he finally brought out:
“I adore her. Beyond everything I deeply deeply love her.” He then
added: “I feel shameful enough now. I rage inwardly. All these many
weeks I have dallied like a boy, I did not understand the situation. I
have wasted our chances, our time, and now you are going.”
“You can’t waste time”; retorted the abrupt lady. “Time deals with you
no matter how you use his hours.”
“I suppose so,” he agreed quite helplessly, “but we might have been
extraordinary friends.”
“O, but you are, eh! She is bewitched, you cannot speak to her, she
cannot speak to you, but yet you love. O, she is vairy vairy fond of
you, Mr. Hardross. Why not? She has the best opinions of you.”
“Ah, she will change her opinion now. A fool like me?”
“No one ever changes an opinion. Your opinions govern and guide and
change you. If they don’t they are not worth holding. And most of them
are not, eh, do you see, we are such fools but God is our help.”
She talked confidently, intimately and quickly, but Hardross wished she
would not do so, or use her hairpins in that absurd distracting way. He
himself had no confidence; he was reserved by nature, irrevocably, and
the mask of deliberation was necessary to him.
“Madame Peshkov, I shall take her out for a walk in the town, now, at
once!” he cried.
“Ah, so?” Madame nodded her head vigorously, even approvingly. He had
sprung up and approached the quiet woman. All her gentle nearness
overcame him and he took her audaciously into his arms. Not less
eagerly she slid to his breast and clung there like a bird to the
shelter of its tree. Julia turned to Madame Peshkov with a smiling
apologetic shrug, as much as to say: “What can one do with such a
fellow, so strong he is, you see!” Madame bade him bring Julia later on
to the café where they always dined.
His happiness was profound. He had never had an experience so moving
as the adorable dumb woman by his side: yet so unsurprising, as if its
possibility had always lain goldenly in his mind like an undreamed
dream, or like music, half-remembered music. There was nothing, of
course, just nothing they could talk about. They could look into shop
windows together rather intimately, and they were a long time in a
shady arcade of the park, full of lime-browsing bees, where they
sat watching a peacock picking the gnats off the shrubs. It was the
pleasantest possible defeat of time. Then there was the handsome girl
crossing the yard of a weaving mill as they passed. She was carrying a
great bale of bright blue wool and had glanced at them with a friendly
smile. Her bare white arms encircled the wool: she had big gilt rings
in her ears, and her fine shining chestnut-coloured hair was disarrayed
and tumbled upon the bale. Julia had pressed his arm with joy. Yes, she
delighted in the things he delighted in; and she felt too that sense of
sorrow that hung in the air about them.
Her appearance in the café stirred everybody like a wave of sweet air.
Hardross was filled with pride. He felt that it was just so that she
would enrich the world wherever she wandered, that things would respond
to her appearance in astonishing mysterious ways. Why, even the empty
wine glasses seemed to behave like large flowers made miraculously out
of water, a marvel of crystal petals blooming but for her; certainly
the glasses on other tables didn’t look at all like these. He drank
four glasses of wine and after dinner they all sat together in the flat
until the half darkness was come. And now Madame Peshkov too was very
silent; she sat smoking or scratching her head with her pins. It was
nine o’clock, but there remained a preposterous glare in the west that
threw lateral beams against the tops of tall buildings, although the
pavements were already dim. It made the fronts of the plastered houses
over the way look like cream cheese. Six scarlet chimney pots stood
stolidly at attention--the torsos of six guardsmen from whom head and
limbs had been unkindly smitten; the roof seemed to be rushing away
from them. Beyond was an echo of the sunset, faint in the northern sky.
How sweet, how sad, to sit so silently in this tremulous gloom. It was
only at the last when they parted at her door that the shadow of their
division became omnipresent. Then it overwhelmed them.
Hardross crept upstairs to his own rooms. In such plights the mind,
careless of time present and time past, full of an anguish that
quenches and refills like a sponge, writhes beyond hope with those
strange lesions of demeanour that confound the chronicler. Tra-la-la,
sang the distracted man, snapping his sweating fingers in time with a
ribald leering ditty, Tra-la-la. He dropped plumb to Atlantean depths
of grief, only to emerge like a spouting whale with the maddening
Tra-la-la tugging him, a hook in his body, from despair to dementia. He
was roused from this vertiginous exercise by a knocking at his door.
