THE COTTAGE BY THE SEA
Toby was sitting on the edge of an old weather-beaten breakwater, now
running out lop-sidedly and burying its nose in the sand, some three
miles north of Stanborough-on-Sea, making an exceedingly public toilet
after his swim.
His mother, old Lady Conybeare, had a charming house down here, which
had, so to speak, risen from the ranks; in other words, it had
originally been two cottages, and was now a sort of rustic palace. Her
husband had been a man of extraordinary good taste, and both his idea
and execution of this transformation was on the high-water mark of
felicity. Brick with rough-cast was the delectable manner of it, and the
old cottage chambers had been run one into another like the amalgamation
of separate drops of quicksilver, to produce irregular-shaped rooms with
fireplaces in odd corners. He had built out a wing on one side, a block
on another, a dining-room on a third; the front-door was reached through
a cloister open to the sea, and supported on brick pillars; and big
green Spanish oil-jars and Venetian well-tops lined the terraced walk.
Opposite the front-door, on the other side of the carriage sweep, was a
monastic-looking, three-sided courtyard, bounded by low-arched
cloisters, and an Italian tower, square and tapering towards the top,
bisected the middle side. Close abutting on this was a charming huddled
group of red roofs, with beaten ironwork in the windows, suggestive of
the refectory of this seaside monastery. In reality it comprised a
laundry, a bakehouse, and the dynamos which supplied the electric light.
For there was in reality nothing unpleasantly monastic about the place;
the cloisters were admirable shelters from sun or wind, and were heavily
cushioned; the bell in the tower rang folk not to prime, but to dinner;
and the peas were not put in visitors' boots, but boiled and put in
dishes. The house, in fact, was as habitable as it was picturesque, a
high degree of merit; it was no penance at all to stay there; the
electric light seemed to brighten automatically as dusk fell, even as
the moon and stars begin to shine without visible lamplighter in the
high-roofed hall of heaven; and there were about as many bathrooms, with
hot and cold water, as there were bedrooms.
Toby was putting on his socks very leisurely; he had been down for a dip
in the sea before lunch, and having lit the post-ablutive cigarette,
sweetest of all that burn, he threw his towel round his neck, took his
coat on his arm, and walked slowly up the steep sandy pathway to the top
of the fifty-foot cliff on which the house and garden stood. Several old
fishermen were standing about at the top in nautical attitudes, hitching
their trousers, folding their arms, and scanning the horizon like the
chorus in light opera. One had a lately-taken haul, and Toby inspected
his wares with much interest. There were lobsters in blue mail--angry
and irritable, which glanced sideways at one like vicious horses looking
for a good opening to kick--feebly-flapping soles, anæmic whiting, a
few rainbow mackerel, and, oh, heavens! crabs.
Now, temptation and crab were the two things in the world which Toby
found it idle to attempt to resist, and he ordered that the biggest and
best should be sent instantly up to the house. Perhaps it would be safer
if he took it himself, for the mere possibility of its miscarrying was
not to be borne, and grasping it gingerly by the fourth leg, he carried
it, not without nervousness, wide angry pincers all agape, up across the
lawn.
He went through the cloister and in at the door leading to the servants'
parts, where he met a stern, stark butler.
"Oh, Lowndes," he said, "for lunch, if possible. By the hind-leg. For
the cook, with my compliments, and dressed."
The transference was effected, much to Toby's relief, and he put down
his towel and on his coat. There was still half an hour to wait for
lunch, but that cloud had now its proverbial silver lining. Half an hour
seemed an impossible time, but the silver lining was the possibility of
the crab being ready by then. How long a crab took dressing Toby did not
know, but if it took no longer than he did himself--and there was more
of him to dress--half an hour should be sufficient for two.
Lily, who, like himself, held firmly the wholesome creed that it is
impious to stop indoors while it is possible to be out, was sure to be
in the garden somewhere, and Toby walked out again in his white,
sea-stained tennis-shoes to find her.
