three times before I spoke. "Yes," said I, "I think I understand. We
have both been hangers-on. But that seems, somehow, a long while ago.
Yes, it was a knave who scaled that wall the first time,--one who needed
and had earned a kicking from here to Aldebaran. But I think that I
loved you from the very moment I saw you. Will you marry me, Avis?"
And in her face there was a wonderful and tender change. "You care for
me--just me?" she breathed.
"Just you," I answered, gravely.
And I saw the start, and the merest ghost of a shiver which shook her
body, as she leaned toward me a little, almost in surrender; but,
quickly, she laughed.
"That was very gentlemanly in you," she said; "but, of course, I
understand. Let us part friends, then,--Robert. Even if--if you really
cared, we couldn't marry. We are too poor."
"Too poor!" I scoffed,--and my voice was joyous, for I knew now that it
was I she loved and not just Peter Blagden's money; "too _poor_, Avis! I
am to the contrary, an inordinately rich man, I tell you, for I have
your love. Oh you needn't try to deny it. You are heels over head in
love with me. And we have made, no doubt, an unsavoury mess of the past;
but the future remains to us. We are the earthen pots, you and I, who
wanted to swim with the brazen ones. Well! they haven't quite smashed
us, these big, stupid, brazen pots, but they have shown us that they
have the power to do it. And so we are going back where we belong--to
the poor man's country, Avis,--or, in any event, to the country of those
God-fearing, sober and honest folk who earn their bread and, just
occasionally, a pat of butter to season it."
The world was very beautiful. I knew that I was excellent throughout and
unconquerable. So I moved more near to her.
"For you will come with me, won't you, dear? Oh, you won't have quite so
many gowns in this new country, Avis, and, may be, not even a horse and
surrey of your own; but you will have love, and you will have happiness,
and, best of all, Avis, you will give a certain very undeserving man his
chance--his one sole chance--to lead a real man's life. Are you going
to deny him that chance, Avis?"
Her gaze read me through and through; and I bore myself a bit proudly
under it; and it seemed to me that my heart was filled with love of her,
and that some sort of new-born manhood in Robert Etheridge Townsend was
enabling me to meet her big brown eyes unflinchingly.
"It wouldn't be sensible," she wavered.
I laughed at that. "Sensible! If there is one thing more absurd than
another in this very absurd world, it is common-sense. Be sensible and
you will be miserable, Avis, not to mention being disliked. Sensible!
Why, of course, it is not sensible. It is stark, rank, staring idiocy
for us two not to make a profitable investment of, we will say, our
natural endowments, when we come to marry. For what will Mrs. Grundy say
if we don't? Ah, what will she say, indeed? Avis, just between you and
me, I do not care a double-blank domino what Mrs. Grundy says. You will
obligingly remember that the car for the Hesperides is in the rear, and
that this is the third and last call. And in consequence--will you
marry me, Avis?"
She gave me her hand frankly, as a man might have done. "Yes, Robert,"
said Miss Beechinor, "and God helping us, we will make something better
of the future than we have of the past."
In the silence that fell, one might hear the birds. "Sweet, sweet,
sweet!" they twittered. "Can you see, can you see, can you see? Their
lips meet. It is sweet, sweet, sweet!"
3
But, by and by, she questioned me. "Are you sure--quite sure," she
queried, wistfully, "that you wouldn't rather have me Margaret Hugonin,
the heiress?"
I raised a deprecatory hand. "Avis!" I reproached her; "Avis, Avis, how
little you know me! That was the solitary fly in the amber,--that I
thought I was to marry a woman named Margaret. For I am something of a
connoisseur in nomenclature, and Margaret has always--_always_--been my
pet detestation in the way of names."
"Oh, what a child you are!" she said.
27.
_He Calls, and Counsels, and Considers_
"I am now" said I, in my soul, "quite immeasurably, and insanely, and
unreasonably, and unadulteratedly happy. Why, of course I am."
This statement was advanced just two weeks later than the events
previously recorded. And the origin of it was the fact that I was now
engaged to Avis Beechinor though it was not as yet to be "announced";
just this concession alone had Mrs. Beechinor wrested from an indignant
and, latterly, a tearful interview.... For I had called at Selwoode, in
due form; and after leaving Mrs. Beechinor had been pounced upon by an
excited and comely little person in black.
