good creature, but dreadfully underhung.” Of a well-chinned woman with
dyed hair, it said, “There goes a strong character.” The hair did it,
and the hair was dyed by human agency. Providence had no hand in the
making of Mrs. Rust’s forcible reputation. Nowadays we leave it to our
dressmaker, and our manicurist, and our milliner, and our doctor, and
our vicar, to make us what we are. This is an age of luxury, and it is
so fatiguing to assert a home-made personality. Shall I go to my
hairdresser and say, “Here, take me, dye me heliotrope. Make an
influential woman of me”?
The gardener did not quail before the terrifying outer wall of Mrs.
Rust’s fortress. Believing as he did that man makes himself, and that
the pose of victor is as easy to assume as any other, he was unaware of
the reality of the word ‘defeat.’ Whether woman also makes herself, I
never fully understood from the gardener at this stage. But I gathered
that woman takes the rôles that man rejects.
The gardener, as a protégé of Mr. Abel, who, on the _Caribbeania_, was
respected because he was not personally known, found himself treated _à
la_ junior officer, streaked with a certain flavour of second-class
passenger, but distinctly suggesting ship’s orchestra. He was allowed to
have his meals in the first-class saloon, he was occasionally asked
about the weather by lady passengers, and the captain and officers
looked upon him good-naturedly, as a sort of example of poetic licence.
It seemed a good thing when dinner was over. One had proved one’s
courage, and the strain was past. The suffragette, who had given a proof
rather of obstinacy than of courage, retired weakly to her cabin. And
the gardener stood on deck and looked at the sea, while the moon
followed the ship’s course with her eyes. A table companion, an Anglican
priest, with a weak chin and piercing eyes, came and leaned upon the
rail at the gardener’s side.
“You smoke?” he asked, and you could hear that he was very conventional,
and that he believed that he was not.
A man-to-man sort of man.
“No,” said the gardener, and added, “I have no vices.”
He said this sort of thing simply to exasperate. The pose of
indifference to the world’s opinion is apt, sooner or later, to lead to
the pose of wilful pricking of the world’s good taste. The gardener had
a morbid craving for unpopularity; it was part of the unique pose.
Unpopularity is an excellent salve to the conscience; it is delicious to
be misunderstood.
The priest did not appear exasperated. He was tolerant. The man who aims
at unlimited tolerance, as a rule, only achieves the absorbent and
rather undecided status of spiritual blotting-paper. But he is a
dreadfully difficult man to anger.
I hate talking to people who are occupied in reminding their conscience:
“After all this is my sister, albeit, a poor relation. I must be
tolerant.” Then they pray for strength, and turn to me, spiritually
renewed, with a brave patient smile.
This was the priest’s pose.
“You have no vices?” he said, in a slow earnest voice. “How I envy you!”
The gardener was more concerned with the varied conversation of the sea.
Each wave of it flung back some magic unspeakable word over its shoulder
as it ran by. But he answered the priest:
“You don’t really envy me, you would rather be yourself with virtues
than me without vices.”
The priest smiled the inscrutable smile of the vague-minded. “You have a
very original way of talking. You interest me. Yerce, yerce. Tell me
what you were thinking about when I came up.”
The gardener did so at once. Sometimes his imagination weighed heavily
upon his mind, and he expanded, regardless of his listeners.
“I was thinking about the things I saw,” he said. “Things that I often
see before I have time to think. Snapshots of things that even I have
never actually imagined. Do you know, wonders crash across my eyes like
a blow, when I am thinking of something else. Ghosts out of my enormous
past, I suppose. There was a very white beach that I saw just now, with
opal-coloured waves running along it, and a mist whitening the sky.
There were very broad red men in grey wolf-skins, standing in the water,
dragging dead bodies from the sea. There were little children, blue and
thin, lying dead upon the beach. I know the way children’s ribs stand
out when they are dead. I have never seen a dead child, except
those....”
“You ought to write fiction, yerce, yerce,” said the priest. “You have a
very strong imagination.”
“I have,” admitted the gardener. “But not strong enough to control these
visions that besiege me.”
The priest, who had preached more and known less about visions than any
one else I can think of, was constrained to silence.
Next morning the gardener found his garden. He saw it under varied
aspects and at varied angles, for a gold and silver alternation of sun
and shower chequered the Atlantic, and inspired the _Caribbeania_ to a
slow but undignified dance, like the activities of a merry cow. The high
waves came laughing down from the high horizon, and curtseyed mockingly
at her feet.
