Everything she did was transmuted into something wonderful by that halo
of hers.
“I’ll come to-day, if I may,” said the gardener, who had never mastered
the art of social diffidence. “You’d better have me to-day, for I hope I
shan’t be respectable to-morrow.”
Courtesy did not want him to-day. In her code there was only one
programme for the first day in a strange land. It was made up of a visit
to the principal church, the principal shop, the principal public
gardens, and to a few “old-world relics of the past.” It did not include
ordinary five-o’clock tea with a familiar figure. But, on the other
hand, her invincible conventionality made it impossible for her to evade
the gardener’s suggestion. Courtesy was content to suffer for her
convictions. At any rate, you will notice that Mrs. Rust was not
consulted.
“You may come,” Courtesy said. “At five. We are due back from the
cathedral at a quarter to.”
Probably the reason why Mrs. Rust submitted to Courtesy’s tyranny from
the first was that no other woman in the world would have done so.
The land reeled under the gardener’s feet as he arrived. The only
comfort in parting with the sea after a long intimacy is that for the
first day or two the land follows the example of its sister element. The
gardener found more difficulty in walking straight along Union High
Street than he had experienced along the deck of the _Caribbeania_.
The morning was yet very young when he put his little luggage down at
the bamboo-tree arch of a house that proclaimed itself ready to receive
boarders at moderate terms. He relied much on impulse, and the little
house, which was lightly built on its own first story, so to speak,
beckoned to him. But only in theory, for when he mounted the flight of
wooden steps, and, through the open door, saw the dirty living-room,
seething with gaudy trifles, he knew that in practice it was better
suited to his means than to his mind.
However, he had rung the bell. One has to pay penalties for acting on
impulse. A woman with black wire hair, a face the colour of varnished
deal, and a pale pink dressing-gown, appeared. Luckily she transpired to
be the hostess before the gardener had voiced the fact that he mistook
her for a drunken housemaid.
“I want a room here,” began the gardener, who had never wanted anything
less in his life. But the three pounds lay very light in his pocket.
“We can give you one,” said the lady, and took his portmanteau. She
could have given him several, but not one worth having. She conducted
him through one or two doors that led from the living-room. Each showed
a less attractive bedroom than the one before, but the cheapest was
barely within the range of prudence, as far as the gardener’s pocket was
concerned. In a leaden voice, proceeding from a heart of lead, he
concluded a bargain for the temporary possession of the least inviting.
And when it was done, and the portmanteau deposited drearily in the
middle of a dirty linoleum floor, he discovered that time had been
standing still, and that it was hardly nearer five o’clock than before.
It was the first time he had realised the four thousand miles that lay
between him and the kindly grey pavements of Penny Street. He remembered
the look of the London lamps reflected in the slaty mirrors of London
streets ... the smile of the ridiculous little griffin who sits on a
pedestal at the top of Fleet Street, playing the ’cello with his
shield ... the shrugging shoulders of St. Paul’s on tiptoe on the peak
of Ludgate Hill ... the dead leaves blowing down the Broad Walk, in the
rain....
There is no pose that saves you from that awful longing for the things
that are no longer yours, and which you hated while you possessed.
“I said I was enough for myself. And I am not,” said the gardener, and
hid his face in the mosquito net.
Strange things in barbaric colours made the garden outside a whirlpool.
Sometimes these things say to you: “You are a very long way from home”;
and you exult, and think This is Life. But sometimes they say again:
“You are a very long way from home”; and you cry out, and think This is
Worse than Death.
Now there are moral drawbacks about the posing habit. But there are also
advantages, though possibly none deserved. For after three minutes of
despair the gardener straightened himself, blinked, and began putting
his spare shirt into a drawer that would not shut. He was posing as One
Who was Seeing Life, and who was Making the Best of it. The vision that
inspired this brave pose was the ghost of a pair of small haggard eyes,
set in a short pointed face, eyes that cried easily and never
surrendered. A thin unbeautiful ghost with clenched fists, and in the
air, the ghost of a low and militant voice.
“I am not enough,” the gardener admitted. “But together, we are enough.”
He whistled a comic song tentatively. The Englishman never whistles or
sings to suit his feelings. He dies to the tune of “Tipperary,” or goes
to his wedding humming the “Dead March in Saul.”
