she made such a powerful appeal to Masterman; the way she would wait
silently for him on the outside of a crowd of the laughing chattering
students was touching--she was an egotist of extraordinary type. She
believed in herself and in her virtue more strongly than she believed
in him or their mutual love. By midsummer, after months of wooing, she
knew that the man who so passionately moved her and whose own love she
no less powerfully engaged was a man who would never marry, who had a
morbid preposterous horror of the domesticity and devotion that was her
conception of living bliss. “The hand that rocks the cradle rocks the
world,” he said. He, too, knew that the adored woman, for her part,
could not dream of a concession beyond the limits her virginal modesty
prescribed. He had argued and stormed and swore that baffled love turns
irrevocably to hatred. She did not believe him, she even smiled. But he
had behaved grossly towards her, terrified her, and they had parted in
anger.
He did not see her for many weeks. He was surprised and dismayed that
his misery was so profound. He knew he had loved her, he had not
doubted its sincerity but he had doubted its depth. Then one September
evening she had come back to the class and afterwards she had walked
along the road with him towards his home.
“Come to my house,” he said, “you have never been to see it.”
She shook her head, it was getting dark, and they walked on past
his home further into the country. The eve was late but it had come
suddenly without the deliberation of sunset or the tenuity of dusk.
Each tree was a hatful of the arriving blackness. They stood by a white
gate under an elm, but they had little to say to each other.
“Come to my house,” he urged again and again; she shook her head. He
was indignant at her distrust of him. Perhaps she was right but he
would never forgive her. The sky was now darker than the road; the
sighing air was warm, with drifting spots of rain.
“Tell me,” she suddenly said taking his arm, “has anybody else ever
loved you like that.”
He prevaricated: “Like what?” He waited a long time for her answer. She
gave it steadily.
“Like you want me to love you.”
He, too, hesitated. He kissed her. He wanted to tell her that it was
not wise to pry.
“Tell me,” she urged, “tell me.”
“Yes,” he replied. He could not see her plainly in the darkness, but he
knew of the tears that fell from her eyes.
“How unreasonable,” he thought, “how stupid!” He tried to tell the
truth to her--the truth as he conceived it--about his feelings towards
her, and towards those others, and about themselves as he perceived it.
She was almost alarmed, certainly shocked.
“But you don’t believe such things,” she almost shivered, “I’m sure you
don’t, it isn’t right, it is not true.”
“It may not be true,” he declared implacably, “but I believe it. The
real warrant for holding a belief is not that it is true but that it
satisfies you.” She did not seem to understand that; she only answered
irrelevantly. “I’ll make it all up to you some day. I shall not change,
David, toward you. We have got all our lives before us. I shan’t
alter--will you?”
“Not alter!” he began angrily but then subduedly added with a grim
irony that she did not gather in: “No, I shall not alter.”
She flung herself upon his breast murmuring: “I’ll make it all up to
you, some day.”
He felt like a sick-minded man and was glad when they parted. He went
back to his cottage grumbling audibly to himself. Why could he not
take this woman with the loving and constant heart and wed her? He
did not know why, but he knew he never would do that. She was fine
to look upon but she had ideas (if you could call them ideas) which
he disliked. Her instincts and propensities were all wrong, they
were antagonistic to him, just, as he felt, his were antagonistic to
her. What was true, though, was her sorrow at what she called their
misunderstandings and what was profound, what was almost convincing,
was her assumption (which but measured her own love for him) that he
could not cease to love _her_. How vain that was. He had not loved
any woman in the form she thought all love must take. These were not
misunderstandings, they were just simply at opposite ends of a tilted
beam; he the sophisticated, and she the innocent beyond the reach
of his sophistries. But Good Lord, what did it all matter? what did
anything matter? He would not see her again. He undressed, got into
bed. He thought of Julia, of Ianthe, of Kate. He had a dream in which
he lay in a shroud upon a white board and was interrogated by a saint
who carried a reporter’s notebook and a fountain pen.
“What is your desire, sick-minded man?” the saint interrogated him,
“what consummation would exalt your languid eyes?”
“I want the present not to be. It is neither grave nor noble.”
“Then that is your sickness. That mere negation is at once your hope
and end.”
“I do not know.”
“If the present so derides the dignified past surely your desire lies
in a future incarnating beautiful old historic dreams?”
“I do not know.”
“Ideals are not in the past. They do not exist in any future. They rush
on, and away, beyond your immediate activities, beyond the horizons
that are for ever fixed, for ever charging down upon us.”
