THE CASKET LINED WITH PINK
It was such a very large room. And the child left over wanted badly to
cry, because her toys had all been broken, because it was her birthday,
because Peter had gone. But who could possibly cry in such a very
large room, that unwound itself and escaped at the corners, whenever
she tried to seek comfort in tucking the walls close about her like an
eiderdown quilt. She could have cried in a little room, quite easily;
but this regal apartment was Second Empire--somebody important had
slept here once.
Nicole knocked and entered: “It is time for Mademoiselle to dress. Is
Mademoiselle completely rested?” beaming, she exhibited an elaborate
bouquet, white lilac and lilies of the valley, that had just been sent
by a middle-aged admirer from the Legation.
Madame des Essarts trailed in, to discuss in what costume Merle would
shine to the best advantage, at the dinner-party given in her honour
that evening.
“The apricot ninon? What do you think, Nicole?”
Nicole was in favour of a quaint old-rose brocade, which suited
Mademoiselle _à merveille_. Merle was invited to take part in the
discussion. She could have indicated a startling preference for a
sea-faded jersey and cap ... but she said that she preferred the
brocade. Her grandmother laid cool fingers, heavily beringed, upon her
head.
“Mignonne, we must call in _ce bon_ Docteur Dufour again; you are
slightly feverish. The excitement of your fête, is that it?”
Merle smiled. A doll had returned to its elaborate wrappings; a bon-bon
was replaced in its satin casket; a jewel laid back in its nest of
cotton-wool. Merle smiled: Yes, she was excited because it was her
birthday. Nice things always happened on one’s birthday, was it not so?
And murmuring benignly an epigram on _la jeunesse_, Madame departed to
put herself in the hands of the coiffeur.
Merle lay back among the pillows, and watched Nicole laying out silk
stockings and embroidered shoes; soft underwear; a string of pearls;
a handkerchief edged in fine old lace; Nicole, drawing the curtains,
fetching hot water.... “Good Heavens! that I should own a friend who
owns a maid. You know it’s quite easy to pull on your stockings,
once you’ve learnt the way”--How long would the memory of Peter’s
mischievous remarks entangle themselves like alien threads through the
dainty artificial pattern that must henceforth be woven only in dim
pastels and misted silver?
“Mademoiselle is now ready for me to arrange her hair?” Ablutions
performed, Merle slipped around her a silk kimono. The monogrammed
tortoise-shell hair-brushes stood at hand on the panelled
dressing-table; the room was deliciously warm, and fragrant with the
scent of white lilac. Merle had enjoyed with all her heart this parade
of luxury and ceremonial when it had stood as contrast to her secret
life of adventure with Peter; their stolen days, their long tramps--oh,
it had been fun, while roughing it, to remember Nicole and the waiting
casket lined with pink.
But now the casket stood for all there was; the tortoise-shell
toilet-service had to be taken seriously; and Merle’s eyes, looking
back at her from the oval mirror, were wide and frightened with the
knowledge that one could not laugh alone.
* * * * *
Mademoiselle des Essarts, in old-rose brocade and pearls, stands
beside Madame in the Louis salon, and, with charming self-possession,
helps to receive the entering guests. And now they have all arrived:
well-known figures in foreign ministerial circles; courteous and
urbane old gentlemen wearing decorations; brilliant and polished young
gentlemen from the various embassies; the two daughters of the new
Consul (invited because they were of Merle’s age); the elegant wives
of numerous consuls; the white-haired Marchese di Salvador, whose
rule it is never to make a remark that is not unpleasant; finally, a
middle-aged member of the Legation, tall, kindly, and distinguished,
his head already beflecked with grey: Jean Raoul Théodore, Comte de
Cler, who so admires Mademoiselle des Essarts, and is enchanted to find
that he is to lead her down to dinner.
General conversation round the table is mostly of a political nature,
and carried on in foreign languages, the assembled company slipping
with ease from one tongue to another. Merle’s partner considerately
leaves her alone, remarking with instinctive delicacy that the charming
child beside him is troubled, and not in a mood to talk. But presently
le Vicomte d’Alençon turns from a spirited contest with the Marchese,
to Merle on his other side, and enquires if she has received many gifts
in celebration of the day which seventeen years ago was responsible
for such a beautiful and talented addition to the world. His tone is
sugary and indulgent, as to a petted child. She blushes and deprecates,
correcting his mistake--“Twenty-two? _Ma non è possibile!_”--and
watches him return with unmistakable relief to his argument with the
Marchese.... “I agree with you, _mon ami_, he should never have been
put in responsible office; I will see what can be done....”
Undoubtedly fascinating to insiders, this game of diplomacy. Merle
would not be averse to be admitted as equal to the intricacies of
wire-pulling, instead of being tossed an occasional sugar-plum to
keep her quiet; but she realizes that these people are justified in
thrusting her outside of their world--why is she not in her own? The
universe is a series of cosy cubicles, but dreary for the strays who
wander beyond the drawn curtains.... She sends a swift thought to the
Room, the Perfect Piratical Playroom. Will it be sub-let, now that two
of its owners are grown-up? And she imagines a grave discussion with
Peter and Stuart on the subject of a suitable tenant, who would be
kind to the giraffe, and keep on Squeith as included in the inventory,
and....
--Twinkling the pear-shaped emeralds in her ears, the wife of the new
Consul asks deferentially of her hostess if her little granddaughter
will be allowed to spend a week-end at their country-seat: “My two
girls here are of her age, I believe; and they would be so delighted,
_chère_ Madame.”
Madame is also delighted, and vouches enthusiastically for Merle’s
delight. And the two daughters murmur their double delight, and wish
Merle were not so beautiful, and continue to coquette with the young
gentlemen from the embassies.
“But lately one never sees _cette méchante petite_,” shrills the
widowed sister-in-law of Madame; “she neglects _la vieille tante_
shamefully.”
“Merle is so much with her special friend,” Madame explains in apology;
“Peter Kyndersley--a sweet girl; they are inseparable. Even now they
have but just returned from a visit to Devonshire.”
“Ah, she must indeed have enjoyed that,”--they are talking _at_ Merle,
not to her--“And how well she is looking.”
“The fresh air,” says Madame; and turns the subject. Youth has received
sufficient attention for the moment.
... Dancing before Merle’s eyes, a sudden vision of a tea-party
of nice young girls, to celebrate her last year’s natal day, and
the arrival of Peter in the rôle of Inseparable Friend, bearing the
present of a particularly hideous work-basket: “_Dearest_ Merle, _so_
many happy returns of the day. Just a _little_ remembrance for your
birthday; oh, a mere nothing, but I always say it’s the _spirit_
and not the _gift_ that matters!” A murmur of approbation here from
grandmother, aunts, and visitors--and Merle, meeting the wicked twinkle
in Peter’s eye, controls herself with difficulty.
--Last year.
And again: “We can’t quarrel really,” laughed Peter, “because of your
grandmother. One would hear nothing but: ‘You never ask that charming
Peter Kyndersley to tea, _chèrie_, and you were once so fond of
her.’...”
Well, that will have to be gone through as well.
The table is one blaze and glitter; the light falling on the Salviati
vases; wine trembling and reflecting in the long-stemmed glasses;
vivid splashes of fruit and flowers; flash of epigram from one lip to
another. The Marchese is in great form to-night.... “Oh, _là là_!” and
peals of laughter--
... Peter ... Peter....
The other two will not miss the games so intensely; they had played
because it was their nature to play, as now they loved because it was
their nature to love. But Merle had played for all her wasted years of
Château and Convent; played for the prim little maiden with her toes
turned out, who hung in a frame on the wall of the boudoir; played
for all the children of all the world who had not the chance to play
enough....
“But you are grown-up. Grown-ups cannot play.”
“We did! we did!”
“Are you sure? Were _they_ playing--all the time?”
Had they indeed ever played, all three of them together? Yes; Merle saw
clearly now when the change had occurred; when the pendulum, vibrating
equally between herself and Peter, had swung completely over. It was
after the April night when Stuart had come to her in his trouble, and
she had given him comfort.
“But he asked for it--I only gave him what he asked for.”
Just so, my dear. Just so.
--“Merle! _chèrie!_”
Merle starts guiltily from her absorption; becomes aware of Monsieur
le Vicomte d’Alençon, as the oldest present, making a few appropriate
remarks in her honour. He tugs his white imperial; bows gracefully in
the direction of the so charming granddaughter of their so delightful
hostess--
And now they are all clinking and drinking to the good health and good
fortune of Mademoiselle des Essarts!
* * * * *
“It’s Merle’s birthday,” said Peter, facing Stuart over their
particular table at the Billet-doux.
“Then we’ll drink to Merle’s good health,” Stuart replied.
Glasses raised--eyes meeting steadily over the rims--meeting
steadily--kindling to flame--
By the time the circular stems again touch the table-cloth, Merle is
forgotten.
END OF PART I
PART II
CHAPTER I
HAIRPIN VISION
Stuart said: “Everything’s worth dying for, or else nothing would be
worth living for.”
“You mean,” Peter queried, “that dying and living are of equal
unimportance?”
“Equal importance.”
They were seated side by side upon a luggage-truck, in a deserted
vaulty corner on the outskirts of Euston. In front of them were ranged
battalions of empty luggage-trucks, standing stiffly at attention.
From far away rolled in waves the hollow reverberating echoes that are
part of a great terminus. All about them, enormous stone pillars stood
sentinel, their tops presumably lost in a murky infinity; but robbed of
majesty by the absurd fretwork of vine-leaves that encircled their base.
The occupants of this draughty suburb were not so much waiting for
a train to convey Peter to Thatch Lane, as awaiting the moment they
themselves should be seized by desire for a train; when, strolling
forth to investigate, they usually found the very article just about
to leave the platform. Such was the never-waning influence of Stuart’s
star, in which, by dint of her proximity, Peter had assumed a share,
with the same ease as she would have displayed coming under another’s
umbrella.
--“Of equal importance,” Stuart maintained, reverting to their
argument; “if death be essential for the completion of a moment, no
person ought to let their rubbishy life stand in the way. The moment’s
the thing. To walk about attaching such a tremendous weight to the
value of the-breath-in-my-body, and none at all to the fun which can be
extracted from ignoring it, is the unbalanced attitude of all people
who have no sense of form.”
Peter was straining to follow him; she could almost hear her brain
creak with the effort.
“If by the hairpin vision, you glimpse an act as needing for completion
the sacrifice of your life, you’d give it?”
“Every time. By way of proving the vital importance of the act. And if
all were to throw themselves more recklessly into the impersonal spirit
of formation, we’d be done with age and illness, with fears and frets
and muddle and blind gropings. Hanging-on is the evil. I’d like to make
a pool, a Greatest Common Factor, into which each man is ready at all
times to chuck his life for the sake of living, snap the thread for the
sake of the pattern.”
“H’m. It’s superb, but does it hold water? The gift of supreme
selflessness----”
“Supreme priggishness! ’Tisn’t that. It’s to a fellow’s personal
advantage to see just where he’s going, where to stop, where to snap.
The vision demands certain sacrifice, of course.” Stuart chuckled.
“I’m pleased with the notion of offering myself as a burnt-offering to
myself,” he declared; “such a compliment!”
Peter chanted: “And they could not find an ox nor an ass, nor a
signpost nor a manservant, nor diamonds nor decanters, nor pork nor
porridge, worthy to be sacrificed to the supreme master of all, son of
the house of Heron. Then himself uprose, and stripped him of his braces
and other adornments of the flesh----”
But the metaphysician was again in the ascendant; leprechaun had
but drummed an instant with shaggy heels, to make sure of not being
forgotten.