"Don't you mind a word she said," this lady had exhorted, "because she
is _the_ Gadarene swine, and Avis has told me everything! Of course you
are to be married at once, and I only wish _I_ could find the only man
in the world who can keep me interested for four hours on a stretch and
send my pulse up to a hundred and make me feel those thrilly thrills
I've always longed for."
"But surely--" said I.
"No, I'm beginning to be afraid not, beautiful, though of course I used
to be crazy about Billy Woods; and then once I was engaged to another
man for a long time, and I was perfectly devoted to him, but he _never_
made me feel a single thrilly thrill. And would you believe it, Mr.
Townsend?--after a while he came back, precisely as though he had been a
bad penny or a cat. He had been in the Boer War and came home just a
night before I left, wounded and promoted several times and completely
covered with glory and brass buttons. He came seven miles to see me, and
I thoroughly enjoyed seeing him, for I had on my best dress and was
feeling rather talkative. Well! at ten I was quite struck on him. At
eleven perfectly willing to part friends, and at twelve _crazy_ for him
to go. He stayed till half-past, and I didn't want to think of him for
days. And, by the way, I am Miss Hugonin, and I hope you and Avis will
be very happy. _Good-bye!_"
"Good-bye!" said I.
2
And that, oddly enough, was the one private talk I ever had with the
Margaret Hugonin whom, for some two weeks, I had believed myself to be
upon the verge of marrying; for the next time I conversed with her alone
she was Mrs. William Woods.
"Oh, go away, Billy!" she then said, impatiently "How often will I have
to tell you it isn't decent to be always hanging around your wife? Oh,
you dear little crooked-necktied darling!"--and she remedied the fault
on tiptoe,--"_please_ run away and make love to somebody else, and be
sure to get her name right, so that I shan't assassinate the wrong
person,--because I want to tell this very attractive child all about
Avis, and not be bothered." And subsequently she did.
But I must not forestall her confidences, lest I get my cart even
further in advance of my nominal Pegasus than the loosely-made
conveyance is at present lumbering.
3
And meanwhile Peter Blagden and I had called at Selwoode once or twice
in unison and due estate. And Peter considered "Miss Beechinor a damn
fine girl, and Miss Hugonin too, only--"
"Only," I prompted, between puffs, "Miss Hugonin keeps everybody, as my
old Mammy used to say, 'in a perpetual swivet.' I never understood what
the phrase meant, precisely, but I somehow always knew that it was
eloquent."
"Just so," said Peter. "You prefer--ah--a certain amount of
tranquillity. I haven't been abroad for a long while," said Mr. Blagden;
and then, after another meditative pause: "Now Stella--well, Stella was
a damn sight too good for me, of course--"
"She was," I affably assented.
"--and I'd be the very last man in the world to deny it. But still you
_do_ prefer--" Then Peter broke off short and said: "My God, Bob! what's
the matter?"
So I think I must have had the ill-taste to have laughed a little over
Mr. Blagden's magnanimity in regard to Stella's foibles. But I only
said: "Oh, nothing, Peter! I was just going to tell you that travelling
_does_ broaden the mind, and that you will find an overcoat
indispensable in Switzerland, and that during the voyage you ought to
keep in the open air as much as possible, and that you should give the
steward who waits on you at table at least ten shillings,--I was just
going to tell you, in fine, that you would be a fool to squander any
money on a guide-book, when I am here to give you all the necessary
pointers."
"But I didn't mean to go to Europe exactly," said Mr. Blagden; "--I just
meant to go abroad in a general sense. Any place would be abroad, you
know, where people weren't always remembering how rich you were, and
weren't scrambling to marry you out of hand, but really cared, you know,
like she does. Oh, may be it _is_ bad form to mention it, but I couldn't
help seeing how she looked at you, Bob. And it waked something--Oh, I
don't know what I mean," said Peter--"it's just damn foolishness,
I suppose."
"It's very far from that," I said; and I was honestly moved, just as I
always am when pathos, preferably grotesque, has caught me unprepared.
This millionaire was lonely, because of his millions, and Stella was
dead; and somehow I understood, and laid one hand upon his shoulder.