“I do not know.”
“What is it you do know?” asked the exasperated saint, jerking his
fountain pen to loosen its flow, and Masterman replied like a lunatic:
“I know that sealing wax is a pure and beautiful material and you get
such a lot of it for a penny.”
He woke and slept no more. He cursed Kate, he sneered at Julia, he
anathematized Ianthe, until the bright eye of morning began to gild
once more their broken images.
IV
Between the sisters there grew a feud; Ianthe behaved evilly when she
discovered their mutual infatuation for their one lover. The echoes
of that feud, at first dim, but soon crashingly clear, reached him,
touched him and moved him on Kate’s behalf: all his loyalty belonged
to her. What did it matter if he could not fathom his own desire, that
Ianthe was still his for a word, that Kate’s implacable virtue still
offered its deprecatory hand, when Kate herself came back to him?
They were to spend a picnic day together and she went to him for
breakfast. Her tremors of propriety were fully exercised as she cycled
along to his home; she was too fond of him and he was more than fond of
her; but all her qualms were lulled. He did not appear in any of the
half-expected negligee, he was beautifully and amusingly at home.
“My dear!” he exclaimed in the enjoyment of her presence; she stood
staring at him as she removed her wrap, the morn though bright being
fresh and cool: “Why do I never do you justice! Why do I half forget!
You are marvellously, irresistibly lovely. How do you do it--or how do
I fail so?”
She could only answer him with blushes. His bungalow had but two rooms,
both on the ground floor, one a studio and the other his living and
sleeping room. It was new, built of bricks and unpainted boards. The
interior walls were unplastered and undecorated except for three small
saucepans hung on hooks, a shelf of dusty volumes, and nails, large
rusty nails, projecting everywhere, one holding a discarded collar
and a clothes brush. A tall flat cupboard contained a narrow bed to
be lowered for sleeping, huge portmanteaus and holdalls reposed in a
corner beside a bureau, there was a big brass candle-pan on a chair
beside the round stove. While he prepared breakfast the girl walked
about the room, making shy replies to his hilarious questions. It
was warm in there but to her tidy comfort-loving heart the room was
disordered and bare. She stood looking out of the window: the April
air was bright but chilly, the grass in thin tufts fluttered and
shivered.
“It is very nice,” she said to him once, “but it’s strange and I feel
that I ought not to be here.”
“O, never mind where you ought to be,” he cried, pouring out her
coffee, “that’s where you are, you suit the place, you brighten and
adorn it, it’s your native setting, Kate. No--I know exactly what is
running in your mind, you are going to ask if I suffer loneliness here.
Well, I don’t. A great art in life is the capacity to extract a flavour
from something not obviously flavoured, but here it is all flavour.
Come and look at things.”
He rose and led her from egg and toast to the world outside. Long
fields of pasture and thicket followed a stream that followed other
meadows, soon hidden by the ambulating many folding valleys, and so
on to the sea, a hundred miles away. Into his open door were blown,
in their season, balls of thistledown, crisp leaves, twigs and dried
grass, the reminder, the faint brush, of decay. The airs of wandering
winds came in, odours of herb, the fragrance of viewless flowers. The
land in some directions was now being furrowed where corn was greenly
to thrive, to wave in glimmering gold, to lie in the stook, to pile
on giant stack. Horses were trailing a harrow across an upland below
the park, the wind was flapping the coats of the drivers, the tails
and manes of the horses, and heaving gladly in trees. A boy fired the
heaps of squitch whose smoke wore across the land in dense deliberate
wreaths. Sportsmen’s guns were sounding from the hollow park.
Kate followed Masterman around his cottage; he seemed to be fascinated
by the smoke, the wind, the horses and men.
“Breakfast will be cold.”
How queerly he looked at her before he said: “Yes, of course, breakfast
will be getting cold,” and then added, inconsequently: “Flowers are
like men and women, they either stare brazenly at the sun or they bend
humbly before it, but even the most modest desire the sun.”
When he spoke like that she always felt that the words held a
half-hidden, perhaps libidinous, meaning, which she could not
understand but only guess at; and she was afraid of her guesses. Full
of curious, not to say absurd superstitions about herself and about
him, his strange oblique emotions startled her virginal understanding;
her desire was to be good, very very good, but to be that she could not
but suspect the impulses of most other people, especially the impulses
of men. Well, perhaps she was right: the woman who hasn’t any doubts
must have many illusions.