There was a bay tree in a tub on either side of the entrance to the
garden, and the gardener, as he stood between them, surveying his
territory, slid involuntarily from one to the other and back again, as
the world wallowed. The garden was conventionally conceived, by a
carpenter rather than a gardener. Grass-green trellis-work, which should
belong essentially to the background, here usurped undue prominence.
Arches in the trellis-work, looking to the sea, gave bizarre views, now
of the heavy hurried sky, now of the panting sea. Hanging drunkenly from
the apex of each arch was a chained wicker basket, from which sea-sick
canariensis waved weak protesting hands. A few creepers, lacking
sufficient initiative for the task set before them, clawed incompetently
at the lowest rungs of the trellis. A row of geraniums in pots shouted
in loud brick-red at the farther and more sheltered end of the garden.
It was impossible to tolerate the thought of Hilda associating with
those geraniums. She was a very vulnerable and emotional soul, was
Hilda. Deep orange is a colour beyond the comprehension of the vermilion
and vulgar. A few sodden-looking deck-chairs occupied the gardener’s
territory, and repelled advances. But on the farthest sat the
suffragette. She was crying.
If you have ever crossed the Bay of Biscay while weakened by emotion,
you will not ask why she was crying.
The gardener dropped his pose between the bay trees, and did something
extraordinarily pretty, considering the man he was. He sat on the next
deck-chair to hers, and patted her knee.
“My fault ...” he said. “My fault....”
Of course he did not really believe that it was his fault, but it was
unusually gracious of him to tell the lie.
The suffragette turned her face from him. She had cried away all her
vanity. Her hair was lamentable, her small plain eyes were smaller than
ever, and her nose was the only pink thing in her face.
“I’m very morbid,” she said. “And that at any rate is not your fault.”
“Don’t let’s think either about you or me,” said the gardener, and it
would have been wise had he meant it. “We have all our lives to do that
in, and it is a pity to do it in the Bay. When one’s feeling weak, it’s
easier to fight the world than to fight oneself.”
The suffragette was a grey thing, a snake-soul. To the eye of a grey
soul there is something forbidding about the many colours of the
universe, and you will always know snake-people by their defensive
attitude. It is an immensely lonely thing to be a snake, to have that
tortuous spirit, with no limbs for contact with the earth. And yet the
compensation is most generous, for there are few joys like the joy of
knowing yourself alone.
In cubes of blue, in curves of mauve,
They spotted up my firmament;
And with my sharp grey heart I strove
To stab the colours as they went.
“Lou-_la_ ...” they said—“Lou-_la_, a thing
At war without a following.”
“Lou-_la_ ...” they cried—and now cry I—
“At war without an enemy....”
“I can’t think how you dare to speak out your imagination,” said the
suffragette. “Most people hide it like a sin.”
He was always willing to be the text of his own oratory.
“Imagination is my Genesis, and my Book of Revelations,” he answered.
“There is nothing with more power. It is stronger than faith, for it can
really move mountains. It has moved mountains, it has moved England from
my path and left me this clear sea.”
The suffragette walled herself more securely in. “I have no imagination
at all,” she lied, and then she added some truth: “I am very unhappy and
lonely.”
“The other day ...” said the gardener, “you were happy to be independent
and alone.”
“That’s why I’m now unhappy to be independent and alone. You can’t
discover the heaven in a thing without also tripping over the hell. I
like a black and white life.”
“Don’t think,” said the gardener suddenly, and almost turned the patting
of her knee into a slap. “It’s a thing that should only be done in
moderation. Some day you won’t be able to control your craving for
thought, and then you’ll die of Delirium Tremens.”
“It’s not such a dangerous drug as some,” smiled the suffragette. “I’d
rather have that craving than the drink craving, or the society craving,
or the love craving.”
“Better to have nothing you can’t control.”
“You hypocrite! You can’t control your imagination.”
“You’re right,” said the gardener after a pause. He was a curiously
honest opponent in argument. Besides, she had stopped crying, and there
was no special reason for continuing the discussion. Also Mrs. Paul Rust
at that moment appeared between the bay trees.
Mrs. Rust’s hair looked vicious in a garden, beside the geraniums, which
were at least sincere in colour, however blatant.
