly mediocre study in black and
white. He had a white and wooden face, black hair as smooth as a wet
seal’s back, thin arms and legs, and enormous hands and feet. He was not
indispensable to any one, but he believed that he was a pillar
supporting the world. It sometimes makes one nervous to reflect what
very amateur pillars the world seems to employ.
He lived in a boarding-house in Penny Street, W. A boarding-house is a
place full of talk, it has as many eyes as a peacock, and ears to
correspond. It is lamentably little, and yet impossible to ignore. It is
not a dignified foundation for a pillar.
The gardener was twenty-three. Twenty-three is said to be the prime of
life by those who have reached so far and no farther. It shares this
distinction with every age, from ten to three-score and ten.
On the first of June, in his twenty-fourth year, the gardener broke his
boot-lace. The remains of the catastrophe dangled from his hand. String
was out of the question; one cannot be decent dressed in string, he
thought, with that touch of exaggeration common to victims of disasters.
The world was a sordid and sardonic master, there was no heart in the
breast of Fate. He was bereft even of his dignity, there is no dignity
in the death of a boot-lace. The gardener’s twenty-three years were
stripped from him like a cloak. He felt little and naked.
He was so busy with his emotions that he had forgotten that the door of
his room was open.
It was rather like the girl Courtesy to stand on the landing boldly
staring in at a man sitting on his bedroom floor crushed by
circumstances. She had no idea of what was fitting. Any other woman
would have recognised the presence of despair, and would have passed by
with head averted.
But the girl Courtesy said, “Poor lamb, has it broken its boot-lace?”
The gardener continued in silence to watch the strangling of his vanity
by the corpse of the boot-lace. His chief characteristic was a whole
heart in all that he did.
A tear should have appeared in Courtesy’s eye at the sight of him. But
it did not.
“Give me the boot,” she said, advancing into the room in the most
unwomanly manner. And she knotted the boot-lace with a cleverness so
unexpected—considering the sort of girl she was—that the difference in
its length was negligible, and the knot was hidden beneath the other
lace.
“Women have their uses,” thought the gardener. But the thought was
short-lived, for Courtesy’s next remark was:
“There, boy, run along and keep smilin’. Somebody loves you.” And she
patted him on the cheek.
Now it has been made clear that the gardener was a Man of Twenty-three.
He turned his back violently on the woman, put on his boot, and walked
downstairs bristling with dignity.
The girl Courtesy not only failed to be cut to the heart by the silent
rebuke, but she failed to realise that she had offended. She was rather
fat, and rather obtuse. She was half an inch taller than the gardener,
and half a dozen years older.
The gardener’s indignation rode him downstairs. It spurred him to force
his hat down on his head at a most unbecoming angle, it supplied the
impetus for a passionate slamming of the door. But on the door-step it
evaporated suddenly. It was replaced by a rosy and arresting thought.
“Poor soul, she loves me,” said the gardener. He adjusted his hat, and
stepped out into London, a breaker of hearts, a Don Juan, unconscious of
his charm yet conscious of his unconsciousness. “Poor thing, poor
thing,” he thought, and remembered with regret that Courtesy had not
lost her appetite. On the contrary, she had been looking even plumper of
late. But then Courtesy never quite played the game.
“I begin to be appreciated,” reflected the gardener. “I always knew the
world would find out some day....”
The gardener was a dreamer of dreams, and a weaver of many theories. His
theories were not even tangible enough to make a philosophy, yet against
them he measured his world. And any shortcomings he placed to the
world’s account. He wrapped himself in theories to such an extent that
facts were crowded from his view, he posed until he lost himself in a
wilderness of poses. He was not the victim of consistency, that most
ambiguous virtue. The dense and godly wear consistency as a flower, the
imaginative fling it joyfully behind them.
Imagination seems to be a glory and a misery, a blessing and a curse.
Adam, to his sorrow, lacked it. Eve, to her sorrow, possessed it. Had
both been blessed—or cursed—with it, there would have been much keener
competition for the apple.
The million eyes of female London pricked the gardener, or so he
imagined, as he threaded the Strand. He felt as if a glance from his eye
was a blessing, and he bestowed it generously. The full blaze of it fell
upon one particular girl as she walked towards him. She seemed to the
gardener to be almost worthy. Her yellow hair suffered from Marcelle
spasms at careful intervals of an inch and a half, every possible tooth
enjoyed publicity. The gardener recognised a kindred soul. A certain
shade of yellow hair always at this period thatched a kindred soul for
the gardener.
He followed the lady.
He followed her even into the gaping jaws of an underground station.
There she bought cigarettes at a tobacco stall.
“She smokes,” thought the gardener. “This is life.”
He went close to her while she paid. She was not in the least miserly of
a certain cheap smell of violets. The gardener was undaunted.
“Shall we take a taxi, Miss?” he suggested, his wide eager smile a
trifle damped by self-consciousness. For this was his first attempt of
the kind. “They say Kew is lovely just now.”
It was his theory that spoke. In practice he had but threepence in his
pocket.