There was no more life to be seen in that hot little room, even by one
fixed in an optimistic pose. He emerged into the sitting-room, and
through an opposite and open door he could see the pink dressing-gown,
containing his landlady, heaving sleepily under a mosquito net. One of
her bare feet was drooping under the net. At this he had to swallow down
London again violently, and remember that he was Seeing Life, and that
he was Luckier than Most.
Did you know that the surest way of ensuring luck is to be sure that you
are lucky?
“Now I will find my suffragette,” he said, standing between the bamboos
at the gate. And he expelled an entering misgiving that he was perhaps
presuming on his luck.
It was curiously cool in the shade of the high cactus hedge that ran
along one side of the way. A fresh breeze, like the unbidden guest at
the wedding, conscious that it was not attired in character, crept
guiltily in from the sea. The sun, which would have disclaimed even
distant relationship with the cool copper halfpenny that inhabits
English skies, fretted out the black shadows across and across the white
street. The gardener thought painfully of many glasses of cold water
that he had criminally wasted in England. He stiffened his long upper
lip, and tried to look for new worlds instead of remembering the old.
He went into the Botanical Gardens, and sat on a seat opposite the mad
orchids. I think the Almighty was a little tired of His excellent system
by the time He came to the orchids, so He allowed them to fashion
themselves. For they are contrived, I think, and not spontaneously
created like the rest.
On the other end of the seat were two children, so blessedly English
that for a moment the gardener smelt Kensington Gardens. The girl wore
very little between her soft neck and her long brown arms and legs,
except a white frill or two, and a passion flower in her sash. The boy,
more modest, was encased in a white sailor suit. Both were finished off
at the feet with sandals.
Hardly had the gardener sat down when he was regretfully aware that he
had sat by mistake on a pirate-ship in mid-ocean. The two commanders
looked coldly at him from their end of the treasure-laden deck, and
there was an awkward silence which somehow left the impression that much
exciting talk had immediately preceded it on that vessel.
“I beg your pardon,” said the gardener. “I forgot to tell you that I am
the prisoner you seized when you captured your last prize. There was a
desperate resistance, but in spite of heavy odds, you overcame me.”
The boy, because he was a boy, looked for a second towards his
mahogany-coloured Nana, who was staring an orchid out of countenance
farther up the path. The girl, because she was a girl, looked neither
right nor left, but straight at the gardener, and said: “All right then.
But you mustn’t let your feet dangle into the sea. And you must be very
frightened.”
The gardener restrained his feet, and became so frightened that the
whole vessel shook. The boy continued to look doubtful, until his sister
reminded him in a hoarse whisper: “It’s all right, Aitch, we were
wanting somebody to walk the plank.”
In providing a willing villain, the gardener was supplying a long-felt
want in pirate-ships. So thoroughly did he do his duty that when he was
finally obliged as a matter of convention to walk the walking-stick
blindfolded, and die a miserable death by drowning in the gravel-path,
the pirate-ship seemed to have lost its point.
“Let’s betend,” said the lady-pirate, “that Aitch and me are fairies,
and we touch you with our wand and you turn into a speckled pony.”
“Greatscod, no,” said Aitch; for there are limits to what a fellow of
seven can betend in company. “Don’t let’s have any fairying, my good
Zed. Let’s betend we’re just Aitch and Zed, and we’ll show the prisoner
the Secret Tree.”
So they set off, and the Nana, who might as well have been a
Nanning-machine for all the individuality she put into her work, trotted
behind them.
The Secret Tree was one of those secrets that remain inviolate because
it occurs to nobody to lay them bare. It was an everyday little palm
tree, exquisitely bandaged by Nature in cocoanut matting; it was very
fairy-like, and when you looked up at its fronds in their infinite
intersections against the sky, you saw a thrill, like the thrill you see
on a cornfield curtseying in the wind, or in the light moving across
watered silk. In one of the folds of the palm tree’s garment a White
Pawn, belonging to Aitch, had made his home. He lived there for days at
a time—the gardener was told with bated breath—and the park-keeper never
knew he was there. At night he saw the fireflies light their lamps, and
heard the swift slither of the fearful scorpion; once he had reported an
adventure with a centipede three times his own size. That pawn was the
epitome of People Who Stay Up Late At Night, and Are Not Afraid of the
Dark. A super-grown-up.