“Is this private?” she asked. There was something in the shy look of the
garden, and in the reproachful look of the gardener, that made the
question natural.
“No,” said the gardener. “This is the ship’s garden.”
“Good,” said Mrs. Paul Rust.
She always said “good” to everything she had not heard before. To her
the newest was of necessity the best. Originality was her ideal, and as
unattainable as most ideals are. For she was not in the least original
herself. She was doomed for ever to stand outside the door of her
temple. And “good” was her tribute of recognition to those who had free
passes into the temple. It owned that they had shown her something that
she would never have thought of for herself. For nothing had ever sprung
uniquely from her. Even in her son she could only claim half the
copyright.
The suffragette tried to rearrange her looks, which certainly needed it.
There are two sorts of women, the women before whom you feel you must be
tidy and the women before whom such things don’t matter. Mrs. Rust all
her life had belonged to the former, all her life what charm she had,
had lain in the terror she inspired.
For the first time the gardener questioned himself as to his plan of
attack. Hitherto he had pinned his faith to inspiration. He had left the
matter in the hands of his private god, Chance. His methods were very
simple, as well as bizarre. His mind was a tortuous path, but he
followed it straightforwardly, and never looked back. To do him justice,
however, I must say that he searched his repertoire for a suitable point
of conversational contact with Mrs. Rust. Finding none, he dispensed
with that luxury.
“I am the ship’s gardener,” he said, smiling at his intended victim.
Mrs. Rust was broad, and the deck-chair was narrow. It was some time
before a compromise between these two facts could be arrived at, so the
remark came upon her at a moment of some stress.
“Now, then, what was that you were saying?” she asked at last, in an
unpromising voice.
The gardener, who was very literal in very small things, repeated his
information, word for word, and inflection for inflection. “I am the
ship’s gardener.”
Mrs. Rust grunted. She showed no tolerance for the thing that was not
sensational. Nor had she any discrimination in her search for the
novelty. Still, energy is something.
“But I am only ship’s gardener in theory,” persisted the gardener. “In
practice I don’t even know where the watering-can is kept.”
“Then you are here under false pretences,” retorted Mrs. Rust a little
more genially, for his last remark was not everybody’s remark.
“I am,” said the gardener, suddenly catching a fleeting perspective of
the path to her good graces.
“Good,” said Mrs. Rust, and turned her little bright eyes upon him.
When she opened her eyes very wide, it meant that she was on the track
of what she sought. When she shut them, as she often did, it meant that
she did not understand what was said. But it gave the fortunate
impression that she understood only too well. She was instinctively
ingenious at hiding her own limitations.
It was the end of that interview, but a good beginning to the campaign.
The sea to some extent recovered its temper within that day. Towards the
evening, when slate and silver clouds, with their backs to the
_Caribbeania_, were racing to be the first over the horizon, the garden
was invaded by passengers, racing to be the first over the boundary of
sea-sickness. The silence of the unintroduced at first lay, like a pall,
along the deck-chairs, but a mutual friend was quickly found in
Mothersill, whose excellent invention was represented in every work-bag.
The bright noise of women discussing suffering rippled along the garden.
Abuse of the _Caribbeania’s_ stewardesses sprang from lip to lip. It was
a pretty scene, and the gardener turned his back on it, and went below
to water Hilda.
The gardener’s cabin, which was impertinently shared by a couple of
inferior souls, was as square as a box, and furnished with nautical
economy. The outlook from its porthole was as varied in character as it
was limited in size. At one moment one felt oneself the drunken brain
behind the round eye of a giant, staring into green and white obscurity;
at another one blinked, as a mist of spray like shivered opal spun up
over one’s universe; again one enjoyed an instantaneous glimpse of the
flat chequered floor of the Atlantic; and at rare intervals the curtain
of the sky slid over the porthole, and the setting sun dropped across
the eye like a rocket.
Hilda sat wistfully on the recess of the porthole, leaning her forehead
against the glass. She had a bud, chosen to match Courtesy’s hair. Just
as Hilda’s stalk was necessary to hold her bud upright, so Courtesy
herself was necessary to support the conflagration of her hair on the
level of the onlooker’s eye. Both were necessities, and both were
artistically negligible.
