meditation. He had no liking for any service or ritual; he had no
apprehension of the spiritual symbols embodied in the building; he
only liked to sit there in the quiet, gazing at things in a dumb sort
of way, taking, as it were, a bath of holiness. He sat a long time;
indeed, so still was he, he might have been dozing as the legions of
dead parishioners had dozed during interminable dead sermons. When he
went to the door--the light having grown dim--he found it was locked.
He was not at all alarmed at his situation: he went and sat down again.
In ten minutes or so he again approached the door ... it was still
locked. Then he walked up the aisle to the chancel steps and crossed
the choir for the first time. Choristers’ robes were in the vestry, and
soon, arrayed in cassock and surplice, he was walking with a singular
little dignity to his old seat by one of the pillars. He sat there with
folded hands, the church growing gloomier now; he climbed into the
pulpit and turned over the leaves of the holy book; he sat in the choir
stalls, pretended to play the organ, and at last went before the altar
and, kneeling at the rails, clasped his orthodox hands and murmured,
as he had heard others murmuring there, a rigmarole of his scholastic
hours:
_Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November.
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting February alone,
And leap year coming once in four,
February then has one day more._
Re-entering the vestry, he observed on a shelf in a niche a small loaf
wrapped in a piece of linen. He felt hungry and commenced to devour the
bread, and from a goblet there he drank a little sip of sweet tasting
wine. He liked the wine very much, and drank more and more of it.
There was nothing else to be done now in the darkness, so he went on
to the soft carpet within the altar rails, and, piling up a few of the
praying mats from the choir--little red cushions they were, stamped
with black fleur-de-lys, which he admired much in the daylight--he fell
asleep.
And he slept long and deeply until out of some wonderful place he began
to hear the word “Ruffian, Ruffian,” shouted with anger and harshness.
He was pulled roughly to his feet, and apprehension was shaken into his
abominable little head.
The morning sunlight was coming through the altar window, and the
vicar’s appearance was many-coloured as a wheelwright’s door; he had a
green face, and his surplice was scaled with pink and purple gouts like
a rash from some dreadful rainbow. And dreadful indeed was the vicar as
he thrust the boy down the altar steps into the vestry, hissing as he
did, “Take off those things!” and darting back to throw the cushions
into proper places to support the knees of the expected devotees.
“Now, how did you get in here?” he demanded, angrily.
The boy hung up the cassock: “Someone locked me in last night, Sir.”
“Who was it?”
“I dunno, Sir, they locked me in all night.”
His interrogator glared at him for a moment in silence, and the boy
could not forbear a yawn. Thereat the vicar seized him by the ear
and, pulling it with such animation as to contort his own features as
well as the child’s, dragged him to the vestry door, gurgling with
uncontrolled vexation, “Get out of this. Get out ... you ... you beast!”
As the boy went blinking down the nave the tenor bell began to ring;
the stone posties looked serene and imperturbable in new clean
sunlight, and that old blackbird was chirping sweetly in the lilac at
the porch.
* * * * *
THE QUIET WOMAN
* * * * *
THE QUIET WOMAN
It was the loneliest place in the world, Hardross said. A little
cogitation and much experience had given him the fancy that the ark
of the kingdom of solitude was lodged in a lift, any lift, carrying a
charter of mute passengers from the pavement to any sort of Parnassus.
Nothing ever disturbs its velveteen progression; no one ever speaks
to the lift man (unless it happens to be a lift girl). At Hardross’s
place of abode it happened to be a lift boy, sharp and white-faced,
whose tough hair was swept backwards in a stiff lock from his brow,
while his pert nose seemed inclined to pursue it. His name was Brown.
His absences from duty were often coincident with the arrivals and
departures of Mr. Hardross. His hands were brown enough if the beholder
carried some charity in his bosom, but the aspect of his collar or his
shoes engendered a deal of vulgar suspicion, and his conduct was at
once inscrutable and unscrupulous. It may have been for this reason
that Hardross had lately begun walking the whole downward journey from
his high chamber, but it must have been something less capricious that
caused him always to essay the corresponding upward flight. A fancy
for exercise perhaps, for he was a robust musician, unmarried, and of
course, at thirty-three or thirty-four, had come to the years of those
indiscretions which he could with impunity and without reprobation
indulge.
