to her companion with disappointment and some dismay.... “I hardly
understand yet ... is this all then just....”
“Yes,” it replies, “just the ghost of the world.”
She turned unhappily and looked back across the gateway into the fair
combe with its cattle, its fine grass, and the man working diligently
therein. A sense of bleak loneliness began to possess her; here,
then, was no difference save that there were no correlations, no
consequences; nothing had any effect except to produce the ghost of
a ghost. There was already in the hinterland of her apprehensions a
ghost, a ghost of her new ghostship: she was to be followed by herself,
pursued by figures of her own ceaseless being!
She looked at the one by her side: “Who are you?” she asked, and at the
question the group of men drew again very close to them.
“I am your unrealized desires,” it said: “Did you think that the
dignity of virginhood, rarely and deliberately chosen, could be so
brief and barren? Why, that pure idea was my own immaculate birth, and
I was born, the living mate of you.”
The hungry-eyed men shouted with laughter.
“Go away!” screamed Clorinda to them; “I do not want you.”
Although they went she could hear the echoes of their sneering as she
took the arm of her new lover “Let us go,” she said, pointing to the
man in the combe, “and speak to him.” As they approached the man he
lifted his ladder hugely in the air and dashed it to the ground so
passionately that it broke.
“Angry man! angry man!” mocked Clorinda. He turned towards her
fiercely. Clorinda began to fear him; the muscles and knots of his
limbs were uncouth like the gnarl of old trees; she made a little
pretence of no more observing him.
“Now what is it like,” said she jocularly to the angel at her side, and
speaking of her old home, “what is it like now at Weston-super-Mare?”
At that foolish question the man with the ladder reached forth an ugly
hand and twitched the scarf from her shoulders.
It cannot now be told to what remoteness she had come, or on what roads
her undirected feet had travelled there, but certain it is that in
that moment she was gone.... Why, where, or how cannot be established:
whether she was swung in a blast of annihilation into the uttermost
gulfs, or withdrawn for her beauty into that mysterious Nox, into some
passionate communion with the eternal husbands, or into some eternal
combat with their passionate other wives ... from our scrutiny at least
she passed for ever.
It is true there was a beautiful woman of this name who lay for a
month in a deep trance in the West of England. On her recovery she
was balladed about in the newspapers and upon the halls for quite a
time, and indeed her notoriety brought requests for her autograph from
all parts of the world, and an offer of marriage from a Quaker potato
merchant. But she tenderly refused him and became one of those faded
grey old maids who wear their virginity like antiquated armour.
* * * * *
CRAVEN ARMS
* * * * *
CRAVEN ARMS
I
The teacher of the sketching class at the evening school was a man
who had no great capacity for enduring affection, but his handsome
appearance often inspired in women those emotions which if not enduring
are deep and disturbing. His own passions may have been deep but they
were undeniably fickle.
The townspeople were proud of their new school for in addition to the
daily curriculum evening instruction of an advanced modern kind was
given. Of course all schools since the beginning of time have been
modern at some period of their existence but this one was modern, so
the vicar declared, because it was so blessedly hygienic. It was built
upon a high tree-arboured slope overlooking the snug small town and
on its western side stared ambiguously at a free upland country that
was neither small nor snug. The seventeen young women and the nine
young men were definitely, indeed articulately, inartistic, they were
as unæsthetic as pork pies, all except Julia Tern, a golden-haired
fine-complexioned fawn of a girl whose talent was already beyond
the reach of any instruction the teacher could give. He could not
understand why she continued to attend his classes.
One evening she brought for his criticism a portrait sketch of himself.
“This is extraordinarily beautiful,” he murmured.
“Yes?” said Julia.
“I mean the execution, the presentation and so on.”
Julia did not reply. He stared at her picture of him, a delicately
modelled face with a suggestion of nobility, an air that was kind as it
was grave. The gravity and nobility which so pleased him were perhaps
the effect of a high brow from which the long brown hair flowed thinly
back to curve in a tidy cluster at his neck. Kindness beamed in the
eyes and played around the thin mouth, sharp nose, and positive chin.
