“DOUG”
[I]
URSULA’S husband waited for her to speak. But she laughed instead. Just
a low, thrilled, secret little laugh, very peculiarly hers. It made
Doug uncomfortable. Because by all the laws of commonplace she ought
to have been working up for a scene. And he was quite ready to call
himself a despicable brute, and had taken off his coat to do so--he
always felt bigger and more virile and primitive in his shirt sleeves,
than in a sober dinner-jacket. Doug Barrison had roughed it so much,
that, metaphorically, he still swung a perpetual axe with which to
build a log cabin for his woman.
“By God, Teddy, it’s hot tonight. I’d like--I’d like to be beating down
the Channel, with the deck lifting and straining under my feet.”
She dismissed the deck as momentarily unimportant. “Doug----”
He sat on the edge of the bed; it creaked under his weight. Ursula
leant back against the pillows, hands clasped behind her head.
“If I were you, and you were me, what would you do about it, Doug?”
“I’ve been a vile, hulking, despicable brute,” he began.
“Oh, no, dear, nothing as powerful as that. Because you can’t help it,
can you?”
“Not in this world full of girls,” he confessed, with sudden
understanding that she understood.
How mischievously attractive she was, with that wise little
smile flickering round her lips, and her profound mermaid eyes.
Teddy--Ursula--his teddy-bear--the nickname was obvious. She was so
much more to him than Monica and Kate and--and Doreen--oh, all the
procession!
But his flirtation with Doreen ended tonight by the sudden--and, he
must admit it, sensible action of the girl’s parents. They had simply
left the boarding-house during the day, while he was doing his duty as
Secretary to the Knapsack Club. Ursula had broken the news to him while
they were dressing for dinner.
“And play up to me at dinner, Doug, and afterwards. All those hateful
intimate _strangers_ looking on, and they’ve nothing else to be
excited about, most of them.”
He knew she detested the boarding-house. They had only moved into it
when the seven years’ lease of their flat had expired, while they had
hunted for another. But somehow the hunting had become desultory.
Doug declared that he did not want to anchor himself again; the old
rover mood was once more upon him--so they had stayed for nearly
twelve months at the boarding-house. For presently had come Doreen
Jones, and he had talked to her about the glorious adventure of
having no anchorage, but obeying an invisible call to the South Seas
or to Persia, just the very instant it sounded. He talked to her--as,
perhaps, he had once talked to the little schoolgirl Ursula Maxwell.
His own sister, Gwen, was at Regina Hall with Ursula, and had coaxed
her big brother, just home from a trip to Chile, to come to the annual
fancy-dress dance. Among the cowgirls, Pierrettes and Dutch peasants,
was a glowing, radiant Cinderella, in faded rags certainly, and
carrying a broom, but behaving with a wild abandon very far from the
original modest and obedient maiden of the fairy-tale. Ursula, indeed,
was wildly over-excited. Tonight, at any rate, she would retrieve the
humiliation of her one previous attempt to “sparkle in the throng”....
Tonight there was no question of making a fool of herself, even had
Nina been there to say so. Success was like a rush of wine in her
blood; she danced--well, Miss Luther had frequently to speak a few
low, restraining words in her ear. The other girls swarmed round her,
begging to introduce their brothers and cousins. Each hair of the gold
which tumbled over her shoulders and down her back seemed to stand
out and quiver with a separate vitality. There was no reason for all
this--except for the stinging remembrance that she had come to the last
day of her last term, and tomorrow ... she would be going back home,
back to the Laburnums for good, to share a bedroom with Nina and sit
at table with the family and Aunt Lavvy and Gums; with Aunt Lavvy and
Gums and the family.... And she had never been popular with them since
that unfortunate affair of the room.
[II]
SCHOOL, after the first hot indignation, had proved not so bad. It was
a simple and more impersonal matter to share with a dozen than with
one. Besides, expecting an atmosphere like warm clinging toffee, sweet
and sentimental and tenacious, she had found instead a community of
off-hand young women, encouraged by their mistresses to strive for
fitness, hygiene and efficiency--a collection of embryo Ninas, in fact.
Ursula adapted herself swiftly to these conditions, glad that too
cloying intimacy was “not done.” She was not by any means the Favourite
of the School nor the Queen of the Upper Fifth.... The night of the
fancy-dress ball was the first time she was ever conspicuous at Miss
Luther’s. When Douglas Barrison saw her again, she was sedate in navy
blue and a white flannel shirt; Gwen’s little friend on a week’s visit
to the house; very shy and unimportant; hair in a “door-knocker.” “Yes,
thank you, Mr. Barrison, I enjoyed the dance very much----”
But no repetition of wild and vivid behaviour would have fascinated him
like this sudden baffling change and withdrawal.
