say she is a pretty child,--a weird, elf-like thing, with questioning,
wistful eyes, and masses of dark hair,--and yet as I look the little
face draws me to it, and makes a kind of yearning in me, strikes me
with a "fairy blast," perhaps.
The journey was all too short, and when we got to Hull she saw me to
my train. It was odd to see the quiet way in which she got everything
she wanted. She put me into the carriage, got me a foot-warmer and a
magazine, kissed me, and said as she held my hand,--
"The world is small; we run in circles; perhaps we shall meet again. In
any case I wish you a white elf."
I was sorry to part with her; I felt richer than before I knew her. I
fancy she goes about the world giving graciously from her richer nature
to the poorer endowed folk she meets on her way.
Often since that night I have rounded my arm and bowed down my face,
and fancied I had a little human elf cuddled to my breast.
* * * * *
I am very busy just now getting everything ready; I had so much to buy.
I don't like confessing it even to myself, but down in the bottom of
my deepest trunk I have laid a parcel of things,--such pretty, tiny
things. I saw them at a sale; I couldn't resist them, they were so
cheap. Even if one doesn't want the things, it seems a sin to let them
go. Besides, there may be some poor woman out in Cincinnati. I wrote
to Hans Jörgen, you know, back in spring, and--Du störer Gud! there is
Hans Jörgen coming across the street!
A LITTLE GRAY GLOVE.
EARLY-SPRING, 1893.
The book of life begins with a man and woman in a garden, and
ends--with Revelations.--OSCAR WILDE.
Yes, most fellows' book of life may be said to begin at the chapter
where woman comes in: mine did. She came in years ago, when I was a raw
undergraduate. With the sober thought of retrospective analysis, I may
say she was not all my fancy painted her; indeed, now that I come to
think of it, there was no fancy about the vermeil of her cheeks, rather
an artificial reality. She had her bower in the bar of the Golden Boar,
and I was madly in love with her, seriously intent on lawful wedlock.
Luckily for me she threw me over for a neighboring pork butcher; but at
the time I took it hardly, and it made me sex shy. I was a very poor
man in those days: one feels one's griefs more keenly then; one hasn't
the wherewithal to buy distraction. Besides, ladies snubbed me rather
on the rare occasions I met them. Later I fell in for a legacy, the
forerunner of several; indeed, I may say I am beastly rich. My tastes
are simple too, and I haven't any poor relations: I believe they are of
great assistance in getting rid of superfluous capital; wish I had some!
It was after the legacy that women discovered my attractions. They
found that there was something superb in my plainness (before they
said ugliness), something after the style of the late Victor Emanuel,
something infinitely more striking than mere ordinary beauty. At least
so Harding told me his sister said, and she had the reputation of
being a clever girl. Being an only child I never had the opportunity
other fellows had of studying the undress side of women through
familiar intercourse, say with sisters. Their most ordinary belongings
were sacred to me. I had, I used to be told, ridiculous, high-flown
notions about them (by the way I modified those considerably on
closer acquaintance): I ought to study them; nothing like a woman
for developing a fellow. So I laid in a stock of books in different
languages, mostly novels, in which woman played title-rôles, in order
to get up some definite data before venturing among them. I can't say
I derived much benefit from this course. There seemed to be as great
a diversity of opinion about the female species as, let us say, about
the salmonidae. My friend Ponsonby Smith, who is one of the oldest
fly-fishers in the three kingdoms, said to me once:--
"Take my word for it, there are only four true salmo,--the salar,
the trutta, the fario, the ferox; all the rest are just varieties,
sub-genuses of the above,--stick to that. Some writing fellow divided
all the women into good-uns and bad-uns; but as a conscientious
stickler for truth, I must say that both in trout as in women I
have found myself faced with most puzzling varieties, that were a
tantalizing blending of several qualities."