The cottage had risen from the ranks, but not less remarkable had been
the promotion of the garden. What a few years ago had been an
unprofitable acreage of wind-swept corn, and more suggestive, by reason
of its fine poppy-bearing qualities, of an opium rather than a
wheat-field, was become a flowery wilderness of delight. Buckthorn, gray
and green like the olives of the South, and bearing berries as if of a
jaundiced holly, had been planted in shrubberies in the centre of
garden-beds as screens from the wind, robbing the sea-gales of their
bitter saltness before they passed over the flowers, and letting the
bracing quality alone reach the plants. Mixed with the buckthorn were
the yellow flames of the golden elder, noblest of the English shrubs,
and rows of aspen all a-quiver with nervous feminine energy. Thus
sheltered, there ran on each side of a broad space of grass away from
the house an avenue of herbaceous border. Hollyhocks and sunflowers
stood up behind, like tall men looking over the heads of an average
crowd; shoulder-high to them were single dahlias and scarlet salvias;
below them again a row of Shirley poppies, delicate in tint and texture
as Liberty fabrics, and in a happy plebeian crowd at the edge
mignonette, love-lies-a-bleeding, London-pride, and double daisies.
Toby sauntered silent-footed over the velvet carpet of grass up to the
summer-house, faced with split planks of pollarded elm, which stood at
the end, but drew an unavailing cover. Thence crossing the broad gravel
walk, he tried the tennis-court, and went down the steps past flowering
fuchsia-trees, where two great bronze storks of Japanese work turned a
world-weary eye skywards, and explored the rose-garden. This lay in a
natural dip of the land, studiously sheltered, and the wirework pergola
which ran through it was on these August days one foam of pink sherbet
petals. On either side were rockeries covered with creeping stonecrops,
mountain-heaths, and Alpine gentians, those remote sentinels of the
vegetable world. And strange to their blue eyes, accustomed to see
morning break on paths untrodden of man and fields of flashing snow,
must have been the soft hint of dawn in this land of tended green. But
Toby saw them not, for there in a nook at the end, below an ivy-trained
limb of tree, sat the queen of the rosebud garden.
Lily was not reading, in spite of the seeming evidence of an open book
on her lap, for the breeze turned its leaves backwards and forwards like
some student distractedly hunting up a reference. For a moment the page
would lie open and unturned; then a scud of flying leaves would end in a
long pause at p. 423; then one leaf would be turned very slowly, as if
the unseen reader was perusing the last words very carefully, while his
fingers pushed the page over to be ready for the next. Then with a
bustle and scurry he would hurry on and study the advertisements at the
end, and as like as not go suddenly back to the title-page.
Lily had been thinking pleasantly and idly about Toby, and the many
charming things in this delightful world, when he appeared. She welcomed
him with a smile in those adorable dark eyes.
"Had a nice dip?" she asked, as he sat down by her. "Oh, Toby, when we
are married I shall devote my whole life to getting your hair tidy for
once. Then I shall turn my face to the wall and softly expire."
"If that's your object you'll be aiming at the impossible," remarked
Toby, "like that silly school-master you read me about in Browning who
aimed at a million."
"Grammarian," corrected Lily, "and I'll read you no more Browning."
"Well, it does seem to be a bit above my head," said Toby, without
regret. "And I bought a crab on my way up, and, oh, I love you!"
Lily laughed.
"I thought you were going to say, 'Oh, I love crab!'" she said.
"And that would be true, too," said Toby. "What a lot of true things
there are, if one only looks for them!" he observed.
"That's what the Christian scientists say," remarked Lily. "They say
there is no such thing as lies or evil or pain."
"Who are the Christian scientists?" asked Toby. "And what do they make
of toothache?"
Lily meditated a moment.
"The Christian scientists are unsuccessful female practitioners," she
observed at length. "And there isn't any toothache; it's only you who
think so."
"Seems to me it's much the same thing," said Toby. "And how about lies?
Supposing I said I didn't love you?"
"Or crab?"