“Peter, we must know when to cut, you and I. There’ll come the moment,
inevitably; and if we don’t act in time, it will be done for us, and
just too late.”
“When the last juice is out of the orange,” she quoted.
“And the taste of the skin is already bitter in the mouth.” He
considered her steadfastly: “I wonder if you are up to it,” he mused;
“it would be rather a magnificent stunt, really and truly to cheat the
gods of their aftermath. Could you, Peter? You devil, I believe you
could ... I’m not sure that I want you defiant enough for that.”
Thus Stuart to the conception of Peter which he had built from his
own desire and from the cavalier tilt of her head. And seeing clearly
his Portrait-of-a-Lady; battle-eager and brain-clear and courageous;
glorying in freedom from all bondage; a lady with mockery on her lips,
and sudden moods of tenderness in her soul, as of mist veiling softly
a shining sword; swift in recovery after defeat; tempered at all times
to fine adjustment of the spirit to circumstance and adventure; and
withal a lady mysterious and unexpected, but of bodily hardihood like
to a man’s; and, above everything, able to stand alone and without
him;--seeing all this, and finding the portrait attractive, she had
played up to it; at first for fun; then because it came as natural to
do so as not; then for his sake; finally, because she could no more
extricate herself.
One effort indeed she had made in the latter direction: “Stuart, has
it ever struck you that you have mixed the oranges in your basket? and
when you think to be employed with mine, it is your own you are busily
sucking all the while.”
He laughed, not grasping the significance of what she said. “What of
it?”
“Well--no wonder you approve of the flavour!”
“You’re a dentist, Peter!” he cried then, exasperated; “you bring forth
the hidden molars of my mind, molars of which I myself am not even
aware, and dangle them on your nasty little pincers, saying: ‘Look,
this is yours!’ It’s a horrid, a most reprehensible trick.”
She abandoned the attempt at revelation; continued to respond to his
conception of her: never to tell him when she was tired; never to own
that she had need of him; never to let him see her afraid; never to ask
his help in trouble. Herein lay the primary rules to be observed. And
she had learnt from him actually to enjoy the utmost limits of strain;
found exhilaration in the knowledge that after all, she was top-dog
in the silent battle, since she had so successfully restrained her
real nature from proclaiming to him its hidden wants and weaknesses.
Top-dog--a pity that this superiority must be for ever kept secret,
when one considered how he would be annoyed at the information.
Nevertheless, she doubted if her powers were capable of this final
test, complete severance at the topmost summit of happiness, in
avoidance of descent on the further side. This was super-girl he
demanded now. Perversely, she experienced a hatred of his talk of
evanescence and the separation to come; wished to hear the old foolish
“for-ever-an’-ever” on his lips, the old mad belief in immortality
of love, which her reason rejected so scornfully. Were they a pair
of fools too clever for love? Peter questioned silently of the
luggage-trucks. Beyond the fading rails, beyond the last red-eyed
signal-box, a train-whistle hooted derisively.
“Stuart, if we went on without use of the shears, what do you see in
store for us?”
Resting his chin on his hands, he gazed beyond the towering pillars, as
if in the attempt to throw a loop around the future and pull it into
his line of vision.
“Knowledge of each other, worst of all. Knowledge that is bound to
widen, and each day lick up a little more of the unknown territory,
till none remains. I shall fight hard not to know you, Peter; not to
anticipate your attitude, or expect your unexpectedness, or follow too
confidently and without trepidation your mental twists and turns. But
it’s a losing fight. And one day we shall experience a sensation of
things commonplace, the tingle gone from them.”
“We won’t tell....”
“No, we won’t tell; we’ll try and whip up by artificial means. I
might marry you in that mood--from a sort of desperation at having
pushed beyond desire. There are no hills and no stars in the country
that lies beyond desire. I think, seeing it, one of us will make a
half-hearted attempt to break. But too late to glory in the break; it
will merely be odious and necessary, with the past already spoiled, and
the future rather bleak; a break complicated by entanglements and--oh,
other people! So we shall drift together again, as a matter of habit,
somewhat ashamed of ourselves----”
Peter was seeing it now: “You will begin to take me for granted, and
not strain to please me. And I--I might possibly become exacting----”
“That phase would pass as well. We should grow older, more comfortable,
wonder what the uneasiness had all been about, and the sense of loss.
Impulse would slip away and topsy-turvydom and conceit”--Stuart
waxed pathetic at the contemplated loss of his insufferable
bumptiousness,--“and, sane together, we will wonder we could ever have
been mad together. If I must age to sanity, damn it! I’ll face the
process alone.”
“You won’t remember ... but I shall, on anniversaries. I hate dates,
but I can’t break them of their meaning--that’s my sex coming
through. Anniversaries ... when I shall have known you a year--two
years--three--Stuart, I’m frightened of the years; I want to be meeting
you again for the first time.”
“We haven’t come to that yet. But when we do--the world may label me a
brute or you a jilt; they may expect you to cling, or me to reproach;
they may talk of the steady affection which grows and subsists upon
a durable basis of mutton-fat,--but when we touch top, Peter, as we
two shall do simultaneously, because we are level, then it’s: ‘Thanks
for what you’ve given me, and good-bye,’ proudly and cleanly. I never
thought I should meet the genius of life who could do that.” And he
repeated softly his tribute: “You are a genius of life, Peter....”
Then, fearful of an imposed descent from the clear heights, he gave
a rapid exhibition of his own unprompted skill at banister-sliding:
“Eleven times two is twenty-two!” he recited, awestruck, catching
sight of figures roughly scrawled in white chalk on the pillars
opposite; “eleven times three is thirty-three! O, far-reaching hand of
education----”
“Not so far,” laughed Peter, following him down with remarkable
celerity; “eleven times eleven is _not_ a hundred and eleven, well, not
usually! and our unknown mathematician seems himself to have had doubts
on the subject, for he has broken off at that juncture of reckoning.”
Stuart evoked a touching image of the Self-Improving Porter, hoping
one day to be a County Councillor; and stealing away from his soulless
burden of trundling, to practise his tables in stillness and solitude
upon the props of Euston.
“Euston more than any other place will be a home of ghosts, after we
have finally torn ourselves asunder,” remarked Peter, as they strolled
through dim archways into the circular booking-hall. “You, of course,
can avoid the building; but unless I contrive to alight always at
Kilburn, which will be inconvenient, my raw wounds will be kept well
salted.” She glanced down at the sprawling silent figures from which
the wooden benches were never free; phantom figures for ever waiting
for some phantom train; never moving, never asking,--indissoluble
adjuncts to the mystery of Euston. “I will not consent to have my
feelings lacerated in chance fashion,” she declared; “I’m going to
take you now, and solemnly lay you, as a hen lays eggs, in different
portions of the building; so that in years to come I shall know exactly
at what points to wince with a sudden pain. If we arrange our own
exists, we will also premeditate our own agonies.”
Peter had not yet learnt to refrain from playing at God.
So thrice they sought to trespass in the gallery which, close up to
the smoke-black ceiling, ringed the hall. And were twice ejected by a
sympathetic stoker; and once by a policeman, who smiled not nor scowled
when Stuart quoted to him art and Lucullus in argument against the
law, but said simply and stolidly, “Maybe, sir, but them’s my orders,”
which is the essential condition of mind for a policeman, and one to
be encouraged, ranking him in excellence beside the Self-Improving
Porter. And they sought for the elusive platform, from which trains
are rumoured to depart on Sundays, but which on all other days lies
beyond platform nine, and beyond the world, and beyond space; drifting
formless platform to which the evil familiars of Euston occasionally
lure a harmless passenger-train, then to chuckle at the bewildered
victims of their devilry. And they found also the platform of a
thousand milk-cans; and a model steamship in a glass case, reported
to perform marvellous feats at the insertion of one penny, but which,
clutching Stuart’s penny to its iron breast, stirred not from tranced
sleep; thinking doubtless: he is a millionaire and can well spare
it. And they planned to hold a Roman feast on a great scale, in the
bathroom at Euston; weary sooty travellers to be lured inside and
plunged forthwith into cooling floods of water, and given stale
sandwiches to eat, and a third-class ticket to Willesden, gratis with
every bar of soap. Finally, they entered Euston through seven different
portals, beheld it from seven different aspects, all fearsome with the
clankings and throbbings of metal, and the oblique approach of red
goblin eyes from the outside glooms.
And Peter said that her train was due, and that the premises were now
quite sufficiently imbued with sad sweet memories hereafter as ghosts
to haunt her.
“It would be rather funny if my aching heart should turn inartistic and
refuse to perform.”
“Oh, if we can’t cheat Ladye Art, at our age!” he leant against the
door of the carriage, and lit a cigarette; “she belongs to the first
stages of consciousness. I put out my tongue at Art. A man with the
artistic sense of things, would never again take you home by train to
Thatch Lane, after having once done it so successfully; ‘for fear of
spoiling things,’ he would say.”
The guard passed along the line of doors, his passage punctuated by
heavy slams.
“But you----” she mocked.
“But I, Peter, can be artistic, and also cheat Art by being
inartistic;” he placed a tentative foot upon the step, and she
anticipated his evident intentions by a careless: “I don’t need you
with me to-night.”
--“And then cheat myself by being re-artistic!” he ran alongside the
moving train, and secured the door-handle by a deft turn of the wrist.
“And I had no intention of coming with you, Peter. Good night!”
... Peter hated him. It struck her that the most poignant ghost of all,
and one where she had no hand in the manufacture, would run for ever
abreast of a moving train; leap on to the footboard: “I told the man to
drive like Hell!”... leap from the footboard: “I had no intention of
coming with you----”
And here were the ends of Euston, where the trio had chanted their
triumphant ritual; where Peter had once taken her tiger a-walking, and
Merle had followed her. Merle....
Blackness now, save for a few splashed lights among a dark huddle of
roofs. Then open country.
Yes, she hated Stuart. He might have known that she did rather want him
to come. He _had_ known----
Peter smiled. She was mentally framing a letter to him, of which this
was the opening phrase: “If you had no intention of coming, why, oh
why, did you hold in your hand _two_ first-class tickets to Thatch
Lane, when you returned from the booking-office?”
It was just as well, Peter decided, to keep cultivated and alert one’s
powers of observation.
CHAPTER II
A PRODIGAL FATHER
Alighting at the tiny station of Thatch Lane, she was immediately
lapped around with a cool bath of air, refreshing as water after the
dust and turmoil of a day in London. She walked quickly along the
tree-lined road; each house a sleeping mystery divided from the next
by a dimness of hedge and garden. Occasionally a light-pricked window;
footfall of an invisible passer-by; long echoing shriek from the
railway line, as the train in a rushing curve was seen cleaving the
fields.
Peter halted beneath a solitary lamp-post, swung open a white gate on
her left, passed up the neat gravel path of Bloemfontein, and, bringing
forth her latchkey, was just about to let herself in, when she became
aware of a blurred bundle, somewhat darker than the darkness, squatting
on the steps.
“Hullo!”
“Hullo!” responded the bundle forlornly.
“Have you lost your way?”
“N-no, but there’s nobody to open to us.”
Peter had not looked upon the huddled form in the light of an evening
caller: “I’m sorry, I thought you were a beggar--No, I don’t mean
that--but it’s awfully dark, isn’t it?” with a quick attempt to
retrieve her blunder. “But who are you?”