I then resolved to study them on my own account. I pursued the Eternal
Feminine in a spirit of purely scientific investigation. I knew you'd
laugh sceptically at that, but it's a fact. I was impartial in my
selection of subjects for observation,--French, German, Spanish, as
well as the home product. Nothing in petticoats escaped me. I devoted
myself to the freshest _ingénue_ as well as the experienced widow of
three departed; and I may as well confess that the more I saw of
her the less I understood her. But I think they understood me. They
refused to take me _au sérieux_. When they weren't fleecing me, they
were interested in the state of my soul (I preferred the former); but
all humbugged me equally, so I gave them up. I took to rod and gun
instead, _pro salute animæ_; it's decidedly safer. I have scoured every
country in the globe; indeed, I can say that I have shot and fished
in woods and waters where no other white man, perhaps, ever dropped a
beast or played a fish before. There is no life like the life of a free
wanderer, and no lore like the lore one gleans in the great book of
Nature; but one must have freed one's spirit from the taint of the town
before one can even read the alphabet of its mystic meaning.
What has this to do with the glove? True, not much; and yet it has a
connection--it accounts for me.
Well, for twelve years I have followed the impulses of the wandering
spirit that dwells in me. I have seen the sun rise in Finland, and
gild the Devil's Knuckles as he sank behind the Drachensberg. I have
caught the barba and the gamer yellow-fish in the Vaal River, taken
muskelunge and black-bass in Canada, thrown a fly over guapote and
cavallo in Central American lakes, and choked the monster eels of the
Mauritius with a cunningly faked-up duckling. But I have been shy as a
chub at the shadow of a woman.
Well, it happened last year I came back on business,--another
confounded legacy; end of June too, just as I was off to Finland. But
Messrs. Thimble and Rigg, the highly respectable firm who look after
my affairs, represented that I owed it to others, whom I kept out of
their share of the legacy, to stay near town till affairs were wound
up. They told me, with a view to reconcile me perhaps, of a trout
stream with a decent inn near it,--an unknown stream in Kent. It seems
a junior member of the firm is an angler; at least he sometimes catches
pike or perch in the Medway, some way from the stream where the trout
rise in audacious security from artificial lures. I stipulated for a
clerk to come down with any papers to be signed, and started at once
for Victoria. I decline to tell the name of my find, firstly because
the trout are the gamest little fish that ever rose to fly, and run
to a good two pounds; secondly, I have paid for all the rooms in the
inn for the next year, and I want it to myself. The glove is lying on
the table next me as I write. If it isn't in my breast-pocket or under
my pillow, it is some place where I can see it. It has a delicate gray
body (Suede, I think they call it), with a whipping of silver round the
top and a darker gray-silk tag to fasten it. It is marked 5-3/4 inside,
and has a delicious scent about it,--to keep off moths, I suppose;
naphthaline is better. It reminds me of a "silver-sedge" tied on a ten
hook.
I startled the good landlady of the little inn (there is no village,
fortunately) when I arrived, with the only porter of the tiny station,
laden with traps. She hesitated about a private sitting-room; but
eventually we compromised matters, as I was willing to share it with
the other visitor. I got into knickerbockers at once, collared a boy
to get me worms and minnow for the morrow; and as I felt too lazy to
unpack tackle, I just sat in the shiny arm-chair (made comfortable by
the successive sitting of former occupants) at the open window, and
looked out. The river (not the trout stream) winds to the right, and
the trees cast trembling shadows into its clear depths; the red tiles
of a farm roof show between the beeches, and break the monotony of blue
sky background. A dusty wagoner is slaking his thirst with a tankard
of ale. I am conscious of the strange lonely feeling that a visit
to England always gives me. Away in strange lands, even in solitary
places, one doesn't feel it somehow,--one is filled with the hunter's
lust, bent on a "kill;" but at home in the quiet country, with the
smoke curling up from some fireside, the mowers busy laying the hay in
swaths, the children tumbling under the trees in the orchards, and a
girl singing as she spreads the clothes on the sweetbrier hedge,--amid
a scene quick with home sights and sounds, a strange lack creeps in
and makes itself felt in a dull, aching way. Oddly enough, too, I had
a sense of uneasiness, a "something going to happen." I had often
experienced it when out alone in a great forest, or on an unknown lake;
and it always meant "ware danger" of some kind. But why should I feel
it here? Yet I did, and I couldn't shake it off. I took to examining
the room. It was a commonplace one of the usual type. But there was a
work-basket on the table, a dainty thing, lined with blue satin. There
was a bit of lace stretched over shiny blue linen, with the needle
sticking in it,--such fairy work, like cobwebs seen from below, spun
from a branch against a background of sky. A gold thimble too, with
initials,--not the landlady's, I know. What pretty things, too, in the
basket!--a pair of scissors, a capital shape for fly-making; a little
file, and some floss silk and tinsel, the identical color I want for
a new fly I have in my head, one that will be a demon to kill,--the
"northern devil" I mean to call him. Some one looks in behind me, and
a light step passes upstairs. I drop the basket, I don't know why.