"Or crab, even. Would that be true, therefore?"
Lily leaned forward, and put down Toby's tie, which was rising above his
collar.
"Well, I think we've disposed of them," she said. "Oh dear, I wish I was
a man!"
"I don't," said Toby.
"Why not? Oh, I see. Thanks. But I should like to be able to bathe from
a breakwater, and buy crabs from fishermen, and have very short, untidy
straight-up hair, and a profession, Toby."
"Yes," said Toby, wincing, for he knew or suspected what was coming.
"Don't say 'yes' like that. Say it as if you meant it."
Toby took a long breath, and shut his eyes.
"Yes, so help me God!" he said, very loud.
"That's better. Well, Toby, I want you--I really want you--to have a
real profession. What is the use of your being secretary to your cousin?
I don't believe you could say the names of the men in the Cabinet, and,
as you once told me yourself, all you ever do there is to play
stump-cricket in the secretary's room."
"You should have warned me that whatever I said would be used against
me," said the injured Toby. "But I saw after the flowers in Hyde Park
last year."
"The work of a life-time," said Lily. "I wonder they don't offer you a
peerage."
"You see, I'm not a brewer," said Toby.
"Beer, beerage--a very poor joke, Toby."
"Very poor, and who made it? Besides, I think you are being sarcastic
about the flowers in Hyde Park. If there's one thing I hate," said Toby
violently, "it is cheap sarcasm."
"Who wouldn't be sarcastic when a great tousle-headed, able-bodied,
freckle-faced scion of the aristocracy tells one that he is
employed--employed, mark you--in looking after the flowers in Hyde
Park?" asked Lily, with some warmth. "Why, you didn't even water them!"
"I did the organization, the head work of the thing," said Toby. "That's
the rub."
"Bosh!"
"Lily, you are really very vulgar and common in your language
sometimes," said Toby. "I have often meant to speak to you about it; it
makes me very unhappy."
"Indeed! Try and cheer up. But really, Toby, and quite seriously, I wish
you would settle to do something; I don't care what. Go into the Foreign
Office."
"Languages," said Toby; "I don't know any."
"Or some other office, or buy a farm, and work it properly, and try to
make it pay. Give your mind seriously to something. I hate a loafer.
Besides, a profession seems to me the greatest luxury in the world."
"Plain folk like me don't care for luxuries," said Toby. "I'm not like
Kit. Kit is perfectly happy without the necessaries of life, provided
she has the luxuries."
This diversion was more successful. Lily was silent a moment.
"Toby, I'm afraid I don't like your sister-in-law," she said at length.
Toby plunged with fervour into the new topic.
"Oh, there you make a great mistake," he said. "I allow Kit is not
exactly a copy-book-virtue person, but--well, she's clever and amusing,
and she is never a bore."
"I don't trust her."
"There, again, you make a mistake. I don't say that everybody should
trust her, but I am sure she would never do a shabby thing to you or me,
or----"
"Or?" said Lily, with the straightforwardness which Kit labelled
"uncomfortable."
"Or anybody she really liked," said Toby. "Besides, Lily, I owe her
something; she brought us together. As I have told you, she simply
insisted on introducing me, though I didn't want to be introduced at
all."
Lily made the sound which is usually written "pshaw!"
"As if we shouldn't have met!" she said. "Toby, our meeting was in
better hands than hers."
"Well, she hurried the better hands up," said Toby, "and I am grateful
for that. If it had not been for her, we should not have been introduced
at that dance at the Hungarians, and I shouldn't probably have dined at
Park Lane the night after; I should have gone to the Palace instead, so
there would have been one, perhaps two, evenings wasted."
"Well, I'll make an effort to like her more," said Lily.
"Oh, but that's no manner of use," said Toby. "You may hold your breath,
and shut your eyes, and try with both hands, and never get a yard nearer
liking anybody for all your trying. And it's the same with disliking."
"Do you dislike anyone, Toby?" asked Lily, with a touch of wistfulness,
for Toby's habit of universal friendliness always seemed to her
extremely enviable.
