the museum, and they went in together. It was a vast hollow-sounding
flagstone place that had a central brightness fading into dim recesses
and galleries of gloom. They examined a monster skeleton of something
like an elephant, three stuffed apes, and a picture of the dodo. Kate
stood before them without interest or amusement, she just contemplated
them. What did she want with an elephant, an ape, or a dodo? The glass
exhibit cases were leaned upon by them, the pieces of coal neatly
arranged and labelled were stared at besides the pieces of granite or
coloured rock with long names ending in _orite dorite_ and _sorite_
and so on to the precious gems including an imitation, as big as a
bun, of a noted diamond. They leaned over them, repeating the names
on the labels with the quintessence of vacuity. They hated it. There
were beetles and worms of horror, butterflies of beauty, and birds that
had been stuffed so long that they seemed to be intoxicated; their
beaks fitted them as loosely as a drunkard’s hat, their glassy eyes
were pathetically vague. After ascending a flight of stone steps David
and Kate stooped for a long time over a case of sea-anemones that had
been reproduced in gelatine by a German with a fancy for such things.
From the railed balcony they could peer down into the well of the
fusty-smelling museum. No one else was visiting it, they were alone
with all things dead, things that had died millions of years ago and
were yet simulating life. A footfall sounded so harsh in the corridors,
boomed with such clangour, that they took slow diffident steps,
almost tiptoeing, while Kate scarcely spoke at all and he conversed
in murmurs. Whenever he coughed the whole place seemed to shudder. In
the recess, hidden from prying eyes, David clasped her willing body in
his arms. For once she was unshrinking and returned his fervour. The
vastness, the emptiness, the deadness, worked upon their feelings with
intense magic.
“Love me, David,” she murmured, and when they moved away from the
gelatinous sea-urchins she kept both her arms clasped around him as
they walked the length of the empty corridors. He could not understand
her, he could not perceive her intimations, their meaning was dark to
him. She was so altered, this was another Kate.
“I have come home to make it all up to you,” she repeated, and he
scarcely dared to understand her.
They approached a lecture-room; the door was open, the room was empty,
they went in and stood near the platform. The place was arranged like
a tiny theatre, tiers of desks rising in half-circles on three sides
high up towards the ceiling. A small platform with a lecturer’s desk
confronted the rising tiers; on the wall behind it a large white sheet;
a magic lantern on a pedestal was near and a blackboard on an easel.
A pencil of white chalk lay broken on the floor. Behind the easel was
a piano, a new piano with a duster on its lid. The room smelled of
spilled acids. The lovers’ steps upon the wooden floor echoed louder
than ever after their peregrinations upon the flagstones; they were
timid of the sound and stood still, close together, silent. He touched
her bosom and pressed her to his heart, but all her surrender seemed
strange and nerveless. She was almost violently different; he had liked
her old rejections, they were fiery and passionate. He scarce knew
what to do, he understood her less than ever now. Dressed as she was
in thick winter clothes it was like embracing a tree, it tired him.
She lay in his arms waiting, waiting, until he felt almost stifled.
Something like the smell of the acids came from her fur necklet. He was
glad when she stood up, but she was looking at him intently. To cover
his uneasiness he went to the blackboard and picking up a piece of the
chalk he wrote the first inconsequent words that came into his mind.
Kate stood where he had left her, staring at the board as he traced the
words upon it:
_We are but little children weak_
Laughing softly she strolled towards him.
“What do you write that for? I know what it is.”
“What it is! Well, what is it?”
She took the chalk from his fingers.
“It’s a hymn,” she went on, “it goes....”
“A hymn!” he cried, “I did not know that.”
Underneath the one he had written she was now writing another line on
the board.
_Nor born to any high estate._
“Of course,” he whispered, “I remember it now. I sang it as a child--at
school--go on, go on.”
But she had thereupon suddenly turned away, silent, dropping her hands
to her side. One of her old black moods had seized her. He let her go
and picking up another fragment of chalk completed the verse.
_What can we do for Jesu’s sake
Who is so high and good and great?_
She turned when he had finished and without a word walked loudly to the
piano, fetched the duster and rubbed out the words they had written on
the blackboard. She was glaring angrily at him.
“How absurd you are,”--he was annoyed--“let us go out and get some
tea.” He wandered off to the door, but she did not follow. He stood
just outside gazing vacantly at a stuffed jay that had an indigo eye.