The gardener looked around the cabin. There is something depressing
about other people’s clothes. There is something depressing in an
incessant attack on one’s skull by inanimate objects. There is something
depressing in a feeling of incurable drunkenness unrelieved by the
guilty gaiety that usually accompanies such a condition. There is
something depressing about ocean life below decks at any time. The
gardener and Hilda sat in despair upon the hardhearted thing that
sea-going optimists accept as a bed.
“Of course I don’t want to go home,” the gardener told himself.
Hilda, poor golden thing of the soil, had no doubts as to what she was
suffering from. But the gardener wondered why despair had seized him.
Until he remembered that the spirit of the sea walks on deck alone, and
is never permitted by the stewards to enter the cabins. He climbed the
companion-way, like a tired angel returning to heaven after a stuffy day
on earth. He came upon Courtesy making a bad shot at the door that leads
to the Promenade deck.
“Come and sit in the garden,” he said in a refreshed voice.
On deck, a few enterprising spirits were playing deck quoits against the
elements. The general geniality whose rule only lasts for the first
three days of a voyage was reigning supreme. Young men were making
advances to young ladies with whom they would certainly quarrel in
forty-eight hours’ time, and young ladies were mocking behind their
hands at the young men they would be engaged to before land was reached.
The priest, with an appearance of sugared condescension, was showering
missiles upon the Bullboard as though they were blessings. (And they
were misdirected.) The inevitable gentleman who has crossed the Atlantic
thirty times and can play all known games with fatiguing perfection, was
straining like a greyhound on the leash towards the quoits which mere
amateurs were usurping. Captain Walters, who has a twin brother on every
liner that ever sailed, was brightly collecting signatures for a
petition to the Captain concerning a dance that very evening.
The gardener, with unusual cordiality, gave the reeling Courtesy his
arm, as they threaded the maze of amusements towards the garden.
There was only one deck-chair unoccupied. It was labelled loudly as
belonging to some one else, but Courtesy, always bold, even when
physically weakest, advanced straight upon it. It was next to the
suffragette’s. And the gardener became for the first time aware of a cat
in a bag, and of the fact that the cat was about to emerge.
The suffragette was the sort of person next to whom empty chairs are
always to be found. She had plenty to say, and what she said was often
rather amusing, but it was always a little too much to the point, and
the point was a little too sharp. She had a certain amount of small
talk, but no tiny talk. She was not so much ignored as avoided. She had
altogether missed youth, and its glorious power of being amused by what
is not, correctly speaking, amusing. Her generation thought her
“brainy,” it was very polite to her. Do you know the terrible sensation
of being invariably the last to be chosen at Nuts in May? This was the
suffragette’s atmosphere. My poor suffragette! It is so much more
difficult to bear the snub than the insult. Insult is like a bludgeon
thrown at the inflated balloon of our conceit. With the very blunt force
of it we rebound. But the snub is a pin-prick, which lets our supporting
pride out, and leaves us numb and nothing. I always feel the insult is
founded on passion, while the snub springs from innate dislike.
“May I introduce Miss Courtesy Briggs ...” began the gardener, hoping
for an inspiration before the end of the sentence. “Miss Courtesy
Briggs....”
Both women looked expectant.
“Miss Courtesy Briggs ... my wife.”
“O Lor’!” said Courtesy, and then, with her healthy regard for
conventions, remembered that this was not the proper retort to an
introduction.
“When you left Penny Street, a week ago ...” she said to the gardener,
as she shook the suffragette’s hand, “you didn’t tell me you were
engaged.”
“I wasn’t,” said the gardener.
Courtesy dropped the subject, because it was hardly possible to continue
it. She was not the girl to do what was conventionally impossible.
Besides the bugle was sounding to show that dinner was within hailing
distance. Courtesy was a slave of time. Her day was punctuated by the
strokes of clocks. Her life was a thing of pigeon-holes, and if some of
the pigeon-holes were empty they were all neatly labelled. She was the
sort of person who systematically allowed ten minutes every morning for
her prayers, and during that time, with the best intentions, mused upon
her knees about the little things of yesterday. It is a bold woman that
would squeeze Heaven into a pigeon-hole.
Theresa stopped in front of the gardener’s chair. Theresa’s surname had
been blown away from her with the first Atlantic wind. So had the
shining system in her yellow hair. So had most of her land conventions.
She was not a thing of the ocean, but a thing of the ocean liner. She
had immediately become Everybody’s Theresa. I could not say that
everybody loved Theresa, but I know that everybody felt they ought to.