“Oh, please, I’m Chavvy!”
Came a heavy step upon the gravel. A looming figure returned from what
had evidently been a tour of exploration round the back premises:
“No luck, my dear. All bolted, even the pantry window. We shall just
have to wait.”
“Father!” exclaimed Peter, relieved from her equal fear of burglars or
eccentric demigods, which latter she recollected were in the habit of
occasionally week-ending with unsuspecting mortals.
“That you, Peter? Hooray, hooray! Can you let us into this infernal
house? we’ve been knocking since half an hour,” Bertram Kyndersley
sounded not a whit depressed by the occurrence.
“Aunt Esther is out. But cook had no right to leave the house alone.”
Peter inserted the key, and opened to a square hall, blue-papered, with
pleasant glimpses beyond of a gas-lit dining-room, its table spread
with wine and fruit, with seed-cake and cress sandwiches.
“Aren’t you coming in, Chavvy?” the man spoke impatiently, of a sudden
convinced that something was wrong with a universe that permitted
to his daughter a latchkey, while himself was forced to nocturnal
prowlings and pantry windows.
“May I--Pierrot?”
“Good God, yes!” he helped the bundle to its feet, and brought it into
the hall. Peter, who from the high plaintive tones had expected to
see a child, was astonished when Chavvy resolved itself into a girl
some four or five years older than herself; though stunted in growth,
and with dark hair scattered loosely about the shoulders. She wore an
odd assortment of what looked like rags, but taken separately, proved
a faded green jersey, a brown muffler, scanty red skirt, coloured
stockings gaping with huge holes, shoes likewise ornamented, and a
Neapolitan red fishing-cap that didn’t match the skirt.
Bertram too had a threadbare appearance, though his waist-line had
considerably increased its girth of late, and his eye seemed to have
melted more than was good for it. Nothing could detract, however, from
a certain picturesqueness which clung about him like an aroma, and he
met Peter’s mildly wondering gaze with his old jaunty smile.
“This is my wife, Peter!”--and waited to be cursed or blessed, as
fortune decreed.
Chavvy took an impulsive step forward, both hands held out: “Please ...
we are so tired and cold and hungry ... and--and I promise never to
come between you and Pierrot!”
“Pierrot?” Peter felt that this sobriquet bestowed upon her slightly
obese parent, added the last absurd touch of unreality to the situation:
Pierrot and Chavvy--the doorstep vigil--tired and cold and hungry--the
prodigal and the play-actress--certainly a snowstorm was lacking, but
Miss Esther on her return home might be trusted to supply this last
essential.
Nevertheless, with all her artificial appeal, there was about poor
little third-rate Chavvy something genuinely pathetic, though one
felt instinctively that this was her favourite adjective and ought
not to be encouraged; genuinely pathetic in the north-east, where
she saw herself attractively pathetic in the south-west. Peter was
irresistibly reminded of the touring road-companies she had known in
her pre-Bloemfontein days; their jargon, their manners, and careless
bonhomie. And in this spirit she bade her stepmother heartily welcome.
“Come in, both of you; cut all explanations, they don’t matter much,
any old way! And help yourselves to whatever you want in the food
line. I say, though, you’re shivering,--half a jiff, while I light
a fire! Rather eccentric in June--Auntie’s hair will stand on end
when she sees. Yes, that’s right, off with your jersey and cap, sling
them anywhere ... what pretty hair you’ve got.” Peter talked very
fast, concealing intense amusement at her father’s latest escapade,
and uncaring that the trimly conventional dining-room was being
transformed as if by magic to a fair replica of cheap theatrical
lodgings: Chavvy squatting on the hearthrug, her sharp white features
lit by the wavering flames, the while she peeled a tangerine and
carelessly littered the skin in the fender; jersey, cap and muffler
tossed anyhow on the floor; firescreen (hand-painted with lilies)
upset; Bertram lounging in an arm-chair, his boots half-way up the
mantelpiece, and spilling wherever most convenient the ash of a
particularly foul-smelling cigar; a glass of port streaming its
contents across the white cloth, and dripping slowly from the table’s
edge; crumbs on every plate; Peter herself astride the table, listening
to irrelevant anecdotes of shoddy people whose names she did not even
know, and delighting at the taint of vulgarity within her which woke so
very naturally to the prevailing atmosphere.
--“By the way,” she interrupted a stirring narrative of how one Billy
Devereux--such a dear boy--had been slung out of work because the
leading lady--vain old beast--had bestowed his rôle and her affections
upon a youth with longer eyelashes than Billy’s,--“by the way, dad, are
you stopping?”
Bertram drew from his pocket a shilling, a threepenny bit and a
halfpenny:
“’Tis the very last shilling
That with me would stay,”
in a tenor voice of exceeding charm;
“All its charming companions
Have faded away----”
“And therefore I have come to seek shelter beneath your aunt’s roof;
dwelling amidst so much luxury, she will surely not begrudge me my cup
of cold water,” and he sipped appreciatively at the port wine.
“And were she in the cauld blast
My plaid should shelter her”
he warbled anew. “Not that she’s ever likely to be in a cauld blast,
old skinflint stick-by-the-fire!” in soft parenthesis.
Peter said no more. Bertram, reduced to sudden penury, had once before
returned in this fashion, but never yet with a wife. Miss Esther did
not approve of her brother-in-law. Miss Esther, bright and chirrupy
from an evening’s well-bred enjoyment, was now heard in the front
garden, thanking Mr. Lorrimer, an elderly widower inclined to be
attentive, for his kindness in seeing her home:
“You won’t refuse to come in for a glass of something and a sandwich?
Nothing prepared, you know, nothing prepared; just pleasantly
informal,”--innocent of what lay in store for her of pleasant
informality.
Miss Esther was extremely short-sighted, and her first impression of
the three figures round the fire at the far end of the room, was of
Peter and her two young friends, Merle and Stuart. Then her cordial
expression froze to antagonism, as advancing towards the male outline,
the blur of face shaped itself into the features of her disreputable
relative. Bertram, responding to suggestion, became instantly the
impudent scaramouch she had always seen in him.
“Hullo, Essie! Pleased to see me? No--you’d rather not be kissed? Just
as you like. Chavvy, hither and be introduced.”
Chavvy came shrinkingly forward. Miss Esther, not daring to guess with
what Bertram had here invaded the sanctity of her home, bowed stiffly;
and presented Bertram to Mr. Lorrimer and Mr. Lorrimer’s daughter
Myrtle:
“My brother-in-law.”
“My wife,” said Bertram, explaining Chavvy.
Resulting in a fictitious assumption throughout Thatch Lane, that Miss
Worthing’s younger sister--not a bit like her to look at--had turned
up unexpectedly--“and Esther doesn’t seem a bit pleased! Such an odd
little thing, my dear, almost not quite a lady.”
Which rumour was to cause Miss Esther Worthing a great deal of future
annoyance. At present she had only room for one supremely outraged
sentiment: that it was not county etiquette to cast your second wife
upon the bosom of your deceased first wife’s sister.
“Cook’s lying in a scarlet sleep under the kitchen dresser,” Peter
indiscreetly announced, having been in quest of more glasses. “That’s
why she didn’t open to them.”
“Oh, dear me, how very tiresome; I hope you hadn’t to wait long.”
Admirably the mistress of the house rose to the occasion, to the
traditions of caste, and to the height of her linen collars. “But
anybody who knows anything about servants will know also what a
problem it is,” this to Chavvy, by way of a suitable conversational
opening. Peter, her aunt noticed with satisfaction, was for the moment
concentrating attention on the Lorrimers.
Chavvy laughed with birdlike gaiety: “Why, I’ve knocked about as long
as I can remember in ‘digs.’; and jolly well waited on myself, unless I
could afford to tip the slavey. You mustn’t ask me about servants.”
“Are you on the stage, Mrs.--er----?” threw in Myrtle Lorrimer. “How
sweet! I once took part in a Greek tableau, and wore sandals and
filleted hair.”
“Sure you don’t mean filleted plaice?” interrupted her father, whom
Thatch Lane had encouraged as a wit.
“Don’t be silly, father,” pettishly.
“And don’t you be pert, young lady.”
Bertram watched the pair closely and made a few mental notes on the
art of being a father, an accomplishment wherein he was liable to grow
rusty during his long intervals of absence from Peter. Miss Esther was
still dutifully laughing at Mr. Lorrimer’s joke; and Chavvy, more at
home now the talk had swung nearer her zone of comprehension, replied
eagerly to Myrtle:
“Yes, just think, I played my first part when I was only nine: Wally,
in ‘Two little Vagabonds.’ And I used to cry my heart out every night
in the consumptive bit at the end--have you seen it?--where he says:
‘Don’t forget Wally, who was your little son for ... for a week!’”
“How sweet!” cried Myrtle Lorrimer again; “how I should love to see you
act!”
“I’ll act for you now, if you like.” Accustomed to the society of
touring pros, who would open the floodgates of their genius at the
slightest inducement, and usually without, Chavvy placed a chair to
represent Sydney Carton; and, minus all preliminary hesitations,
treated the assembled company to scenes from the life of Little Mimi,
her most successful rôle.
... “Oh, Mr. Carton, if only you would not drink so much----”
Bertram indifferently reached his hand for the decanter. Peter, at that
moment more niece of Worthing than daughter of Kyndersley, squirmed
uneasily at this embarrassing exhibition of histrionics, and wished
Chavvy were a canary in a cage, that somebody might throw a cloth to
quench her.
... “I fear nothing while I hold your hand. I shall fear nothing when I
let it go....”
“Very nice,” said Miss Esther frigidly, “what an excellent memory,”
when Chavvy had slowly and with drooping head mounted an imaginary
guillotine, and thus signified the performance at an end. Myrtle
clapped feebly. Her father muttered, “Ha--hum--yes, Dickens. All very
well in its proper place!” which was emphatically with pages uncut upon
an English gentleman’s bookshelf. And Little Mimi, aware suddenly that
she was a stranger among the Philistines, fled to Bertram’s side, and,
looking frightened, laid her cheek against his hand.
Peter thought, “I’m sure somebody told her once that she had eyes like
a trapped fawn or a jugged hare or something of that sort.” Chavvy’s
appearance gave rise to any amount of zoological speculation.
The Lorrimers rose to go. This type of entertainment was not what they
expected to find at Bloemfontein, and they were quite unreasonably
disappointed in Miss Worthing. With lowered prestige, that lady
returned from the hall to her transfigured dining-room.
“Are you spending the night here, may I ask, Bertram?”
“We are spending many nights here, Esther,” he assured her gravely. And
added in conversational tone: “If you turn us out, we shall starve.”
Where was the man’s proper pride, Miss Esther wondered disapprovingly.
Well, well, she supposed it was her duty to put them up for a day or
two. One couldn’t let people starve; it wasn’t done; and really, that
impossible little person in the red cap looked nothing but skin and
bone. Miss Esther offered to show the bride to her room. And added a
silent determination to draw special attention to the cake of soap on
the washstand.
“Run along, Chavvy,” quoth Chavvy’s lord and master.
She hung back and pouted. Then went slowly forward to meet hostility,
awaiting her at the threshold.
“Won’t you,” she faltered, “won’t you try to love me just a little?”
Upon this she made her exit. The door closed behind the twain, leaving
Miss Esther’s reply to the imagination.