She replied, “Bless you, kid. Run ’ome to mammy, do.”
Her voice sounded like the scent she wore. It had a hard tone which
somehow brought the solitary threepence to mind.
The gardener returned at great speed to Penny Street.
It was lunch-time at Number Twenty-one. The eternal hash approached its
daily martyrdom. Hash is a worthy thing, but it reminds you that you are
not at the Ritz. There is nothing worse calculated to make you forget a
lonely threepenny bit in your pocket.
The gardener had a hundred a year. He was apparently the only person in
London with a hundred a year, for wherever he went he always found
himself the wealthiest person present. His friends gave his natural
generosity a free rein. After various experiments in social economy, he
found it cheapest to rid himself of the hundred a year immediately on
its quarterly appearance, and live on his expectations for the rest of
the time. There are drawbacks about this plan, as well as many
advantages. But the gardener was a pillar, and he found it easier to
support the world than to support himself.
It was on this occasion that his neighbour at luncheon, unaware of his
pillar-hood, asked him what he was doing for a living.
“Living,” replied the gardener. He was not absolutely sure that it made
sense, but it sounded epigrammatic. He was, in some lights, a shameless
prig. But then one often is, if one thinks, at twenty-three.
“It’s all living,” he continued to his neighbour. “It’s all life. Being
out of a job is life. Being kicked is life. Starving’s life. Dying’s
life.”
The neighbour did not reply because he was busy eating. One had to keep
one’s attention fixed on the food problem at 21 Penny Street. There was
no time for epigrams. It was a case of the survival of the most silent.
The gardener was very thin.
The girl Courtesy, however, was one who could do two things at once. She
could support life and impart information at the same time.
“I do believe you talk for the sake of talking,” she said; and it was
true. “How can dying be living?”
It is most annoying to have the cold light of feminine logic turned on
to an impromptu epigram. The gardener pushed the parsnips towards her as
a hint that she was talking too much. But Courtesy had the sort of eye
that sees no subtlety in parsnips. Her understanding was of the black
and white type.
“Death is the door to life,” remarked Miss Shakespeare, nailing down the
golden opportunity with eagerness. 21 Penny Street very rarely gave Miss
Shakespeare the satisfaction of such an opening. There was, however, a
lamentable lack of response. The subject, which had been upheld contrary
to the laws of gravitation, fell heavily to earth.
“Is this your threepenny bit or mine?” asked the girl Courtesy. For that
potent symbol, the victim of its owner’s absence of mind, in the course
of violent exercise between the gardener’s plate and hers, had fallen
into her lap.
Whose idea was it to make money round? I sometimes feel certain I could
control it better if it were square.
“It is mine,” said the gardener, still posing as a philosopher. “A
little splinter out of the brimstone lake. Feel it.”
Courtesy smelt it without repulsion.
“Talk again,” she said. “Where would you be without money?”
“Where would I be without money? Where would I be without any of the
vices? Singing in Paradise, I suppose.”
“If I pocket this threepenny bit,” said Courtesy, that practical girl,
“what will you say?”
“Thank you—and good-bye,” replied the gardener. “It is my last link with
the world.”
Courtesy put it in her purse. “Good-bye,” she said. “So sorry you must
go. Reserve a halo for me.”
The gardener rose immediately and walked upstairs with decision into his
bedroom, which, by some freak of chance, was papered blue to match his
soul. It was indeed the anteroom of the gardener’s soul. Nightly he went
through it into the palace of himself.
He took out of it now his toothbrush, a change of raiment, and Hilda. It
occurs to me that I have not yet mentioned Hilda. She was a nasturtium
in a small pot.
On his way downstairs he met Miss Shakespeare, who held the destinies of
21 Penny Street, and did not hold with the gardener’s unexpected ways.
“Your weekly account ...” she began.
“I have left everything I have as hostages with fate,” said the
gardener. “When I get tired of Paradise I’ll come back.”
On the door-step he exclaimed, “I will be a merry vagabond,
tra-la-la ...” and he stepped out transfigured—in theory.
As he passed the dining-room window he caught sight of the red of
Courtesy’s hair, as she characteristically continued eating.
“An episode,” he thought. “Unscathed I pass on. And the woman, as women
must, remains to weep and grow old. Courtesy, my little auburn lover, I
have passed on—for ever.”
But he had to return two minutes later to fetch a pocket-handkerchief
from among the hostages. And Courtesy, as she met him in the hall,
nodded in an unsuitably unscathed manner.
The gardener walked, with Hilda in his hand. It became night.
Practically speaking, it is of course impossible for night to occur
within three paragraphs of luncheon-time. But actually the day is often
to me as full of holes as a Gruyère cheese.
To the gardener the beginnings of a walk which he felt sure must
eventually find a place in history were torn ruthlessly out of his
experience. He was thinking about red hair, and all things red.
He hoped that Hilda, when she flowered, would be the exact shade of a
certain head of hair he had lately seen.
“Hoping and planning for Hilda like a mother-to-be,” he thought, but
that pose was impossible to sustain.