He looked into the room again. She was there still, just as he had left
her; her head bent, her hands hanging clasped before her, the dimness
covering and caressing her--a figure full of sad thoughts. He ran to
her and crushed her in his arms again.
“Kate, my lovely.”
She was saying brokenly: “You know what I said. I’ve come to make it
all up to you. I promised, didn’t I?”
Something shuddered in his very soul--too late, too late, this was no
love for him. The magic lantern looked a stupid childish toy, the smell
of the acid was repulsive. Of all they had written upon the blackboard
one word dimly remained: _Jesu_.
She stirred in his arms. “You are changed, David.”
“Changed, yes, everything is changed.”
“This is just like a theatre, like a play, as if we were acting.”
“Yes, as if we were acting. But we are not acting. Let us go up and sit
in the gallery.”
They ascended the steps to the top ring of desks and looked down to
the tiny platform and the white curtain. She sat fondling his hands,
leaning against him.
“Have you ever acted--you would do it so well?”
“Why do you say that? Am I at all histrionic?”
“Does that mean insincere? O no. But you are the person one expects to
be able to do anything.”
“Nonsense! I’ve never acted. I suppose I could. It isn’t difficult, you
haven’t to be clever, only courageous. I should think it very easy to
be only an ordinary actor, but I’m wrong, no doubt. I thought it was
easy to write--to write a play--until I tried. I once engaged myself
to write a little play for some students to act. I had never done such
a thing before and like other idiots I thought I hadn’t ever done it
simply because I hadn’t ever wanted to. Heavens, how harassed I was
and how ashamed! I could not do it, I got no further than the author’s
speech.”
“Well that was something. Tell me it.”
“It’s nothing to do with the play. It’s what the author says to the
audience when the play is finished.”
She insisted on hearing it whatever it was. “O well,” he said at last,
“let’s do that properly, at least. I’ll go down there and deliver
it from the stage. You must pretend that you are the enthusiastic
audience. Come and sit in the stalls.”
They went down together.
“Now imagine that this curtain goes up and I suddenly appear.”
Kate faintly clapped her hands. He stood upon the platform facing her
and taking off his hat, began:
“Ladies and Gentlemen,
“I am so deeply touched by the warmth of this reception, this utterly
undeserved appreciation, that--forgive me--I have forgotten the
speech I had carefully prepared in anticipation of it. Let me meet
my obligation by telling you a story; I think it is true, I made it
up myself. Once upon a time there was a poor playwright--something
like me--who wrote a play--something like this--and at the end of the
performance the audience, a remarkably handsome well-fed intellectual
audience--something like this--called him before the curtain and
demanded a speech. He protested that he was unprepared and asked
them to allow him to tell them a story--something like this. Well,
that, too, was a remarkably handsome well-fed intellectual audience,
so they didn’t mind and he began again.--Once upon a time a poor
playwright--and was just about to repeat the story I have already twice
told you when suddenly, without a word of warning, without a sound,
without a compunction, the curtain swooped down and chopped him clean
in half.”
Masterman made an elaborate obeisance and stepped off the platform.
“Is that all?” asked Kate.
“That’s all.”
At that moment a loud bell clanged throughout the building signifying
that the museum was about to close.
“Come along!” he cried, but Kate did not move, she still sat in the
stalls.
“Don’t leave me, David, I want to hear the play?” she said archly.
“There _was_ no play. There _is_ no play. Come, or we shall be locked
in for the night.”
She still sat on. He went to her and seized her hands.
“What does it matter!” she whispered, embracing him. “I want to make it
all up to you.”
He was astoundingly moved. She was marvellously changed. If she hadn’t
the beauty of perfection she had some of the perfection of beauty. He
adored her.
“But, no,” he said, “it won’t do, it really won’t. Come, I have got to
buy you something at once, a ring with a diamond in it, as big as a
bun, an engagement ring, quickly, or the shops will be shut.”
He dragged the stammering bewildered girl away, down the stairs and
into the street. The rain had ceased, the sunset sky was bright and
Masterman was intensely happy.