He won her on scenery, mainly. Big lonely romantic scenery. Wide
Pacific seas, the Southern Cross overhead.... She thought he found
difficulty in talking about it all--“Civilization’s all right--but
sometimes a man feels he wants to be up against things ... to sleep on
a bed of fern or the hard earth itself----”
When Doug stayed overnight with friends, he would nearly always, with
his peculiarly jolly, open-air laugh, reject the comforts of the spare
room. “Oh, I’m an old campaigner.... I can turn in anywhere ... on the
floor--in a barn. Once, I remember, I slept----”
His sufferings when he wore a collar and trousers and such ordinary
European raiment, and his relief when he could cast them off, seemed
almost disproportionately exaggerated. “A loose shirt and a pair of old
shorts’ll do me any time, thank you.”
He liked makeshifts in the midst of civilization: to find a door locked
so that he had to enter by a window, genuinely pleased him. It was so
virile. A row was virile, too.... It was disappointing to pugnacity
when coal-heavers, navvies and bargees were civil.
Was he a romantic, then? Well ... a dependent romantic, dependent
upon his setting. He could understand how a traveller, staying in
safe, prosy, comfortable London because his old mother wanted him,
would chafe and get restless for hard winds and bare horizons and
the hot-coloured East. But a retired grocer fretful for his cheeses
and balls of string again--“Not much romance about cheese, is there?
What beats me, is how the poor little chap stuck to trade all those
years. I’d have broken away...” it was a constant miracle to Doug, how
few people did indeed by their bodies break away. The spirit which
had broken away was invisible to him. It may have been by sheer luck
that Douglas Barrison was tanned and hard-bitten, or it may have been
that his desire for this type of looks was powerful enough to achieve
them. Tall, burly--he would have preferred to be lean, though!--his
hearty boyish voice contradicting a certain remote sadness in his
deep-set eyes; hard brown skin and even a small white scar ... no
wonder he impressed Ursula romantically. Ursula, at eighteen, was a
baby still, proud that her notions of romance swung with free steps
past the pale sentimentalities of an earlier generation of schoolgirls.
Her definition of a man--after she had met Doug--was a massive and
inarticulate being, who would rather be cold than warm, rather fighting
than lapped in unperilous peace.
They confided in each other a craving for loneliness and adventure.
“You’re the first girl I’ve met who understood all that. God, if I had
you in ...” he became geographical.
“Four corners to my bed,
Four angels round my head----”
De Vere Stacpoole, Robert Service, Jack London and Joseph Conrad were
the four angels who ought to be grouped round the bed in any symbolic
representation of Doug. Not that he ever read them much; big, simple,
rolling-stone sort of men read their Bible and perhaps Shakespeare.
They seem to find Shakespeare easy reading, even scenes in which the
Fool makes conversation.
Ursula was not fond of reading, either. So that their courtship did
not include enthusiastic quotations and miraculous discovery of mutual
favourites.
Instead, he planned a love-scene in every setting that captivated by
its distance from the actual verandah of the Barrison home.... And yet,
it was not such a bad verandah. He won Ursula on scenery, and on his
restlessness which leapt to hers and exultantly joined hands with it.
Now they had been married eight years, and all their journeyings had
been for “holidays,” Easter and Summer, tethered at one end by Pall
Mall and the Knapsack Club. Doug liked his genial post as secretary
there; the careless come and go; a drink with a fellow just back from
Tibet, a chat with another over his plans for a toddle into the Amazon
region--“Lucky devil, wish I could come with you!” from Doug.
Mind you, Doug did not pose as one of the world’s wayfarers, without
justification. He _had_ travelled, quite a lot, and beyond the
ordinary tourist zone. And he had enjoyed it, too, though his relish
for discomfort multiplied enormously in retrospect. No other post
but secretary to the Knapsack would have held him faithful. But at
the Knapsack he could absorb daily all his favourite atmosphere of
travel--the talk of routes and equipments, the fantastic anecdotes, the
society of the right sort of men, thin, cheerful, leathery fellows;
without yielding his regular salary, his duties to his mother, or the
pleasures of London, three meals a day, electric light, telephone and
taxis. His qualifications of good temper, good breeding and competence
made him popular with the members of the Club. It was travelling by
proxy, certainly, and many evenings he came home to Ursula in the
“break-away and be damned to my salary and this damned monotonous
safety” mood ... but Ursula was always a little bit too ready to assent
and encourage him and dare an uncharted future. She was eager for pain
and horror, the tragedy of making mistakes--all the perils along the
road that might break in sudden dazzle and glory. She was eager only to
go and not to stay--never to stay. But Doug was very young at all his
ages, and his resolutions needed resistance, as a puppy’s teeth need
bone if they are to sharpen effectively.
