supremacy and could start back that moment to pit her three matches
against the gods. “Never. There’s no such thing as running to no
purpose. It’s excellent exercise—running, but I’ll never run with the
crowd. There are much better things than winning the prize. There’s more
of everything out here—more air, more light, more comedy, more tragedy.
Also I get there first, you know. When you get the law-abider and the
church-goer in a crowd, they increase its moral tone, but they lessen
its power of covering the ground.”
“Personally I never was inside,” said the gardener, who had a natural
preference for talking about himself. “But then I am building a path of
my own.”
“Anyway, what did you mean originally?”
The gardener blushed again. He showered reproaches on himself. “Only
that we might walk into Southampton as friends. And if we liked it....
Besides I owe you a shilling, and you’d better keep an eye on your
financial interests. My boat sails to-morrow. You know, it is a nice
shock to me to find that a militant suffragette is human at all. When I
held your arm, I was surprised to find it was not iron.”
“Did you say your boat sailed to-morrow?”
“I should have said, ‘Our boat sails to-morrow.’”
“There’s no time to walk. We’ll hire a car in Aldershot.”
So at sunset, side by side, they arrived in sight of Southampton’s
useful but hackneyed sheet of water.
Even then they had no plans. In youth one likes the feeling of standing
on empty air with a blank in front of one.
The suffragette paid for the car without question. “I am quite well
off,” she excused herself, as they traversed the smug and comfortless
suburbs of the town. “Has that shilling I lent you to invest brought in
any interest?”
“I hate money,” posed the gardener; “but I have a profession, you know.
I am a gardener.”
“And where is your garden?”
“I have two. This is one”—and he held up Hilda, who was looking rather
round-shouldered owing to the exertions and emotions of the day—“and the
world is the other. It also happens that I have had three months’
training in a horticultural college.”
The gardener did not talk like this naturally, any more than you or I
do. But in addition to his many other poses he posed as being unique.
Unfortunately there is nothing entirely unique except insanity. Of
course there are better things than insanity. On the other hand, it is
rather vulgar to be perfectly sane.
The suffragette went to an hotel, and the gardener went to meet Mr.
Samuel Rust at their appointed meeting-place.
Mr. Rust looked even more colourless against the brownness of the town
than he had seemed against the redness of his place. He wore town
clothes, too, and one noticed them, which is what one does not do with a
well-dressed man. The ideal, of course, is to look as if the Almighty
made you to fit your clothes. There are a great many unfortunates whose
appearance persists in confessing the truth—that the tailor made their
clothes to fit them.
Mr. Samuel Rust, however, was not self-conscious. He escaped that
pitfall, but left other people to be conscious of his appearance for
him.
“Come along,” he said, skipping up to the gardener like a goat, or like
a little hill. “I’ve sounded my cousin on the telephone, and the outlook
is not otherwise than middling hopeful. He’s promised, in fact, to ship
you on board the _Caribbeania_. The question is—what as? What can you
do?”
“I am a gardener—in theory.”
“Unfortunately only facts are shipped on Abel’s line.”
“Then all is over. For I am just a sheaf of theories held together by a
cage of bones. There is no fact in me at all.”
“Don’t be humble. It’s waste of time in such a humiliating world.”
“I’m not humble”—the gardener indignantly repudiated the suggestion.
“I’m proud of being what I am. I am more than worthy of the
_Caribbeania_.”
“Then come and prove it,” said Mr. Rust, and dragged the gardener
passionately down the street.
The gardener found himself placed on the door-step of an aspiring corner
house. Mr. Samuel Rust stood on a lower step with his back to the door.
It is part of the code of shadows to pretend, when you have rung the
bell, that you do not care whether the door is opened or not.
The gardener, following the code of the socially simple, stood with his
nose nearly touching the knocker, and his eyes glued to the spot where
the head of the servant might be expected to appear. It therefore
devolved on him to draw Mr. Rust’s attention to the eventual appearance
of a black-frocked white-capped answer to his summons.
“Ah!” exclaimed Samuel, “Mr. Abel in?”
The maid, with fine dramatic feeling, stepped aside, thus opening up a
vista, at the end of which could be seen Mr. Abel advancing with both
hands outstretched.