There are some reviews near it. I take up one, and am soon buried in
an article on Tasmanian fauna. It is strange, but whenever I do know
anything about a subject, I always find these writing fellows either
entirely ignorant or damned wrong.
After supper, I took a stroll to see the river. It was a silver-gray
evening, with just the last lemon and pink streaks of the sunset
staining the sky. There had been a shower, and someway the smell of
the dust after rain mingled with the mignonette in the garden brought
back vanished scenes of small-boyhood, when I caught minnows in a
bottle, and dreamt of a shilling rod as happiness unattainable. I
turned aside from the road in accordance with directions, and walked
toward the stream. Holloa! some one before me,--what a bore! The angler
is hidden by an elder-bush, but I can see the fly drop delicately,
artistically, on the water. Fishing up the stream, too! There is a bit
of broken water there, and the midges dance in myriads; a silver gleam,
and the line spins out, and the fly falls just in the right place. It
is growing dusk, but the fellow is an adept at quick, fine casting. I
wonder what fly he has on, why he's going to try down stream now! I
hurry forward, and as I near him I swerve to the left out of the way.
S-s-s-s! a sudden sting in the lobe of my ear. "Hey!" I cry, as I find
I am caught; the tail-fly is fast in it. A slight, gray-clad woman
holding the rod lays it carefully down and comes toward me through the
gathering dusk. My first impulse is to snap the gut and take to my
heels; but I am held by something less tangible but far more powerful
than the grip of the Limerick hook in my ear.
"I am very sorry!" she says in a voice that matched the evening, it was
so quiet and soft; "but it was exceedingly stupid of you to come behind
like that."
"I didn't think you threw such a long line; I thought I was safe," I
stammered.
"Hold this!" she says, giving me a diminutive fly-book, out of which
she has taken a pair of scissors. I obey meekly. She snips the gut.
"Have you a sharp knife? If I strip the hook you can push it through;
it is lucky it isn't in the cartilage."
I suppose I am an awful idiot, but I only handed her the knife, and
she proceeded as calmly as if stripping a hook in a man's ear were an
every-day occurrence. Her gown is of some soft gray stuff, and her
gray-leather belt is silver clasped. Her hands are soft and cool and
steady, but there is a rarely disturbing thrill in their gentle touch.
The thought flashed through my mind that I had just missed that--a
woman's voluntary tender touch, not a paid caress--all my life.
"Now you can push it through yourself; I hope it won't hurt much."
Taking the hook, I push it through, and a drop of blood follows it.
"Oh!" she cries, but I assure her it is nothing, and stick the hook
surreptitiously in my coat sleeve. Then we both laugh, and I look at
her for the first time. She has a very white forehead, with little
tendrils of hair blowing round it under her gray cap; her eyes are
gray (I didn't see that then,--I only saw they were steady, smiling
eyes, that matched her mouth). Such a mouth! the most maddening mouth a
man ever longed to kiss, above a too pointed chin, soft as a child's;
indeed, the whole face looks soft in the misty light.
"I am sorry I spoilt your sport!" I say.
"Oh, that don't matter, it's time to stop. I got two brace, one a
beauty."
She is winding in her line, and I look in her basket; they _are_
beauties, one two-pounder, the rest running from a half to a pound.
"What fly?"
"Yellow dun took that one; but your assailant was a partridge spider."
I sling her basket over my shoulder; she takes it as a matter of
course, and we retrace our steps. I feel curiously happy as we walk
toward the road; there is a novel delight in her nearness. The feel
of woman works subtilely and strangely in me; the rustle of her skirt
as it brushes the black-heads in the meadow-grass, and the delicate
perfume, partly violets, partly herself, that comes to me with each of
her movements, is a rare pleasure. I am hardly surprised when she turns
into the garden of the inn; I think I knew from the first that she
would.
"Better bathe that ear of yours, and put a few drops of carbolic in the
water." She takes the basket as she says it, and goes into the kitchen.