Red hair.
He did not think of the girl Courtesy at all. Only her hair flamed in
his memory. The remembrance of the rest of her was as faint and lifeless
as a hairdresser’s dummy.
It struck him that auburn, with orange lights in the sunlight, was the
colour of heat, the colour of heaven, the colour of life and love. He
looked round at the characteristic London female passer-by, the
thin-breasted girl, with hair the colour of wet sand, and reflected that
Woman is a much rarer creature than she appears to be.
He recovered consciousness in Kensington Gardens at dusk. He remembered
that he was a merry vagabond.
“Tra-la-la ...” he sang as he passed a park-keeper.
People in authority seem as a rule to be shy of the pose. The
park-keeper was not exactly shy, but he made a murmured protest against
the Tra-la-la, and saw the gardener to the gate with most offensive
care.
In theory the gardener spent the night at the Ritz. In practice he slept
on the Embankment. He was a man of luck in little things, and the night
was the first fine night for several weeks. The gardener followed the
moon in its light fall across the sky. Several little stars followed it
too, in and out of the small smiling clouds.
The moon threaded its way in and out of the gardener’s small smiling
dreams. Oh mad moon, you porthole, looking up into a fantastic Paradise!
The gardener did not dream of red hair. That subject was exhausted.
When an undecided sun blinked through smoked glasses at the Thames, and
at the little steamers sleeping with their funnels down like sea-gulls
on the water with their heads under their wings, the gardener rose. He
had a bath and a shave—in theory—and walked southward. Tra-la-la.
He walked very fast when he got beyond the tramways, but after a while a
woman who was walking behind him caught him up. Women are apt to get
above themselves in these days, I think.
“I’m going to walk with you,” said the woman.
“Why?” asked the gardener, who spent some ingenuity in saying the thing
that was unexpected, whether possible or impossible.
“Because you’re carrying that flower-pot,” replied the woman. “It’s such
absurd sort of luggage to be taking on a journey.”
“How do you know I’m going on a journey?” asked the gardener, astonished
at meeting his match. “By the expression of your heels.”
The gardener could think of nothing more apt to say than “Tra-la-la ...”
so he said it, to let her know that he was a merry vagabond.
The woman was quite plain, and therefore worthy only of invisibility in
the eyes of a self-respecting young man. She had the sort of hair that
plays truant over the ears, but has not vitality enough to do it
prettily. Her complexion was not worthy of the name. Her eyes made no
attempt to redeem her plainness, which is the only point of having eyes
in fiction. Her only outward virtue was that she did not attempt to
dress as if she were pretty. And even this is not a very attractive
virtue.
She carried a mustard-coloured portmanteau.
“I know what you are,” said the gardener. “You are a suffragette, going
to burn a house down.”
The woman raised her eyebrows.
“How curious of you!” she said. “You are perfectly right. Votes for
women!”
“Tra-la-la ...” sang the gardener wittily.
(You need not be afraid. There is not going to be so very much about the
cause in this book.)
They walked some way in silence. The gardener, of course, shared the
views of all decent men on this subject. One may virtuously destroy life
in a good cause, but to destroy property is a heinous crime, whatever
its motive.
(Yes, I know that made you tremble, but there are not many more
paragraphs of it.)
Presently they passed a car, pillowed against a grassy bank. Its
attitude, which looked depressed, was not the result of a catastrophe,
but of a picnic. In the meadow, among the buttercups, could be seen four
female hats leaning together over a little square meal set forth in the
grass.
“Look,” said the suffragette, in a voice thin with scorn.
The gardener looked, but could see nothing that aroused in him a horror
proportionate to his companion’s tone.
“Listen,” said the suffragette half an octave higher.
The gardener listened. But all he heard was, “Oh, my dear, it was too
killing....”
Then, because the chauffeur on the bank paused in mid-sandwich, as if
about to rebuke their curiosity, they walked on.
“One is born a woman,” said the suffragette. “A woman in her
sphere—which is the home. One starts by thinking of one’s dolls, later
one thinks about one’s looks, and later still about one’s clothes. But
nobody marries one. And then one finds that one’s sphere—which is the
home—has been a prison all along. Has it ever struck you that the
tragedy of a woman’s life is that she has time to think—she can think
and organise her sphere at the same time. Her work never lets her get
away from herself. I tell you I have cried with disgust at the sound of
my own name—I won’t give it to you, but it might as well be Jane Brown.
I have gasped appalled at the banality of my Sunday hat. Yet I kept
house excellently. And now I have run away, I am living a wide and
gorgeous life of unwomanliness. I am trying to share your simplest
privilege—the privilege you were born to through no merit of your own,
you silly little boy—the privilege of having interests as wide as the
world if you like, and of thinking to some purpose about England’s
affairs. My England. Are you any Englisher than I?”
“You are becoming incoherent,” said the gardener. “You are enjoying a
privilege which you do not share with me—the privilege of becoming
hysterical in public and yet being protected by the law. You are a
woman, and goodness knows that is privilege enough. It covers everything
except politics. Also you have wandered from the point, which at one
time appeared to be a picnic.”