What could have inspired her to make this idealization of himself,
for it was idealization in spite of its fidelity and likeness? He
knew he had little enough nobility of character--too little to show
so finely--and as for that calm gravity of aspect, why gravity simply
was not in him. But there it was on paper, deliberate and authentic,
inscribed with his name--_David Masterman 1910_.
“When, how did you come to do it?”
“I just wanted it, you were a nice piece, I watched you a good deal,
and there you are!” She said it jauntily but there was a pink flush in
her cheeks.
“It’s delicious,” he mused, “I envy you. I can’t touch a decent
head--not even yours. But why have you idealized me so?” He twitted
her lightly about the gravity and nobility.
“But you are like that, you are. That’s how I see you, at this moment.”
She did not give him the drawing as he hoped she would. He did not care
to ask her for it--there was delicious flattery in the thought that
she treasured it so much. Masterman was a rather solitary man of about
thirty, with a modest income which he supplemented with the fees from
these classes. He lived alone in a wooden bungalow away out of the town
and painted numbers of landscapes, rather lifeless imitations, as he
knew, of other men’s masterpieces. They were frequently sold.
Sometimes on summer afternoons he would go into woods or fields with
a few of his pupils to sketch or paint farmhouses, trees, clouds,
stacks, and other rural furniture. He was always hoping to sit alone
with Julia Tern but there were other loyal pupils who never missed
these occasions, among them the two Forrest girls, Ianthe the younger,
and Katharine, daughters of a thriving contractor. Julia remained
inscrutable, she gave him no opportunities at all; he could never
divine her feelings or gather any response to his own, but there could
be no doubt of the feelings of the Forrest girls--they quite certainly
liked him enormously. Except for that, they too, could have no reason
for continuing in his classes for both were as devoid of artistic grace
as an inkstand. They brought fruit or chocolate to the classes and
shared them with him. Their attentions, their mutual attentions, were
manifested in many ways, small but significant and kind. On these
occasions Julia’s eyes seemed to rest upon him with an ironical gaze.
It was absurd. He liked them well enough and sometimes from his shy
wooing of the adorable but enigmatic Julia he would turn for solace to
Ianthe. Yet strangely enough it was Kate, the least alluring to him of
the three girls, who took him to her melancholy heart.
Ianthe was a little bud of womanhood, dark-haired but light-headed,
dressed in cream coloured clothes. She was small and right and tight,
without angularities or rhythms, just one dumpy solid roundness. But
she had an astonishing vulgarity of speech, if not of mind, that
exacerbated him and in the dim corridors of his imagination she did
not linger, she scurried as it were into doorways or upon twisting
staircases or stood briefly where a loop of light fell upon her hair,
her dusky face, her creamy clothes, and her delightful rotundities. She
had eyes of indiscretion and a mind like a hive of bees, it had such a
tiny opening and was so full of a cloying content.
One day he suddenly found himself alone with Ianthe in a glade of larch
trees which they had all been sketching. They had loitered. He had been
naming wild flowers which Ianthe had picked for the purpose and then
thrown wantonly away. She spied a single plant of hellebore growing in
the dimness under the closely planted saplings.
“Don’t! don’t!” he cried. He kept her from plucking it and they knelt
down together to admire the white virginal flower.
His arm fell round Ianthe’s waist in a light casual way. He scarcely
realized its presumption. He had not intended to do it; as far as that
went he did not particularly want to do it, but there his arm was.
Ianthe took no notice of the embrace and he felt foolish, he could not
retreat until they rose to walk on; then Ianthe pressed close to his
side until his arm once more stole round her and they kissed.
“Heavens above!” she said, “you do get away with it quick.”
“Life’s short, there’s no time to lose, I do as I’d be done by.”
“And there are so many of us! But glory,” said the jolly girl, taking
him to her bosom, “in for a penny, in for a pound.”
She did not pick any more flowers and soon they were out of the wood
decorously joining the others. He imagined that Julia’s gaze was full
of irony, and the timid wonder in Kate’s eyes moved him uncomfortably.
There was something idiotic in the whole affair.
Until the end of the summer he met Ianthe often enough in the little
town or the city three miles off. Her uncouthness still repelled him;
sometimes he disliked her completely, but she was always happy to be
with him, charmingly fond and gay with all the endearing alertness of a
pert bird.