He carried a bag of lunch and they walked out into the day. Soon the
wind ceased, the brightness grew warm, the warmth was coloured; clouds
lolled in the air like tufts of lilac. At the edge of a spinney they
sat down under a tree. Boughs of wood blown down by the winter gales
were now being hidden by the spring grass. A rabbit, twenty yards away,
sat up and watched the couple, a fat grey creature. “Hoi,” cried Kate,
and the rabbit hopped away. It could not run very fast, it did not seem
much afraid.
“Is it wounded?” she asked.
“No, I think it is a tame one, escaped from a farm or a cottage near
us, I expect.”
Kate crept after it on hands and knees and it let her approach. She
offered it the core of an apple she had just eaten. The rabbit took
it and bit her finger. Then Kate caught it by the ears. It squealed
but Kate held it to her bosom with delight, and the rabbit soon rested
there if not with delight at least with ease. It was warm against her
breast, it was delicious to feel it there, to pull its ears and caress
its fat flanks, but as she was doing this she suddenly saw that its
coat was infested with fleas. She dropped the rabbit with a scream of
disgust and it rushed into the thicket.
“Come here,” said Masterman to her, “let me search you, this is
distressing.”
She knelt down before him and in spite of her wriggling he reassured
her.
“It’s rather a nice blouse,” he said.
“I don’t care for it. I shall not wear it again. I shall sell it to
someone or give it to them.”
“I would love to take it from you stitch by stitch.”
With an awkward movement of her arm she thrust at his face, crying
loudly, “No, how dare you speak to me like that!”
“Is it very daring?” For a moment he saw her clenched hands, detestably
bloodless, a symbol of roused virtue: but at once her anger was gone,
Kate was contrite and tender. She touched his face with her white
fingers softly as the settling of a moth. “O, why did we come here?”
He did not respond to her caresses, he was sullen, they left the
spinney; but as they walked she took his arm murmuring: “Forgive me,
I’ll make it all up to you some day.”
Coyness and cunning, passion and pride, were so much at odds that later
on they quarrelled again. Kate knew that he would neither marry her nor
let her go; she could neither let him go nor keep him. This figure of
her distress amused him, he was callously provoking, and her resentment
flowed out at the touch of his scorn. With Kate there seemed to be no
intermediate stages between docility and fury, or even between love and
hatred.
“Why are you like this?” she cried, beating her pallid hands together,
“I have known you for so long.”
“Ah, we have known each other for so long, but as for really knowing
you--no! I’m not a tame rabbit to be fondled any more.”
She stared for a moment, as if in recollection; then burst into
ironical laughter. He caught her roughly in his arms but she beat him
away.
“O, go to ... go to....”
“Hell?” he suggested.
“Yes,” she burst out tempestuously, “and stop there.”
He was stunned by her unexpected violence. She was coarse like Ianthe
after all. But he said steadily:
“I’m willing to go there if you will only keep out of my way when I
arrive.”
Then he left her standing in a lane, he hurried and ran, clambering
over stiles and brushing through hedges, anything to get away from the
detestable creature. She did not follow him and they were soon out of
sight of each other. Anger and commination swarmed to his lips, he
branded her with frenzied opprobrium and all the beastliness that was
in him. Nothing under heaven should ever persuade him to approach the
filthy beast again, the damned intolerable pimp, never, never again,
never.
But he came to a bridge. On it he rested. And in that bright air, that
sylvan peace, his rancour fell away from him, like sand from a glass,
leaving him dumb and blank at the meanness of his deed. He went back
to the lane as fast as he could go. She was not there. Kate, Kate, my
dove! But he could not find her.
He was lost in the fields until he came at last upon a road and a
lonely tavern thereby. It had a painted sign; a very smudgy fox,
in an inexplicable attitude, destroying a fowl that looked like
a plum-pudding but was intended to depict a snipe. At the stable
door the tiniest black kitten in the world was shaping with timid
belligerency at a young and fluffy goose who, ignoring it, went on
sipping ecstatically from a pan of water. On the door were nailed, in
two semicircles of decoration, sixteen fox pads in various stages of
decay, an entire spiral shaving from the hoof of a horse, and some
chalk jottings:
2 pads
3 cruppers
1 Bellyband
2 Set britchin
The tavern was long and low and clean, its garden was bare but trim.
There was comfort, he rested, had tea, and then in the bar his
painful musings were broken by a ragged unfortunate old pedlar from
Huddersfield.