On the second floor, outside the principal door of one set of chambers,
there always stood a small console table; it was just off the landing,
in an alcove that covered two other doors, a little dark angular-limbed
piece of furniture bearing a green lacquer dish of void visiting cards,
a heap that seemed neither to increase nor dwindle but lay there as if
soliciting, so naïvely, some further contributions. Two maiden ladies,
the Misses Pilcher, who kept these rooms, had gone to France for a
summer holiday, but though the flat had for the time being some new
occupants the console table still kept its place, the dish of cards
of course languishing rather unhopefully. The new tenants were also
two ladies, but they were clearly not sisters and just as clearly not
Pilcherly old maids. One of them, Hardross declared, was the loveliest
creature he had ever seen. She was dark, almost tall, about as tall
as Hardross though a little less robust and rather more graceful.
Her mature scarlet lips and charming mature eyes seemed always to be
wanting to speak to him. But she did not speak to him, even when he
modestly tried to overcome, well, not her reserve--no one with such
sparkling eyes could possibly be reserved--but her silence. He often
passed her on the landing but he did not hear her voice, or music, or
speech, or any kind of intercourse within the room. He called her The
Quiet Woman. The other lady, much older, was seldom seen; she was of
great dignity. The younger one walked like a woman conscious and proud
of the beauty underneath her beautiful clothes; the soft slippers she
wore seemed charged with that silent atmosphere. Even the charwoman
who visited them daily and rattled and swept about was sealed of the
conspiracy of silence; at least he never caught--though it must be
confessed that he guiltily tried--the passage of a single word. What
was the mystery of the obstinately silent ménage? Did the elder lady
suffer from sorrow or nerves; was she under a vow; was she a genius
writing a sublime book?
The voiceless character of the intercourse did not prevent Hardross
becoming deeply enamoured and at the same time deeply baffled.
Morning and evening as he went to the great city church of which he
was organist he would often catch a glimpse of his quiet woman on
the stairs. At favourable junctures he had lifted his hat and said
Good-morning or Good-evening, but she had turned away as if overcome by
confusion or an excess of propriety.
“I am a coward,” he would think; “shyness and diffidence rule me, they
curse me, they ruin my life; but she, good heavens! is extraordinarily
retiring. Why, I am just a satyr, a rampant raging satyr, a satyr!” And
he would liken her to Diana, always darting with such fawnlike modesty
from the alcove whenever he approached. He did not even know her name.
He wanted to enquire of the lift boy Brown or the porter, but there
again he lacked the casual touch to bring off the information. The boy
was too young, too cute, too vulgar, and the porter too taciturn, as
difficult for Hardross to approach as an archbishop would have been.
But Miss Barker now, that milliner, down below on the ground floor!
She would know; she knew everybody and everything about the chambers
including, quite familiarly, Hardross himself--she would be sure to
know. But even she would have to be approached with discrimination.
“Evening, Miss Barker!” he cried. The good-looking spinster peered up
from a half-trimmed bonnet. “When do _you_ go for a holiday, then?”
“Holidays,” she sighed, though the corner of her mouth was packed with
pins, “I cannot afford holidays.”
“Ho-ho, you can’t afford!”
Their common fund of repartee lay in his confident assumption that she
was rolling in surplus income and her counter assertion that she was
stricken in poverty; that people--the pigs--would not pay her prices,
or that those who did not flinch at her prices would not pay her bills.
“Astonishing, deplorable, this Mammon-worship!” he declared, leaning
genially upon her table; “you know, it breaks my heart to see you a
slave to it, a woman of a thousand, ten thousand in fact. Give it up,
O,”--he beat the table with his hand--“give it up before it is too
late!”
“Too late for what?” she asked.
“Why, all the delightful things a woman like you could do.”
“As what?”
“O ... travel, glories of nature, you know, friendship, men ... love
itself.”
“Give me all the money I want,”--she was brusque about it, and began
to dab the unwanted pins back into their cushion--“and I’ll buy, yes
_buy_, a sweetheart for each day in the week.”
“Heavens now!” He was chilled by this implication of an experience that
may have been dull, that must have been bitter, but he floundered on:
“What now would you give for me?”