"Oh, _you_ can't help it, I suppose, if all women love by ordinary
because he is so like another person, where as men love because she is
so different. My poor caliph, I would sincerely advise you to play the
fool just as you plan to do,--oh, anywhere,--and without even a Mesrour.
In fine go Bunburying at once. For very frankly, First Cousin of the
Moon, it is the one thing worth while in life."
"I half believe I will," said Peter.... So he was packing in the interim
during which I pretended to be writing, and was in reality fretting to
think that, whilst Avis was in England by this, I could not decently
leave America until those last five chapters were finished. So, in part
as an excuse for not scrawling the dullest of nonsense and subsequently
tearing it up, I fell to considering the unquestionable fact that I was
in love with Avis, and upon the verge of marrying her, and was in
consequence, as a matter of plain logic, deliriously happy.
"For when you are in love with a woman you, of course, want to marry her
more than you want anything else. In nature, it is a serious and--well,
an almost irretrievable business. And I shall have to cultivate the
domestic virtues and smoke cheaper cigarettes and all that, but I shall
be glad to do every one of these things, for her sake--after a while. I
shall probably enjoy doing them."
And I read Bettie Hamlyn's letter for the seventeenth time....
4
For Bettie had answered the wild rhapsody which I wrote to tell her how
much in love I was with Elena Barry-Smith. And in the nature of things I
had not written Bettie again to tell her I was, and by a deal the more,
in love with Avis Beechinor. The task was delicate, the reasons for my
not unnatural change were such as you must transmit in a personal
interview during which you are particularly boyish and talk very fast.
Besides, I do not like writing letters; and moreover, there was no real
need to write. I was going to Gridlington; what more natural than to
ride over to Fairhaven some clear morning and tell Bettie everything? I
pictured her surprise and her delight at seeing me, and reflected it
would be unfair to her to render an inaccurate account of matters, such
as any letter must necessarily give.
Only, first, there was the garden of Peter's aunt,--which sounds like
an introductory French exercise,--and then Avis came. And, somehow, I
had not, in consequence, traversed the scant nine miles that lay as yet
between me and Bettie Hamlyn. I kept on meaning to do it the next day.
And the next day after this I really did.
"For I ought to tell Bettie about everything," I reflected. "No matter
if the engagement is a secret, I ought to tell Bettie about it."
5
When I had done so, Bettie shook her head. "Oh, Robin, Robin!" she said,
"how did I ever come to raise a child that doesn't know his own mind for
as much as two minutes? And how dared that Barry-Smith person to slap
you, I would like to know."
"Now you're jealous, Bettie. You are thinking she infringed upon an
entirely personal privilege, and you resent it."
"Well,--but I've the right to, you see, and she hadn't. I consider her
to be a bold-faced jig. And I don't approve of this Avis person either,
you understand; but we poor mothers are always being annoyed by slushy,
mushy Avises. I suppose there's a reason for it. She'll throw you over,
you know, as soon as _her_ mother has had an inning or two. That's why
she took her to Europe," Bettie explained, with a fine confusion of
personalities. "Only she just wanted any quiet place where she could
take aromatic spirits of ammonia and point out between doses that she
has given up her entire life to her child and has never made any demands
on her and hasn't the strength to argue with her, because her heart is
simply broken. We mothers always say that; and the funny part is that if
you say it often enough it invariably works far better than any possible
argument."
I told her she was talking nonsense, and she said, irrelevantly enough:
"Setebos, and Setebos, and Setebos! I don't think very highly of Setebos
sometimes, because He muddles things so. Oh, well, I shan't cry Willow.
Besides there _aren't_ any sycamore-trees in the garden. So let's go
into the garden, dear. That sounds as if I ate in the back pantry,
doesn't it? Of course you aren't of any account any more, and you never
will be, but at least you don't look at people as though they were a new
sort of bug whenever they have just thought a sentence or two and then
gone on, without bothering to say it."
So we went into Bettie's garden. It had not changed....
6
Nothing had changed. It was as though I had somehow managed, after all,
to push back the hands of the clock. Fairhaven accepted me incuriously.
I was only "an old student." In addition, I was vaguely rumoured to
write "pieces" for the magazines. Probably I did; "old students" were
often prone to vagaries after leaving King's College; for instance, they
told me, Ralph Means was a professional gambler, and Ox Selwyn had
lately gone to Shanghai and had settled there,--and Shanghai, in common
with most other places, Fairhaven accorded the negative tribute of just
not absolutely disbelieving in its existence.