“Born and bred in Slatterwick, it’s no lie ah’m speaking, ah were born
and bred Slatterwick, close to Arthur Brinkley’s farm, his sister’s in
Canady, John Orkroyd took farm, Arthur’s dead.”
“Humph!”
“And buried. That iron bridge at Jackamon’s belong to Daniel Cranmer.
He’s dead.”
“Humph!”
“And buried. From th’ iron bridge it’s two miles and a quarter to
Herbert Oddy’s, that’s the ‘Bay Horse,’ am ah right, at Shelmersdyke.
Three miles and three-quarters from dyke to the ‘Cock and Goat’ at
Shapley Fell, am ah right?”
Masterman, never having been within a hundred miles of Yorkshire,
puffed at his cigarette and nodded moodily, “I suppose so” or “Yes,
yes.”
“From Arthur Brinkley’s to th’ iron bridge is one mile and a half and a
bit, and from Arthur Brinkley’s to Jury Cartright’s is just four mile.
He’s dead, sir.”
“Yes.”
“And buried. Is that wrong? Am ah speaking wrong? No. It’s long step
from yon, rough tramp for an old man.”
Masterman--after giving sixpence to the pedlar who, uttering a
benediction, pressed upon him a card of shirt buttons--said “Good
evening” and walked out to be alone upon the road with his once angry
but now penitent mind. Kate, poor dear Kate!
The sun was low down lolling near the horizon but there was an
astonishing light upon the land. Cottage windows were blocks of solid
gold in this lateral brilliance, shafts of shapely shade lay across
leagues of field, he could have counted every leaf among the rumpled
boskage of the sycamores. A vast fan of indurated cloud, shell-like and
pearly, was wavering over the western sky but in the east were snowy
rounded masses like fabulous balloons. At a cross road he stood by an
old sign post, its pillar plastered with the faded bill of a long-ago
circus. He could read every word of it but when he turned away he found
everything had grown dimmer. The wind arose, the forest began to roar
like a heaving beast. All verdurous things leaned one way. A flock of
starlings flew over him with one movement and settled in a rolling
elm. How lonely it was. He took off his hat. His skull was fearfully
tender--he had dabbed it too hard with his hair brush that morning. His
hair was growing thin, like his youth and his desires.
What had become of Kate, where had she hidden? What _would_ become of
her? He would never see her again. He disliked everything about her,
except her self. Her clothes, her speech, her walk, the way she carried
her umbrella, her reticence that was nothing if not conspicuous, her
melancholy, her angular concrete piety, her hands--in particular
he disliked her pale hands. She had a mind that was cultivated as
perfunctorily as a kitchen garden, with ideas like roots or beans,
hostilities like briars, and a fence of prudery that was as tough as
hoops of galvanized iron. And yet he loved her--or almost. He was
ready to love her, he wanted to, he wanted her; her deep but guarded
devotion--it was limited but it was devotion--compelled this return
from him. It was a passionate return. He had tried to mould that
devotion into a form that could delight him--he had failed. He knew
her now, he could peer into her craven soul as one peers into an empty
bottle, with one eye. For her the opportunities afforded by freedom
were but the preludes to misadventure. What a fool she was!
When he reached home Kate stood in darkness at the doorway of his
house. He exclaimed with delight, her surprising presence was the very
centre of his desire, he wanted to embrace her, loving her deeply,
inexplicably again; just in a moment.
“I want my bike,” the girl said sullenly. “I left it inside this
morning.
“Ah, your bicycle! Yes, you did.” He unlocked the door. “Wait, there
should be a candle, there should be.”
She stood in the doorway until he had lit it.
“Come in, Kate,” he said, “let me give you something. I think there is
some milk, certainly I have some cake, come in, Kate, or do you drink
beer, I have beer, come in, I’ll make you something hot.”
But Kate only took her bicycle. “I ought to have been home hours ago,”
she said darkly, wheeling it outside and lighting the lantern. He
watched her silently as she dabbed the wick, the pallor of her hands
had never appeared so marked.
“Let’s be kind to each other,” he said, detaining her, “don’t go, dear
Kate.”
She pushed the bicycle out into the road.
“Won’t you see me again?” he asked as she mounted it.
“I am always seeing you,” she called back, but her meaning was dark to
him.
“Faugh! The devil! The fool!” He gurgled anathemas as he returned to
his cottage. “And me too! What am I?”
But no mortal man could ever love a woman of that kind. She did not
love him at all, had never loved him. Then what was it she did love?