(Courage. There is only a little more of this. But you must allow the
woman the privilege of the last word. It is always more dignified to
allow her what she is perfectly certain to take in any case.)
“The picnic was an example of that sphere of which ‘Oh, my dear, too
killing ...’ is the motto. You educate women—to that. I might have been
under one of those four hats—only I’m not pretty enough. You have done
nothing to prevent it. I might have been an ‘Oh, my dear’ girl, but
thank heaven I’m an incendiary instead.”
That was the end of that argument. The gardener could not reply as his
heart prompted him, because the arguments that pressed to his lips were
too obvious.
Obviousness was the eighth deadly sin in his eyes. He would have agreed
with the Devil rather than use the usual arguments in favour of virtue.
That was his one permanent pose.
A little way off, on a low green hill, the suffragette pointed out the
home of a scion of sweated industry, the house she intended to burn
down. High trees bowed to each other on either side of it, and a little
chalky white road struggled up to its door through fir plantations, like
you or me climbing the world for a reward we never see.
“I’m sorry,” said the gardener. “I love a house that looks up as that
one does. I don’t like them when they sit conceitedly surveying their
‘well-timbered acres’ under beetle brows that hide the sky. Don’t burn
it. Look at it, holding up its trees like green hands full of
blessings.”
“In an hour or two the smoke will stand over it like a tree—like a
curse....”
When they parted the gardener liked her a little because she was on the
wrong side of the law. There is much more room for the wind to blow and
the sun to shine beyond the pale—or so it seems to the gardener and me
standing wistful and respectable inside. It is curious to me that one of
the few remaining illusions of romance should cling to a connection with
that most prosy of all institutions—the law.
I forgot to mention that the gardener borrowed a shilling from the
suffragette, thus rashly forming a new link with the world in place of
the one he had relinquished to the girl Courtesy. The worst of the world
is that it remains so absurdly conservative, and rudely ignores our
interesting changes of pose and of fantasy. I have been known to crave
for a penny bun in the middle of a visit from my muse, and that is not
my fault, but Nature’s, who created appetites and buns for the common
herd, and refused to adapt herself to my abnormal psychology.
It was interesting to the gardener to see how easily the suffragette
parted with such an important thing as a shilling. Superfluity is such
an incredible thing to the hungry. The suffragette gave Holloway Gaol as
her permanent address.
Thus accidentally bribed, the gardener, feasting on a cut from the joint
in the next village, refrained from discussing women, their rights or
wrongs, or their local intentions, with the village policeman. “She
won’t really dare do it,” he thought.
(I may here add that I was not asked by a militant society to write this
book. I am writing it for your instruction and my own amusement.)
The gardener did not sleep under a hedge as all merry vagabonds
do—(Tra-la-la)—but he slept in the very middle of a large field, much to
the surprise of the cows. One or two of these coffee-coloured matrons
awoke him at dawn by means of an unwinking examination that would have
put a lesser man out of countenance. But the gardener, as becomes a man
attacked by the empty impertinences of females, turned the other way and
presently slept again.
He washed next morning near to where the cows drank. He had no soap and
the cows had no tumblers,—nothing could have been more elemental than
either performance.
“I am very near to the heart of nature—tra-la-la,” trilled the gardener.
But the heart of nature eludes him who tries to measure the distance.
The only beat that the gardener heard was the soft thud of his own feet
along the thick dust of the highway.
About the next day but one he came to a place where the scenery changed
its mind abruptly, flung buttercups and beeches behind it, and drew over
its shoulders the sombre cloak of heather and pines.
Under an unremarkable pine tree, listening to the impatient summons of
the woodpecker (who, I think, is the feathered soul of the foolish
virgin outside the bridegroom’s door), sat a man. He was so fair that he
might as well have been white-haired. His eyes were like two copper
sequins set between white lashes, beneath white brows, in a white face.
His lips were very red, and if he had seemed more detached and less
friendly, he would have looked like harlequin. But he rose from his seat
on the pine needles, and came towards the gardener, as though he had
been waiting for him.
The gardener steeled himself against the stranger’s first word, fearing
lest he should say, “What a glorious day!”
But the stranger, making a spasmodic attempt to remove a hat which had
been left at home, said, “My name is Samuel Rust, a hotel-keeper. Won’t
you come and look at my place?”
It was impossible for the gardener to do otherwise, for Mr. Samuel
Rust’s place framed itself in a gap in the woods to the right, and was
introduced by a wave of its owner’s hand.
“What a red place!” said the gardener.
“Of course. No other name is possible for it,” said Mr. Rust.
The house was built of red brick that had much tangerine colour in it.
The flowering heather surged to its very door-step. And thick around it
the slim pine tree-trunks shot up, like flame, whispered flame.
The gardener smiled at it. If only Hilda might be the colour of those
tree-trunks when she flowered.
Mr. Rust acknowledged the smile in the name of his red place. “It’s
an—inoffensive little hole,” he said.