When people shake hands with both their hands and both their eyes and
all their teeth, and with much writhing of the lips, you at once know
something fairly important about them. They have acquired the letter of
enthusiasm without its spirit, and their effect on the really
enthusiastic is like the effect of artificial light and heat on a flower
that needs the sun.
The gardener became as though he were not there. All that he vouchsafed
to leave at Mr. Rust’s side in the library of Mr. Abel was a white and
sleepy-looking young man, standing on one fourteen-inch foot while the
other carefully disarranged the carpet edge. The gardener was not shy,
though on such occasions he looked silly. He was really encrusted in
himself; loftily superior to Mr. Abel and his like he hung, levitated by
the medium of his own conceit, at a level far above Mr. Abel’s
house-top.
Fortunately Mr. Abel and Mr. Rust both took his aloofness for the
sheepishness to be expected of one of his age.
“This is the instrument of my designs, and the victim of your kindness,
Abel,” remarked Mr. Rust. “He doesn’t always look such an ass. He is a
gardener, by profession.”
“In theory,” added the gardener, whose armour of aloofness had chinks.
There is something practical about this inconsistent young man which he
has never yet succeeded in smothering, and to this day, though he poses
as being superbly absent-minded, his mind is generally present—so to
speak—behind the door.
“In theory,” repeated Mr. Abel, ecstatically amused. He made it his
business to shoot promiscuous appreciation at the conversation of his
betters, and though his aim was not good, he was at least gifted with
perseverance. If you shoot enough, you must eventually hit something.
Hereafter he kept his profile agog towards the gardener, a smile
hovering round that side of his mouth in readiness for his guest’s next
sally.
One pose in which the gardener has never approached is that of the wag,
and he made renewed efforts to unhook his mind from this exasperating
interview.
“Is there any opening for a gardener on the _Caribbeania_?” asked Mr.
Rust.
“A gardener ...” said Mr. Abel, looking laboriously reflective. “We have
no gardener as yet on board.”
“But is there a garden?” asked Mr. Samuel Rust acutely.
“A garden,” repeated Mr. Abel, ruminating intensely. “There is the
winter garden. And a row of geraniums on the promenade deck. And some
trellis work with ivy. Yes, there is certainly a garden.”
“Then the thing is settled,” said Mr. Rust, and at these hopeful words
the gardener rose loudly from his chair.
“Wait a moment,” said Mr. Abel in the same voice as the voice in which
Important Note is printed in the Grammar Book. “What about the salary?”
There was no reply and no sensation. The gardener was yearning towards
the door.
“Of course....” said Mr. Abel. “The position is not one of any
responsibility, and therefore could hardly be expected to be a paying
one. Your passage out....”
“I wouldn’t touch money. I hate the feel of it,” said the gardener
abruptly. That threw Mr. Abel into a paroxysm of humour.
On the door-step the gardener did a heroic thing. He turned back and
found Mr. Abel in the hall, completely recovered from his paroxysm.
“What about——” began the gardener, with the suffragette in his mind.
“Dangerous to lose sight of her,” he thought.
“What about what?” asked Mr. Abel, and was again very much amused by the
symmetry of the phrase. He was a bright-mannered man.
The gardener’s new pose lay suddenly clear before him.
“What about my wife?” he asked.
He was rather pleased with the sensation he made.
“Your wife?” exclaimed Mr. Rust and Mr. Abel in duet (falsetto and
tenor).
“What on earth did you do with her last night?” continued Samuel solo.
“Can’t she ship as stewardess?” asked the gardener.
Poor suffragette! But in the eyes of men one woman is much the same as
another. Every woman, I gather, is a potential stewardess. This is
woman’s sphere when it takes to the water. The gardener thought he knew
all about women. All her virtues he considered that she shared with man,
but her vices he looked upon as peculiarly her own.
“The boat sails to-morrow,” Mr. Abel observed reproachfully. “The
stewardesses have been engaged for weeks.”
“Why can’t you leave her behind, what?” asked Mr. Rust. “Women do far
too much travelling about nowadays. There’s such a thing as broadening
the mind too far, you know. Sometimes, like elastic, it snaps. A lot of
women I know have snapped.”
“Yes,” said the gardener. “But it would be better for England if I took
her away.”
This spark nearly put an end to the career of Mr. Abel. He squeezed the
gardener’s hand in an agony of appreciation.