“For you!” She contemplated him with gravity: “To be sure I had not
thought of you, not in that way.”
“O but please _do_ think of me, dear lady, put me in your deepest
regard.”
The ghost of a knowing grin brushed her features. Really a charming
woman, in parts. A little stout, perhaps, and she had fat red hands,
but her heart was a good substantial organ, it was in the right place,
and her features seemed the best for wear.
“You are one of those surprising ladies”--he plunged gaily--“who’ve a
long stocking somewhere, with trunks full of shares and scrip, stocks
at the bank and mortgages at your solicitor’s. O yes, yes,” he cried
out against her protestation, “and you will make a strange will leaving
it all to me!”
She shook her head hopelessly, bending again over the bonnet whose
desperate skeleton she had clothed with a flounce of crimson velvet.
She was very quiet.
“Have I been rude?” he hazarded. “Forgive me.”
“Well, it’s not true,” she insisted.
“Forgive me--I have hurt you--of course it’s not true.”
Apparently she forgave him; he was soon asking if there were any rooms
to let in the building. “Furnished, I mean.” He gave rein to his naïve
strategy: “I have friends who want to come here and stay with me for a
short holiday. I thought you might know of some.”
“In these flats?” She shook her head, but he persisted and played his
artful card:
“The Miss Pilchers, on the second floor, haven’t they gone away?”
She did not know--why not ask the porter.
“Yes, I must ask the porter, but I can never catch the porter, he is so
fugitive, he is always cutting his lucky. I hate that man, don’t you?”
And there, temporarily, he had to leave it.
So many days passed now without a glimpse of his lovely one that
he had almost brought himself to the point of tapping at the door
and enquiring after her welfare, only the mysterious air of the
apartment--how strange, how soundless it was--forbade any such
crudeness. One morning he recklessly took a cigarette from his case and
laid it upon the console table as he passed. When he returned later the
cigarette was gone; it had been replaced by a chocolate cream, just
one, a big one. He snatched it away and rapturously ate it. Later in
the day he was blessed by a deep friendly gaze, as she flitted into her
room. Hardross rejoiced; in the morning he left another cigarette and
was again rewarded.
“But O God help me,” he thought, “I can’t go on like this!”
So he bought a whole box of bonbons, but his courage deserted him as
he approached their door; he left the package upon the console table
and slunk guiltily away. The next morning he observed a whole box of
cigarettes, a well-known exquisite brand, laid temptingly there. He
stretched his eager hand towards it, but paused. Could that be a gift
for him? Heavens above! What were the miraculous gods about to shower
upon him? Was this their delicate symbol? He could not believe it,
no, he could not, he left the box lying there. And it lay there for
hours indeed until he crept down and seized it. Afterwards he walked
trembling into the brighter air and went for a long ride on the top
of an omnibus. There had been no letter, but he fancied that he had
got hold of a clue. “Be very careful, Hardross my boy, this is too too
splendid to spoil.”
An afternoon or so later he met her coming into the hall, a delicious
figure with gay parasol and wide white hat. He delayed her:
“Let me thank you, may I, for those perfect cigarettes?”
The lovely creature did not reply. She just smiled her recognition of
him; she did not speak nor move away, she stood there quite silent and
timid.
“I wonder,” he began again, “if I might”--it sounded dreadfully silly
to him, but having begun he went on--“if I might invite you to my
church this evening, a rather special choral service, very jolly, you
know. I’m the organist; would you come?”
No answer.
“Would you care to come?”
She lifted both her hands and touching her lips and ears with
significant gestures shook her head ever so hopelessly at him.
“Deaf and dumb!” he exclaimed. Perhaps the shock of the revelation
showed too painfully in his face for she turned now sadly away. But
the hall was divinely empty. He caught one of the exquisite hands and
pressed it to his lips.
Thereafter Hardross walked about as if he too were deaf and dumb,
except for a vast effusion of sighs. He could praise that delicacy
of the rarest whereby she had forborne to lure him, as she could so
easily have done, into a relation so shrouded and so vague. But that
did not solve his problem, it only solidified it. He wanted and awaited
the inspiration of a gesture she could admire, something that would
propitiate her delicacy and alarms. He did not want to destroy by
clumsy persistencies the frail net of her regard for him; he was quite
clear about that, the visible fineness of her quality so quelled him.