The door was thrust open, and Madame Peshkov asked if he was there. He
rose up and switched on a light.
“What is to be done now?” cried the lady. If her silence below had been
complete, as complete as poor Julia’s, she was now fully audible and
not a little agitated. “What is to be done? I cannot believe it of her
but it is true, as true as God!”
Hardross beheld her sink, stricken with some trouble, into an armchair,
beating her hands together.
“I have no influence, gone it is, no power over her, none whatever.
What is to be done? Assist us please. She has been so.... O, for days,
and now it comes, it comes....”
“What has come?” he interrupted sharply.
“I cannot believe it of her, but it is true ... as God. She is like a
vast ... cold ... stone, a mountain.”
“Is this about Julia?”
“She will not go. Of course she will not go! She declines, she will not
come back to Odessa. She says she will not come. I have to tell you
this, Mr. Hardross, I cannot move her. She is like a vast ... cold ...
stone. What then?”
Madame’s appeal seemed pregnant with a significance that he but dimly
savoured. He asked: “What is she going to do then?”
“To stop in this England, here, in this very place! But our passages
are booked, tomorrow it is--pooh, it does not matter!--I am to leave
her here in this place, here she will stay, in a foreign land, without
speech or understanding. But what is to be done, I ask of you?”
He was delirious himself; he kept whispering Julia, Julia, but he
managed to ask with a lugubrious covering of propriety:
“What? I don’t know. Shall I go to her?”
“But can you not see? Do you comprehend, you Hardross? O, it is a
madness, I want to explain it to you but it is all so gross, so swift,
like a vulture. You see it is impossible for me to remain an hour
longer, an hour in England impossible absolutely; there are reasons,
lives perhaps, depending on my return. Yes, it is true; we live in
Russia, do you see, and in Russia ... ah, you understand! But how shall
I leave this woman here?”
Madame stared at him with curious inquisitiveness, beating her hands
upon the arm of the chair as if she expected an answer, a prompt one:
“Of course she will not go away from you now, of course, of course, she
has never had a lover before--how could she, poor thing. I understand
it, she is not a child. And you Mr. Hardross you are a generous man,
you have courage, a good man, a man of his honour, O yes, it is true,
I see it, I feel it, and so she will not be torn away from you now. I
understand that, she is no longer a child.”
Madame rose and took him by the arm. “Marry her, my friend! Do not you
see? I can leave her to you. Marry her at once, marry her!” She stood
as if it were something that could be done on the spot, as easy as
giving one a cup of tea. But he did not hesitate.
“Why, I would give my soul to do it!” he cried, and rushed away down
the stairs to Julia.
And surely she was as wise as she was beautiful, and as rich as she was
wise.
* * * * *
THE TRUMPETERS
* * * * *
THE TRUMPETERS
They were crossing the Irish Sea. It was night, blowing a moderate
gale, but the moon, aloft on the port bow with a wind, was chock full
of such astounding brightness that the turmoil of the dark waves was
easy and beautiful to see. The boat was crowded with soldiers on leave;
the few civilian passengers--mechanics, labourers, and a miner going
to his home in Wexford, who had got drunk at the harbour inn before
coming aboard--were congregated in the angles on the lee-side of the
saloon bunks and trying to sleep amid the chill seething, roaring,
and thudding. The miner, young, powerful, and very much at his ease,
sprawled among them intoxicated. He sang, and continued to sing at
intervals, a song about “The hat that my father wore,” swaying, with
large dreamy gestures, to and fro, round and about, up and down upon
the unfortunate men sitting to right and left of him. Close at hand sat
another young man, but smaller, who carried a big brass trumpet.
“Throw him in the sea, why not, now!” the trumpeter shouted to the
drunken man’s weary supporters. “Begad I would do it if he put his
pig’s face on e’er a shoulder of me!” He was a small, emphatic young
man: “Give him a crack now, and lay on him, or by the tears of God
we’ll get no repose at all!”