I hurry over this, and go into the little sitting-room. There is a
tray, with a glass of milk and some oaten cakes, upon the table. I
am too disturbed to sit down; I stand at the window and watch the
bats flitter in the gathering moonlight, and listen with quivering
nerves for her step; perhaps she will send for the tray, and not come
after all. What a fool I am to be disturbed by a gray-clad witch with
a tantalizing mouth! That comes of loafing about doing nothing. I
mentally darn the old fool who saved her money instead of spending
it. Why the devil should I be bothered? I don't want it anyhow. She
comes in as I fume, and I forget everything at her entrance. I push the
arm-chair toward the table, and she sinks quietly into it, pulling the
tray nearer. She has a wedding-ring on; but somehow it never strikes
me to wonder if she is married or a widow, or who she may be. I am
content to watch her break her biscuit; she has the prettiest hands,
and a trick of separating her last fingers when she takes hold of
anything: they remind me of white orchids I saw somewhere. She led me
to talk,--about Africa, I think. I liked to watch her eyes glow deeply
in the shadow and then catch light as she bent forward to say something
in her quick responsive way.
"Long ago when I was a girl," she said once.
"Long ago?" I echo incredulously,--"not surely?"
"Ah, but yes; you haven't seen me in the daylight," with a soft little
laugh. "Do you know what the gypsies say? 'Never judge a woman or a
ribbon by candle-light.' They might have said moonlight equally well."
She rises as she speaks, and I feel an overpowering wish to have her
put out her hand. But she does not; she only takes the work-basket and
a book, and says "good-night" with an inclination of her little head.
I go over and stand next her chair; I don't like to sit in it, but I
like to put my hand where her head leant, and fancy, if she were there,
how she would look up.
I woke next morning with a curious sense of pleasurable excitement;
I whistled from very lightness of heart as I dressed. When I got
down I found the landlady clearing away her breakfast things; I felt
disappointed, and resolved to be down earlier in future. I didn't
feel inclined to try the minnow; I put them in a tub in the yard, and
tried to read and listen for her step. I dined alone; the day dragged
terribly. I did not like to ask about her; I had a notion she might
not like it. I spent the evening on the river; I might have filled a
good basket, but I let the beggars rest: after all, I had caught fish
enough to stock all the rivers in Great Britain; there are other things
than trout in the world. I sit and smoke a pipe where she caught me
last night. If I half close my eyes I can see hers, and her mouth in
the smoke: that is one of the curious charms of baccy,--it helps to
reproduce brain pictures. After a bit, I think perhaps she has left.
I get quite feverish at the thought, and hasten back. I must ask. I
look up at the window as I pass; there is surely a gleam of white. I
throw down my traps and hasten up. She is leaning with her arms on the
window-ledge, staring out into the gloom. I could swear I caught a
suppressed sob as I entered. I cough, and she turns quickly and bows
slightly. A bonnet and gloves and lace affair and a lot of papers are
lying on the table. I am awfully afraid she is going. I say,--
"Please don't let me drive you away, it is so early yet. I half
expected to see you on the river."
"Nothing so pleasant. I have been up in town [the tears have certainly
got into her voice] all day; it was so hot and dusty. I am tired out."
The little servant brings in the lamp and a tray, with a bottle of
lemonade. "Mistress hasn't any lemons, 'm; will this do?"
"Yes," she says wearily, she is shading her eyes with her hand;
"anything, I am fearfully thirsty."
"Let me concoct you a drink instead. I have lemons and ice and things;
my man sent me down supplies to-day; I leave him in town. I am rather a
dab at drinks; learnt it from the Yankees: about the only thing I did
learn from them I care to remember. Susan!"
The little maid helps me to get the materials, and she watches me
quietly. When I give it to her she takes it with a smile (she _has_
been crying) that is an ample thank you. She looks quite old; something
more than tiredness called up those lines in her face.
* * * * *
Well, ten days passed. Sometimes we met at breakfast, sometimes at
supper; sometimes we fished together, or sat in the straggling orchard
and talked; she neither avoided me nor sought me. She is the most
charming mixture of child and woman I ever met; she is a dual creature.
Now, I never met that in a man. When she is here, without getting a
letter in the morning or going to town, she seems like a girl; she runs
about in her gray gown and little cap, and laughs, and seems to throw
off all thought like an irresponsible child; she is eager to fish, or
pick cherries and eat them daintily, or sit under the trees and talk.