What he meant was of course, “It’s a perfectly exquisite spot.” What is
becoming of our old eloquence and enthusiasm? The full-blooded
conventions are dying, and we have already replaced them by a code of
shadows. But whether the life beneath the code is as vivid as ever,
remains to be seen. I think myself that manners are changing, but not
man. In all probability we shall live to greet the day when “fairly
decent” will express the most ecstatic degree of rapture.
The gardener was not intentionally modern. It is the tendency of his
generation to be modern—it is difficult to believe that it has been the
tendency of every generation from the prehistoric downwards. And it was
the gardener’s ambition to walk in the opposite direction to the
tendency of his generation. He shared the common delusion that by
walking apart he could be unique. This arises from the divine fallacy
that man makes man, that he has the making of himself in his own hands.
I am glad that I share this pathetic illusion with my gardener.
So, as he thought the Red Place very beautiful, he said, “I think it is
very beautiful.”
But even so he was not sincere throughout. He posed even in his honesty.
For he posed purposely as an honest man.
Of course you know that one of the most effective poses is to pose as
one who never poses. A rough diamond with a heart of gold.
The first moment Mr. Samuel Rust heard the gardener say Tra-la-la he
ceased to have a doubt as to the species of citadel he had invaded.
“You are one of these insouciant wanderers, what?” he suggested. “A
light-hearted genius going to make a fortune grow out of the twopence in
your pocket. You got yourself out of a book. I think your sort make your
hearts light by blowing them up with gas.”
True to his code, he then feared that he had spoken with insufficient
mediocrity, and blushed. A small circular patch of red, like a rose,
appeared high up on either cheek, suddenly bringing the rest of his face
into competition with his vivid lips.
“You are wrong about the twopence,” said the gardener, “I have three
halfpence.”
“Come and see my Red Place,” said Mr. Rust. “That is, if you’re not
bored.”
Boredom and the gardener were strangers. One can never be bored if one
is always busy creating oneself with all the range of humanity as model.
“This is an hotel,” said the owner, as they approached the door. “It is
my hotel, and it promised to make my fortune. So far it has confined
itself to costing a fortune. When I remind it of its promise it puts its
tongue in its cheek—what?”
The northern side of the Red Place was quite different in character from
the side which first smiled on the gardener. This was because one
essential detail was lacking—the heather. Fire had passed over the
little space at some recent date in its sleepy history, and had left it
sinister. Tortured roots and branches appealed from the black ground to
a blue heaven. The surrounding pine trees, with their feet charred and
blistered, and their higher limbs still fiercely red, still looked like
flames now turned into pillars of delight in answer to the prayer of the
beseeching heather.
“Is there anybody in your hotel?” asked the gardener, smoothing his hair
hopefully—the young man’s invariable prelude to romance.
“Nobody, except the gods,” replied the host. “We sit here waiting, the
divine and I. There is a blessing on the place, and I intend to make
money out of it. You can see for yourself how wonderfully good it is. If
people knew of the peace and the delight.... The table is excellent
too—I am the chef as well as the proprietor. Our terms are most
moderate.”
“All the same you need advertisement,” said the gardener, who, in
unguarded moments, was more modern than he knew. “I can imagine most
sensational advertising of a place with such a pronounced blessing on
it. Buy up the front page of the _Daily Mail_, and let’s compose a
series of splashes.”
“I am penniless,” began Mr. Rust dramatically, and interrupted himself.
“A slight tendency towards financial inadequacy—what?”
“I have three halfpence,” said the gardener, but not hopefully.
“Come in for the night,” begged the host. “I have twelve bedrooms for
you to sleep in, and three bathrooms tiled in red. Terms a halfpenny,
_tout compris_.”
“Tra-la-la ...” trilled the gardener, for as he followed his host the
heather tingled and tossed beneath his feet, and the gods came out to
meet him with a red welcome.
“You have nothing to do—what?” said Mr. Samuel Rust, when they were
sitting in the high russet hall.
“We-ll ...” answered the gardener, feeling that the suggestion of
failure lurked there. “I am a rover, you know. Busy roving.”
“To say that shows you haven’t roved sixty miles yet. When you’ve roved
six hundred you’ll see there’s nothing to be got out of roving. When
you’ve roved six thousand you’ll join the Travellers’ Club and be glad
it’s all over.”
“Six thousand miles ...” said the gardener, as if it were a prayer. His
heart looked and leapt towards the long, crowded perspective that those
words hinted.
“You’ve never been to sea,” continued Mr. Samuel. And the gardener
discovered with a jerk that he was a blue man born for the sea, and that
he had never yet felt the swing of blue water beneath his feet.
“No,” he said, “I believe I must go there now.”
And he jumped to his feet.
“If you stay here for the night,” said Mr. Rust, “to-morrow I’ll suggest
to you something that—may possibly interest you to some slight extent.”
With a clumsy blood-red pottery candlestick, which was so careless in
detail as to seem to be the unconscious production of a drunken
master-potter, the gardener found his room.