“I won’t go without her,” said the gardener, rather surprising himself.
He gave Mr. Abel no answering smile. He was too busy reproaching
himself.
“Abel,” implored Mr. Rust. “I simply can’t let old Mrs. Paul go without
some one to keep the Red Place in her line of thought. This is obviously
the man for the job. My career hangs on you. Be worthy. That is—be a
sport, now, what?”
“I’ll find your wife a berth,” said Mr. Abel, accompanying each word
with a dramatic tap on the gardener’s arm. “The boat is not full.”
“Settled,” exclaimed Mr. Samuel, and after that, of course, escape
followed. The idea of dinner together hovered between the two as they
emerged into the principal street, but as both were penniless, the idea,
which originated chiefly in instinct, died.
The gardener went to call on the suffragette. He was conscientious in
his own way, and fully realised that the woman had a right to know that
she was now a wife, and, if not a stewardess, an intending passenger on
a boat bound immediately for the uttermost ends of the earth.
He found the suffragette, looking sad, playing a forlorn game of
solitaire in forlorn surroundings in the little hotel sitting-room. With
her hat off she looked not so ugly, but more insignificant. Her hair
seemed as if it would never decide whether to be fair or dark until
greyness overtook it and settled the question. It had been tidied under
protest, and already strands of it were creeping over her ears, like
deserters leaving a fortress by stealth.
The room was papered and ceiled and upholstered in drab, there were also
drab photographs of unlovable bygones on the walls, and some drab
artificial flowers in a drab pot on the table.
There are some colour schemes that kill romance. Directly the gardener
felt the loveless air of the place, he plunged headlong into the cold
interview. Like a bather who, on feeling the chill of the sea, hastens
desperately to throw it around him from head to foot.
“I have been telling lies,” said the gardener.
“I have been crying,” said the suffragette.
They each thought that it was thoughtless of the other to be so
egotistical at this juncture. There is nothing that kills an effect so
infallibly as a collision in conversation.
“I have been telling lies,” said the gardener, “about you.”
“I have been crying—about you.”
(These women....)
The gardener took a deep breath, recoiled for a start, and ran upon his
subject.
“I have told them that you are my wife, and that you are coming with me
on the _Caribbeania_, sailing to-morrow morning for Trinity Islands.”
“Told who ... _Caribbeania_ ... Trinity Islands ...” gathered the
suffragette, with a woman’s instinct for tripping over the least
essential point. And then she interviewed herself laboriously on the
subject.
There was ample motive for a militant protest, and that was a
comfortable thought. She was justified in throwing any article of the
drab furniture at the gardener’s sharp and doubtful face. This creature
had put himself in authority over her without the authority to do so; he
had decided to lead her to Trinity Islands, whereas her life’s work lay
in England. This cold and curious boy had twisted off its hinges the
destiny of an independent woman. She had hitherto closed the door of her
heart against to-morrow. She had momentarily liked the idea of having a
friend who loved the shape of her face, especially as he was leaving the
country to-morrow. The unconventionality of the friendship had crowned
as an ornament a life of dreadful refinement. She had meant to step for
a moment from the lonely path, and now she found that her way back was
barred—by this impenetrable trifle. It was infuriating. But the
suffragette searched in vain for a trace of real fury in her heart. She
tested the power of words.
“It is infuriating,” she said.
“Yes,” said the gardener, not apologetically. “I quite see that.”
But she did not see it herself—except in theory.
“All the same,” said the gardener, “you are an incendiary, not exactly a
woman. Can’t two friends, an incendiary and a horticultural expert, go
on a voyage of exploration together? Mutual exploration?”
“One can be alone in couples,” thought the suffragette. “It would be
studying loneliness from a new angle. My life has been a lifeless thing,
run on the world’s principles; I shall try a new line, and run it on my
own principles.”
But, as I may have mentioned, she was a woman, so she said: “What is to
prevent my going back to that house in the woods now, and burning it
down—if I ever meant to do it?”
“Me,” said the gardener.
“But you can’t sit there with your eyes pinned to me until the boat
sails.”
“Unless you give me your word as a World’s Worker that you will not
leave the hotel, I shall stay here, and so will you.”
For quite a long time the suffragette’s upbringing wrestled with all
comers, but it was a hopeless fight from the first. There is no strength
in the principles created out of a lifeless past. Besides, the woman of
six-and-twenty was very much flattered and fluttered, whatever the
militant suffragette might be.