* * * * *
COTTON
* * * * *
COTTON
At the place where the road from Carnaby Down ends in the main western
highway that goes towards Bath there stands, or once stood, a strongly
built stone cottage confronting, on the opposite side of the highroad,
a large barn and some cattle stalls. A man named Cotton lived with his
wife lonely in this place, their whole horizon bounded by the hedges
and fences of their farm. His Christian name, for some unchristian
reason, was Janifex, people called him Jan, possibly because it rhymed
with his wife’s name, which was Ann. And Ann was a robust managing
woman of five and thirty, childless, full of desolating cleanliness
and kindly tyrannies, with no perceptions that were not determined by
her domestic ambition, and no sympathies that could interfere with her
diurnal energies whatever they might be. Jan was a mild husbandman,
prematurely aged, with large teeth and, since “forty winters had
besieged his brow,” but little hair. Sometimes one of the large teeth
would drop out, leaving terrible gaps when he opened his mouth and
turning his patient smile to a hideous leer. These evacuations, which
were never restored, began with the death of Queen Victoria; throughout
the reign of her successor great events were punctuated by similar
losses until at last Jan could masticate, in his staid old manner, only
in one overworked corner of his mouth.
He would rise of a morning throughout the moving year at five of the
clock; having eaten his bread and drunk a mug of cocoa he would don
a long white jacket and cross the road diagonally to the gate at the
eastern corner of the sheds; these were capped by the bright figure of
a golden cockerel, voiceless but useful, flaunting always to meet the
challenge of the wind. Sometimes in his deliberate way Jan would lift
his forlorn eyes in the direction of the road coming from the east, but
he never turned to the other direction as that would have cost him a
physical effort and bodily flexion had ceased years and years ago. Do
roads ever run backward--leaps not forward the eye? As he unloosed the
gate of the yard his great dog would lift its chained head from some
sacks under a cart, and a peacock would stalk from the belt of pines
that partly encircled the buildings. The man would greet them, saying
“O, ah!” In the rickyard he would pause to release the fowls from their
hut and watch them run to the stubbles or spurn the chaff with their
claws as they ranged between the stacks. If the day were windy the
chaff would fall back in clouds upon their bustling feathers, and that
delighted his simple mind. It is difficult to account for his joy in
this thing for though his heart was empty of cruelty it seemed to be
empty of everything else. Then he would pass into the stalls and with
a rattle of can and churn the labour of the day was begun.
Thus he lived, with no temptations, and few desires except perhaps for
milk puddings, which for some reason concealed in Ann’s thrifty bosom
he was only occasionally permitted to enjoy. Whenever his wife thought
kindly of him she would give him a piece of silver and he would traipse
a mile in the evening, a mile along to the _Huntsman’s Cup_, and take a
tankard of beer. On his return he would tell Ann of the things he had
seen, the people he had met, and other events of his journey.
Once, in the time of spring, when buds were bursting along the hedge
coverts and birds of harmony and swiftness had begun to roost in the
wood, a blue-chinned Spaniard came to lodge at the farm for a few
weeks. He was a labourer working at some particular contract upon the
estate adjoining the Cottons’ holding, and he was accommodated with a
bed and an abundance of room in a clean loft behind the house. With
curious shoes upon his feet, blazing check trousers fitting tightly
upon his thighs, a wrapper of pink silk around his neck, he was an
astonishing figure in that withdrawn corner of the world. When the
season chilled him a long black cloak with a hood for his head added
a further strangeness. Juan da Costa was his name. He was slightly
round-shouldered with an uncongenial squint in his eyes; though he
used but few words of English his ways were beguiling; he sang very
blithely shrill Spanish songs, and had a pleasant courtesy of manner
that presented a deal of attraction to the couple, particularly Ann,
whose casual heart he reduced in a few hours to kindness, and in a few
days, inexplicably perhaps, to a still warmer emotion--yes, even in the
dull blankness of that mind some ghostly star could glimmer. From the
hour of his arrival she was an altered woman although, with primitive
subtlety the transition from passivity to passion was revealed only by
one curious sign, and that was the spirit of her kindness evoked for
the amiable Jan, who now fared mightily upon his favourite dishes.
Sometimes the Spaniard would follow Jan about the farm. “Grande!” he
would say, gesturing with his arm to indicate the wide-rolling hills.
“O, ah!” Jan would reply, “there’s a heap o’ land in the open air.”
The Spaniard does not understand. He asks: “What?”
“O, ah!” Jan would echo.
But it was the cleanly buxom Ann to whom da Costa devoted himself.