His advice was tendered as constantly and as insistently as the
miner’s song about his parent’s headgear, and he would encourage these
incitements to vicarious violence by putting the brass trumpet to his
lips and blowing some bitter and not very accurate staves. So bitter
and so inaccurate that at length even the drunken miner paused in his
song and directed the trumpeter to “shut up.” The little man sprang to
his feet in fury, and approaching the other he poured a succession of
trumpet calls close into his face. This threw the miner into a deep
sleep, a result so unexpected that the enraged trumpeter slung his
instrument under his arm and pranced belligerently upon the deck.
“Come out o’ that, ye drunken matchbox, and by the Queen of Heaven I’ll
teach ye! Come now!”
The miner momentarily raised himself and recommenced his song: “’Tis
the Hat that me Father wore!” At this the trumpeter fetched him a
mighty slap across the face.
“Ah, go away,” groaned the miner, “or I’ll be sick on ye.”
“Try it, ye rotten gossoon! ye filthy matchbox! Where’s yer khar_kee_?”
The miner could display no khaki; indeed, he was sleeping deeply again.
“I’m a man o’ me principles, ye rotten matchbox!” yelled the trumpeter.
“In the Munsters I was ... seven years ... where’s your khar_kee_?”
He seized the miner by the collar and shook that part of the steamer
into a new commotion until he was collared by the sailors and kicked up
on to the foredeck.
Nothing up there, not even his futile trumpeting, could disturb the
chill rejoicing beauty of the night. The wind increased, but the
moonlight was bland and reassuring. Often the cope of some tall wave
would plunge dully over the bows, filling the deck with water that
floundered foaming with the ship’s movement or dribbled back through
the scuppers into the sea. Yet there was no menace in the dark
wandering water; each wave tossed back from its neck a wreath of foam
that slewed like milk across the breast of its follower.
The trumpeter sat upon a heap of ropes beside a big soldier.
“The rotten matchbox, did ye ever see the like o’ that? I’ll kill him
against the first thing we step ashore, like ye would a flea!”
“Be aisy,” said the soldier; “why are ye making trouble at all? Have ye
hurt your little finger?”
“Trouble, is it? What way would I be making trouble in this world?”
exclaimed the trumpeter. “Isn’t it the world itself as puts trouble on
ye, so it is, like a wild cat sitting under a tub of unction! O, very
pleasant it is, O ay! No, no, my little sojee, that is not it at all.
You can’t let the flaming world rush beyant ye like that....”
“Well, it’s a quiet life I’m seeking,” interjected the soldier,
wrapping his great coat comfortingly across his breast, “and by this
and by that, a quiet night too.”
“Is that so? Quiet, is it? But I say, my little sojee, you’ll not get
it at all and the whole flaming world whickering at ye like a mad
cracker itself. Would ye sleep on that wid yer quiet life and all? It’s
to tame life you’d be doing, like it was a tiger. And it’s no drunken
boozer can tame me as was with the Munsters in the East ... for seven
holy years.”
“Ah, go off wid you, you’ve hurt your little finger.”
“Me little finger, is it?” cried the trumpeter, holding his thin hands
up for inspection in the moonlight, “I have not then.”
“You surprise me,” the soldier said, gazing at him with sleepy
amused tolerance. “Did you never hear of Tobin the smith and Mary of
Cappoquin?”
“I did not then,” snapped the other. “Who was they?”
“He was a roaring, fatal feller, a holy terror, a giant. He lived in
the mountains but he went over the country killing things--a tiger or
two at an odd time, I’m thinking--and destroying the neat condition of
the world. And he had a nasty little bit of a bugle....”
“Was it the like o’ that?” demanded the other, holding out the trumpet
and tapping it with his fingers.
“‘A bugle,’ I said,” replied the soldier sternly, “and every time he
puffed in its tubes the noise of it was so severe the hens in the town
fell dead....”
“The hens!”