(I know it is a shock to you to find it bedtime at this point, but the
gardener and I forgot to notice those parts of the day which I have not
mentioned.)
He dreamt of red hair, redder than natural, as red as a sunset, seen at
close quarters from Paradise. At midnight he awoke, in the clutch of
perfectly irrelevant thoughts.
The room was a velvet cube, with the window plastered at one side of it,
a spangled square. And the silken moonlight was draped across the floor.
“I am myself,” said the gardener. “I am my world. Nothing matters except
me. I am the creator and the created.”
With which happy thought he returned to sleep again.
The Red Place lost its flame-like life at night. Night, that blind
angel, has no dealings with colour, and turns even the auburn of the
pine-trunks to cold silver. But before the gardener awoke again, the sun
had roused the gods of the place to discover the theft of their red
gold, and to replace it.
The gardener, as he trilled like a lark in one of the red-tiled
bathrooms, was suddenly reminded that he was a merry vagabond.
“I must disappear,” he thought. “No true vagabond ever says, ‘Good-bye,
and thank you for my pleasant visit.’”
So he prepared to disappear. From his bedroom window he could see, as he
dressed, the pale head of Mr. Samuel Rust on a far fir-crowned slope,
looking away over the green land towards London, waiting, side by side
with the divine.
The gardener took three slices of dry bread from the breakfast which
waited expectantly on a table in the hall, and went out. But under a
gorse bush amongst the heather, he found some tiny scarlet flowers. He
picked two or three, and returning put them on the breakfast plate of
Mr. Samuel Rust. He put a halfpenny there too.
“Very vagabondish—tra-la-la ...” he murmured tunefully, and studied the
infinitesimal effect with his head on one side.
Then he disappeared. He did it straightforwardly along the open road, as
the best vagabonds do, and he was pleased with his fidelity to the part.
Presently he recalled for the first time Mr. Samuel Rust’s promise of a
happy suggestion for that morning. For a moment he wondered, for a
second he regretted, but he posed as being devoid of curiosity. This is
a good pose, for in time it comes true. It eventually withers the little
silly tentacles which at first it merely ignores. Curiosity needs food
as much as any of us, and dies soon if denied it. And I am glad, for it
seems to me that curiosity and spite are very closely akin, and that
spite is very near to the bottom of the pit.
The memory of Mr. Rust’s remark, however, kept the gardener for some
moments busy being incurious. He was not altogether successful in his
pose, for when the pallid owner of the Red Place stepped out of a
thicket in front of him, he thought with a secret quiver, “Now I shall
know what it was....”
“Taking a morning walk—what?” remarked Mr. Rust, achieving his ambition,
the commonplace, for once in perfection.
“No,” replied the gardener (one who never told a lie unless he was
posing as a liar), “I was leaving you. I have left a smile of thanks and
a halfpenny on your plate. You know I’m a rover, an incurable vagabond,
and my fraternity never disappears in an ordinary way in the station
fly.”
It is rather tiresome to have to explain one’s poses. It is far worse
than having to explain one’s witticisms, and that is bad enough.
“Come back to breakfast,” said Samuel. “I can let you into a much more
paying concern than vagabondage.”
It is not in the least impressive to disappear by brute force in public,
so the gardener turned back.
The gods did not run out to meet the returning vagabond, as they had run
out to meet him arriving. The gardener did not look for them. He was too
much occupied in thinking of small cramping things like “paying
concerns.” The expression sounded to him like a foggy square room
papered in a drab marbled design.
“A paying concern does not interest me at all,” he said, feeling rather
noble.
“It won’t as long as you’re a merry vagabond. But your situation as such
is not permanent, I think. Wouldn’t you like to go and strike attitudes
upon the sea?”
The gardener was intensely interested in what followed.
Mr. Samuel Rust was penniless, owing, as he frankly admitted, to
propensities which he shared with the common sieve. But in other
directions he was well supplied with blessings. He had, for instance, a
mother. And the mother—well, you know, she managed to scrape along on
nine thousand a year—what? The said mother, excellent woman though she
was, had refused to finance the Red Place. She had not come within the
radius of its blessing. She had no idea that it was under the direct
patronage of the gods, and that it promised a fortune in every facet.
Samuel had explained these facts to her, but she had somehow gathered
the impression that he was not unbiassed. In her hand she held the life
of the Red Place, and at present held it checked. A little money for
advertisement, a few hundred pounds to set the heart of the place
beating, and Samuel Rust saw himself a successful man, standing with his
gods on terms of equality. But his mother had become inaccessible, she
had in fact become so wearied by the conversation of Samuel upon the
subject that she had made arrangements to emigrate to Trinity Islands,
somewhere on the opposite side of the world.
“And what is it to do with me?” asked the gardener, who suffered from
the drawbacks of his paramount virtue, enthusiasm, and never could wait
for the end of anything. “Do you want me to turn into an unscrupulous
rogue and dog her footsteps because——”
“You can have scruples or not as you choose,” said Mr. Rust. “But rogue
is a word that exasperates me. It’s much the same as ‘naughty-naughty,’
and that is worse than wickedness. The wicked live on brimstone, which
is at least honest; but the naughty-naughty play with it, which is
irreverent. With or without your scruples, armed only with the blessing
and the promise of this place, I want you to cross the Atlantic on the
_Caribbeania_ with my mother, and tell her what it is the gods and I are
waiting for. That is—just try and talk the old lady round—don’t you
know. Any old twaddle would do—what?”