Presently his performance of a stern, rugged spirit clenched against
the call of lagoons and mountains and bronchos, the lure of the Far
East and the Far West and small animal-whimpers through primeval
forests at night--were played to other audiences than Ursula; audiences
who would not say: “Oh yes, let’s!”--audiences of Monica and Kitty
and--and Doreen.
Nobody, not even Doug himself, had thought it worth while to warn
little schoolgirl Ursula from loving and marrying a man who was beyond
everything else, and beyond laughter and tears, and beyond cure,
susceptible. Monstrously, grotesquely susceptible.
Being married made him more susceptible than before, because it gave
him a reason why he must not be--a reason with hard bone in it. Lord!
how he renounced them, Monica and Kitty and--no, not Doreen; he was
just going to renounce her, when her people took her away from the
boarding-house, which was disconcerting. How he began to tell them
about lagoons, etc., and where he would like to take them--and then
abruptly was silent, mouth set, jaw squared, but blue eyes still
narrowed and dreamy with inward vision of two tiny figures alone
together in the Sudan or on a coral island.... “Look here, my dear,
shut me up when I get talking ... like this. It isn’t good for either
of us. I’m getting soft, that’s the trouble. But for a man to know
eternally where his next meal’s coming from--He ought to sling it home
on his shoulders, while his mate----”
“Hush, Doug--we mustn’t.”
“No. We mustn’t. Give us this day our daily round.... Don’t you
ever get sick for freedom? To chuck the whole code and get away
... ride away” (when it wasn’t the ship and the straining deck!).
“Oh--riding--the steady thud and gallop of your horse’s feet under
you, miles and miles and miles....”
And so Doug went on for miles and miles and miles. And years and years
and years.
[III]
TILL now, at last, he and Ursula were talking about it. It was amazing
to Doug that she did not cry, and cling to him, and attempt to win a
promise of no more Doreens. He said so.
“Dear old boy, I’ve learnt from King Canute that I may sit in a chair
and forbid the waves to wet my feet, and they’ll blandly roll up all
the same. No more Doreens? There will be dozens of Doreens. Dozens--and
I love you. What am I to do about it, Doug? Can you suggest anything?”
“Let’s go away, then--where there are no waves--no Doreens.
Darling--you take matches away from a child, because he’s not to be
trusted. I’m a child. Take the matches away from me. Take me away from
the matches.” He was speaking honestly now.
“Animal, vegetable, mineral,” murmured Ursula--“Doreen, waves, matches.
Never mind. We can’t cut clean away from things as they are, unless you
give up the Knapsack, Doug.”
“I’ve been wanting to for a long time”--two and a half minutes
precisely. “I’m getting much too fat and contented.” He strolled to
the looking-glass, humming: “Put me on an island where the girls are
few!”--“Yes, I’m in rotten condition. Look at this arm. I’ll hand in
my resignation tomorrow. I expect they’ll get up a subscription for a
present, as I’ve been there so long. Mr. Barrison all unobservant as
the list goes round! I’m rather keen on a decent pocket-flask. Useful
when I’m riding round to have a look at the crops.”
“Dear, we’re not going into the Bush, are we?”
“We’re going to the other end of nowhere!” shouted Doug,
swinging out his arm and hitting it against the bed-post. “We’re
buccaneers--soldiers of fortune. The horizon ... how it pulls and
pulls----”
“And beyond it, the warm dim lagoons, where a man and a woman can
bathe their hot bodies, naked and unashamed,” Ursula reeled off with
wicked fluency. “God--and the maddening smell of the hibiscus blossom
in the blue night air. Why does any one stay this side of the Equator,
I wonder? Just wait till you see the Southern Cross flaming above our
heads--I’ve been pent up long enough. Oh, I’m talking damned rot,
perhaps, but convention--it’s nothing but a strait-waistcoat. Let’s
burst it and be off! I want to show you the warm dim lagoons----”
Ursula broke off from imitation “And here the same tune comes round
again on the barrel-organ,” she finished, in her soft, sedate fashion.
Doug was staring at her, bewildered as a puppy before whom a mirror is
held up.
“Don’t you want to go to the tropics?”
“They’re so--tropical,” sighed Ursula. “Insects and miasma.”
“North-West, then? Canada? It’ll be a new land to me----”
“Doug-land! cowboy sombreros and log-cabins and biting blizzards and
leagues of glittering white snow ... the red fox ... or is it the Red
Indian? Never mind, we needn’t be accurate in Doug-land!”
Her husband remained good-tempered. Good temper under provocation was,
indeed, one of his attractions: “I can’t quite get the hang of that.
But it looks as though any place I took you to would be Doug-land, as
you call it.”