But when she goes to town (I notice she always goes when she gets a
lawyer's letter; there is no mistaking the envelope) she comes home
tired and haggard-looking, an old woman of thirty-five. I wonder why.
It takes her, even with her elasticity of temperament, nearly a day to
get young again. I hate her to go to town; it is extraordinary how I
miss her! I can't recall, when she is absent, her saying anything very
wonderful; but she converses all the time. She has a gracious way of
filling the place with herself; there is an entertaining quality in
her very presence. We had one rainy afternoon; she tied me some flies
(I sha'n't use any of them). I watched the lights in her hair as she
moved,--it is quite golden in some places; and she has a tiny mole
near her left ear, and another on her left wrist. On the eleventh day
she got a letter; but she didn't go to town, she stayed up in her room
all day. Twenty times I felt inclined to send her a line, but I had no
excuse. I heard the landlady say as I passed the kitchen window, "Poor
dear! I'm sorry to lose her!" Lose her? I should think not. It has
come to this with me, that I don't care to face any future without her;
and yet I know nothing about her, not even if she is a free woman. I
shall find that out the next time I see her. In the evening I catch a
glimpse of her gown in the orchard, and I follow her. We sit down near
the river. Her left hand is lying gloveless next me in the grass.
"Do you think from what you have seen of me that I would ask a question
out of any mere impertinent curiosity?"
She starts. "No, I do not!"
I take up her hand and touch the ring. "Tell me, does this bind you to
any one?"
I am conscious of a buzzing in my ears and a dancing blur of water and
sky and trees, as I wait--it seems to me an hour--for her reply. I felt
the same sensation once before, when I got drawn into some rapids and
had an awfully narrow shave; but of that another time.
The voice is shaking. "I am not legally bound to any one, at least; but
why do you ask?" She looks me square in the face as she speaks, with a
touch of haughtiness I never saw in her before.
Perhaps the great relief I feel, the sense of joy at knowing she is
free, speaks out of my face; for hers flushes and she drops her eyes,
her lips tremble. I don't look at her again, but I can see her all the
same. After a while she says,--
"I half intended to tell you something about myself this evening, now I
_must_. Let us go in; I shall come down to the sitting-room after your
supper."
She takes a long look at the river and the inn, as if fixing the place
in her memory; it strikes me with a chill that there is a good-by in
her gaze. Her eyes rest on me a moment as they come back; there is a
sad look in their gray clearness. She swings her little gray gloves in
her hand as we walk back. I can hear her walking up and down overhead;
how tired she will be, and how slowly the time goes! I am standing
at one side of the window when she enters; she stands at the other,
leaning her head against the shutter, with her hands clasped before
her. I can hear my own heart beating, and I fancy hers, through the
stillness; the suspense is fearful. At length she says,--
"You have been a long time out of England, you don't read the papers?"
"No." A pause; I believe my heart is beating inside my head.
"You asked me if I was a free woman. I don't pretend to misunderstand
why you asked me. I am not a beautiful woman, I never was; but there
must be something about me--there is in some women, 'essential
femininity' perhaps--that appeals to all men. What I read in your eyes
I have seen in many men's before; but before God I never tried to rouse
it. To-day [with a sob] I can say I am free; yesterday morning I could
not. Yesterday my husband gained his case, and divorced me!"
She closes her eyes and draws in her under-lip to stop its quivering. I
want to take her in my arms but I am afraid to.
"I did not ask you any more than if you were free!"
"No; but I am afraid you don't quite take in the meaning. I did not
divorce my husband, he divorced _me_; he got a decree _nisi_. Do you
understand now? [She is speaking with difficulty.] Do you know what
that implies?"
I can't stand her face any longer. I take her hands, they are icy
cold, and hold them tightly.
"Yes, I know what it implies; that is, I know the legal and social
conclusion to be drawn from it, if that is what you mean. But I never
asked you for that information. I have nothing to do with your past;
you did not exist for me before the day we met on the river. I take you
from that day, and I ask you to marry me."
I feel her tremble, and her hands get suddenly warm. She turns her head
and looks at me long and searchingly; then she says,--
"Sit down, I want to say something!"
I obey, and she comes and stands next the chair. I can't help it, I
reach up my arm; but she puts it gently down.