Peter crossed to the fireplace, lit a cigarette, and stood looking
down upon the man in the arm-chair. Noted with pity that the topmost
hairs of his head were thinning considerably. Otherwise his florid
good looks seemed in no danger from the years. With a certain shock
of surprise, she realized how akin they were, he and she; adventurers
both, play-actors both; though, lacking her burden of pride, his
passage through the world was even more divinely unhampered.
“Hadn’t you better tell me all about it?” she suggested.
When Bertram’s reply came, it was still tinged with borrowed
reflections from Mr. Lorrimer, Parent.
“I’ve been a good deal by myself, my dear girl; you don’t seem to
realize what the loss of your poor mother meant to me. And you, who
might have been a solace and a companion, you preferred to live here
in comfort and luxury. I was--lonely. And when this child Chavvy crept
into my life, I let her remain, to fill the gap my daughter might have
filled.”
Peter thought it over. “No,” she said at length, very gently, “I don’t
think that will do. Try again.”
The dark upward-springing moustache was not sufficient to conceal a
responsive grin on Bertram’s lips. With considerable ease, he shed his
garments of hypocrisy.
“’Pon my word, Peter, I dunno exactly how it happened.”
“Who and what is Chavvy?”
Chavvy, it transpired, was one of those people who have no sober
appellation, but answer to such names as Kiddy or Babe or Rags or
Little Pal, according to taste. She was also alone in the world. “A
weird child, yet with something strangely attractive about her,”
would have been Chavvy as visualized by Chavvy. Garments, whatever
their previous origin, on her looked oddly tattered. Fancifully
she dwelt in a kingdom of dreams and Pierrots and red, red roses
and beating-rain-against-the-window-panes,--all the paraphernalia
appertaining to quaintness. Actually she dwelt in the fourth or fifth
or sixth stratum below normal level of the stage profession; a tangle
of veins spreading well beneath the surface; unknown territory save to
those who are of it and in it and can never rise above it; underworld
of touring companies; fit-up companies; pantomime, concert, and
entertainment parties; sketches and repertory and pageant. Comprising
intimate acquaintance with the smaller towns, the smaller theatres,
the smallest halls; of what audiences will take what type of play
and at what season. Underworld where each member has an infallible
instinct for ‘dates,’ for ‘something to be had,’ and good-naturedly
pass the word from one to the other. Where all names are familiar: “I
knew him three years ago in Nottingham; we played together in ‘The
Bells’”--drifting friendships, drifting memories, drifting lives; yet
all inseparably woven together. London the improbable El Dorado of
impossible chances. A glamourless battered underworld, yet from which
none of their volition could entirely sever themselves. An occasional
one of its members dropped to depths unmentioned and unquestioned; or
else was incongruously pitchforked into spheres outside, as now Chavvy
and Bertram.
They had met that summer at Blackpool; Chavvy playing ‘Cigarette’
in a very makeshift version of ‘Under Two Flags’; Bertram warbling
sentimental ballads in the Masked Quartette of seaside singers. In need
of admiration and dalliance, as a burnt child needs the fire, he found
Chavvy interesting; alternately teased and pitied her; and told her the
story of his life, the latter pastime a never-ending source of pleasure
and fount of imagination. Her brain stuffed up with plaintive little
Pierrot-poems, she found the man more than interesting; and listened
wide-eyed to the story of his life, thinking the while how wonderful it
was that he should so obviously be in want of her, poor, shabby....
--“In fact,” said Peter, “she called you Pierrot, and immediately you
_were_ Pierrot. There, O my father, you have inherited my very worst
tendencies. How did you come to marry her?”
“Scoundrelly manager bunked, and left the whole company in the lurch,
with three weeks’ salary owing. And she seemed to sort of cling to me.
Masked Quartette did rotten badly. We hung on till our united loose
cash was all spent, and then in extremity I bethought me of Esther.
I decided it would be quite nice if Chavvy and I came to live with
Esther. And I assumed the old lady would prefer us to be married.”
“On the whole,” mused Peter, “I believe you assumed correctly.”
“And so we fixed it up. And--and here we are. Going to scold me?”
“Not as long as you guarantee my stepmother will neither starve me,
beat me, nor send me to gather firewood. Come along, dad, we’re
supposed to keep early hours here.”
He pulled a grimace. “Can’t see myself sticking it for long. I’ll run
up to town to-morrow and see if there’s anything doing in concert
parties. I suppose you can lend me my fare and a bit over?”
“As broke as that?”
“You can take it from me, my daughter,” turning to face her, as they
mounted the stairs, “that the prodigal would not have returned for his
fatted calf while there was the least remnant of a husk left to him.”
--Miss Esther met them on the landing. “There is the spare-room,
Bertram; it adjoins mine, so please do not chatter with your wife after
half-past ten o’clock. I will give you a face towel and a hand towel.
Do not use the bell-rope on any account. And breakfast is at nine
precisely,--we are very punctual people here.”
CHAPTER III
“WE TRAVEL LIGHT”
Bertram was beginning to tire of Chavvy. Aunt Esther was beginning
to tire of Bertram. And Mr. Lazarus, tailor, was quite obviously
beginning to tire of Peter and her persistent lack of response to his
demands for payment. Peter was just rather tired. She could not pay Mr.
Lazarus; and Chavvy had conceived for her an unnecessarily clinging
affection: “After all,” she was wont to remark wistfully, “we are girls
together.”... Peter were not sure if it were legitimate to girl with
one’s stepmother. Furthermore, her father and her aunt made her their
headquarters of separate complaint. And withal at any moment might come
a summons from Stuart, a letter from Stuart, a challenge from Stuart,
demanding that she must be constantly and supremely on the alert. For
his siege of her was carried on in the spirit of who would say: “Yield
you shall--but yield if you dare!”
At present he was following up a period of furious and feverish need of
her, when meeting after meeting failed to quench the thirst that was
upon them, by a prolonged outburst of silence. An outburst in that it
lacked all of relaxation or flatness; insisted every moment of every
day that it was on both sides a silence pregnant of meaning--though
whether of self-torment or of defeat or of bomb-manufacture neither
could tell; a silence awaiting hourly shatterment. Peter felt once or
twice that Stuart was mutely pleading with her to break it, or else
allow him to break it, but now it amused her to exact mercilessly from
him the quality of superman which himself had thrust her into exacting.
“I want to speak to you, my daughter.” In such ponderous fashion did
Bertram one Sunday’s noon, call Peter aside into the trim quadrangle
of garden. He was addicted to airing his fatherhood in front of Miss
Esther and Chavvy, as though challenging them to go and do likewise if
they could,--“and it isn’t easy,” disregarding a few minor facts of
co-operation, “it isn’t easy to have had a splendid girl like that, all
by oneself, and to have brought her up to be a credit!”
So now he laid emphasis on the appellation ‘my daughter,’ causing Miss
Esther to toss her head, as she remarked: “Special afternoon Service
at three o’clock, Peter, my dear, should you feel inclined to come,”
signifying that she, more than Bertram, was responsible for the girl’s
welfare and up-bringing.
“Do you want me too, Pierrot?” pleaded Chavvy, always alarmed at the
prospect of a _tête-à-tête_ with her husband’s sister-in-law.
“No,” snapped Pierrot; “stay where you are.”
--“I can’t make out,” he confided in Peter, as they strolled towards
the garden-seat, “why those two don’t get on better; there’s a fuss
every single time I run up to town.”
“You’ve been up every single day,” she reminded him gently. As, indeed,
her pocket had good cause to know.
Bertram, misliking her accents of reproof, remembered his original
intention in calling her aside:
“The--ah--young gentleman who seemed to occupy a great deal of your
attention, Peter; I’ve been making enquiries, and he appears to be in
a fairly sound position. He hasn’t called here lately, I’ve noticed; I
hope,” with tender concern, “that he isn’t making a fool of my little
girl?”
Peter gazed helplessly at the speaker; then bubbled over with joyous
laughter.
“What would you do if that were the case, daddy, dear?”
Bertram ignored both the question and the laughter. “I should like to
know,” he persisted, “what his intentions may be?”
“As strictly dishonourable as even you could wish--Pierrot!” mocked his
undutiful child.
“Oh, damn!--Sorry, Peter; but do I look like a Pierrot?”
“More like an organ-grinder; you’re disgracefully shabby.”
“I know,” ruefully; “and my dress-suit is much too tight, supposing I
wore it in the mornings.”
“I don’t think that Aunt Esther would approve of that.”
“Well, I’ll run in to Lazarus to-morrow, and see if he’ll rig me up a
suit on spec.”
“Mr. Lazarus,” murmured Peter, “has just got out a summons against me.
I wouldn’t go to Mr. Lazarus, if I were you.”
“Lord!” Bertram exclaimed in genuine sympathy. “I’m awfully sorry,
Peter, old girl; I was just going to ask you to lend me a fiver. I
wonder if I could borrow a ten-pound-note from anyone, and lend you a
fiver to pay Lazarus; then he might make me that suit without pressing
for payment, and I’d be five pounds to the good.” He brightened
considerably at the prospect of five pounds to the good, and, jingling
the imaginary coins in his pocket, evidently considered that he
had now solved the financial problem with as much ease as he had
previously disposed of his daughter’s love affairs. He turned to his
own matrimonial aspects: “Chavvy will be perfectly happy with you and
Esther, I suppose. The tour will only be for the rest of the season.”
“What tour?”
“Didn’t I tell you? I’m booked with the ‘Troubadours’ from the first of
July; next Monday. A month at Maidenhead, then a fortnight of Hastings,
wind up at Bournemouth. Got it through young Tommy Weekes; he has
cancer of the throat, and mayn’t sing in the open,--or anywhere else, I
should imagine, poor Tom, except in the heavenly choir--and for that he
don’t sing the right kind of song. Being able to strum on the mandoline
settled it for me, and jolly thankful I was, too.” He spoke quickly,
feeling the impending disapproval.
“You’re leaving Chavvy here?”
“Yes,” defiantly.
“It’s hardly fair, dad; she’ll be miserable. ’Tisn’t her sphere.”
“I’m not going to tour with a wife,” muttered Bertram. “Where’s the
fun, Peter? And she hangs round me--oh, you’ve seen!”
True that Chavvy was of an ivy-like disposition. And even a Pierrot
will turn if sufficiently Pierretted upon.
“I couldn’t have stood this infernal tidiness a day longer,” continued
Bertram gaily, his momentary depression lifted at the prospect of
freedom. “’Pon my word, Peter, I dunno how you’ve put up with it all
these years. I’d lift you out, if I could; take you along with me. I
wonder--perhaps you could hold a tambourine, or something,” doubtfully.
“Thanks,” said Peter, really grateful; “but I don’t think I’ll do that,
it’s too difficult. Besides, the tidiness is only surface, and doesn’t
worry me much. But it’s a shame to leave Chavvy planted in the midst of
it.”
“My dear, to her it’s the height of luxury, after all the hardships
she’s undergone; clean towels every week, a bath every night, nice
society, what more can she want?” Bertram had not the faintest idea
of being illogical. And try as she would, Peter was unable to detach
herself from his point of view. It was, after all, merely a repetition
of Stuart’s creed, to cease sucking when the orange was dry. But then,
spoke justice, one must not marry the orange.
A puff of wind which had been toying with some odd scraps of paper on
the lawn, now lifted the largest of these and deposited it at Peter’s
feet. She recognized a fragment of the plaintive storyettes which
Chavvy was in the habit of scribbling, and afterwards, in the pride of
her heart, showing to Peter. So the girl felt no present scruples in
reading:
... “Who wear the white-and-black Moon Livery, must sooner or later go
forth to look for new loves. So Pierrot went ... and Pierrette was very
lonely--oh, very lonely! Harlequin came to passionately woo her, and
many other suitors, but she sent them all away from her quaint Little
Red House, thinking that Pierrot would return.... Pierrot did not
return. The crimson rose that he had dropped at her feet in leaving,
withered, but still she found sweetness in its Crushed Perfume.