“It would. Oh, it would.”
“Ursula--aren’t we going to break away, then? by ourselves? to the back
of nowhere?”
“We needn’t be quite so drastic, nor so picturesque about it, that’s
all.” She sank to a more serious note: “We mustn’t be more than a
day’s journey away from your mother, Doug, for the next few years....
Remember what the doctor told you about her heart.”
He nodded, contrite.
“Poor old Mater. England, then. How far can we trek from mankind.
Jove--trekking--I’d like to have swept you off to a farm on the
Transvaal, Teddy!”
“Grey felt sombrero exchanged for flopping straw, the same loose
shirt as we used in the tropics and in Canada; patient lumbering oxen
responsive to the slightest crack of your sjambok....”
“I don’t see why we shouldn’t farm in the west of England,” reflected
Doug; “there’d be moors and the sea and good rich soil--I’d have to
look round a bit first and find my feet. My oath, it’s a topping notion
of yours, Teddy. I’ve always been keen on farming, deep down. Good-bye
to the artificial life and hurrah for Arcadia!”
“Doug, are there no Doreens in Arcadia?”
“Rustics, farm-girls. No, they don’t appeal to me. Honestly. It’s girls
of our own class, with dainty minds and dainty bodies who are fatal.
It’s queer, you know”--Doug was engrossed in the subject of his ego;
and Ursula listened attentively, thinking that out of all his innocent
misconceptions of himself, she might yet pick up an essential hint or
two; “it’s queer that though I’m a primitive man, primitive to the very
spine, yet the type of opposite sex that--that upset me, is delicate
and puzzling and highly-finished--you don’t meet ’em often away from
towns. Isn’t it queer, Ursula?”
She nodded absently, her mind a-swing upon some tiny thread of its
own. “I don’t want to be a beast--and I don’t want to nag--but,
Doug, if we go and live in the country, away from temptation, it’s
_not_ just for a change and a jolly adventure. It’s because I’m
desperate. I don’t look it, I know, and I don’t behave like it, but
I’m desperate all the same. Do you really want to be cured, Doug? I
won’t force the experiment on you. I’m the last creature who ought to
do that--I’m personally too much interested. But austerity isn’t half
as romantic as you’re imagining it now. You’re still thinking about the
hunting-flask....”
“No, I’m not. Anyway, they’ll most likely fork out with a
cigarette-case instead. And I’ve got three already. Teddy darling, I
solemnly swear I want to be cured. I _mean_ to be cured. I owe you
that. We’ll be all-in-all to each other, down in the country. Pretty
desolate in winter, I expect ... all the better, cold and rain sharpen
you up like blazes. I’m fed up with town people and their sallow, dingy
faces. They’re helpless; they’re afraid, they’re hemmed in----”
His voice became resonant; and the old couple in the adjoining bedroom
thumped the wall in peevish protest.
“Right!” said Doug, glaring at them through the paper and plaster and
match-boarding, and highly pleased at this timely illustration to his
arguments. “Right! Thump away! We’re off! We’ve done with being herded
and packed. We’re going to where a fellow can bellow his lungs inside
out at whatever time of night he pleases. You know, Teddy, the root of
the trouble is, that living in town has made us too complex. If that
old hag and her husband loved us, in the simple country fashion--love
is really a very simple thing, Teddy,” and Doug’s voice was a little
deeper than usual as he came to this conclusion.
“But surely it _is_ a fairly simple thing, to bang at the wall
when your neighbours are noisy at midnight. Mr. and Mrs. Cox would be
far more complex if they loved us for it!”
Mr. and Mrs. Cox thumped again, urgently.
“Oh, be---- Teddy, why have we put up so long with this slummy
dosshouse, that’s what I want to know?”
But Ursula was silent, thinking that enough had been said about Doreen,
who had only left that day.
She did not sleep at once, but persistently chased the wheeling
thought: “Will it be any good?” It was not that she wanted Doug to feel
their future isolation as punishment--discipline--not with any such
priggish quality attached to it. But his innocently chubby view of the
idea as a jolly, buccaneering adventure, with shouts and banners--it
was so exasperatingly like putting a naughty child to bed, only to see
him at once rig up a tent with the sheets, and begin to play.
“Doug----”
“Wha’?”
Ursula recognized that he was too nearly asleep for further
psychological discussion. And, after all, if she was cast for heroine
of his latest muscular romance, was it not better than the grimmer rôle
of chastiser to a penitent. So----
“Doug, I _am_ longing for ... Arcadia.”
His arm strayed out at random, and lay heavily, possessively across her
throat.... “Darling ... so glad ... thought you’d come round to the
idea.... And we’ll be able to keep a dog in the country....”