Toby considered a moment.
"Yes," he said.
"Who is that?"
"Ted Comber," said Toby.
Lily drew her brows together. Toby's promptness in singling out this one
person seemed hard to reconcile with his wide forbearance.
"Now why?" she asked. "Tell me exactly why."
"He ain't a man," said Toby gruffly. "Surely, Lily, we can talk about
something pleasanter."
"Yes, I'm sure we can," she replied fervently. "I quite share your view.
Oh, Toby, promise me something!"
"All right," said Toby, taken off his guard.
"Hurrah! that you will instantly get a profession of some sort. Dear
Toby, how nice of you! There's the gong, and I'm simply ravenous."
Toby got up rather stiffly.
"If you consider that fair," he remarked, "I wonder at you. At least, I
don't wonder, for it's extraordinary how little sense of honour women
have."
"I know. Isn't it terrible?" said Lily. "Toby, it was nice of you to
order that crab. I adore crab. Oh, there's mamma! I suppose she must
have crossed last night. I didn't expect her till this evening."
Mrs. Murchison had been to the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth, and was very
communicative and astounding about it. She began by saying how delicious
it had been at Beyrout, and Lily, whose real and tender affection for
her mother did not blunt her sense of humour, began to giggle
helplessly.
"Bayreuth, I should say," continued Mrs. Murchison without a pause.
"Lily dearest, if you laugh like that you'll get a piece of crab in your
windgall. Well, as I was saying, Lady Conybeare, it was all just too
beautiful. You may be sure I studied the music a good deal before each
opera; it is impossible to grasp it otherwise--the life-motive and all
that. Siegfried Wagner conducted; they gave him quite an ovarium. But
some people go just in order to say they have been, without thinking
about the music. Garibaldi to the general, I call it."
Lady Conybeare, a fresh-faced, dark-eyed woman of not more than fifty,
healthy as a sea-wind, and in her wholesome way as tyrannical, cast an
appealing look at Toby. Toby was one of the few people who did not in
the least fear her, and she was proportionately grateful. She had tried
to spoil him as a child, and now depended on him. He had warned her what
calls would be made on her gravity during Mrs. Murchison's visit, and
she had promised to do her best.
"So few people appreciate Garibaldi," she said with emphatic sympathy.
"Yes it is so," said Mrs. Murchison, flying off at a tangent. "When I
was a girl I used to adore him, and wore a photograph of him in a
locket. But that is all gone out; it went out with plain living and high
thinking;" and she helped herself for the second time to Toby's crab and
drank a little excellent Moselle.
"But Bayreuth was very fatiguing," she went on; "or is it Beyrout? Until
one has heard the operas once, it is a terrible effort of attention.
_C'est le premier fois qui coûte._ Really, I felt quite exhausted at the
end of the circle, and I was so glad to get back to dear, delightful,
foggy old London again, where one never has to attend to anything. And
it looked so beautiful this morning as I drove down the Embankment. I
see they have put up a new statue at the corner of Westminster
Bridge--Queen Casabianca, or some such person."
Toby choked suddenly and violently.
"I've said something wrong, I expect," remarked Mrs. Murchison genially.
"Tell me what it is, Lord Evelyn, or I should say Lord Toby."
"Toby, please."
"Well, Toby---- Dear me! how funny it sounds, considering I only saw you
first in June! Ah, dear me, since first I saw your face, what a lot has
happened! But if it's not Casabianca, who is it?"
"Boadicea, I think," said Toby.
"Dear me! so it is. How stupid of me! She comes in the Anglo-Saxon
history, does she not? and she used to bleed beneath the Roman rods in
the blue poetry book--or was it pink? I never can remember. But how it
all comes back to one! Caractacus, too, and Alfred and the cakes, and
the seven hills."