“Autumn came and Autumn went....
“And Winter....
“Night after night Pierrette crouched in front of the fire, waiting for
the footsteps that never came; dreaming into the ruddy hollows of the
coals all her sad little memories of the sunshine and carnival that Had
Been.
“... One evening when the rain and hail and wind shook the windows,
Pierrette saw the petals of her rose drop one by one to the ground,
and gathering them into her hand she cried impatiently that she too
wouldn’t wait any longer, and ran to cast the faded token of a faded
love on to the Rubbish-heap at the end of her little garden of lilies.
“... Hark! a sound of sobbing through the darkness. Across the
Rubbish-heap lay a glimmer of white! ... ragged, wet, tired, Pierrot
had crept home.... And, forgiving all, she crouched down beside him,
drew his head into her lap.... ‘Pierrot,’ she whispered, ‘_I knew you
would come back_.’...”
* * * * *
Thus far Peter was able to read. The author’s style was well imbued
with the Pierrot-germ just then rampant in the air; yet here was
sufficient at least to show that Chavvy did not expect fidelity from
her husband, was preparing herself to be forlornly patient through
the long days of waiting. Peter chided herself as a brute for the
involuntary wish that Chavvy could go and do it all somewhere else.
Suddenly she saw Bertram and his wife as ludicrous caricatures of
herself and Stuart; he in his desire to cut free whenever he pleased;
and she--no, at all events she would not wait for Stuart to come
back to her through wind and rain. Thirteen days now his silence had
endured; Peter cast an anxious look towards the rubbish-heap round
the corner of the house--and at the same moment the gate clicked,
and Stuart sauntered towards them across the lawn; his appearance so
eminently matter-of-fact and prosperous as at once to relieve her of
alarm.
“Hullo, Peter. Come for a tramp?”
She departed to don thick boots. A ‘tramp’ with Stuart, she knew from
previous experience, meant that whatever stood in their direct line
of march, must simply and without question be ignored. One did not go
backwards or roundabout or half-way. One went through and on. If a
mountain blocked the path, one went over it; if a rushing torrent, then
into it; if a board with “trespassers will be prosecuted”--well, of
course, that was as good as an invitation; one had to consider if it
were not mere self-indulgence to follow the call. Time ceased to exist;
climatic conditions were just accepted; ultimate destination remained
a negligible quantity until one established an ultimate destination
by arriving there; and safety of limb was not for an instant weighed
in the balance against the possibility of surmounting an eight-foot
barrier interlaced with barbed wire, and an enraged bull waiting on the
further side. These little country strolls with Stuart gave Peter an
insight into his religion of ignoring life itself in favour of life’s
lightest moment.
Therefore she donned thick boots and an unquestioning spirit, wondering
the while whether the first might not be regarded as rather a
contradiction to the second.
Meanwhile, left to entertain Stuart in the garden, Bertram borrowed his
ten pounds.
“_Pax?_” said Peter tentatively, as they swung up the road towards the
Weald.
“Certainly _pax_, or I shouldn’t have come.”
“You gave in first.”
“I did,” with quiet triumph; “you’d never have given in, Peter; you’re
a bit of a coward that way.”
“_I’m_ a coward because I’d never have given in?” cried the girl, who
in the thirteen days’ interim had almost forgotten how to tread in
looking-glass land.
“Of course. I suddenly had enough of the fray, wanted to see you,
chucked over the entire edifice of silence, and came. You’d have stuck
to your guns, not dared abandon them. Coward!”
She dashed back: “So you simply abstain from indulgence as long as
abstinence itself is the indulgence. I always thought your asceticism
was a distorted form of vice.”
He laughed across the broad sun-slashed road, to where she plodded in
solitary anger.
“Won’t you join me in my ditch, Peter?” seductively; “it’s a very nice
ditch.”
No reply.
“Peter. I did have to come. That’s rather a triumph for you, isn’t it?
I couldn’t keep away any longer.”
She stamped her foot: “I won’t have my sword returned to me in that
fashion. And you know perfectly well it wasn’t cowardice; that I can’t
call you back, ever, in case you might be gone for good.”
“Do you mean to say,” in blank astonishment, “that if it were for good,
you’d have let me walk out in that casual fashion?”
“‘According to the letter of the bond,’” she quoted.
He kicked the sodden leaves with his heel; picked up a stick and
swished it at the air; burst forth at length: “Hang it, Peter! I showed
you the exit-door once, and you’ve kept your eye glued to it ever
since. Forget it, can’t you?”
“It was an insult ever to point it out. Because there was no need for
it. I wouldn’t have tugged.”
“I know that--now,” his accents were almost humble; “but you see,
Peter, there have been other she-encounters, and ... and they didn’t
know about the door. So I suppose I grew mistrustful.”
“Worse than that. You grew careful.”
“Yes. I’m sorry. Please, Peter, join me in my ditch.”
So she laughed, and crossed the road to his side. And a little further
up the hill, they found a tinker in the ditch, and tried to make him
talk like the tinkers of J. M. Synge and Jeffrey Farnol and Borrow
and Hilaire Belloc, and other welkinistic writers. But this was Just
a tinker; a man of no conversation and apparently no philosophy. So
in disgust they left him; and, climbing a stile, struck out across
the Weald, sweet with the hot sweet smell of trodden fern; before
them in the East a threatening pall of cloud hung low and grey over
the landscape; and behind them, where they could not see it, the sun
flooded the same landscape in slanting gold, which gave a curiously
sinister effect to the whole. Then a steep descent plunged them head
foremost into a labyrinth of bushes; netted undergrowth, which they
were compelled to butt through darkly, with snapping of twigs and
branches to mark each outward step; till at last, scratched and torn
and out of breath, they stood in the lane on the further side.
Stuart swung himself over a formidable gate which barred the further
end of the lane, and waited for Peter to follow. After one or two
attempts, she saw it was beyond her accomplishment.
“I give it up, Stuart,--no, I’m hanged if I do!” impetuously, meeting
his quizzical look.... Then drew back: “I’m not so afraid of you but
that I can own to being beaten,” she said.
He had remounted the gate in order to assist her, and now paused to
deliberate, a leg on either side the topmost bar: “I wonder if I ought
to make you do it, after that.”
Gravely Peter waited, while he hovered on the verge of a blunder.
“No!” and dropping to her side, he quietly raised the wooden latch, and
stood aside for her to pass through.
“If I’d noticed that it opened!” she laughed. “Stuart, I’ve found your
tombstone epitaph at last.”
“Which is?”
“‘He took the line of most resistance.’”
Stuart dwelt on her with a slow warm look, more of man in it than he
was wont to show. His hand rested lightly upon her shoulder:
“Tired?”
She had never yet answered ‘yes’ to this query, and wondered what mood
it would arouse in him should she do so. Supposing she _were_ tired?
tired of the pilgrimage, of conflict, of the rain beating fresh and
cold upon her face....
A few yards ahead stood a little group, consisting of a man, a woman,
a perambulator, and two children. The man wore a bowler hat, and the
woman a fussy dress of bright blue cloth, obviously reserved for Sunday
wear; one child was distinguished from the other by a tippet of dirty
imitation ermine. Otherwise they both had sticky mouths, and both were
complaining loudly. The man lifted them in turn from the perambulator,
and dandled them: “Shall daddy wheel the pram then?” and loud crows of
assent.
Seen thus, the man in the bowler had the appearance of one fettered
to the texture of a dream, a dream whence all the radiance had been
soaked. In the wide spaces of sky and land and rain, the whole turn-out
had an inexpressibly dingy look, that caused Stuart and Peter, with
an upward rush of spirits, to feel like Hermes and Artemis walking
the earth. He dropped his hand from her shoulder, and side by side,
untouching, they flashed past the man and the woman and the two
children and the perambulator. And Stuart said again: “Tired, Peter?”
no longer wishing, as in the first instance, that her answer might be
‘yes.’ “No,” she rang back at him; and they smiled at one another, and
swung on.
* * * * *
Towards evening, an unexpected bend of the road brought them home.
It was Stuart’s habit to leave Peter at the gate, without jarring by
extraneous chatter what they had found of magic in their day. But Miss
Esther, anxiously watching for them from beneath a large umbrella,
willed otherwise; insisted that Stuart should not depart without his
tea, “And you run straight upstairs and get into some dry clothes,
Peter, my dear; Mr. Heron will excuse you.”
Rather glumly, Stuart followed his hostess into the dining-room, where
tea was informally spread upon the big table. The prevailing atmosphere
struck in him the same note of drabness as had the incident of the
perambulator. Among these people he was regarded as Peter’s ‘young
man,’--well, not quite as bad as that; Peter’s ‘admirer,’ who came to
visit her on Sundays, and took her for a walk, and brought her home to
tea, and----
“Milk and sugar, Mr. Heron?”
“We used to sometimes squeeze lemon into tea, a Russian boy and I,”
volunteered Chavvy, who was bravely hiding a heart that ached, Bertram
having that afternoon confessed his plans; “he had such melancholy
eyes, and his father was a convict,” attempting by this recital to
rouse her Pierrot to some sort of jealousy. “They call it sayonara,”
she added, in somewhat incorrect explanation of the tea.
Miss Esther said that she had no patience with heathen habits, and
that everybody knew they were only imitations of honest English
tea-drinking, which was quite good enough for her, thank you, without
squeezing ‘sayonara’ into her cup. “Though I daresay you’ll call me
narrow-minded, Mr. Heron,” drawing Stuart into the conversation, that
he might not feel shy.
Animated by an Encyclopædic spirit very foreign to his nature, Stuart
explained drily the difference between ‘samovar’ and ‘sayonara’--“which
happens to be Japanese for ‘farewell.’”
“That’s just as bad,” pronounced Miss Esther. While Chavvy murmured
in timid apology for her error: “I was thinking of Port Arthur,” and
subsided altogether.
Stuart looked up, relieved, at Peter’s entrance--then bit his lip in
annoyance. She had changed into a thin crêpe frock; he felt sure it
was her ‘best,’ donned for his benefit. As a matter of fact, Peter’s
garments had been soaked through, and this particular dress was
quickest and easiest for her to fasten unaided; but, thoroughly jarred
by his surroundings, he chose to see her too tainted by Suburbanism.
Miss Esther filled and refilled cups; sent Peter for more hot water;
maintained a flow of lofty but gracious chatter, thinking privately
the while that not often had she to entertain so leaden a tea-party;
why, the Lorrimers’ Saturday tea-and-tennis institution held a hundred
times as much of innocent mirth. But, then, Mr. Lorrimer himself was
sufficient of a humorist to make any party ‘go.’
Stuart she considered ‘difficult.’ All young men were more or less so,
but she had a method of taming their barbarism never known to fail: on
their second introduction to Bloemfontein she would say carelessly:
“Now please remember that you can smoke all over the house here--no
forbidden ground,” and having found the key to their mysterious
masculinity, would watch them in grateful enjoyment of their privilege:
“They appreciate it, poor fellows; of course at home they’re never
allowed it”--and: “You spoil them, Esther,” usually the conclusion of
these remarks.