Her sister Kate was not just the mere female that Ianthe was; at once
sterner and softer her passions were more strong but their defences
stood solid as a rock. In spite of her reserve she was always on the
brink of her emotions and they, unhappily for her, were often not
transient, but enduring. She was nearly thirty, still unwed. Her dark
beauty, for she, too, was fine, seemed to brood in melancholy over his
attentions to the other two women. She was quiet, she had little to
say, she seemed to stand and wait.
One autumn night at the school after the pupils had gone home he walked
into the dim lobby for his hat and coat. Kate Forrest was there. She
stood with her back to him adjusting her hat. She did not say a word
nor did he address her. They were almost touching each other, there was
a pleasant scent about her. In the classroom behind the caretaker was
walking about the hollow-sounding floor, humming loudly as he clapped
down windows and mounted the six chairs to turn out the six gas lamps.
When the last light through the glazed door was gone and the lobby was
completely dark Kate all at once turned to him, folded him in her arms
and held him to her breast for one startling moment, then let him go,
murmuring O ... O.... It made him strangely happy. He pulled her back
in the gloom, whispering tender words. They walked out of the hall into
the dark road and stopped to confront each other. The road was empty
and dark except for a line of gas lamps that gleamed piercingly bright
in the sharp air and on the polished surface of the road that led back
from the hill down past her father’s villa. There were no lamps in
the opposite direction and the road groped its way out into the dark
country where he lived, a mile beyond the town. It was windy and
some unseen trees behind a wall near them swung and tossed with many
pleasant sounds.
“I will come a little way with you,” Kate said.
“Yes, come a little way,” he whispered, pressing her arm, “I’ll come
back with you.”
She took his arm and they turned towards the country. He could think of
nothing to say, he was utterly subdued by his surprise; Kate was sad,
even moody; but at last she said slowly: “I am unlucky, I always fall
in love with men who can’t love me.”
“O but I can and do, dear Kate,” he cried lightly. “Love me, Kate, go
on loving me, I’m not, well, I’m not very wicked.”
“No, no, you do not.” She shook her head mournfully: after a few
moments she added: “It’s Julia Tern.”
He was astounded. How could she have known this, how could any one have
known--even Julia herself? It was queer that she did not refer to his
friendship with Ianthe; he thought that was much more obvious than his
love for Julia. In a mood that he only half understood he began to deny
her reproachful charge.
“Why, you must think me very fickle indeed. I really love you, dear
Kate, really you.” His arm was around her neck, he smoothed her cheek
fondly against his own. She returned his caresses but he could glimpse
the melancholy doubt in her averted eyes.
“We often talk of you, we often talk of you at night, in bed, often.”
“What do you say about me--in bed? Who?”
“Ianthe and me. She likes you.”
“She likes me! What do you say about me--in bed?”
He hoped Ianthe had not been indiscreet but Kate only said: “She
doesn’t like you as I do--not like this.”
Soon they began to walk back toward the town. He smiled once when, as
their footsteps clattered unregularly upon the hard clean road, she
skipped to adjust the fall of her steps to his.
“Do not come any further,” she begged as they neared the street lamps.
“It doesn’t matter, not at all, what I’ve said to you. It will be all
right. I shall see you again.”
Once more she put her arms around his neck murmuring: “Goodnight,
goodnight, goodnight.”
He watched her tripping away. When he turned homewards his mind was
full of thoughts that were only dubiously pleasant. It was all very
sweet, surprisingly sweet, but it left him uneasy. He managed to light
a cigarette, but the wind blew smoke into his eyes, tore the charred
end into fiery rags and tossed the sparkles across his shoulder. If it
had only been Julia Tern!--or even Ianthe!--he would have been wholly
happy, but this was disturbing. Kate was good-looking but these quietly
passionate advances amazed him. Why had he been so responsive to her?
He excused himself, it was quite simple; you could not let a woman
down, a loving woman like that, not at once, a man should be kind. But
what did she mean when she spoke of always falling in love with men
who did not like her? He tossed the cigarette away and turned up the
collar of his coat for the faintest fall of warm rain blew against his
face like a soft beautiful net. He thrust his hands into his pockets
and walked sharply and forgettingly home.