He brought home daily, though not ostensibly to her, a bunch of the
primroses, a stick of snowbudded sallow, or a sprig of hazel hung with
catkins, soft caressable things. He would hold the hazel up before
Ann’s uncomprehending gaze and strike the lemon-coloured powder from
the catkins on to the expectant adjacent buds, minute things with stiff
female prongs, red like the eyes of the white rabbit which Ann kept in
the orchard hutch.
One day Juan came home unexpectedly in mid-afternoon. It was a cold
dry day and he wore his black cloak and hood.
“See,” he cried, walking up to Ann, who greeted him with a smile; he
held out to her a posy of white violets tied up with some blades of
thick grass. She smelt them but said nothing. He pressed the violets to
his lips and again held them out, this time to her lips. She took them
from him and touched them with the front of her bodice while he watched
her with delighted eyes.
“You ... give ... me ... something ... for ... los flores?”
“Piece a cake!” said Ann, moving towards the pantry door.
“Ah ... cake...!”
As she pulled open the door, still keeping a demure eye upon him, the
violets fell out and down upon the floor, unseen by her. He rushed
towards them with a cry of pain and a torrent of his strange language;
picking them up he followed her into the pantry, a narrow place almost
surrounded by shelves with pots of pickles and jam, plates, cups and
jugs, a scrap of meat upon a trencher, a white bowl with cob nuts and a
pair of iron crackers.
“See ... lost!” he cried shrilly as she turned to him. She was about to
take them again when he stayed her with a whimsical gesture.
“Me ... me,” he said, and brushing her eyes with their soft perfume
he unfastened the top button of her bodice while the woman stood
motionless; then the second button, then the third. He turned the
corners inwards and tucked the flowers between her flesh and
underlinen. They stood eyeing one another, breathing uneasily, but with
a pretence of nonchalance. “Ah!” he said suddenly; before she could
stop him he had seized a few nuts from the white bowl and holding open
her bodice where the flowers rested he dropped the nuts into her warm
bosom. “One ... two ... three!”
“Oh...!” screamed Ann mirthfully, shrinking from their tickling, but
immediately she checked her laughter--she heard footsteps. Beating
down the grasping arms of the Spaniard she darted out of the doorway
and shut him in the pantry, just in time to meet Jan coming into the
kitchen howling for a chain he required.
“What d’ye want?” said Ann.
“That chain for the well-head, gal, it’s hanging in the pantry.” He
moved to the door.
“Tain’t,” said Ann barring his way. “It’s in the barn. I took it there
yesterday, on the oats it is, you’ll find it, clear off with your dirty
boots.” She “hooshed” him off much as she “hooshed” the hens out of the
garden. Immediately he was gone she pulled open the pantry door and was
confronted by the Spaniard holding a long clasp knife in his raised
hand. On seeing her he just smiled, threw down the knife and took the
bewildered woman into his arms.
“Wait, wait,” she whispered, and breaking from him she seized a chain
from a hook and ran out after her husband with it, holding up a finger
of warning to the Spaniard as she brushed past him. She came back
panting, having made some sort of explanation to Jan; entering the
kitchen quietly she found the Spaniard’s cloak lying upon the table;
the door of the pantry was shut and he had apparently gone back there
to await her. Ann moved on tiptoe round the table; picking up the
cloak she enveloped herself in it and pulled the hood over her head.
Having glanced with caution through the front window to the farmyard,
she coughed and shuffled her feet on the flags. The door of the pantry
moved slowly open; the piercing ardour of his glance did not abash her,
but her curious appearance in his cloak moved his shrill laughter. As
he approached her she seized his wrists and drew him to the door that
led into the orchard at the back of the house; she opened it and pushed
him out, saying, “Go on, go on.” She then locked the door against him.
He walked up and down outside the window making lewd signs to her. He
dared not call out for fear of attracting attention from the farmyard
in front of the house. He stood still, shivered, pretended in dumb show
that he was frozen. She stood at the window in front of him and nestled
provocatively in his cloak. But when he put his lips against the pane
he drew the gleam of her languishing eyes closer and closer to meet his
kiss through the glass. Then she stood up, took off the black cloak,
and putting her hand into her bosom brought out the three nuts, which
she held up to him. She stood there fronting the Spaniard enticingly,
dropped the nuts back into her bosom one ... two ... three ... and then
went and opened the door.
In a few weeks the contract was finished, and one bright morning the
Spaniard bade them each farewell. Neither of them knew, so much was
their intercourse restricted, that he was about to depart, and Ann
watched him with perplexity and unhappiness in her eyes.