“Yes, and the ducks on the ponds were overcome with emotion and sank to
the bottom. One day he was in his forge driving a few nails into the
shoe of an ass when he hit his little finger such a blow, a terrible
blow, that it bled for a day. Then he seared the wound with his searing
iron, but it was no better, and it bled for a night. I will go--says
he--to the physician of Cappoquin and be sewn up with some golden
wire. So he drove into Cappoquin, but when he was in it the physician
was gone to a christening; there was only his daughter Mary left to
attend to him, a bright good girl entirely, and when she saw the finger
she said to Tobin: ‘I declare on my soul if I don’t chop it off it’s
not long till you have your death.’ ‘Chop it off, then,’ says Tobin,
and she did so. He came back the next day and this is how it was; the
physician was gone to a wake. ‘What’s your need?’ asked Mary. He showed
her his hand and it dripping with blood. ‘I declare to my God,’ said
Mary, ‘if I don’t chop it off it’s short till you have your death.’
‘Chop it off,’ says Tobin, and she struck off the hand. The day after
that he drove in again, but the physician was gone to an inquest about
a little matter concerning some remains that had been found. ‘What is
it today, Tobin?’ and he showed her his arm bleeding in great drops.
‘I declare by the saints,’ says she, ‘that unless I chop it off you’ll
die in five minutes.’ ‘Chop it off,’ says Tobin, and she struck off his
arm. The next day he was back again with the stump of his arm worse
than before. ‘Oh, I see what it is,’ said Mary, and going behind him
she struck off his head with one blow of her father’s sharp knife and
gave it to the cat.”
“That is a neat tale,” said the trumpeter. “Did you hear the story of
the dirty soldier and the drummer?”
“No--” The soldier hesitated reflectively. “No, I never heard it.”
“Well, this is how it was....”
But just then the steamer began to approach the harbour, and in the
hurry and scurry of preparations to land the two friends were separated
and the tale was never told.
At the disembarkation passengers and soldiers crowded on the pier
awaiting the boat train. The harbour was full of lights; the moon was
still high in the heavens, but her glory faded as the sun began to
rise. The thick densities of the night sky quivered into frail blues,
violet and silver were mingled in the sea, the buildings on the wharf
looked strange; icily, bitterly grey. The trumpeter ran about in the
bleak air seeking the “rotten matchbox,” but he could not find him.
He comforted himself by executing some castigating blares upon his
instrument. The hollow wharves and the pier staging echoed with acrid
sound that pleased his simple heart. He blew and blew and blew until
he was surrounded by people watching him strain his determined eyes
and inflate his pale cheeks--all of them secretly hoping that the ones
might fall out or the others might crack. Suddenly he caught sight of
the now-sobered miner, quite close to him, almost touching him! The
call he was blowing faded with a stupid squeak. The world began to
flame again ... when an officer burst into the circle, demanding to
know who he was, where from, and what in all the realm of blasphemous
things he meant by tootling in that infernal manner on that infernal
thing.
The trumpeter drew himself proudly to attention and saluted.
“Discharged I am, sir, it’s with the Munsters I was, seven years, sir,
with the Munsters, in the east.”
“You disgrace the Army! If I hear another tootle on that thing, I ...
I’ll have you clapped in irons--I will! And ... and transported ...
damn me if I don’t! You understand?”
The trumpeter meekly saluted as the captain swaggered away. At that
moment the miner laid his hand upon his arm.
“What, my little man,” said he, “have you lost your teeth? Give it me
now!”
And putting the trumpet to his own lips he blew a brilliant and mocking
reveille, whose echoes hurtled far over the harbour and into the
neighbouring hills.
“God save us!” cried the trumpeter with a furtive eye on the captain
at the end of the platform, who did not appear to have heard that
miraculous salvo, “it’s a great grand breath you’ve got, sir.”
* * * * *
THE ANGEL AND THE SWEEP
* * * * *
THE ANGEL AND THE SWEEP
I’d been sitting in the _Axe & Cleaver_ along of Mrs. Pellegrini for an
hour at least; I hadn’t seen her in five years since she was doing the
roads near Pontypool. An hour at least, for isn’t the _Axe & Cleaver_
the pleasant kind of place? Talking or not talking you can always hear
the water lashing from the outfall above Hinney Lock, the sound of it
making you feel drowsy and kind. And isn’t the old bridge there a thing
to be looking at indeed?