Mrs. Murchison beamed with happiness. She knew very well the difference
between being a unit among a large house-party, and staying as an only
guest, and this cottage by the sea seemed to her to be the very
incarnation of the taste and culture of breeding. She knew also that
several rich and aspiring acquaintances of hers were spending a week at
Stanborough, and she proposed after lunch to stroll along the beach
towards there, and perhaps call at the hotel on the links. Her friends
were sure to ask where she was staying, and it would be charming to say:
"Oh, down at the cottage with Lady Conybeare. So delicious and rustic;
there is no one there except Lily and dear Toby. Of course we are very
happy about it. And don't you find a hotel quite intolerable?"
In the pause that followed Mrs. Murchison ran over her plans.
"What a charming place this is," she went on; "and how delightful to be
near Stanborough! Lord Comber is there; he told me he was going on there
from Beyrout. At the Links Hotel, I think he said."
Toby looked up.
"Is Comber there?" he asked. "Are you sure?"
His cheerful face had clouded, and his tone was peremptory.
"Of course I am sure," said Mrs. Murchison. "Dear me, how annoyed you
look, Lord--I mean Toby. And I thought he was such a friend of your
sister-in-law's and all. What is the matter?"
"Nothing--nothing at all," he said quickly.
But he looked at his mother and caught her eye.
"What a very odd place for Lord Comber to come to!" said Lily, who had
grasped "watering-place" with greater distinctness than Mrs. Murchison.
"I am sure I don't see why," said she. "Stanborough is extremely bracing
and fashionable. I saw they had quite a list of fashionable arrivals
there in the World yesterday. Isn't it so, Toby?"
"Perhaps he has come to play golf," said Toby in a tone of resolute
credulity.
"Golf?" asked Mrs. Murchison vaguely. "Oh, that's the game, isn't it,
where you dig a sandpit, and then hit the ball into it and swear? So
somebody told me. It sounds quite easy."
Toby laughed.
"A very accurate description," he said. "I'm going to play this
afternoon. Hear me swear!"
Lady Conybeare rose, as they had finished lunch.
"Come and see me before you go out, Toby," she said.
Lily looked from one to the other, and saw the desire of a private word
between them.
"Oh, mother, let me take you to the rose-garden!" she said. "Shall we
have coffee there as usual, Lady Conybeare?"
"Yes, dear. Take your mother out."
The two left the room, and Lady Conybeare turned to Toby.
"Well, Toby," she said.
"I don't wish to be either indiscreet or absurd, mother," he answered.
"Nor I," said she. "Kit told me she was coming to Stanborough for a
week, and I asked her, of course, to stay here. She said she had made
arrangements to stay at the Links Hotel. Jack is not coming."
Toby made two bread pellets, and flicked them out of the window with
extraordinary accuracy of aim.
"Damn Kit!" he said. "She comes to-morrow, and that beast, I suppose,
came a day or two ago. I saw somebody in the distance the day before
yesterday who reminded me of him, but I didn't give another thought to
it. No doubt it was he."
There was a pause.
"But Jack----" said Lady Conybeare, and it cost her something to say it.
"Oh, Jack's a fool!" said Toby quickly. "You know that as well as I do,
mother. Of course, he's awfully clever, and all that; but I'll be blowed
if my wife ever stops at a seaside hotel with a Comber-man."
Lady Conybeare stretched out her hand.
"Thank God, I have you, Toby!" she said.
"What a fool Kit is!" said Toby thoughtfully. "There are hundreds of
people there, as Mrs. Murchison says. Telegraph for Jack, mother," he
said suddenly.
Lady Conybeare shook her head.
"We have no right, no reason to do that," she said. "Toby, take the
thing in hand. Do your best."
Toby looked out of the window and hit an imaginary opponent with his
closed fist.
"Perhaps we could manage something," he said. "Don't say a word to Lily,
mother, or to Mrs. Murchison."
Lady Conybeare smiled rather bitterly.
"Nor wash my dirty linen in public," she said. "Is that my habit, dear?"
Toby got up and kissed his mother lightly on the forehead.
"I'll do my best," he said.
"I know you will."
And they went out to coffee in the rose-garden.