Nothing had changed. The Finals were over; and with the noisy exodus of
the college-boys, Fairhaven had sunk contentedly into an even deeper
stupor, as Fairhaven always does in summer. And, for the rest, the
unpaved sidewalks were just as dusty, the same deep ruts and the puddles
which never dry, not even in mid-August, adorned Fairhaven's single
street; the comfortable moss upon Fairhaven's roofs had not varied by a
shade; and George Washington or Benjamin Franklin might have stepped out
of any one of those brass-knockered doorways without incongruity and
without finding any noticeable innovation to marvel at.
Nothing had changed. In the precise middle of the campus Lord Penniston,
our Governor in Colonial days, still posed, in dingy marble; and the
fracture of the finger I had inadvertently broken off, the night that
Billy Woods and I painted the statue all over, in six colours, was white
and new-looking. Kathleen Eppes had married her Spaniard and had left
Fairhaven; otherwise the same girls were already planning their toilets
for the Y.M.C.A. reception in October, which formally presents the "new
students" to society at large; and presently these girls would be going
to the germans or the Opera House with the younger brother of the boy
who used to take them thither....
Nothing had changed; not even I was changed. For I had soon discovered
that Bettie Hamlyn did not care a pin for me in myself. She was simply
very fond of me because, at times, I reminded her of a boy who had gone
to King's College; and her reception of me, for the first two days, was
unmistakably provisional.
"Very well!" I said.
And I did it. For I knew how difficult it was to deceive Bettie, and in
consequence all my faculties rose to the challenge. I did not merely
mimic my former self, I was compelled, almost, to believe I was indeed
that former self, because not otherwise could I get Bettie Hamlyn's
toleration. Had I paused even momentarily to reflect upon the excellence
of my acting, she would have known. So I resolutely believed I was being
perfectly candid; and with constant use those older tricks of speech and
gesture and almost of thought, at first laborious mimicry, became
well-nigh involuntary.
In fine, we could not wipe away five years, but with practice we found
that you would very often forget them, and for quite a while....
I had explained to Bettie's father I was going to board with them that
summer. Had I not been so haphazard in the progress of this narrative, I
would have earlier announced that Bettie's father was the Latin
professor at King's College. He was very old and vague, and his general
attitude toward the universe was that of remote recollection of having
noticed something of the sort before. Professor Hamlyn, therefore, told
me he was glad to hear of my intended stay beneath his roof; hazarded
the speculation that I had written a book which he meant to read upon
the very first opportunity; blinked once or twice; and forthwith lapsed
into consideration of some Pliocene occurrence which, if you were to
judge by the expression of his mild old countenance, he did not find
entirely satisfactory....
So I spent three months in Fairhaven; and Bettie and I read all the old
books over again, and were perfectly happy.
7
And what I wrote in those last five chapters of my book was so good that
in common decency I was compelled to alter the preceding twenty-nine and
bring them a bit nearer to Bettie's standard. For I was utilising
Bettie's ideas. She did not have the knack of putting them on paper;
that was my trivial part, as I now recognised with a sort of scared
reverence.
"Of course, though, you had to meddle," I would scold at her. "I had
meant the infernal thing to be a salable book. To-day it is just a
stenographic report of how these people elected to behave. I haven't
anything to do with it. I wash my hands of it. I consider you, in fine,
a cormorant, a conscienceless marauder, a meddlesome Mattie, _and_ a
born dramatist."
"But, it's _much_ better than anything you've ever done, Robin--"
"That is what I'm grumbling about. I consider it very unfeeling of you
to write better novels than I do," I retorted. "But, oh, how good that
scene is!" I said, a little later.
"Let's see--'For you, dear clean-souled girl, were born to be the wife
of a strong man, and the mother of his dirty children'--no, it's
'sturdy', but then you hardly ever cross your T's. And where he goes on
to tell her he can't marry her, because he is artistic, and she is too
practical for them to be real mates, and all that other
feeble-mindedness? Dear me, did I forget to tell you we were going to
cut that out?"
"But I particularly like that part--"
"Do you?" said Bettie, as her pen scrunched vicious lines through it.