Applying himself to the task he took lessons in the alphabet language,
that inductile response of fingers and thumbs.
Meanwhile she had marked her sense of the complication by hiding like a
hurt bird, and although the mystery of the quiet rooms was now exposed
she herself remained unseen. He composed a graceful note and left it
upon the console table. The note disappeared but no reply came: she
made no sign and he regretted his ardour.
Such a deadlock of course could not exist for ever, and one evening he
met her walking up the stairs. She stopped mutually with him. He was
carrying his music. He made a vain attempt to communicate with her by
means of his finger alphabet, but she did not understand him although
she delightedly made a reply on her fingers which he was too recently
initiated to interpret. They were again at a standstill: he could think
of nothing to do except to open his book of organ music and show her
the title page. She looked it over very intelligently as he tried by
signs to convey his desire to her, but he was certain she was blank
about it all. He searched his pockets for a pencil--and swore at his
non-success. There he stood like a fool, staring at her smiling face
until to his amazement she took his arm and they descended the stairs,
they were in the street together. He walked to the church on something
vastly less substantial than air, and vastly superior.
Hardross’s church was square and ugly, with large round-headed windows.
Its entrance was up some steps between four Corinthian pillars upon the
bases of which cabmen snoozed when it was warm or coughed and puffed in
the winter cold. There was a pump on the kerb and a stand for hackney
cabs. A jungle of evergreens squatted in a railed corner under the
tower, with a file of iris plants that never flowered. Upon the plinth
of the columns a ribald boy had chalked:
REMOVE THIS OBSTACLE
Eternally at the porch tired cabhorses drooped and meditated, while the
drivers cut hunches of bread and meat or cheese or onion and swallowed
from their tin bottles the cold tea or other aliment associated with
tin bottles. There was always a smell of dung at the entrance, and an
aroma of shag tobacco from the cabmen’s pipes curled into the nave
whenever the door opened for worshippers. Inside the church Hardross
ushered his friend to a seat that he could watch from his organ loft.
There were few people present. He borrowed a lead pencil from a choir
boy, and while the lesson was being perfunctorily intoned, sounding
like some great voice baffled by its infinitely little mind, he
scribbled on a sheet of paper the questions he was so eager to ask;
what was her name and things like that:
_How can we communicate? May I write to you? Will you to me? Excuse
the catechism and scribble but I want so much to know you and grab at
this opportunity._
_Yours devotedly
John Hardross_
When he looked up her place was empty; she had gone away in the middle
of the service. He hurried home at last very perturbed and much
abashed, for it was not so much the perplexities of intercourse, the
torment of his dilemma, that possessed him now as a sense of felicities
forbidden and amenities declined.
But his fickle intelligence received a sharp admonitory nudge on
the following evening when he espied her sitting in the same place
at church for all the world as if she had not deserted it on the
evening before. Then he remembered that of course she couldn’t hear
a thing--idiot he was to have invited her. Again she left the church
before the close of the service. This for several days, the tantalized
lover beholding her figure always hurrying from his grasp.
He pursued the practice of the deaf and dumb alphabet with such
assiduity that he became almost apt in its use; the amount of affection
and devotion that he could transcribe on finger and thumb was
prodigious, he yearned to put it to the test. When at last he met her
again in the hall he at once began spelling out things, absurd things,
like: “May I beg the honour of your acquaintance?” She watched this
with interest, with excitement even, but a shadow of doubt crept into
her lovely eyes. She moved her own fingers before him, but in vain;
he could not interpret a single word, not one. He was a dense fool;
O how dense, how dense! he groaned. But then he searched his pockets
and brought out the note he had scribbled in church. It was a little
the worse for wear but he smoothed it, and standing close by her side
held it for her perusal. Again his hopes were dashed. She shook her
head, not at all conclusively but in a vague uncomprehending way. She
even with a smile indicated her need of a pencil, which he promptly
supplied. To his amazement what she scribbled upon the page were some
meaningless hieroglyphs, not letters, though they were grouped as in
words, but some strange abracadabra. He looked so dismally at her that
she smiled again, folding the paper carefully ere she passed on up the
stairs.