“I will come with you on your exploration tour,” she said, and her voice
sounded like the voice of the conqueror rather than the conquered. “I
will give my word as a—woman without principles that I will not leave
Southampton except to go on board the _Caribbeania_.”
The gardener left her, he felt innocently drunk. He made his way out of
the amethyst light of electricity, into the golden light of the
outskirts of the town, and thence into the silver light of the
uncivilised moon. On the beach the tide was receding, despite the
groping, grasping hands of the sea, which contested every inch of the
withdrawal. The gardener stumbled upon the soft solidity of the sand
above high-water mark, and slept the sleep of the thoroughly confused.
He dreamt of a pearl-and-pink sea, and of unknown islands.
I need hardly say, after all this preamble, that the suffragette and the
gardener sailed next day on the _Caribbeania_ for Trinity Islands.
Mr. Samuel Rust, for some time before the boat started, was conspicuous
for a marked non-appearance on the wharf’s edge.
The gardener, who had a vague feeling that tears should be shed in
England on his departure, stood feeling a little cold at heart on the
starboard side of the main deck, looking at the tears that were being
shed for other people.
The suffragette, who was under the impression that her hand was against
all men, stood bleakly on the port side, looking at the hydro-aeroplanes
leaping self-consciously about the Solent in seven-league boots. She was
proud to stand thus aloof and unhampered on the threshold of a novelty.
The pride she had in her independence was one of her compensations. This
is a world of compensations, and that is what makes it the hollow world
it is sometimes. So seldom do we get the real thing that in this age we
congratulate ourselves upon our compensations.
Mr. Samuel Rust made a late and dramatic appearance upon the gangway
after the first bell of preparation for departure had been rung. His
hat, inspired by the prevalent aviation craze, blew away. But Mr. Rust’s
thoughts were occupied with other things than the infidelity of hats. He
passed the gardener without noticing him, and with restrained fervour
addressed a square elderly woman, who stood leisurely on the deck,
surrounded by an officious maid, like a liner being attended to by a
tug.
Mr. Samuel Rust did not seem like the sort of person who would have had
a mother. He gave the impression of having been created exactly as he
stood, with one stroke of the Almighty Finger, and not gradually evolved
like you or me. You could imagine the gardener, for instance, at every
stage of his existence. You could picture those light bright eyes under
those scowling brows looking out of lace and baby-ribbons in a proud
nurse’s arms. You could see him as the fierce little schoolboy, with
alternately too much to say and too little. You could imagine him as an
old man, with that thick hair turned into a white strong flame upon his
head, and those already deep-set eyes blazing out of hewn hollows above
his abrupt cheek-bones. But Mr. Samuel Rust seemed to have no past and
no future.
He addressed the woman who, contrary to appearances, had played an
important part in the creating of him.
“I couldn’t let you go without saying good-bye to you, Mrs. Paul,” he
said.
“Of course you couldn’t,” said Mrs. Rust, and the words seemed shot by
iron lips from above a chin like a ship’s ram.
Something that might have usurped the name of a kiss passed between
them, and Mr. Samuel hurried to the impatient gangway. As he passed the
gardener he winked earnestly, conscious of his mother’s eyes on the back
of his head. The gardener, feeling delightfully unscrupulous and
roguish, made no sign.
The vulgarly tuneful swan-songs of Cockney emotion trailed from the deck
to the wharf and back again. The sound was like thin beaten silver,
becoming thinner as the distance increased. There were tears among the
women on land, and the shivering water blurred the reflections of the
crowd until they looked as though they were seen through tears. The last
song fainted in the air, the crowd on the wharf ceased to be human, and
became a long suggestion of many colours, a-quiver with waving
handkerchiefs.
The gardener looked at Mrs. Paul Rust. There was a tear following one of
the furious furrows that bracketed her hyphen of a mouth.
The south of England is a land that reluctantly lets her deserters go.
For full twelve hours she stands on tiptoe on the sea-line, beckoning
their return.
The gardener watched the land and felt the sea for long hours. He felt
no regret at having forsaken one for the other. For the moment he prided
himself on heartlessness, or rather on intactness of heart, for he had
left none of it behind. He was proud of the fact that he loved no one in
the world. He prided himself on his vices more than on his virtues.