Then she said: "I only hope she had the civility and self-control not to
laugh until you had gone away. And 'We irrelevant folk that design all
useless and beautiful things,' indeed! No, I couldn't have blamed her if
she laughed right out. I wonder if you will never understand that what
you take to be your love for beautiful things is really just a dislike
of ugly ones? Oh, I've no patience with you! And wanting to print it in
a book, too, instead of being content to make yourself ridiculous in
tete-a-tetes with minxes that don't especially matter!"
"Well--! Anyhow, I agree with you that, thanks to your editing and
carping and general scurrility, this book is going to be," I meekly
stated, "a little better than _The Apostates_ and not just 'pretty much
like any other book'."
"Do you know that's just what I was thinking," said Bettie, dolefully.
She clasped both hands behind her crinkly small black head, and in that
queer habitual pose appraised me, from between her elbows, in that way
which always made me feel I had better be careful. "Damn you!" was
her verdict.
"Whence this unmaidenliness?" I queried, with due horror.
"You are trying to prove to me that it has been worth while. This nasty
book is coming alive, here in our own eight-cornered room, with a horrid
crawly life of its own that it would never have had if you hadn't been
learning things my boy knew nothing about. That's what you are crowing
in my face, when you keep quiet and smirk. Oh, but I know you!"
"You do think, then, that, between you and me, it is really coming
alive?"
"Yes,--if that greatly matters to the fat literary gent that I don't
care for greatly. Yes, the infernal thing will be a Book, with quite a
sizable B. I am feeding its maw with more important things than a few
ideas, though. The thing is a monster that isn't worth its keep. For my
boy was worth more than a Book," she said, forlornly,--"oh,
oceans more!"
8
All in all, we were a deal more than happy during these three very hot
months. It was a sort of Lotus Eaters' existence, shared by just us two,
with Josiah Clarriker intruding occasionally, and with echoes from the
outer world, when heard at all, resounding very dimly and unimportantly.
I began almost to assume, as Fairhaven tacitly assumed, that there was
really no outer world, or none at least to be considered seriously....
For instance: Marian Winwood had come to Lichfield, and wrote me from
there, "hoping that we would renew an acquaintance which she remembered
so pleasurably." It did not seem worth while, of course, to answer the
minx; I decided, at a pinch, to say that the Fairhaven mail-service was
abominable, and that her letter had never reached me. But the young
fellow who two years ago had wandered about the Green Chalybeate with
her had become, now, as unreal as she. I glimpsed the couple, with
immeasurable aloofness, as phantoms flickering about the mirage of a
brook, throwing ghostly bread crumbs to Lethean minnows.
And then, too, when the police caught Ned Lethbury that summer, it
hardly seemed worth while to wonder about his wife. For she was,
inexplicably, with him, all through the trial at Chiswick, you may
remember, though you were probably more interested at the time by the
Humbert trial in Paris. In any event, no rumor came to me in Fairhaven
to connect Amelia Lethbury with Nadine Neroni, but, instead, a deal of
journalistic pity and sympathy for her, the faithful, much-enduring
wife. Still quite a handsome woman, they said, for all her suffering and
poverty.... And when he went to the penitentiary, Amelia Lethbury
disappeared, nobody knew whither, except that I suspected Anton von
Anspach knew. I could not explain the mystery. I did not greatly care
to, for to me it did not seem important, now....
9
Meantime, I meditated.
"I am in love with Avis--oh, granted! I am not the least bit in love
with--we will euphemistically say 'anyone else.' But confound it! I am
coming to the conclusion that marrying a woman because you happen to be
in love with her is about as logical a proceeding as throwing the cat
out of the window because the rhododendrons are in bloom. Why, if I
marry Avis I shall probably have to live with her the rest of my life!
"What if that obsolete notion of Schopenhauer's were true after
all,--that love is a blind instinct which looks no whit toward the
welfare of the man and woman it dominates, but only to the equipment a
child born of them would inherit? What if, after all, love tends,
without variation, to yoke the most incompatible in order that the
average type of humanity may be preserved? Then the one passion we
esteem as sacred would be simply the deranged condition of any other
beast in rutting-time. Then we, with the pigs and sparrows, would be
just so many pieces on the chess-board, and our evolutions would be just
a friendly trial of skill between what we call life and death.