On their way to the garden gate, each child held a hand of the gardener,
and the automatic Nana walked behind. As they came out into the main
street, the gardener thought that the houses looked like skulls—so white
they were, and so soulless, and their windows so black and empty.
“Greatscod,” said Aitch, “what is happening to the church steeple?”
For it was reeling in front of them, to the tune of a paralysing open
roar from underground.
Behind them the automaton blossomed madly into life, Nana fled shrieking
back into the garden.
Those two things happened, one by one, like sparks struck out of a
flaming experience. Then everything happened at once, and yet lasted a
lifetime. There seemed not a second to spare, and yet nothing to be
done.
The gardener felt unspeakably terrified, his mother earth shot away from
under him, truth was proved false. He discovered that he had seized
Aitch and Zed, one under each arm; and later on—his memory having
vaulted the blank—he found that he was lying on them in the gutter, and
that Aitch was yapping like a dog. Zed was crying, “Mother, Mother.” And
the gardener, with a quick vision of some one watering a cool English
herbaceous border, also said, “Mother, Mother.”
After a while a green beetle ran past his eye, and he recalled the
moment, and raised himself upon his hands and knees. A fire of pain
burnt him suddenly, and he turned his head and saw a pyre of twisted
iron posts heaped upon his legs.
The air was thick with strange sounds, muffled as if from a gramophone.
Some one quite near, but unseen, was shouting, “Oh, Oh,” as regularly as
a clock’s chime. There was a rending wheeze behind them, and the
gardener looked round in time to see a palm tree sink with dignity into
a trench that had been gashed at its feet. But that might have been a
dream.
He felt absolutely sick with horror. His head seemed as though it were
all at once too big for his skin. His whole being throbbed terribly in a
sort of echo of the three throbs that had laid life by the heels.
Yock—Yollock—Yollock. A pounce, and then two shakes, like a terrier
dealing with a rat. Why had one ever trusted oneself to such a risky
crumb of creation as this world? The gardener lost himself in
littleness. And presently found that he had insinuated himself into a
sitting position, and was feeling very sick indeed.
“That was an earthquake,” remarked Zed, with the truly feminine trick of
jumping to foregone conclusions. And she burst into tears, wailing
still, “Mother, Mother.”
“It is funny we should both have thought of her,” observed the gardener,
forgetting that there was room for more than one mother in this tiny
world. His eyes were fixed on a thin and fearful stream of blood that
was issuing from between two bricks in the mass of miscellany that had
once been a house. “Blood—from a skull?” he thought, and fainted.
For centuries his mind skirted round some enormous joke. It was so big
that he could not see its point, and then again it was so little that he
lost it. At any rate it was round, and turned with a jovial hum.
Later on he was aware of the solution of a problem which he felt had
been troubling him all his life. What colour was the face of a nigger
pale with fright? It was several colours, chiefly the shade of a wooden
horse he had once loved, but mottled. But the whites of the eyes were
more blue than white, they shone like electric light. With an effort he
fitted the various parts of his mind together.
“Hullo, constable,” he said in a voice he could not easily control.
“This is a pretty business, isn’t it?” And he tried to rise, and to
whistle a bar or two, in an effort to assume the pose of the hero who
trifles in the face of death. But he could not rise. He was pinned to
the pavement by a leg that seemed somehow to have lost its identity.
It is not in the least romantic to be hurt. There is something curiously
dirty in the feeling of one’s own pain, and in the sight of one’s own
blood, though wounds in others are rather dramatic.
Now Courtesy was a person who, without ever trying to be sensational,
was often unexpected by mistake. Coincidence seemed to haunt her. Out of
the hundred streets that lay shattered in Union Town that afternoon, she
chose the one in which the gardener lay, and, accompanied by the priest,
she bore down upon that unheroic hero, laden with brandy and bandages.
The gardener saw her large face, frank as a sunflower, between him and
the yellow sky.
The priest was quite obviously a saviour. You could see in his eye that
he was succouring the wounded. You could hear in his voice as he
addressed the terrified hotel porters who followed him that he was busy
rising nobly to an emergency.
“Why, gardener,” said Courtesy, in the tones of one greeting a friend at
a garden party. “You here? I was wondering what had become of you. Now
what’s the matter with you?”