Not her virtue--you might as well be proud of the sole of your foot;
it was some sort of pride, perhaps the test of her virtue that the
conflict between them provoked, the contest itself alone alluring her,
not its aim and end. She was never happier than when having led him on
she thwarted him. But she would find that his metal was as tough as her
own.
Before going to bed he spent an hour in writing very slowly a letter to
Kate, telling her that he felt they would not meet again, that their
notions of love were so unrelated, their standards so different. “My
morals are at least as high as yours though likely enough you regard
me as a rip. Let us recognize then,” he wrote concludingly, “that we
have come to the end of the tether without once having put an ounce
of strain upon its delightful but never tense cord. But the effort
to keep the affair down to the level at which you seem satisfied has
wearied me. The task of living down to that assured me that for you the
effort of living up to mine would be consuming. I congratulate you,
my dear, on coming through scatheless and that the only appropriate
condolences are my own--for myself.”
It was rather pompous, he thought, but then she wouldn’t notice that,
let alone understand it. She suffered not so much from an impediment of
speech--how could she when she spoke so little?--as from an impediment
of intellect, which was worse, much worse, but not so noticeable being
so common a failing. She was, when all was said and done, just a fool.
It was a pity, for bodily she must indeed be a treasure. What a pity!
But she had never had any love for him at all, only compassion and
pity for his bad thoughts about her; he had neither pity for her nor
compunction--only love. Dear, dear, dear. Blow out the candle, lock the
door, Good-night!
V
He did not see her again for a long time. He would have liked to have
seen her, yes, just once more, but of course he was glad, quite glad,
that she did not wish to risk it and drag from dim depths the old
passion to break again in those idiotic bubbles of propriety. She did
not answer his letter--he was amused. Then her long silence vexed him,
until vexation was merged in alarm. She had gone away from Tutsan--of
course--gone away on family affairs--oh, naturally!--she might be gone
for ever. But a real grief came upon him. He had long mocked the girl,
not only the girl but his own vision of her; now she was gone his mind
elaborated her melancholy immobile figure into an image of beauty. Her
absence, her silence, left him wretched. He heard of her from Ianthe
who renewed her blandishments; he was not unwilling to receive them
now--he hoped their intercourse might be reported to Kate.
After many months he did receive a letter from her. It was a tender
letter though ill-expressed, not very wise or informative, but he could
feel that the old affection for him was still there, and he wrote her a
long reply in which penitence and passion and appeal were mingled.
“I know now, yes, I see it all now; solutions are so easy when the
proof of them is passed. We were cold to each other, it was stupid, I
should have _made_ you love me and it would have been well. I see it
now. How stupid, how unlucky; it turned me to anger and you to sorrow.
Now I can think only of you.”
She made no further sign, not immediately, and he grew dull again.
His old disbelief in her returned. Bah! she loved him no more than a
suicide loved the pond it dies in; she had used him for her senseless
egoism, tempting him and fooling him, wantonly, he had not begun it,
and she took a chaste pride in saving herself from him. What was it the
old writer had said?
“Chastity, by nature the gentlest of all affections--give it but its
head--’tis like a ramping and roaring lion.” Saving herself! Yes, she
would save herself for marriage.
He even began to contemplate that outcome.
Her delayed letter, when it came, announced that she was coming home at
once; he was to meet her train in the morning after the morrow.
It was a dull autumnal morning when he met her. Her appearance was not
less charming than he had imagined it, though the charm was almost
inarticulate and there were one or two crude touches that momentarily
distressed him. But he met with a flush of emotion all her glances of
gaiety and love that were somehow, vaguely, different--perhaps there
was a shade less reserve. They went to lunch in the city and at the end
of the meal he asked her:
“Well, why have you come back again?”
She looked at him intently: “Guess!”
“I--well, no--perhaps--tell me, Kate, yourself.”
“You are different now, you look different, David.”
“Am I changed? Better or worse?”
She did not reply and he continued:
“You too, are changed. I can’t tell how it is, or where, but you are.”
“O, I am changed, much changed,” murmured Kate.
“Have you been well?”
“Yes.”
“And happy?”
“Yes.”
“Then how unwise of you to come back.”
“I have come back,” said Kate, “to be happier. But somehow you are
different.”
“You are different, too. Shall we ever be happy again?”
“Why--why not!” said Kate.
“Come on!” he cried hilariously, “let us make a day of it, come along!”
Out in the streets they wandered until rain began to fall.