Mr. Mudge had lately been so occupied with their famous “plans” that he
had neglected for a while the question of her transfer; but down at
Bournemouth, which had found itself selected as the field of their
recreation by a process consisting, it seemed, exclusively of
innumerable pages of the neatest arithmetic in a very greasy but most
orderly little pocket-book, the distracting possible melted away—the
fleeting absolute ruled the scene. The plans, hour by hour, were simply
superseded, and it was much of a rest to the girl, as she sat on the
pier and overlooked the sea and the company, to see them evaporate in
rosy fumes and to feel that from moment to moment there was less left
to cipher about. The week proves blissfully fine, and her mother, at
their lodgings—partly to her embarrassment and partly to her
relief—struck up with the landlady an alliance that left the younger
couple a great deal of freedom. This relative took her pleasure of a
week at Bournemouth in a stuffy back-kitchen and endless talks; to that
degree even that Mr. Mudge himself—habitually inclined indeed to a
scrutiny of all mysteries and to seeing, as he sometimes admitted, too
much in things—made remarks on it as he sat on the cliff with his
betrothed, or on the decks of steamers that conveyed them, close-packed
items in terrific totals of enjoyment, to the Isle of Wight and the
Dorset coast.
He had a lodging in another house, where he had speedily learned the
importance of keeping his eyes open, and he made no secret of his
suspecting that sinister mutual connivances might spring, under the
roof of his companions, from unnatural sociabilities. At the same time
he fully recognised that as a source of anxiety, not to say of expense,
his future mother-in law would have weighted them more by accompanying
their steps than by giving her hostess, in the interest of the tendency
they considered that they never mentioned, equivalent pledges as to the
tea-caddy and the jam-pot. These were the questions—these indeed the
familiar commodities—that he had now to put into the scales; and his
betrothed had in consequence, during her holiday, the odd and yet
pleasant and almost languid sense of an anticlimax. She had become
conscious of an extraordinary collapse, a surrender to stillness and to
retrospect. She cared neither to walk nor to sail; it was enough for
her to sit on benches and wonder at the sea and taste the air and not
be at Cocker’s and not see the counter-clerk. She still seemed to wait
for something—something in the key of the immense discussions that had
mapped out their little week of idleness on the scale of a world-atlas.
Something came at last, but without perhaps appearing quite adequately
to crown the monument.
Preparation and precaution were, however, the natural flowers of Mr.
Mudge’s mind, and in proportion as these things declined in one quarter
they inevitably bloomed elsewhere. He could always, at the worst, have
on Tuesday the project of their taking the Swanage boat on Thursday,
and on Thursday that of their ordering minced kidneys on Saturday. He
had moreover a constant gift of inexorable enquiry as to where and what
they should have gone and have done if they hadn’t been exactly as they
were. He had in short his resources, and his mistress had never been so
conscious of them; on the other hand they never interfered so little
with her own. She liked to be as she was—if it could only have lasted.
She could accept even without bitterness a rigour of economy so great
that the little fee they paid for admission to the pier had to be
balanced against other delights. The people at Ladle’s and at Thrupp’s
had _their_ ways of amusing themselves, whereas she had to sit and hear
Mr. Mudge talk of what he might do if he didn’t take a bath, or of the
bath he might take if he only hadn’t taken something else. He was
always with her now, of course, always beside her; she saw him more
than “hourly,” more than ever yet, more even than he had planned she
should do at Chalk Farm. She preferred to sit at the far end, away from
the band and the crowd; as to which she had frequent differences with
her friend, who reminded her often that they could have only in the
thick of it the sense of the money they were getting back. That had
little effect on her, for she got back her money by seeing many things,
the things of the past year, fall together and connect themselves,
undergo the happy relegation that transforms melancholy and misery,
passion and effort, into experience and knowledge.
She liked having done with them, as she assured herself she had
practically done, and the strange thing was that she neither missed the
procession now nor wished to keep her place for it. It had become
there, in the sun and the breeze and the sea-smell, a far-away story, a
picture of another life. If Mr. Mudge himself liked processions, liked
them at Bournemouth and on the pier quite as much as at Chalk Farm or
anywhere, she learned after a little not to be worried by his perpetual
counting of the figures that made them up. There were dreadful women in
particular, usually fat and in men’s caps and write shoes, whom he
could never let alone—not that _she_ cared; it was not the great world,
the world of Cocker’s and Ladle’s and Thrupp’s, but it offered an
endless field to his faculties of memory, philosophy, and frolic. She
had never accepted him so much, never arranged so successfully for
making him chatter while she carried on secret conversations. This
separate commerce was with herself; and if they both practised a great
thrift she had quite mastered that of merely spending words enough to
keep him imperturbably and continuously going.
He was charmed with the panorama, not knowing—or at any rate not at all
showing that he knew—what far other images peopled her mind than the
women in the navy caps and the shop-boys in the blazers. His
observations on these types, his general interpretation of the show,
brought home to her the prospect of Chalk Farm. She wondered sometimes
that he should have derived so little illumination, during his period,
from the society at Cocker’s. But one evening while their holiday
cloudlessly waned he gave her such a proof of his quality as might have
made her ashamed of her many suppressions. He brought out something
that, in all his overflow, he had been able to keep back till other
matters were disposed of. It was the announcement that he was at last
ready to marry—that he saw his way. A rise at Chalk Farm had been
offered him; he was to be taken into the business, bringing with him a
capital the estimation of which by other parties constituted the
handsomest recognition yet made of the head on his shoulders. Therefore
their waiting was over—it could be a question of a near date. They
would settle this date before going back, and he meanwhile had his eye
on a sweet little home. He would take her to see it on their first
Sunday.