There seems something more unique in vice than in virtue.
The gardener had the convenient sort of memory that is fitted with
water-tight doors. His mind conducted a process by which the past was
not kept fresh and green, nor altogether left behind, but crystallised
and packed away on shelves in a businesslike manner. He could label it
and shut it away without emotion. He shut away England now, and rejoiced
to do so. Poor grey silly England that I am so glad to leave and so glad
to see again....
The gardener turned presently to look for his garden, and found—the girl
Courtesy.
Her brilliant and magnetic hair.
Her broad face with the abrupt flush on the cheeks, that was an
inartistic accompaniment to the red of her hair, and looked as if Nature
had become colourblind at the moment of giving Courtesy her complexion.
She herself looked herself—simple yet sophisticated.
“To think of seeing you here,” she said. “Who would have thought it.”
The gardener was one of those who are never surprised without being
thunderstruck. He was very thorough in habit, and drank every emotion to
its dregs.
His manners fell in ruins about him. His hat remained upon his head. His
words remained somewhere beneath his tongue.
“I got a sudden invitation from a cousin in Trinity Island,” explained
Courtesy. “And Dad gave me my passage out as a birthday present. I gave
the threepenny bit to a porter, so I hope you don’t want it back. Have
you kept a halo for me in this Paradise?”
“There is the glassy sea,” replied the gardener, recovering. “And the
halo is just flowering. It is exactly the colour of your hair.”
“I hope the sea will be as you say,” said Courtesy, “for I’m a shockin’
bad sailor.”
And at that moment the sea ceased to be totally glassy. You could
suddenly feel the slow passionate heart of the sea beating.
Courtesy did not look at the change in this poetic light at all. She
hurried along the deck and disappeared.
Even if you are a good sailor there is, apart from a natural pride in
your sailorship, little joy about a first day on board. The climate of
the English seas is not adapted to ocean travel. If I could steam
straight out of Southampton Harbour into the strong yet restrained heat
that I love, if I could glide from the wharf—mottled with
regrets—straight to the silver and emerald coasts of a certain land I
know, where the cocoanut palms lean out over the strip of immaculate
sand, to see their reflections in the opal mirror of the sea, I think I
should love the first day as much as I love its successors. And yet I
would not have the voyage shortened by a minute.
I wonder why nobody has ever brought forward as a conclusive
Anti-suffrage argument the fact that more women are sea-sick than men on
the first day of a sea-voyage. I can so well imagine the superb line the
logic of such a contention would take. If the basis of life is physical
ability, and if physical ability depends upon the digestion, then must
the strong digestion only constitute a right to citizenship. To the wall
with the weak digestion.
Mrs. Paul Rust and the suffragette were the only women who scaled the
heights of the dining saloon for that evening’s meal. Mrs. Rust looked
supremely proud of her immunity from sea-sickness; all the men looked
laboriously unaware that such a thing as sea-sickness existed; the
suffragette looked frankly miserable. The gardener was obliged to remind
himself casually from time to time that there was no pose that included
sea-sickness.
But any disastrous tendency he might have had to give too much thought
to his inner man was checked by the appearance of Mrs. Paul Rust, the
fortress he was there to besiege. She was a truly remarkable woman to
look at. The absence of her hat revealed a surprise. Her hair was dyed a
forcible crimson. And it might have been mud-coloured like mine for all
the self-consciousness she showed. It was so profoundly remarkable that
for a time one’s attention was chained to the hair, and one forgot to
study the impressive general effect, of which the hair was only the
culminating point. Mrs. Rust’s only real feature was her chin, but no
one ever realised this. Her eyes and nose were too small for her face,
and seemed to fit loosely into that great oval; her mouth was only
redeemed by the chin that shot from beneath it. Altogether she would
have been sufficiently insignificant-looking had it not been for her
hair. She proved the truism that the world takes people at their own
valuation.
It is always a surprise to me when a truism is proved true. I have come
across the rock embedded in these truisms several times lately to my
cost. And each time it bruises my knuckles and shocks me. It almost
makes one wonder whether, after all, the ancients occasionally had their
flashes of enlightenment.
The world thought of Mrs. Paul Rust what she thought of herself. It is
so often too busy to work out its own conclusions.