II
Two miles away from the little town was the big city with tramways,
electric light, factories, canals, and tens of thousands of people,
where a few nights later he met Ianthe. Walking around and away from
the happy lighted streets they came out upon the bank of a canal where
darkness and loneliness were intensified by the silent passage of
black water whose current they could divine but could not see. As they
stepped warily along the unguarded bank he embraced her. Even as he did
so he cursed himself for a fool to be so fond of this wretched imp of
a girl. In his heart he believed he disliked her, but he was not sure.
She was childish, artful, luscious, stupid--this was no gesture for a
man with any standards. Silently clutching each other they approached
an iron bridge with lamps upon it and a lighted factory beyond it. The
softly-moving water could now be seen--the lamps on the bridge let
down thick rods of light into its quiet depths and beyond the arch the
windows of the factory, inverted in the stream, bloomed like baskets of
fire with flaming fringes among the eddies caused by the black pillars.
A boy shuffled across the bridge whistling a tune; there was the
rumble and trot of a cab. Then all sounds melted into a quiet without
one wave of air. The unseen couple had kissed, Ianthe was replying to
him:
“No, no, I like it, I like you.” She put her brow against his breast.
“I like you, I like you.”
His embracing hand could feel the emotion streaming within the girl.
“Do you like me better than her?”
“Than whom?” he asked.
Ianthe was coy. “You know, you know.”
Masterman’s feelings were a mixture of perturbation and delight,
delight at this manifestation of jealousy of her sister which was an
agreeable thing, anyway, for it implied a real depth of regard for him;
but he was perturbed for he did not know what Kate had told this sister
of their last strange meeting. He saluted her again exclaiming: “Never
mind her. This is our outing, isn’t it?”
“I don’t like her,” Ianthe added naïvely, “she is so awfully fond of
you.”
“O confound her,” he cried, and then, “you mustn’t mind me saying that
so, so sharply, you don’t mind, do you?”
Ianthe’s lips were soft and sweet. Sisters were quite unscrupulous,
Masterman had heard of such cases before, but he had tenderness and a
reluctance to wound anybody’s susceptibility, let alone the feelings
of a woman who loved. He was an artist not only in paint, but in
sentiment, and it is possible that he excelled in the less tangible
medium.
“It’s a little awkward,” he ventured. Ianthe didn’t understand, she
didn’t understand that at all.
“The difficulty, you see,” he said with the air of one handling
whimsically a question of perplexity that yet yielded its amusement,
“is ... is Kate.”
“Kate?” said Ianthe.
“She is so--so gone, so absolutely gone.”
“Gone?”
“Well, she’s really really in love, deeply, deeply,” he said looking
away anywhere but at her sister’s eyes.
“With Chris Halton, do you mean?”
“Ho, ho!” he laughed, “Halton! Lord, no, with me, with me, isn’t she?”
“With you!”
But Ianthe was quite positive even a little ironical about that. “She
is not, she rather dislikes you, Mr. Prince Charming, so there. We
speak of you sometimes at night in bed--we sleep together. She knows
what _I_ think of you but she’s quite, well she doesn’t like you at
all--she acts the heavy sister.”
“O,” said Masterman, groping as it were for some light in his darkness.
“She--what do you think--she warns me against you,” Ianthe continued.
“Against me?”
“As if I care. Do you?”
“No, no. I don’t care.”
They left the dark bank where they had been standing and walked along
to the bridge. Halfway up its steps to the road he paused and asked:
“Then who is it that is so fond of me?”
“O you know, you know.” Ianthe nestled blissfully in his arm again.
“No, but who is it, I may be making another howler. I thought you meant
Kate, what did she warn you of, I mean against me?”
They were now in the streets again, walking towards the tram centre.
The shops were darkened and closed, but the cinemas lavished their
unwanted illuminations on the street. There were no hurrying people,
there was just strolling ease; the policemen at corners were chatting
to other policemen now in private clothes. The brilliant trams rumbled
and clanged and stopped, the saloons were full and musical.
“What did she warn you against?” he repeated.