The gardener produced two halfpennies, one of which he placed on each
knee.
“And the fare first-class is ...” he said.
“I have a cousin whose only virtue is that he occasionally serves the
purpose of coin,” said Mr. Rust. “That is—I know a fellow I can bleed to
a certain extent—what? He is the son of—well, a middling K-nut at the
top of the shipping tree—what?”
The gardener had visions of an unscrupulous rogue, neatly packed into a
crate labelled champagne, being smuggled on board the _Caribbeania_.
Truly the pose had possibilities. The affair was, however, vague at
present, and the gardener retained, whatever the rôle he was playing, an
accurate mind and a profound respect for the exactness of words.
“Will he stow me away?” he asked.
“Not in the way you mean. But there’ll be room for you on the
_Caribbeania_. Come down to Southampton with me now. There’s a train at
noon.”
“I have my own feet, and a good white road,” replied the gardener in a
poetic voice. “I’ll join you in Southampton this evening.”
“It’s thirty-five miles,” said Mr. Rust. “And the boat sails to-morrow
morning. However.... We haven’t discussed the business side of the
affair yet.”
“And we never will. I’ll take my payment out in miles—an excellent
currency.”
In spite of the distance of his destination, the gardener stood by his
determination to go by road. A friendly farmer’s cart may always be
depended on to assist the pose of a vagabond. It would have been
extremely hackneyed to approach the opening door of life by train. So he
left his blessing with the Red Place, and shook the hand of its white
master, and set his face towards the sea.
It was still early. The sun had set the long limbs of the tree-shadows
striding about the woods; the gorse, a tamed expression of flame, danced
in the yellow heat; the heather pressed like a pigmy army bathed in
blood about the serene groups of pines. There was great energy abroad,
which kept the air a-tingle. The gardener almost pranced along.
Presently he came to a woman seated by the roadside engrossed in a box
of matches.
“You again,” said the gardener to the suffragette, for he recognised her
by her hat. There was a bunch of promiscuous flowers attached to her
hat. They were of an unsuitable colour, and looked as though they had
taken on their present situation as an after-thought, when the hat was
already well advanced in years. _A mariage de convenance._
“Have you any matches?” was the suffragette’s characteristic reply.
“I never give away my matches to people with political opinions without
making the fullest enquiries,” replied the gardener. “People are not
careful enough about the future morals of their innocent matches in
these days.”
Forgetting the thirty-five miles, he sat down on the bank beside her,
and began to refresh Hilda by splashing the water into her pot out of a
tiny heathery stream that explored the roadside ditch.
“I can supply you with all particulars at once,” said the suffragette in
a businesslike voice. “I am going to burn down a little red empty hotel
that stands in the woods behind you. There is only one man in charge.”
“You are not,” said the gardener, descending suddenly to unfeigned
sincerity.
“Certainly it is not the home of an Anti,” continued the suffragette,
ignoring his remark. “At least as far as I know. But you never can tell.
A Cabinet Minister might want to come and stay there any time; there are
good golf-links. I had hoped that the last affair, the burning of West
Grove—a most successful business—would have been my last protest for the
present. I meant to be arrested, and spend a month or two at the not
less important work of setting the teeth of the Home Office on edge. But
the police are disgracefully lax in this part of the world, and though I
left several clues and flourished my portmanteau in three neighbouring
villages, nothing happened. I do not like to give myself up, it is so
inartistic, and people are apt to translate it as a sign of repentance.
But the little hotel is a splendid opportunity.”
One of the drawbacks of posing yourself is that you are apt to become a
little blind to the poses of others. Also you must remember that women,
and especially rebellious women, were an unexplored continent to the
gardener.
“You are not going to take advantage of the opportunity,” said the
gardener, refreshing Hilda so violently that she stood up to her knees
in water.
“I’ve heard the caretaker is constantly out ...” went on the
suffragette.
“Possibly,” admitted the gardener. “But if the house were twenty times
alone, you should not light a match within a mile of it. How dare
you—you a great strong woman—to take advantage of the weak gods who
can’t defend themselves.”
The great strong woman crinkled her eyes at him. She was absurdly small
and thin.
“Well, if you won’t lend me any matches, I shall have to try and do with
the three I have. I am going to reconnoitre. Good-morning.”
There is nothing so annoying as to have one’s really impressive remarks
absolutely ignored. I myself can bear a great deal of passing over. You
may with advantage fail to see my complexion and the cut of my clothes;
you may be unaware of the colour of my eyes without offending me; I do
not care if you never take the trouble to depress your eyes to my feet
to see if I take twos or sevens; you may despise my works of art—which
have no value except in the eyes of my relations; you may refuse to read
my writings—which have no value in any eyes but my own,—all these things
you may do and still retain my respect, but when I speak you must listen
to what I say. If you don’t, I hate you.