But Stuart failed to respond to treatment. Notwithstanding he had
smoked a horrid black pipe up and down the stairs and in Miss Esther’s
own sitting-room--yet here he sat morose and glum as any stranger, not
a patch in manners on that nice Mr. St. Quentin who sometimes came.
Indeed, it was curious to observe how Miss Worthing’s personality,
the least arresting of any present, reduced every other member to a
polite and stricken level of uncommunicativeness. Miss Esther, in her
own setting, and all her convictions securely buttoned in waterproof,
dominated Stuart and Bertram, Peter and Chavvy, to the entire
extinction of their own turbulence; so that presently the two men were
exchanging decorous views on the political situation, while Peter
and Chavvy, like acolytes, supported Miss Esther with seed-cake and
bread-and-butter.
“If you have finished, Peter, you can take Mr. Heron into the
drawing-room. I told them to light a fire, although this is the end of
June, but then I always say be warm when you are cold and never mind
the time of year.”
The drawing-room fire was the outcome of a brief skirmish which
had once occurred between Peter and her aunt, when the former had
carelessly announced her intention of taking Stuart up to her attic for
the viewing of some book.
“My dear, with your bed in it!”
“Oh, I’ll lead him very carefully past the bed,” laughed Peter. “After
all, it’s my den, as well as bedroom.”
Miss Esther stiffened: “Out of the question, Peter. Even if you placed
a screen around it----” doubtfully.
Peter declared that the screen around the bed would add the same
suggestion of immorality that Venus acquired by her fan.
So now Miss Esther emphasized warningly the drawing-room fire.
Stuart pushed back his chair, and sauntered from the room in Peter’s
wake. He felt Chavvy’s eyes upon them, dark and wistful--“you two will
be together when I shall be, oh, so alone,” the unspoken comment; and
he believed Bertram to be smiling complacently upon the back of his
son-in-law-to-be. And there he wronged Bertram, who muttered: “I don’t
like the fellow; too damned superior!” and this in spite of the ten
pounds.
Standing with his elbow on the drawing-room mantelpiece, Stuart
surveyed Peter moodily; she looked content enough, content with the
hideous prim room, with the fire, the cushions at her back, the
approval floating up like incense from the dining-room below. And he
was seeing her in contact with homely familiar things; had marked her
press the bell for the maid to bring hot water; heard her answer Miss
Esther’s enquiries about their walk--“Yes, thanks, very nice; where?
oh, just roundabout----” Artemis linked to the trivial details of
everyday; Artemis at Bloemfontein; she seemed leagues of distance away
from him.
“What’s up?” queried Peter, lazily thrusting at the silence between
them. She too was secretly irritated: why couldn’t he be restful, after
their long wet tramp? why always that atmosphere of tautness? Merle
had once said “Stuart has no firelight mood.”... For the first time
since their quarrel, Peter regretted Merle; would gladly have had her
there in place of Stuart, “Just to volupp,” thinking of the cottage at
Carn Trewoofa, the rainfall, that last long dozing talk, broken by the
entrance of the two letters....
It was a pity, and rather absurd too, that she should not have been
able to keep Stuart and Merle.
--“What’s up?”
“Nothing. I’m going, that’s all.”
She raised her eyebrows in delicate scorn, but made no further comment.
Nor did she move when she heard the door close behind him.
“He needn’t have been afraid,” with a finer appreciation of his mood
than he had given her credit for.
Miss Esther looked up sharply from her knitting, at the rush of feet on
the stairs outside, a slammed door, a gate swinging wide on its hinges.
“It’s Mr. Heron. And he has gone. How very strange, without saying
good-bye. And what is Peter about, not to see him off? Dear me, foolish
young people, they must have quarrelled.”
“He will come back,” murmured Chavvy, in concordance with her leitmotif.
* * * * *
Not yet, reflected Stuart rebelliously, as the train bore him from
Thatch Lane. Barely six weeks since that night in Cornwall,--surely
the shears need not yet be employed. But having started at such
extreme tension, it was utterly impossible that their love should be
of long endurance. He had felt the first slackening this evening; the
first desire to be quit of her presence; the first distaste at any
of her actions. He must disengage her from the background of orderly
respectability; search in his mind for the scene wherein he would most
desire to place her image; could not visualize any sort of setting
... merely a scamper of wind, and a voice--his own voice--saying
authoritatively to someone: “Get her out of irons, you ass! you must
get a way on before you turn her at the bank....”
That was it--exactly it! they had got their boat into irons, he and
Peter; must get a way on before they rushed ahead or--turned at the
bank. In either case, get a way on.
He would take her sailing.
And casting about for a means of accomplishing his wish in accordance
with the conventions--Stuart was not in favour of that ‘splendid
unconventionality’ usually ending in a muddle, whereof Young Bohemia
delights to prate--he bethought him of Nigger Strachey. Nigger had a
wife, which just now would come in handy, though Stuart had hitherto
rather resented her entrapping of his friend. It brought home to him
strongly the lurking danger that besets all men. Strachey had been as
sturdily opposed to marriage as Stuart himself; and then, queerly, it
had befallen him. So Stuart walked warily, mistrustful of the crafty
huntress who hid in the dark, and then pounced. His fear of marriage
was the most unsubtle of all his qualities; an elementary fear, of the
kind that offers food for music-hall comedians, and inspired Bernard
Shaw to the writing of “Man and Superman.” Peter knew of his fear,
and hated it as she might hate a gaoler, because it checked her from
spontaneously revealing all that she felt for him.
The idea of taking Peter sailing utterly possessed Stuart; and he went
straight from Euston to Strachey’s rooms in Chelsea.
“Look here, Nigger, have you still got that bungalow at Potter Heigham?”
“The one you gave me for a wedding-present? Yes. Most unpractical gift
I had. Looked to you for a nice bit of Dresden, or at least a plated
tea-service.”
“I want you and your wife to invite me up for a week’s sailing; day
after to-morrow; and bring whom I like.”
“Do,” grunted Nigger; “delighted. Need we be there?”
“Yes.”
“Um!” Strachey removed the pipe from his mouth and expressed his
disturbance by a long and doubtful whistle. “My wife----” he began
ponderously.
“Oh, that’s all right.... What do you take me for?”
“My mistake,” said Nigger, slowly masticating the new aspect. Oliver
Strachey’s mind matched his face, in that it presented a great dark
bulk occasionally illuminated by a flash of white. His quick grin was
as unexpected as the rare streaks he displayed of wit or humour; and
his cumbersome: “I don’t quite follow your meaning, Heron,” a great
pleasure to his young comrade, who liked to watch Nigger’s massive and
reliable mentality at work upon his own twisted acrobatics. The two men
were never confidential; never gave mutual good advice; were ignorant
each of the other’s troubles; disagreed on all abstract topics; and
had thrice in company faced death by wave and wind. All of which made
for entirely satisfactory comradeship. So that now Oliver asked no
questions about the proposed visit to Norfolk, and merely commented:
“Got stacks of work on hand. Still, I could do it in Norfolk as well as
here. What I’m wondering is if my wife will care to go?”
“Hang your wife,” Stuart was about to say; then recollected in time
that men are absurdly prone to touchiness on the subject of their
domestic partners. Especially when as doggedly in love as Oliver. It
was just as well to have restrained himself, as Aureole Strachey
just then came into the room. She walked swayingly up to Stuart, and
remarked in a heavy-lidded voice:
“I dreamt that your uncle was dead. Is he?”
As an entrance, quite effective.
“I don’t think so,” said Stuart, surprised. “Which? Baldwin?” hopefully.
Aureole did not know. But she was insistent about the death. So to
settle the matter one way or another, Stuart telephoned home:
“Hullo ... that you, Mater?... Any of the uncles dead?... No, you
needn’t scream, darling--I haven’t heard anything; just a passing
curiosity.... Morbid? well, perhaps!... You saw them at dinner. All
quite healthy?... Good!” He rang off, and reassured Aureole: “They’re
not dead, any of them.”
Aureole remained unconvinced. The soft full curves of her mouth,
resemblance of which she was vainly trying to coax from a Greuze to
a Rossetti, drooped sulkily at the corners. She had no acquaintance
with Stuart Heron, save from her wedding-day, when she had not much
liked him. “He--gives me nothing,” she had complained to her husband;
“he--means nothing.” And Nigger had made no reply, save by one of
his dazzlingly incongruous smiles, which all Aureole’s provoked
questionings could not compel him to explain.
But to-night there seemed a possibility that Stuart would give her
more. He scrutinized her intently for a moment, from her copper
hair, carelessly caught up with a single jade hairpin, down to her
temperamental feet; and, inspired by these, shot out at her a sudden:
“The pavements are stifling you. You should be walking among
reeds--always among reeds!”
Nigger had quitted the room in quest of tobacco; so Aureole was able to
blossom forth emotions which, inexplicably to herself, she pruned when
her husband was by.
“Sand,” she breathed. “Miles and miles of shining sand. Desert sand. I
always adored walking on sand at Broadstairs. Stretches of yellow sand
as far as the horizon. I’m a Pagan, you know!”
Stuart knew. He had gathered as much from her first entrance. But sand
was no good to him. He wanted to arouse an all-consuming interest in
reeds.... There were a great many reeds in Norfolk. For the next ten
minutes he plied her Paganism with such consummate skill that she met
her husband on his return to the room, with the frantic request to be
taken the very next day to their bungalow on the Broads, or she would
assuredly perish--of paving-stones.
“I--just want to go. I can’t tell you why. Something is calling
me--something with a swish in it. I--just want to go.”
So the expedition was definitely arranged for the ensuing Tuesday;
suspecting the ‘something with a swish in it’ to have been Stuart,
Oliver was yet somewhat amazed that his capricious lady should choose
to quit town before the season’s shutters had closed down. However,
relations between them had been a little strained during the past few
weeks, owing to the effect on her of a belated reading of the “Doll’s
House,” in conjunction with an occult acquaintance who had informed
her that she was the Empress Faustina reincarnated, and must not be
thwarted in aught she did, since she was in this phase working out
Karma. Not keen on Karma, Oliver now hoped, manlike, that the fresh air
would make all the difference in the world towards restoring marital
harmony.
“The ‘Tyke’ in decent repair?”
“Believe so. I haven’t sailed since I’m married.”
Stuart’s grunt was expressive of many things.
“The ‘Tyke’?” cried Aureole. “What a horrid name! It shows how much
imagination you men have, left to yourselves,” in languid disdain.
Stuart promised her that she should re-christen the boat. And after
fixing the final arrangements, took his leave.
“Even chances on ‘Tiger Queen’ or ‘Serpent o’ the Nile,’ I should
imagine.” Thus he speculated on the re-naming of the ‘Tyke,’ as he
walked towards Grosvenor Square.
But Aureole decided that night on ‘Faustina,’ in deference to her own
pleasingly lurid, though unfortunately forgotten past.
* * * * *
He wrote to Peter: “Meet me Tuesday, Liverpool Street, ten-fourteen.
We’re out for a week’s sailing on the Norfolk Broads. Never mind about
the moralities; I’ve arranged for those. Throw overboard other people’s
objections--and your own. Don’t wonder if you ought to indulge me by
giving in; we’ll have no battle here,--you’ve just to come, and leave
the rest to me. Bring as little luggage as possible--we travel light.”
She replied briefly.
“All right”; and then in a postscript: “Were you being symbolical about
the luggage?”
To which his answer:
“You--dear! No, of course not. Damn symbolism! I was thinking of
porters.”