Mrs. Pellegrini had a family of pikeys who traded in horses,
willow-wattles, and rocksalt; she was as cunning as a jacksnipe, and if
she _had_ a deep voice like a man she was full of wisdom. A grand great
woman was Rosa Pellegrini, with a face silky-brown like a beechnut,
and eyes and hair the equal of a rook for darkness. The abundance of
jewellery hooked and threaded upon her was something to be looking at
too. Old man and young Isaac kept going out to look at the horses, or
they’d be coming in to upbraid her for delaying, but she could drink
a sconce of beer without the least sparkle of hilarity, as if it were
a tribute she owed her whole magnificent constitution, or at least a
reward for some part of it. So she kept doing it, while her son and
her husband could do no other and did it with nothing of her inevitable
air.
Well, I was sitting in the _Axe & Cleaver_ along of Mrs. Pellegrini
when who should rove in but Larry McCall, good-looking Larry, bringing
a friend with him, a soft kind of fellow who’d a harsh voice and a
whining voice that we didn’t like the noise of tho’ he had good money
in his purse. Larry gave me the grace of the day directly he entered
the door, and then, letting a cry of joy out of him, he’d kissed Mrs.
Pellegrini many times before she knew what was happening to her. She
got up and punished him with a welt on his chin that would have bruised
an oak-tree, and bade him behave himself. He sat down soothingly beside
her and behaved very well. His companion stood very shy and nervous,
like a kitten might be watching a cockfight.
“Who is this young man?” Mrs. Pellegrini asks.
“That’s Arthur,” said Larry: “I forget what Arthur knocks a living
out of--I’ve known him but these three bits of an hour since we were
walking in the one direction.”
“My dad,” said Arthur slowly and raspingly, “is an undertaker, and he
lets me help him in his business: we bury people.”
“Oh come, young man,” said Mrs. Pellegrini, “that’s no sort of a trade
at all--d’ye think it, Mr. McCall?”
“No, I do not,” replied Larry, “but Arthur does. It don’t seem to be a
trade with very much humour in it. Life ain’t a sad solid chunk.”
“Now that’s just where you’re wrong,” drawled Arthur.
“’Tain’t a life at all,” Rosa interrupted severely, “it’s only
sniffing, having a bad cold! No sort of a life at all--d’ye think it,
Mr. McCall?”
“No, I do not,” said Larry with a chuckle, “but Arthur does!”
“Oh, I know what you’re a deluding on,” commenced the young man again,
“but....”
“Strike me dead if I can see any fun in funerals!” Mrs. Pellegrini said
with finality, taking up her mug. “But if you _will_ have your grief,
young man,” she added, pausing in one of her gulps to gaze at Arthur
until he quivered, “you must have it, and may fortune fall in love with
what we like. Fill up that cup now!”
The young man in agitation obeyed, and while this was doing we all
heard someone come over the bridge singing a song, and that was Jerry
Ogwin, who could tell the neatest tales and sing the littlest songs.
Well, there were great salutations, for we all knew Jerry and loved
Jerry, and he loved some of us. But he was the fiercest looking,
fieriest gipsy man you ever saw, and he had all the gullible prescience
of a cockney.
“My fortune! Where are you from, you cunning little man?”
“I bin doing a bit o’ road down Kent and London way. D’ye know
Lewisham?” commenced Jerry.
“No,” said Larry, grinning at me, “but Arthur does!”
“No, I don’t; I never been there,” chanted Arthur.
“Now what’s the good of talking like that!” said McCall sternly, and
letting a wink at me.
“More I ain’t,” asserted Arthur.
“Then I was at Deptford and Greenwich--know Greenwich?” continued Jerry.
“No,” replied Larry, then adding nonchalantly, “Arthur does.”
“No, I don’t, I don’t,” said Arthur wormily, for Jerry was glaring at
him, and that fighting scar all down his nose, where his wife Katey
once hit him with the spout of a kettle, was very disturbing.
“What’s the good of that?” urged the devilish-minded Larry. “Why don’t
you talk to the gentleman, you don’t want to vex him, do you?”
“You ain’t blooming silly, are you?” queried Jerry.
Without waiting for reply he drifted off again.
“Me and my mate was doing a bit o’ road with oranges and things, you
know--three for a ’eaver--down Mary’s Cray; d’ye know Mary’s Cray?”
But this time Arthur was looking avidly out of the window.