_A Virtuous Adventure_
Nobody who has followed this narrative with any intelligence
can suppose that Mr. Trimblerigg was a man who did not have his
temptations. What happened when he immersed Davidina in the stream
without intending it, what happened when he did not immerse himself in
the bath on a cold morning, has been faithfully told. But what he did
to Davidina had hurt him far more than what he did to himself. It had
hurt him because Davidina had found him out, and then had not allowed
him to explain.
He liked explaining. Explaining always made him feel right again with
his own conscience. Even the look of understanding which he exchanged
with himself in the glass, after some involuntary reversion to type,
was sufficient as a rule to restore him to his own good opinion. To
explain things, therefore, which generally meant to explain them away,
was spiritual meat and drink to him.
But there were two people in the world to whom he very seldom explained
anything: his wife, the quiet Caroline, who understood so little that
it was not worth while; and his sister Davidina who understood so much
that it was dangerous.
And between these two Guardian angels--who should have been his
confidantes, but were not--he led a life of temptations. Not gross, or
serious in kind, or extreme in degree, but temptations none the less,
and all having their root in a very laudable trait of his character,
his abounding love of adventure.
All his life Mr. Trimblerigg had been respectable: when he married he
had no bachelor episodes to conceal from his wife, except perhaps that
sixpenny sale of a kiss to Lizzie Seebohm, of which he had ceased to
be proud, and his temporary infatuation for Isabel Sparling which had
afterwards so embarrassed him. And this rectitude of conduct was not
for lack of opportunity or inclination; for women attracted him and
he attracted them. Puritan training and Puritan ancestry had no doubt
something to do with it: the bath-habit which he had failed in his
youth to acquire materially, he had acquired spiritually.
And so also with other things. He had never drunk wine or spirits; only
once or twice a glass of beer, and that not for its potency or taste,
but because it had froth on the top, and he liked dipping his lips into
it. Surreptitiously, for the mere pleasure of concealment and doing it
with boys older than himself, he had smoked a pipe a few times before
becoming an adherent of True Belief, and he had not, upon escaping from
the confinement of its doctrine, relinquished the abstention which had
become a habit. Nor had he ever betted; though now, with a little money
to turn round in, he had begun to speculate; but that was different.
Finally he had never travelled.
In all these ways he, to whom change and adventure instinctively
appealed, had been cut off from adventure; and adventure--even when it
could not be called wrong--tempted him more than most people. To see
himself in a tight place, and get out of it, meant self-realization; to
find his way into unaccustomed circumstances, and fit them perfectly,
was intellectual and moral training of a stimulating kind. During his
days at College in the annual students’ rag on the Fifth of November,
a plot had been formed by the anti-feminists to make a Guy Fawkes of
him dressed as a woman preacher. And he had escaped by stealing a
policeman’s helmet, truncheon, and overcoat, which were all much too
large for him, and had then helped to batter the heads of the turbulent
crowd which was out seeking for him and breaking the windows of the
lodging-house where he was supposed to be.
That was a memory which he very much enjoyed: he had then drawn blood
for the first time and heard a skull crack under his inexpert handling
of the truncheon which a trained policeman only employs in the way of
kindness. His man had gone to hospital. And that was at a time, too,
when Mr. Trimblerigg considered himself a pacifist.
If the truth must be known he had more thoroughly enjoyed that brief
hour of a violent laying-on of hands than the subsequent day of his
ordination for which all the rest was a preparation. It had been more
of an adventure.
And there you have the key to the temptations of Mr. Trimblerigg.
Neither then, nor subsequently did he ever wish to do any man wrong;
but he did wish to experiment. And whether it was the thickness of
a fellow-student’s skull, or the rise and fall of a market, or the
gullibility of the common herd, or the pious employment of superstition
for high and noble ends, or his own susceptibility to a woman’s charm,
or hers the other way about--he never had any other aim or object,
or desire, except to experiment so that he might get to know and
manipulate human nature better, including his own. Life itself was for
him the great experiment.
And it so happened that at the very centre of his life was Caroline;
and Caroline was dull.
Therefore their marital relations were imperfect.
It struck him one day that Caroline would be more interesting if he
could make her jealous. Without giving her serious cause, he tried,
and failed. But, in the process of his experiment, he engaged the
affections of the instrument he employed much more than he intended.
It was a great nuisance. He had done everything to make such a
_dénouement_ unlikely; had chosen her indeed rather with a view to the
stupidity of Caroline than to the attraction he found in her. She was
rich, married, considerably older than himself, had in fact a grown-up
daughter and a husband who was then in the process of earning a title
for her and himself, together with a handsome retiring pension, in the
Indian Civil Service. She also had a motor-car which she could drive
independently of chauffeurs.
When he found that the affair had become serious he began avoiding her;
and being, as a pedestrian, the more agile of the two he might have
done it; but he could not avoid the motor-car. And so one day, having
gone to a distant town to preach and to stay the night, he found the
lady and the motor-car awaiting him at the chapel door, with an offer
to motor him back to town all in the day.
In that there seemed a hazardous sort of safety; tender passages while
on a high road and going at high speed, were compatible with virtue;
there was also a spice of adventure in it; a half-engagement that they
should meet abroad under platonic but unencumbered conditions, must now
probably either be renewed or broken; to renew it would, he thought, be
the safest way of temporizing with a situation which must end. Caroline
had no capacity for jealousy, and the affair was becoming ridiculous.