CHAPTER IV
WILD DUCK
“Garden-party weather,” grumbled Stuart. “S’pose they think they’re
doing us a favour; one doesn’t want a breeze for sailing,--oh, no!
Strawberries and cream and a band on the lawn, that’s all the day’s fit
for.”
Oliver lumbered indoors to work: “Call me when the wind gets up.” And
Peter announced her intention of going out in the dinghy.
“Shall I come with you?” queried Stuart lazily, from where he stretched
on the grass at Aureole’s side.
“No.”
Instantly he sprang to his feet and followed her down to the bank, fell
determination in his countenance.
“Go back, Stuart,” she whispered; “you can’t leave Aureole alone; she’s
our hostess.”
He protested: “Hang it! _I_ gave her the bungalow.”
“Untie the rope!” Without heeding his complaints, she sprang into the
dinghy, where it floated beside ‘Faustina,’ née ‘Tyke’; and stood
upright, scull in hand, looking up at her comrade on the bank, with
the coolly indifferent air of being perfectly well able to dispense
with his companionship. Her white flannel shirt, flung open to show
the tanned throat; the clean line where her hair sprang upwards from
the neck; the alert poise of her figure, seemed all to have gathered
up and expressed the personality of the background: water quivering
in the sunlight, dazzling white canvas of sails, short bright green
grass of the banks, masts and ropes slicing and interslicing against a
china-blue sky. Peter resembled an adventurer setting forth in silence
to find the beginning of the world. Aureole, exotically reclining with
hands clasped behind her head, had more the appearance of one who had
found the end of the world and was prepared to talk about it. Stuart
flung her a discontented look over his shoulder.
“Is this a morning to waste with an amateur cocotte telling me she’s a
Pagan?” he demanded, still holding in the dinghy.
Peter merely laughed, and, with an adroit movement, pushed away into
midstream.
As Stuart walked slowly back to his hostess, he knew there was nothing
he wanted so much as to be alone with Peter on the Broads. Certainly
he had gone to a vast deal of trouble in bringing hither Mr. and Mrs.
Strachey, for the sake of the proprieties. He was prepared to go to
an equal amount of trouble in ridding himself of them. Nor would the
charge of inconsistency have disturbed him a whit.
Meanwhile, Aureole had been deriving a quantity of fresh ideas from
the contemplation of Stuart and Peter, and their treatment one of the
other. She had never before seen love in conflict, and it struck her
as attractive. An attempt to engage Oliver in a similarly slippery
and perplexing wrestle of wills merely sufficed to augment his loving
consideration; when Aureole was capricious, then Aureole had to be
humoured, was the burden of his thoughts. From considering him a
tyrant, a bully, and a gaoler, which was her last attitude but one,
she veered round to the belief that she had married a poor-spirited
creature. The germ within her, born of Nora Helmer’s rebellion, was
feeding nicely and growing healthily plump, the past three days in
Norfolk.
Aureole broke silence with a sudden: “Mr. Heron, do you think I’m
happy?”
“No,” replied Stuart guardedly. And waited for more.
“_She_ is!” Aureole let her eyes follow the disappearing craft that
contained Peter. Then: “A man takes you for granted when you are once
married to him. He pampers your body and neglects your soul.”
Stuart said: “You mean he pampers your soul as well as your body. A
soul needs no pampering; it wants fresh air, and an occasional touch of
the whip.” And he added musingly: “I’m a Pagan, you see!”
She made bitter reply: “Oliver is--just a man. That’s the difference.”
She had a way of half dropping her eyelids, and, after a pregnant
silence, shooting forth an unexpected audacity, calculated to shatter
the well-bred restraints of convention to a thousand fragments. Stuart
had caught the trick, and found himself unable to refrain from using it
upon her now:
“Why not ... leave him?”
And for a while no sound but the scream and plash of a water-fowl on
the opposite bank.
“Have you read Ibsen?” queried Stuart with disconcerting
acuteness--considering that he had seen her for three days past with
the “Doll’s House” in her hand.
Aureole murmured: “She went out to find herself and to earn his
respect....” No need of a superfluity of words when talking to this
man; his grasp at her meanings was almost uncanny. And she thought with
distaste of Oliver’s “I--don’t--quite--follow,” whenever she let fall
a subtlety. Nor did it ever occur to her that Nigger Strachey, who had
taken a first at Oxford, was perfectly capable of following her to any
lengths that were worth his while, and merely made her explain her
special type of profundity in the faint hope that thus she would attain
to a sense of what it lacked.
Aureole’s soft lips were mysteriously smiling; but she merely said
in light tones: “You are a bad counsellor, Mr. Heron. Why don’t you
persuade me to obey my husband and be content with my lot?”
“Not much fun in that, is there?” he replied; and would have enlarged
further on the stuntorian point of view which lay in breaking away
from a husband because he refused to contradict you. But remembering
Aureole lived three twists further down the corkscrew than himself, he
substituted a reflective: “I wouldn’t mind being present at the scene
when you came together again.”
Her eyes, large and velvety brown as pansies, began to sparkle. “So you
anticipate a stormy reconciliation, do you?”
Stuart said with a graveness that rebuked her flippancy: “Do you love
him so little as to remain always apart?”
She drooped her head; truth to say, she was exceedingly fond of her
stolid square-backed husband. “If I returned to him----”
“You’d have achieved your purpose then. Nigger needs a volcanic
eruption before he would realize anything, least of all you. But
once the knowledge came to him, he’d need an earthquake to dislodge
it again. His mind isn’t elastic, you see. It’s for you to provide
the eruption. If you don’t----” Stuart paused to extract matches and
cigarette from his pocket.
“If I don’t?----”
“Oh, well, if you don’t, I’ve no doubt your husband will continue
faithful and attached----”
“Oh!” Aureole dug her shapely heel--too high for sailing purposes--deep
into the grass.
“And will keep you nicely sheltered from draughts”--he had struck his
match; the flame wavered and went out. Again he attempted the process,
with the same result.
“Thank the Lord!” with sudden buoyancy.
“What is it?”
“Wind!” And loudly summoning Oliver from the house, Stuart strode
towards the boat.
Aureole could have wished the wind to have waited. She was preparing to
announce in her most irrelevant manner: “Do you know ... when I touch
a kitten, I suddenly feel as if I must kill it. Crush it to death.
Just because it’s small and soft, and I love it.” This could not fail
to be productive of interesting discussion about primitive feelings;
and how we are really all savages at heart; and the things that cause
us separately to feel most savage at heart. But you cannot shout
forth statements of this description to a man who is climbing to the
masthead, unfurling sails, swearing at ropes, and generally disporting
himself in a thoroughly joyous and normal fashion.
The three set sail, and picked up Peter swishing her dinghy between
armies of tall reeds. She came aboard, and under Stuart’s curt
directions, sailed ‘Faustina’ in a light breeze, as far as the bridge.
The feel of the tiller she had thoroughly grasped by now, but was still
dependent on superior orders for manipulation of the mainsail. She
resented the necessity for blind obedience; resented the inexperience
standing between her and initiative; wished passionately to be master
of that insolent canvas which now swelled adoring response to the
lordship of wind.
At first, the Broads had merely impressed her with their utter absence
of fuss. Wide waters, and blue skies pulled down to meet their edges;
here and there an upspringing windmill; landscape dropping flatly away
below the water level; a merry impression, arising from the frequent
bends and twists of the stream, that ships can go a-sailing across
field and meadow; racing clouds and racing shadows; music of bottles
that rolled and clinked in the locker; sound of rushes whispering
uneasily; scurry and plunge of a water-rat; an overwhelming interest
developed in the wind, its character and vagaries, to the exclusion
of all intellectual pursuits; the urgent necessity to use strong
language, and to wear as little as possible, and drink yellow ale
stabbed by the sunshine, and sleep anywhere, and eat everywhere,--these
then were the essentials of Sailing. These; and concealed within and
beyond these, the hidden gift, which Peter knew could not be hers until
she had torn away the veils of ignorance that kept her from mastery
of that exasperating expanse of white canvas. Except the necessary
technicalities, Stuart had told her nothing. She must grope until she
found. Meanwhile, she steered them into the putty....
“What the Hell are you doing?” with a lusty roar, Stuart leapt Aureole,
shoved Peter to one side, seized tiller and sheet, and just saved the
keel from running aground. Then sunnily, and with no recollection of
the expletive that had passed his lips, he relinquished his post, and
asked for cigarettes.
“There’s nothing I admire more,” murmured Peter, intensely amused;
“than a truly manly man.”
Stuart did not hear. His major portion was inside the locker. But
Aureole did. And she thought she had rarely witnessed aught so fine as
this virile comradeship between man and girl.
“Nigger! cigarettes!”
A mere voice from before the mast, where he squatted and smoked with
the imperturbability of a Buddha, Oliver replied: “In the locker.”
“Where d’you think I’ve been the last ten minutes? There’s nothing in
the locker but matches.”
“That’s right,” acquiesced the voice. “Heard a legend that people who
sail always forget matches. Destroyed the legend.”
“You have, with forty-eight boxes of wax vestas, and not a single tin
of Gold-Flake among ’em. You’ve got your pipe all right, I suppose?”
with fine sarcasm.
“Thanks. Yes.”
“I say, Mrs. Strachey, do you mind feeling for a cigarette-tin under
your feet, along the lee-scuppers?”
After long and obliging search, Aureole produced the pressed-beef,
whereof Stuart, resigning himself to circumstances, proceeded heartily
to eat.
“What is to be, must be. Not so close to the wind, Peter; that’s
better, that’s a jolly useful luff”; the result of a lucky guess on
the part of the pilot. “All the same, you’d better resign the helm to
Nigger; lot of shallows just about here.”
They were drawing near the spreading waterways of the Sounds. Oliver
took Peter’s place. The wind was still exasperatingly light, needing
experience to extract from it all the possible pace. Oliver seemed
uneasy. Presently he suggested anchoring for lunch.
Peter enquired: “Do we sail over the edge or into the hayfield?” the
latter extending low on their right, so that it really seemed as if
they could sail straight on and in among the haycocks; while on their
other side sky and water closed sharply together, with beyond them a
drop over the very edge of the world.
They chose the hayfield, as being more homely and conducive to good
appetite; moored the ‘Faustina’ fore and aft; and recalled Aureole from
her rapt contemplations of nature: “‘And O! That greener green, that
bluer blue!’”
Her brown eyes were very dewy, and her throat was infinitely whiter
than Peter’s; she was all sinuous curves and melting harmonies of tint.
And very good to look at, Stuart reflected,--if only she wouldn’t
describe the scenery!
“By the way, Nigger, are you aware that you’ve been sailing on the
wrong jibe?”
“Didn’t want to knock out my wife’s brains.”
Aureole looked up sharply: “You could have told me to move, couldn’t
you?”
“You looked very comfortable, my dear.”
A hot spurt of anger flushed Aureole’s creaminess. “If Peter had been
in the way of a jibe,” she said in a carefully controlled voice, “Mr.
Heron would have--sworn at her. He has sworn at her twice to-day.”
“Heron’s not a gentleman,” decreed his friend, with unusual promptness
of speech.
“Perhaps not, but he’s at least a man.”
Stuart looked embarrassed. And Oliver became dimly aware that his wife
was really enraged with him.
“Diddums, spitfire?” tentatively.
She burst forth: “You can’t treat me in the spirit of equality, of
give-and-take. No! I’m a petted little soft thing, who mustn’t be
inconvenienced or she’ll cry; so you’re chivalrous, and sail on
the wrong jibe, and--and think yourself a fine fellow. You don’t
understand, do you, that there’s nothing, no, nothing on earth I want
so much as to be properly sworn at!”