The gardener felt like this, and the retreating form of the suffragette
became hateful to him. Somehow delightfully hateful.
“Come back,” he shouted, but incredible though it may seem, the woman
shrugged one shoulder at him, and walked on towards the Red Place.
It was most undignified, the gardener had to run after her to enforce
his will. He arrived by her side breathless, with his face the colour of
a slightly anæmic beetroot. It is very wrong of women to place their
superiors in such unsuperior positions.
I hope I do not strike you as indulging my suffragettism at the expense
of the gardener. I am very fond of him myself, and because that is so,
his conceit seems to me to be one of his principal charms. There is
something immorally attractive in a baby vice that makes one’s heart
smile.
The gardener closed his hand about the suffragette’s thin arm.
“You will force me to take advantage of my privilege,” he said, and
looked at his own enormous hand.
The suffragette stood perfectly still, looking in the direction she
wanted to go.
“Turn back,” said the gardener. But she made a sudden passionate effort
to twist her arm out of his grasp. It was absurd, and very nearly
successful, like several things that women do.
The gardener’s heart grew black. There seemed nothing to be done. No end
could be imagined to the incident. His blue sea future dissolved. He
pictured himself standing thus throughout eternity, with his hand closed
around the little splinter of life she called her arm. Time seemed to
pass so slowly that in a minute he found he knew her looks by heart. And
yet he was not weary of them. I suppose the feeling he found in himself
was due to a certain reaction from the exalted incident of the blue and
golden young lady who had divined the loneliness of the threepenny bit.
For he discovered that he did not so very much mind hair that had but
little colour in it, and that he found attractive a pointed chin, and an
under lip that was the least trifle more out-thrust than its fellow.
“Do you know why I want to stop you?” he said at last.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you are not a woman, and don’t understand.”
“Because I am a man, and I understand.”
She was silent.
“Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t. I mean that I am a man, and I am not going to let you go,
because you must come with me to the uttermost ends of the earth.”
“Why?”
“Because I love the shape of your face, you dear little thing.”
The gods should not be disturbed. Also there was something very potent
in the impotent trembling of her arm.
There was an unnaturally long pause. Then she turned round.
“Let us discuss this matter,” she said, and gave him her portmanteau to
carry. The gardener loosed her arm and walked beside her. Silence and a
distance of a yard and a half were maintained between them for some way.
The gardener was gazing in blank astonishment at that ass, the gardener
of three minutes ago. Into what foolery had he not plunged?
If I could always be the Woman I Am, I should be a most rational and
successful creature. It is the Woman I Was who makes a fool of me, and
leaves me nervous as to the possible behaviour of the Woman I Shall Be.
There was something in the way the suffragette’s neck slipped loosely
into her collar which took a little of the sting out of the gardener’s
regrets. But the little plain eyes of her, and the aggressive manners of
her, and the misguided morals of her—that was the sequence in which the
gardener’s thoughts fell into line.
As for the suffragette, her heart, in defiance of anatomy, had gone to
her head, and was thundering rhythmically there. She was despising
herself passionately, and congratulating herself passionately. How
grand—she thought: how contemptible—she thought. For she was a world’s
worker, a wronged unit seeking rights, a co-heritor of the splendour of
the earth, a challenger, a warrior. And now, quite suddenly, she
discovered a fact the existence of which she had seldom, even in weak
moments, suspected. She found that—taken off her guard—she was a young
woman of six-and-twenty.
“How laughable,” she thought—and did not laugh—“I’m as bad as the ‘Oh my
dear’ girls.”
“Now,” she said at last, “what did you mean by that?”
“Only that you look like a good friend,” replied the gardener, who, poor
vagabond, was blushing furiously. “Mightn’t we be friends?”
“I am a friend to women,” said the suffragette slowly. “I’m a lover of
women. But never of men. I wouldn’t stir an inch out of my way for a
man. Unless I wanted to.”
“And do you want to?”
She looked at the gardener’s profile with the eyes of the newly
discovered young woman of six-and-twenty. Hitherto she had seen him only
with the militant eyes of armed neutrality. She looked at the rather
pleasing restlessness of his eyes, and the high tilt of his head. His
eyes were not dark with meaning, as the eyes of heroes of novels should
be, they were light and quick. The black pupils looked out fierce and
sharp, like the pupils of a cat, which flash like black sparks out of
the twilight of its soul. The gardener’s eyes actually conveyed little,
but they looked like blinds, barely concealing something of great value.
Presently the suffragette said: “Can you imagine what you feel like if
you had been running in a race, and you had believed you were winning.
The rest were miles behind wasting their breath variously; and then
suddenly your eyes were opened, and you saw that you had been running
outside the ropes of the course, for you were never given the chance to
enter for the competition.”
“Good,” said the gardener enthusiastically. “So you’re tired of running
to no purpose, and you’re coming back to the starting-place to begin
again.”