She poured him out some brandy, as though it were the ordinary thing for
a lady to offer to a friend in the street. And the gardener’s world
regained its feet, he wondered why he had been so frightened.
“Poor little mites,” said Courtesy to Aitch and Zed. “They won’t forget
this in a hurry, will they?”
There is something very comforting in the utterly banal. That is why the
instinct is so strong in good women to make you a cup of tea, and poke
the fire, when you are crossed in love.
“But if she had been the suffragette ...” thought the gardener. He knew
quite well that the thing would not have been so well done, had it been
the suffragette. He was fully aware that the operation of having his leg
put into improvised splints, and of being lifted upon a door, would have
been much more painful, had it been accomplished by the little nervous
hands of the suffragette, instead of the large excellent hands of
Courtesy.
It is discouraging to those of us who have spent much money on becoming
fully efficient in first aid and hygiene and practical economy and all
the luxuries of the modern female intellect, to find how perfect
imperfection can seem.
“Thank you—you little darling,” said the gardener with his eyes shut,
when, after a few spasms of red pain, he was safe upon the door.
White-clad hotel porters stood like tombstones at his head and feet.
“Lor’ bless you,” said Courtesy. “Take him to the St. Maurice, porter.
It’s the only place left more or less standing, I should think.”
“It is not,” said the priest. “Excuse me, Miss Briggs, there are
thousands in this stricken town in need of our help, and I should prefer
that only the gentler and worthier of the sufferers should come under
that roof. There are many excellent resting-places where our friend here
would be far more suitably placed. You ought to know his character by
now, and you must think of your own good name.”
“Rot,” said Courtesy. “What do his morals matter when he’s broken his
leg?”
“Remember you are also succouring these innocent children,” persisted
the priest. “Would you have them under the same roof?”
“Rot,” repeated Courtesy. “The roof’ll be all right.”
“Dose little children ...” said the policeman suddenly. “He covahed dem
when dat house was fallin’. Verree brave gentleman. I chahnced to be
runnin’ by....”
“Of course he did,” said Courtesy. “The St. Maurice, porter.” And
seizing Aitch and Zed each by a hand, she started the procession.
The High Street looked as if one side of it had charged the other with
equally disastrous results to both. At different points in it, fire and
heavy smoke were animating the scene. Distracted men and women panted
and moaned and tore at the wreckage with bleeding hands. A little crying
crowd was collected round a woman who lay nailed to the ground by a
mountain of bricks, with her face fixed in a glare of terrible surprise.
By the cathedral steps the dead lay in a row, shoulder to shoulder, with
the horrid uniformity of sprats upon a plate. Courtesy lifted up Zed and
called Aitch’s attention to the healthier distress of a little dog,
which ran around looking for its past in the extraordinary mazes of the
present.
The gardener, swinging along painfully upon his door, opened his eyes
and saw the fires. To his surprise he recognised the house which could
boast the highest flames. Its wall had fallen to disclose the shattered
remains of the rooms in which the gardener had lately wrestled with
despair. The bamboos and the gorgeous garden watched unmoved the pillar
of fire that danced in their midst. There was no sign of the wire-haired
woman.
But only one thought came to the gardener’s mind on the subject. “Why
she will see that. It is a beacon from me to her.”
As a matter of fact she did not.
A pretty woman, crying in a curious laughing voice, ran into Courtesy’s
arms. “My little babies ...” she quavered. “What a catastrophe. I don’t
know where my husband is. There is a grand piano on my bed.”
“This is my mother,” said Aitch.
“Come along to the St. Maurice,” said Courtesy. “That’s where I am
taking your babies to. Our piano there is still in its proper place.”
So they all followed the gardener.
“Somebody must go and find a doctor,” said Courtesy at the door of the
St. Maurice. She looked suggestively at the priest.
But he replied, “I wash my hands of the matter, Miss Briggs. I consider
this to be a judgment on that young man.”
“A judgment?” wept the mother of Aitch and Zed. “Why, what has he done?”
“He saved the lives of your babies,” replied Courtesy. “And anyway, a
judgment needs a surgeon just as much as a simple fracture.”
“Yerce, yerce, only don’t ask me to help,” said the priest. “I prefer to
succour those deserving of help.” And he went out into the street again.