“You,” chuckled Ianthe.
“But what about? What has she got against me?”
“Everything. You know, you know you do.” The archness of Ianthe was
objectively baffling but under it all he read its significance, its
invitation.
He waited beside her for a tram but when it came he pleaded a further
engagement in the city. He had no other engagement, he only wanted to
be alone, to sort out the things she had dangled before his mind, so
he boarded the next car and walked from the Tutsan terminus to his
cottage. Both girls were fond of him, then--Ianthe’s candour left him
no room for doubt--and they were both lying to each other about him.
Well, he didn’t mind that, lies were a kind of protective colouring, he
lied himself whenever it was necessary, or suited him. Not often, but
truth was not always possible to sensitive minded men. Why, after all,
should sympathetic mendacity be a monopoly of polite society? “But it’s
also the trick of thieves and seducers, David Masterman,” he muttered
to himself. “I’m not a thief, no, I’m not a thief. As for the other
thing, well, what is there against me--nothing, nothing at all.” But
a strange voiceless sigh seemed to echo from the trees along the dark
road, “Not as yet, not as yet.”
He walked on more rapidly.
Three women! There was no doubt about the third, Ianthe had thought
of Julia, too, just as Kate had. What a fate for a misogamist! He
felt like a mouse being taken for a ride in a bath chair. He had an
invincible prejudice against marriage not as an institution but because
he was perfectly aware of his incapacity for faithfulness. His emotions
were deep but unprolonged. Love was love, but marriage turned love into
the stone of Sisyphus. At the sound of the marriage bell--a passing
bell--earth at his feet would burst into flame and the sky above would
pour upon him an unquenching profusion of tears. Love was a fine and
ennobling thing, but though he had the will to love he knew beyond the
possibility of doubt that his own capacity for love was a meandering
strengthless thing. Even his loyalty to Julia Tern--and that had the
strongest flavour of any emotion that had ever beset him, no matter how
brief its term--even that was a deviating zigzag loyalty. For he wanted
to go on being jolly and friendly with Ianthe if only Julia did not get
to know. With Kate, too, that tender melancholy woman; she would be
vastly unhappy. Who was this Christopher whom Ianthe fondly imagined
her sister to favour? Whoever he was, poor devil, he would not thank
D. M. for his intervention. But he would drop all this; however had he,
of all men, come to be plunged so suddenly into a state of things for
which he had shown so little fancy in the past? Julia would despise
him, she would be sure to despise him, sure to; and yet if he could
only believe she would not it would be pleasant to go on being friendly
with Ianthe pending ... pending what?
Masterman was a very pliant man, but as things shaped themselves for
him he did not go a step further with Ianthe, and it was not to Julia
at all that he made love.
III
The amour, if it may be described as such, of David Masterman and
Kate Forrest took a course that was devoid of ecstasy, whatever other
qualities may have illuminated their desires. It was an affair in which
the human intentions, which are intellectual, were on both sides strong
enough to subdue the efforts of passion, which are instinctive, to rid
itself of the customary curbs; and to turn the clash of inhibitions
wherein the man proposes and the woman rejects into a conflict not of
ideal but of mere propriety. They were like two negative atoms swinging
in a medium from which the positive flux was withdrawn; for them the
nebulæ did not “cohere into an orb.”
Kate’s fine figure was not so fine as Julia Tern’s; her dusky charms
were excelled by those of Ianthe; but her melancholy immobility,
superficial as it was, had a suggestive emotional appeal that won
Masterman away from her rivals. Those sad eyes had but to rest on
his and their depths submerged him. Her black hair had no special
luxuriance, her stature no unusual grace; the eyes were almost blue and
the thin oval face had always the flush of fine weather in it; but her
strong hands, though not as white as snow, were paler than milk, their
pallor was unnatural. Almost without an effort she drew him away from
the entangling Ianthe, and even the image of Julia became but a fair
cloud seen in moonlight, delicate and desirable but very far away; it
would never return. Julia had observed the relations between them--no
discerning eye could misread Kate’s passion--and she gave up his class,
a secession that had a deep significance for him, and a grief that he
could not conceal from Kate though she was too wise to speak of it.