“Ah, you Cotton, good-bye I say, and you señora, I say good-bye.”
With a deep bow he kissed the rough hand of the blushing country woman.
“Bueno.” He turned with his kit bag upon his shoulder, waved them an
airy hand and was gone.
On the following Sunday Jan returned from a visit in the evening and
found the house empty; Ann was out, an unusual thing, for their habits
were fixed and deliberate as the stars in the sky. The sunsetting light
was lying in meek patches on the kitchen wall, turning the polished
iron pans to the brightness of silver, reddening the string of onions,
and filling glass jars with solid crystal. He had just sat down to
remove his heavy boots when Ann came in, not at all the workaday Ann
but dressed in her best clothes smelling of scent and swishing her
stiff linen.
“Hullo,” said Jan, surprised at his wife’s pink face and sparkling
eyes, “bin church?”
“Yes, church,” she replied, and sat down in her finery. Her husband
ambled about the room for various purposes and did not notice her
furtive dabbing of her eyes with her handkerchief. Tears from Ann were
inconceivable.
The year moved through its seasons, the lattermath hay was duly mown,
the corn stooked in rows; Ann was with child and the ridge of her
stays was no longer visible behind her plump shoulders. Fruit dropped
from the orchard boughs, the quince was gathered from the wall, the
hunt swept over the field. Christmas came and went, and then a child
was born to the Cottons, a dusky boy, who was shortly christened Juan.
“He was a kind chap, that man,” said Ann, “and we’ve no relations to
please, and it’s like your name--and your name _is_ outlandish!”
Jan’s delight was now to sit and muse upon the child as he had ever
mused upon chickens, lambs and calves. “O, ah!” he would say, popping a
great finger into the babe’s mouth, “O, ah!” But when, as occasionally
happened, the babe squinted at him, a singular fancy would stir in his
mind, only to slide away before it could congeal into the likeness of
suspicion.
Snow, when it falls near spring upon those Cotswold hills, falls deeply
and the lot of the husbandmen is hard. Sickness, when it comes, comes
with a flail and in its hobnailed boots. Contagious and baffling,
disease had stricken the district; in mid March great numbers of the
country folk were sick abed, hospitals were full, and doctors were
harried from one dawn to another. Jan would come in of an evening
and recite the calendar of the day’s dooms gathered from men of the
adjacent fields.
“Amos Green ’ave gone then, pore o’ chap.”
“Pore Amos,” the pitying Ann would say, wrapping her babe more warmly.
“And Buttifant’s coachman.”
“Dear, dear, what ’ull us all come to!”
“Mrs. Jocelyn was worse ’en bad this morning.”
“Never, Jan! Us’ll miss ’er.”
“Ah, and they do say Parson Rudwent won’t last out the night.”
“And whom’s to bury us then?” asked Ann.
The invincible sickness came to the farm. Ann one morning was weary,
sickly, and could not rise from her bed. Jan attended her in his clumsy
way and kept coming in from the snow to give her comforts and food,
but at eve she was in fever and lay helpless in the bed with the child
at her breast. Jan went off for the doctor, not to the nearest village
for he knew that quest to be hopeless, but to a tiny town high on the
wolds two miles away. The moon, large, sharp and round, blazed in the
sky and its light sparkled upon the rolling fields of snow; his boots
were covered at every muffled step; the wind sighed in the hedges and
he shook himself for warmth. He came to the hill at last; halfway up
was a church, its windows glowing with warm-looking light and its bells
pealing cheerfully. He passed on and higher up met a priest trotting
downwards in black cassock and saintly hat, his hands tucked into his
wide sleeves, trotting to keep himself warm and humming as he went. Jan
asked a direction of the priest, who gave it with many circumstances of
detail, and after he had parted he could hear the priest’s voice call
still further instructions after him as long as he was in sight. “O,
ah!” said Jan each time, turning and waving his hand. But after all his
mission was a vain one; the doctor was out and away, it was improbable
that he would be able to come, and the simple man turned home with a
dull heart. When he reached the farm Ann was delirious but still clung
to the dusky child, sleeping snugly at her bosom. The man sat up all
night before the fire waiting vainly for the doctor, and the next day
he himself became ill. And strangely enough as he worked among his
beasts the crude suspicion in his mind about the child took shape and
worked without resistance until he came to suspect and by easy degrees
to apprehend fully the time and occasion of Ann’s duplicity.