And so getting into the car, with four hours of daylight left, and a
hundred and fifty miles to go, Mr. Trimblerigg accommodated himself
to the situation that was soon to end, and renewed with a warm
asseveration of feelings that could not change.
They were still over fifty miles from their destination, and the
darkness of night had settled, when the spice of adventure increased
for Mr. Trimblerigg in a sudden shock. The car had irremediably and
unaccountably broken down in a way which its owner announced would
take hours to repair. They found themselves upon the outskirts of
a village to which the requirements of motorists had added a small
hotel; and before Mr. Trimblerigg could make up his own mind what to
do, his companion had taken command of the situation and made retreat
impossible, by entering in the visitors’ book a Mr. and Mrs. Somebody:
names not their own.
She had done this, while leaving him in charge of the car. They were
booked, he found, to stay for the night; and the accommodation was as
their names indicated.
Mr. Trimblerigg was not prepared to have a scene; but neither was he to
be coerced from the ways of virtue. If he ever left them it would be in
his own time and in his own way. And so presently, when they had dined
together very pleasantly, and when Mr. Trimblerigg, in order to restore
his sense of adventure, had experimented by taking wine, he simply
stepped out casually into the darkness of the night and did not return.
His suit-case he left as a prey to his lady of the situation now ended;
and walking to the nearest station, five miles away, waited there
rather miserably for a midnight train which brought him back in the
small hours to the virtuous side of his astonished Caroline.
He had a good deal to explain, including the absence of his suit-case;
which forced him to say things which were not all of them true. And
when next day the suit-case arrived ‘forwarded by request,’ addressed
on an hotel label to the name left in the visitors’ book, there
was a good deal more to explain; and for the first time Caroline
became jealous. But it did not make her more interesting; it took
the depressing form of a tearful resignation to the inevitable. She
supposed that he had become tired of her, which was true; she added,
less truthfully, that it was what she had always foreseen would happen,
when as a matter of fact her mind had never been sufficiently awake to
foresee anything so undomestic as suspicious circumstances pointing
toward divorce.
Being simple, she spent the rest of the day trimming herself a new
hat; at 6 p.m. she fortified herself in maternity by giving the three
children a hot bath before bed-time; and then, as it was the servant’s
evening out, she descended to the kitchen and made pancakes for Mr.
Trimblerigg’s supper; and sat to watch him eat them with her hair
unbecomingly tied up in a large pink bow.
These mild symptoms of jealousy expending itself in domestic steam,
ought to have interested him but did not. He merely recognized and
accepted the fact that Caroline’s jealousy was as unimportant as had
been her previous lack of it. Perhaps his mind was too preoccupied to
give it all the attention it deserved.
He was amazed by the return of the suit-case under a name not of his
own choosing; and yet somehow it raised the lady in his respect. For he
had in him a touch of the sportsman; and on being struck so shrewd a
blow, was quick to recognize that in going out into the night without
warning he had left behind him a situation difficult for the lady
to explain. He wondered how she had explained it, and was a little
fretted because he could not quite make things fit. All he saw clearly
was that the open forwarding of the suit-case by rail to name and
address, gave to it an air of _bona fide_ which might have served to
allay suspicion. But unless it was to avenge herself why had she given
the right address? Was it, he wondered, an unusual combination of
vindictiveness with plain horse common sense; a straight one in the eye
for him, and a bit of smart dodging for herself? If so, she was more
interesting than he had thought: that was just the sort of thing that
Isabel Sparling would have done. In that direction he was beginning to
have definite regrets.
So, after the pancakes, he sat and thought, while his wife, a mellow
picture of domesticity, bent under the lamplight darning his socks.
And then the evening post came and a letter, in a handwriting which he
knew and had hoped never to see again. It was very brief.
‘Whatever happened?’ it ran. ‘Did you get your suit-case?’
That beat him altogether; it interested, it bewildered him. His spirit
of adventure was suddenly revived; because it would be difficult, he
felt that he must go and explain--explain that he had suddenly seen
somebody at the hotel whom he recognized, and who would recognize
him, and that the only way of safety for both was instant flight. And
so, not because he loved her any more, or wished for a renewal of the
entanglement, but because he loved explaining himself out of difficult
situations, he felt that on the morrow or the day after, he would go
and see her again.
And though this particular episode here finds no further chronicle,
since thereafter it became in kind only one of many--suffice it to say
that, on the morrow, he did.
Just before bed-time, folding up her work, his wife, who had been
thinking her own thoughts quite quietly, looked across at him and said:
‘If you died before me, Jonathan, should you like me to wear widow’s
weeds until I married again?’
Mr. Trimblerigg was startled almost out of his skin. Had it come from
a woman of different character he would have found it a tremendous
utterance. But in another moment he saw that this was only Caroline,
Caroline composedly thinking aloud where other people did not.
‘Now that,’ replied Mr. Trimblerigg, ‘is a very interesting question.
But it is one which your second husband not I had better decide for
you.’
Caroline saw that she was being laughed at. But she had already
forgiven him. She kissed him, and went up to bed.
As the door closed behind her, Mr. Trimblerigg uttered a half-conscious
ejaculation. ‘O, God!’ he cried, ‘how dull, how dull you are!’
This personal remark, though it might seem otherwise, was really
addressed to his wife.