He seemed wedded to the word succour. It is a pose word, and fitted him
exactly. Nothing but an earthquake could have made this worm turn. But
the effect of the disaster on the priest was an obstinate certainty that
there was a Jonah in the case, and that, as heaven was never to blame,
the wicked were entirely responsible.
“Oh, Lor’,” said Courtesy. “I’ll have to go for a surgeon myself.”
“I’ll go with you,” cried the mother of Aitch and Zed, whose name, for
the sake of brevity, was Mrs. Tring. “I don’t know what has become of my
Dally” (who was her husband).
“Somebody must sit with the gardener,” said Courtesy, when she came back
from a successful search for an intact bed, into which, with the help of
a housemaid, she had inserted the gardener.
“I will sit with him,” said the harsh voice of Mrs. Rust, as she rose
from a seat where she had been sitting with an enormous paper bag held
in a rigid hand. “I refuse to run about the streets with brandy. All the
old cats are doing that.”
“Why, Mrs. Rust,” observed Courtesy, whose conventionality was not quite
so striking after an earthquake as it had been upon the comparatively
stable Atlantic. “I had clean forgotten that you existed.”
“Good,” said Mrs. Rust. “I was buying mangoes when the incident
occurred. Perhaps the gardener would like a mango.”
“Perhaps he would. I am so glad to see that you don’t take the same view
about the gardener as the——”
“I never take the same view,” barked Mrs. Rust. “Show me the boy’s
room.”
So the gardener saw that poisonous hair advance along a shaft of
sunlight that intruded through the broken shutter.
“Your jug and basin are broken,” said Mrs. Rust. “Disgraceful.”
“Oh, there are several things broken in this town,” he said feverishly.
“Windows and necks and a heart or two.”
Mrs. Rust sat deliberately on a chair and burst into tears.
“I was buying mangoes,” she sobbed stormily, “from a black man with
bleached hair. And the whole of a shop-front fell out on him. One brick
hit my toe. I looked at the man through a sort of cage of fallen things.
It was as if—one had trodden on red currants.”
“What did you do?” panted the gardener. “How fine to live in a world
where things happen.”
“I ran away,” said Mrs. Rust shakily. “I didn’t pay for the mangoes.”
“I would rather have had this happen,” said the gardener after a pause,
“and have broken my leg, than have had an ordinary day to meet me on
Trinity Island.”
After another pause, he added: “But I have lost the suffragette. And
that is another matter.”
“Was she killed?” asked Mrs. Rust, steeling herself against the
commonplace duty of condolence.
“Certainly not,” replied the gardener. “She is a militant suffragette.”
“Good,” said Mrs. Rust.
“How good the world is,” said the gardener, “to provide such excellent
material. The sea, and the earthquake, and a fighting woman to love.
Just think—an earthquake—on my first day. I am a man of luck.”
“You have broken your leg,” Mrs. Rust informed him.
“I have,” admitted the gardener rather fretfully. “But then everything
has its price.”
“A good many other people have come off much worse,” said Mrs. Rust.
“I’m not complaining, mind, but any other woman would say you were
disgracefully selfish. A lot of people are dead, and a lot of other
people’s people are dead....”
“The longer I live ...” said the gardener, from the summit of his
twenty-three years, “the surer I am that we make a fuss which is almost
funny over death. We run after it all over the world, and then we
grumble at it when it catches us up from behind. It’s an adventure, of
course, but then—so is—shaving every morning. Compare death with—love,
for instance.”
He felt ashamed of this after he had said it, and tried to cover it with
a little laugh which shook him, and changed into a yelp. After breathing
hard for a little while he went on.
“We who have survived this ordeal have gained much more than we risked.
I know that anything is worth a risk, the risk in itself is the gain,
and to risk everything for nothing is a fine thing. Why otherwise do we
climb Alps, or hunt the South Pole? In theory, I would run in front of
an express train to save a mou. In theory I don’t mind what I pay for
danger. That’s why I love the suffragette; she would risk her life for a
little vote, and her honour for a bleak thing like independence.”
“Do you love the suffragette?” asked Mrs. Rust, who was at heart a
woman, although she believed herself to be a neutral intelligence.
“I do, I do,” cried the gardener, suddenly and gloriously losing his
pose of One Who Evolves a New Scale of Values—in other words, the pose
of a Paradox. But his emotion awoke his nerves, and for a while,
although the suffragette obsessed his imagination, pain obsessed the
rest of the universe.