“Captain said no dance this evening,” said Theresa, in her telegraphic
style. “Too much sea on. Doctor said broken legs. But I went and
wheedled. Called the Captain Sweet William. Dance at nine.”
The dance was at nine. There were no limits to what Theresa could do—in
her sphere.
A proud quartermaster was superintending the last touches of chalk upon
the deck, when the gardener and the suffragette led the exodus from the
dining-saloon.
In Paradise I hope I shall be allowed a furious walk around a windy
rocking deck at frequent intervals throughout eternity. I know of
nothing more poetic, and yet more brilliantly prosaic. At such moments
you can feel the muscles of life trembling by reason of sheer strength.
The suffragette and the gardener walked so fast that the smoke from the
suffragette’s cigarette lay out along the wind like the smoke behind a
railway train. The strong swing of the sea threw their feet along. There
was a moon in the sky and phosphorus in the sea.
But there are people who go down to the sea in ships, and yet confine
their world to the promenade-deck. The heart of Theresa’s world, for
instance, was the shining parallelogram, silvered with chalk, on the
sheltered side of the deck. Theresa, looking extremely pretty, was
superintending the over-filling of her already full programme.
“Mustn’t walk round like that,” she said in the polite tones that The
Generation always used to the suffragette. “Must find partners, because
the orchestra will soon begin to orch.”
“We are not dancing,” said the gardener. One always took for granted
that the suffragette was not dancing.
“If you will dance,” said Theresa, “I will give you number eight.” She
assumed with such confidence that this was an inducement, that somehow
it became one.
“Thank you very much,” replied the gardener. “I’ll ask Courtesy Briggs
for one, too.”
The suffragette sat down upon an isolated chair.
“May I have a dance?” asked the gardener of Courtesy. “I can’t dart or
stagger, only revolve.”
“I was sea-sick only three hours ago,” retorted Courtesy with
simplicity. “But I have a lot to talk to you about, so you can have
number one. And we’ll begin it now.”
But the orchestra was still idling in the melancholy manner peculiar to
orchestras. Why—by the way—is there something so unutterably sad in the
expression of an orchestra about to play a jovial onestep?
“I do want to know about your marriage,” pursued Courtesy, whose
curiosity was a daylight trait, like the rest of her characteristics.
“When did it happen, and where did you meet her, and why did you have a
wedding without me to help?”
“I met her—on the way to Paradise,” said the gardener, posing
luxuriously as an enigma. “We got married on the way too. It was a
no-flowers-by-request sort of wedding, otherwise we would have invited
you.”
“But I can’t understand it,” said Courtesy. “Only a week ago you were
snivelling over a broken boot-lace.”
The gardener’s pose had a fall. He might have expected that Courtesy
would trip it up.
The violins, relieving their feelings by a preliminary concerted yell,
settled down to a lamentation in ragtime.
The gardener danced rather well, as his mother had taught him to dance.
Courtesy danced rather well, after the manner of The Generation. But the
_Caribbeania_ danced better than either. She reduced them to planting
their four feet wide and sliding up and down. The ship’s officers, with
their lucky partners, leaning to the undulations of the deck, like
willows bending to the wind, showed to immense advantage. They evidently
knew every wave of the Atlantic by heart. But among the remaining
dancers there was much unrest. Captain Walters, who was accustomed to be
one of the principal ornaments of a more stationary ballroom, at once
knocked his partner down and sat upon her. Theresa and a subaltern slid
helplessly at the mercy of the elements into a forest of chaperons. The
gardener and Courtesy leaned together and clung, with a tense look on
their faces.
I dare not say what angle the deck had reached when the orchestra, with
an unpremeditated lapse into a Futurist style of melody, broke loose,
and glided in a heaving phalanx to join the turmoil. The piano, being
lashed to its post, remained a triumphant survivor, calmly surveying the
fallen estate of the less stable instruments.
“I am not enjoying myself a bit,” said Courtesy, as she disentangled a
violin from her hair, and strove to dislodge the ’celloist from his
position on her lap. The gardener disliked agreeing with any one, but he
seemed by no means anxious to continue dancing. The orchestra also
seemed a little loth to risk its dignity again at once, and even
Theresa, though still plastered with a pink smile, was retiring on the
arm of her subaltern to a twilit deck-chair.