Hardross was now more confounded than ever. A fearful suspicion seized
him: was she an idiot, was it a mild insanity, were those marks just
the notation of a poor diseased mind? He wished he had kept that
letter. God, what a tragedy! But as he walked into the town his doubts
about her intellect were dispelled. Poof! only an imbecile himself
could doubt that beautiful staring intelligence. That was not it; it
was some jugglery, something to do with those rooms. Nothing was solved
yet, nothing at all; how uncanny it was becoming!
He returned in the afternoon full of determination. Behold, like a
favourable augury, the door by the console table stood open, wide
open. It did occur to him that an open door might be a trap for unwary
men but he rapped the brass knocker courageously. Of course there was
no response--how could there be--and he stepped inside the room. His
glance had but just time to take in the small black piano, the dark
carpet, the waxed margins of the floor, the floral dinginess of the
walls brightened by mirrors and softened by gilt and crimson furniture,
when the quiet woman, his Diana, came to him joyfully holding out
both her hands. Well, there was no mystery here after all, nothing at
all, although the elder lady was out and they were apparently alone.
Hardross held her hands for some moments, the intensity of which was
as deeply projected in her own eyes as in the tightness of his clasp.
And there was tea for him! She was at her brightest, in a frock of
figured muslin, and sitting before her he marvelled at the quickness of
her understanding, the vividness of her gestures, the gentleness with
which she touched his sleeve. That criminal suspicion of her sanity
crowned him with infamy. Such communication was deliciously intimate;
there came a moment when Hardross in a wild impulsive ecstasy flung
himself before her, bowing his head in her lap. The quiet woman was
giving him back his embraces, her own ardour was drooping beautifully
upon him, when he heard a strange voice exclaim in the room: “God is my
help! Well then!” A rattle of strange words followed which he could not
comprehend. He turned to confront the elder woman, who surveyed them
with grim amusement. The other stood up, smiling, and the two women
spoke in finger language. The newcomer began to remove her gloves,
saying:
“It is Mr. Hardross then. I am glad to meet. There is a lot of things
to be spoken, eh?”
She was not at all the invalid he had half expected to find. She
removed her hat and came back a competent-looking woman of about
fifty, who had really an overwhelming stream of conversation. She took
tea and, ignoring the girl as if she were a block of uncomprehending
ornament, addressed herself to the interloper.
“You do not know me, Mr. Hardross?”
“It is a pleasure I have but looked forward to,” he replied, in the
formal manner that at times irresistibly seized him, “with the keenest
possible anticipation and....”
“No, I am Madame Peshkov. We are from Odessa, do you know it? We go
back to our Russia tomorrow; yes, it is true.”
His organs of comprehension began to crackle in his skull, but he went
on stirring his fresh cup of tea and continued to do so for quite a
long time.
“No, you ... are ... Russian! I did not know.” Amid his musing
astonishment that fact alone was portentous; it explained so much,
everything in fact, but how he could ever contrive to learn such a
language was the question that agitated him, so fearfully difficult a
language, and on his fingers too! Then that other thunderclap began to
reverberate: they were going, when was it? Tomorrow! All this while
Madame Peshkov ran on with extravagant volubility. She had the habit of
picking one of the hairpins from her hair and gently rubbing her scalp
with the rounded end of it; she would replace the pin with a stylish
tap of her fingers. It was a long time before Hardross extracted the
pith from her remarks, and then only when the hypnotism induced by the
stirring of his tea suddenly lapsed; he became aware of the dumb girl’s
gaze fixed piercingly upon him, while his own was drawn away by the
force of the other’s revelations. What he had already taken in was sad
and strange. Her name was Julia Krasinsky. She was not at all related
to Madame Peshkov, she was an orphan. Madame’s own daughter had been
deaf and dumb, too, and the girls had been inseparable companions
until two years ago, when Natalia Peshkov had died--O, an unspeakable
grief still. He gathered that Madame was a widow, and that since
Natalia’s death the two women had lived and travelled together. Madame
talked on; it was tremendously exciting to Hardross crouching in his
chair, but all that echoed in his mind were the words Julia Krasinsky,
Julia Krasinsky, until she suddenly asked him:
“Do you love her?”