“I’m sorry,” he apologized for not having sufficiently damned her. As a
result of a moment’s consideration, he remarked placidly: “Blast you,
Aureole, pass the mustard,” with an air of having thus fulfilled all
that was required of him.
Aureole did not pass the mustard. But said very quietly, in tones
eloquent of suppressed meaning: “You will discover that it is not
always wise to play the fool, _mon ami_!”... and an echo from a
far-away world of shams and introspections and problem plays, mingled
strangely with the impatient music overhead; for the wind, with the
perversity of winds, had elected to blow fresh and hard from the
instant they moored the boat; and like the crack of whips was the sound
of the sail flapping against restraint.
“Wild-duck paste, Mrs. Strachey?” demanded Stuart, scattering her
preoccupation.
If Oliver had apprehended a tithe of what lay beneath her reply, he
would not have continued hammering so contentedly at the glass tongue.
“Wild duck.... Yes, indeed I will have wild duck.”
“‘Crosse and Blackwell’s Wild Duck,’” Stuart read from the tin in
passing it. “It has a pathetic tone, as if it were their pet, their
only wild duck; the one that Crosse caught in the grounds with a
butterfly net, and Blackwell pounded into paste, and Crosse wept and
said he never loved a dear gazelle to glad him with its soft black
eye----”
Stuart was talking hectically; there was a look in Aureole’s soft brown
eye, meditating upon the nebulous-tinted mess smeared upon her bread,
that positively alarmed him. “I don’t mind symbolism as a rule; but
when it comes to symbolism in potted paste----”
Aureole smiled all the way home; a smile beside which Mona Lisa’s
celebrated grimace paled to inanity. But the two men, beating in a foul
wind and against the tide, had no time to spare from ‘Faustina,’ who
was certainly behaving a great deal more like a Tyke than a lady.
On arrival at the bungalow, Aureole announced that she had run short of
stores, and must walk down to the village before she could provide them
with supper.
“I’ll go with you, dear.”
“I prefer to go alone.”
Oliver shrugged his shoulders, and without further ado, sat down to
write letters.
After a couple of hours’ labour, he looked at the time. Then he called
aloud his wife’s name. Then he searched the bungalow. Finally, he
strode to the foot of the lawn; in the well of the boat, a curve of
obstinate back denoted that Stuart, since their return home, had been
absorbed by a trifling defect of leakage, while Peter reluctantly held
a candle to him.
“Can I speak to you, Heron?”
“One moment,” in smothered tones.
Oliver waited ten, patiently. Then Peter said, “Come up, Stuart!” and
blew out the candle. Whereat, dirty and tousled, he arose from the
depths, and was exceeding wrathful.
“What did you want to do that for?”
“Your pal asked to speak to you.”
“My wife’s gone,” explained Oliver in bewildered tones.
And Stuart sat down suddenly and exclaimed: “Good Lord! Wild Duck!”
“I--don’t--quite--follow,” uttered in Oliver’s most phlegmatic manner.
Stuart’s reception of his tidings struck him as neither respectful nor
efficient.
“How long has she been gone?” queried Peter practically. “She went down
to the village, I thought.”
“Yes. Village seven minutes’ distance. She went at twenty to six. Now
it’s past eight. I don’t suppose for an instant,” continued Oliver,
“that she proposes to stop away longer than a few hours, for the
purpose of annoying me; I believe I wasn’t in favour,” with a slight
smile. “She has played this kind of trick before. High spirits, that’s
all. But it’s getting dark, and I wondered whether we hadn’t better go
out with lanterns.”
“Lanterns, indeed! I tell you, Strachey, it’s the Wild Duck. Don’t look
at me in that--that bovine fashion. Has she taken your pistols?”
“Why should she?” helplessly.
“Wild Duck!” chanted Stuart with monotonous reiteration.
The sun had long since been blotted greyly from the west. Pennons of
ragged mist fluttered wraithlike about the fading banks; waved and
drifted and dissolved in streamers over the colourless tracts of water.
The blasphemous mumblings of an ancient and invisible fisherman rose
and fell in cadences upon the uncanny silence. An hour before, and
the reeds had still been tipped with the sun’s gold. An hour later,
and blackness would be warm and velvety, interrupted by chirps and
rustlings, stir among the rushes, and the brush of unseen wings. But
at this between-hour, phantoms were abroad; and melancholy stole over
the souls of Peter and Oliver; melancholy deepened by Stuart’s strange
repetition of ‘Wild Duck! Wild Duck!’ term which now held a gloom and
menace it had altogether lacked at lunch that afternoon.
“Perhaps you’ll explain your reference, Stuart?”
“Ibsen--and the Doll’s House--when Nora went out to find her soul. You
refused to swear at her this afternoon, and I thought something bad
would come of it. And then the wild duck put it into her head to take
your pistols and go to sacrifice something ... with vine-leaves in her
hair.--No, that’s Hedda Gabler! Oh, well, there’s an impossible husband
in that, too!”
‘Pistols’ were even more sinister than wild ducks. Oliver said, “You
imply that my wife has committed suicide?”
They could not clearly see his face in the half-light. Stuart leapt
in with a hasty and matter-of-fact “Of course not. Don’t be absurd.
She thinks you need--oh, startling into a keener realization of her
personality, and this is her way of doing it.”
“But you said she hadn’t merely gone for a walk?”
“No.”
“You mean, I shall never see her again?”
“No--yes----” exasperated. “Can’t you get something between a mere walk
and never-again?”
Oliver couldn’t. The weight of his opinion had crashed heavily from
one extreme to the other; as Stuart had remarked, he was at all times
difficult to move, either forwards or backwards.
“If she’s not coming back,” argued Oliver, “she must have left me for
good. And if she has firearms with her, then I’d better follow. It all
looks to me very silly.” And with a commendable absence of flurry, his
broad back loomed up the garden, and disappeared into the bungalow.
“Peter,” whispered Stuart, when they were alone; “haven’t you yet
discovered the secret of the Broads?”
She was an instant silent, as if listening for a reply to his question.
Then it flashed across her in the phrase of his letter.
“We travel light.”
“That’s it--we travel light. All luggage too heavy for the rack, to be
thrown on to the rails.”
“Are you speaking symbolically?”
He said, “No, of course not. Damn symbolism!... I’m speaking of Aureole
and Oliver.”
The latter emerged from the bungalow, and called out something about
‘London.’ Stuart walked quickly to meet him:
“Look here, old man, she may lie low for a week or two, but believe me,
there’s no earthly reason for you to get feverish about it.” And then
the notion of Strachey being feverish struck him as inexpressibly comic.
“I’m not. But I’m catching the eight-forty-one to town. She has
probably gone home. I don’t care to think of her messing about with
revolvers, even to impress me.”
The pistol idea had established itself firmly; Stuart saw that it was
hopeless to attempt removing it before the eight-forty-one started.
“Good-bye.” Oliver had evidently forgotten about Peter.
“Good luck!” and Stuart returned to the boat.
“I like Nigger Strachey,” Peter decided, squatting on the rail of the
‘Faustina.’ “Stuart, how far are you concerned in this affair?”
He defended himself hotly, immensely fortified and upheld by the moral
consciousness of being in the wrong.
“Fancy accusing me of being directly responsible for the whim of a
neurotic woman.”
“I don’t. Now tell me how you are indirectly responsible--oh, it’s no
good, my lad! That rigmarole of ducks and pistols gave you away--to me,
at least.”
“It wasn’t my usual style, I admit,” laughed Stuart. And owned to the
morning’s conversation with Aureole, when he had spurred rebellion into
action. “It won’t do either of ’em any harm, you know; prevent ’em from
getting sluggish. Any sort of stir to matrimony;--why,” with fierce
indignation, “they might even have come to think themselves happy, if I
hadn’t shown them they weren’t.”
“Philanthropist,” softly from the girl beside him in the dimness.
“All the same, I wonder where she can have gone, and what she has done;
plenty of spirit there, and character too, if only she weren’t such a
wild--goose!”
“Why did you do it?”
Stuart leaned against the boom and faced her squarely.
“I could pretend it’s too late to catch the eight-forty-one,” he said.
“Or you could pretend not to know that it’s breaking rules to remain up
here alone with me. But we won’t pretend, either of us. The situation
is not accidental--they were in the way, and I got rid of them. I
wanted one day of sailing by ourselves, that’s all.”
He went on, “We can take ‘Faustina’ up as far as the ‘Windmill,’ put up
there for the night, and leave for London to-morrow evening,--or we’ll
catch the eight-forty-one now. There’s still time.”
She repeated musingly, “We won’t pretend----”
“No. You can trust me, Peter. It’s just for the sailing. But other
people, if they get to know, won’t believe that. It’s a question of how
much other people are to count?”
Peter sprang from her perch into the well, and began to untie the
cords which held together the waterproof covering of the mainsail.
He laid his hand over her moving fingers, and looked at her
interrogatively. She laughed, mocking his sudden solemnity:
“You see ... I’m a Pagan!--oh, it’s all right, Stuart; we’ll take
another day on the Broads, in spite of other people. Who was it
counselled me to travel light?”
He smiled. But merely said, as he re-tied the knot her impetuosity had
loosened, “No wind; and the stream against us. I shall have to row.”
Peter took the tiller. Some twenty minutes later, between the plash and
lift of his oars, her ear caught the distant shriek of a train-whistle.
And she knew the eight-forty-one to London had just left the station.
CHAPTER V
THE WORLD WASHED CLEAN
Peter awoke, and, listening intently, heard nothing beyond a faint
lapping of water. Yet she felt impelled to leave her bed and scramble
up to the high narrow window-seat. She had no idea of the time, but it
must have been very early morning; the breeze was chill and aloof that
struck upon her throat, as she leant out, an intruder upon silence.
A white vapour lay lightly as forgetfulness over river and bank and
boathouse. On the opposite shore, a tangle of masts and ropes lay
sketched like a dream upon a blown and tousled sky. A luminous gash in
the east widened suddenly, and silvered all the mist; then closed again
with cloud. The very river ceased its patient clamour for the sea; and
colour had died in the night, leaving its wraith of grey to tell the
tale. Grey that shone, and grey that was thin and dreary, and grey that
pearled and paled to white. Peter had a strange fancy that she would
not have been suffered as an on-looker had not her own eyes held their
depth of grey, and her hair a whisper of the baulked sunrise. It was
her day: she mused on what it might be trailing in its reluctant wake.
Her day, grey and white and pallor of gold. And she wondered why all of
her life that went before should be mist-shrouded in forgetfulness.
Her eyelids drooped heavily; she returned to bed, and at once fell
asleep.
Stuart awoke her by hammering blows upon her door. She went again to
the window before she opened to him. A bright blue sky now; trim
red roof of boathouse and ferryhouse and bungalow, warm in the clear
sunshine; screaming, cackling, chattering chorus of waterfowl; a
sail, left hoisted overnight, flung its broken dance upon the water,
sparkling and rioting between its clumps of emerald-green reeds. The
world washed clean of mystery and evil alike. Peter slid open her door
a few inches.
“Hallo! you’re in full rig.”
“Rather. I say, this is a ripping house, all its clocks have stopped,
and I’ve left my watch down at the bungalow, so we’ll never know what
time it is. Good morning, Peter.”
“Good morning, Stuart; I want some cherries.”
“While you dress?”
“While I dress.”