If you had three weeks’ holiday in the year, three whole weeks in which
to amuse yourself as you liked, how would you spend it? Algy Traill went
to Brighton in August; you should have seen him on the pier. The Fossett
Brothers adorned Weymouth, the Naples of England. They did good, if
slightly obvious, work on the esplanade in fairly white flannels. This
during the day; eight-thirty in the evening found them in the Alexandra
Gardens—dressed. It is doubtful if the Weymouth boarding-house would
have stood it at dinner, so they went up directly afterwards and
changed. Mr. Ransom spent August at Folkestone, where he was understood
to have a doubtful wife. She was really his widowed mother. You would
never have suspected him of a mother, but there she was in Folkestone,
thinking of him always, and only living for the next August. It was she
who knitted him the M.C.C. tie; he had noticed the colours in a
Piccadilly window.
Miss Gertie went to Cliftonville—not Margate.
And where did George go? The conversation at dinner that evening would
have given us a clue; or perhaps it wouldn’t.
“So you’re off to-morrow,” Mrs. Morrison had said. “Well, I’m sure I
hope you’ll have a nice time. A little sea air will do you good.”
“Where are you going, Crosby?” asked Ransom, with the air of a man who
means to know.
George looked uncomfortable.
“I’m not quite sure,” he said awkwardly. “I’m going a sort of
walking-tour, you know; stopping at inns and things. I expect it—er—will
depend a bit, you know.”
“Well, if you _should_ happen to stop at Sandringham,” said Algy, “give
them all my love, old man, won’t you?”
“Then you won’t have your letters sent on?” asked Mrs. Morrison.
“Oh no, thanks. I don’t suppose I shall have any, anyhow.”
“If you going on a walking-tour,” said Owen-Jones, “why don’t you try
the Welsh mountains?”
“I always wonder you don’t run across to Paris,” said the dome-shaped
gentleman suddenly. “It only takes——” He knew all the facts, and was
prepared to give them, but Algy interrupted him with a knowing whistle.
“Paris, George, aha! Place me among the demoiselles, what ho! I don’t
think. Naughty boy!”
Crosby’s first impulse (he had had it before) was to throw his glass of
beer at Algy’s face. The impulse died down, and his resolve hardened to
write about the Finsbury Park boarding-house at once. He had made that
resolution before, too. Then his heart jumped as he remembered that he
was going away on the morrow. He forgot Traill and Finsbury Park, and
went off into his dreams. The other boarders discussed walking-tours and
holiday resorts with animation.
Gertie Morrison was silent. She was often silent when Crosby was there,
and always when Crosby’s affairs were being discussed. She knew he hated
her, and she hated him for it. I don’t think she knew why he hated her.
It was because she lowered his opinion of women.
He had known very few women in his life, and he dreamed dreams about
them. They were wonderful creatures, a little higher than the angels,
and beauty and mystery and holiness hung over them. Some day he would
meet the long-desired one, and (miracle) she would love him, and they
would live happy ever afterwards at—— He wondered sometimes whether an
angel _would_ live happy ever afterwards at Bedford Park. Bedford Park
seemed to strip the mystery and the holiness and the wonder from his
dream. And yet he had seen just the silly little house at Bedford Park
that would suit them; and even angels, if they come to earth, must live
somewhere. She would walk to the gate every morning, and wave him
good-bye from under the flowering laburnum—for I need not say that it
was always spring in his dream. That was why he had his holiday in
April, for it must be spring when he found her, and he would only find
her in the country.... Another reason was that in August Miss Morrison
went to Cliftonville (not Margate), and so he had a fortnight in Muswell
Hill without Miss Morrison.
For it was difficult to believe in the dreams when Gertie Morrison was
daily before his eyes. There was a sort of hard prettiness there, which
might have been beauty, but where were the mystery and the wonder and
the holiness? None of that about the Gertie who was treated so
familiarly by the Fossetts and the Traills and their kind, and answered
them back so smartly. “You can’t get any change out of Gertie,” Traill
often said on these occasions. Almost Crosby wished you could. He would
have had her awkward, bewildered, indignant, overcome with shame; it
distressed him that she was so lamentably well-equipped for the battle.
At first he pitied her, then he hated her. She was betraying her sex.
What he really meant was that she was trying to topple over the
beautiful image he had built.
I know what you are going to say. What about the girl at the A B C shop
who spilt his coffee over his poached egg every day at one thirty-five
precisely? Hadn’t she given his image a little push too? I think not. He
hardly saw her as a woman at all. She was a worker, like himself;
sexless. In the evenings perhaps she became a woman ... wonderful,
mysterious, holy ... I don’t know; at any rate he didn’t see her then.
But Miss Morrison he saw at home; she was pretty and graceful and
feminine; she might have been, not _the_ woman—that would have been
presumption on his part—but a woman ... and then she went and called
Algy Traill “a silly boy,” and smacked him playfully with a teaspoon!
Traill, the cad-about-town, the ogler of women! No wonder the image
rocked.
[Illustration: “Let’s sit down,” he said. “I thought you always went to
Mar—to Cliftonville for your holiday?” (page 27).]
Well, he would be away from the Traills and the Morrisons and the
Fossetts for three weeks. It was April, the best month of the year. He
was right in saying that he was not quite sure where he was going, but
he could have told Mrs. Morrison the direction. He would start down the
line with his knapsack and his well-filled kit-bag. By-and-by he would
get out—the name of the station might attract him, or the primroses on
the banks—leave his bag, and, knapsack on shoulder, follow the road.
Sooner or later he would come to a village; he would find an inn that
could put him up; on the morrow the landlord could drive in for his
bag.... And then three weeks in which to search for the woman.