JIMMIE was trudging along the undulating highroad that leads from
Dieppe to the little village of Berneval, very hot, very dusty, very
thirsty, and very contented. He carried a stick and a little black bag.
His content proceeded from a variety of causes. In the first place it
was a glorious August day, drenched with sunshine and with deep blue
ether; and the smiling plain of Normandy rolled before him, a land of
ripening orchards and lazy pastures. He had been longing for the simple
beauty of sun and sky and green trees, and for the homely sights and
sounds of country things, and now he had his fill. Secondly, Aline was
having a much needed holiday. She had been growing a little pale and
languid, he thought, in London, after a year's confined administering to
his selfish wants. She was enjoying herself, too, and the few days she
had already spent in the sea air had brought the blood to her cheeks
again. Thirdly, he was free for the moment from everyday cares. A dealer
had fallen from heaven into his studio and paid money down for the
copyright of two of his worst pictures. Fourthly, he had definitely
received the commission for the portrait of the Princess of
Herren-Rothbeck. Her Serene Highness and her tutelary duchess had paid
their visit, expressed themselves delighted with his work (the duchess
especially commending the portrait of the hapless Mrs. Marmaduke
Hewson), and had driven away in a most satisfactory condition of
serenity and graciousness.
Jimmie was happy. What could man want more? In addition to all these
blessings, Norma had written to him from Lord Monzie's place in Scotland
a letter _à propos_ of nothing, merely expressive of good-will and
friendliness; and he had received it that morning. He had never seen
her handwriting before. Bold, incisive, distinguished, it seemed to
complement his conception of the radiant lady, and in a foolish way he
tried to harmonise the ink-marks with the curves of her proud lips, the
setting of her eyes, and the poise of her queenly head. The dreariness
of a rainy afternoon with all the men and half the women away on the
grouse-moor had been, she said, her excuse for writing. She sketched
various members of the house-party with light, satiric touches;
notably one Theodore Weever, an American, whose sister had married an
impecunious and embarrassing cousin of the Duchess of Wiltshire. He was
building himself a palace in Fifth Avenue, wrote Norma, and had been
buying pictures in Europe to decorate it with; now he was anxious to
purchase a really decorative wife. Morland was expected in a few days,
and she would be glad when he appeared upon the scene. She did not say
why; but Jimmie naturally understood that her heart was yearning for
the presence of the man she loved. “I have very little to say that can
interest you,” she concluded, “but you can say many things to interest
me: this letter is purely selfish, a mere minnow, after all, that I use
as bait.” So Jimmie walked along the dusty road thinking out an answer
that could bring comfort to the Hero pining for her Leander; thinking
also of Aline, and revelling in the sunshine.
He delighted, like a child, in all he saw. He stopped before the red,
gold, and green paradise of an orchard and feasted upon its colour. He
lingered in talk with a tiny girl driving a great brown cow; asked her
its age, how many calves it had had, its name, and whether she were
not afraid it would mistake her for a blade of grass and bite her. The
little girl scoffed at the possibility. She could drive three cows,
and, if it came to that, a bull. “_Ça me connaît, les bêtes,_” she
said. Whereupon he put a couple of sous in her hand and went on his way.
Presently he sat down on the rough wooden bench in front of a wayside
café and drank cider from an earthenware bowl, and played with a mongrel
puppy belonging to the establishment. When the latter had darted off
to bark amid the cloud of dust and petroleum fumes left by a passing
motor-car, Jimmie, sipping his second bowl of sour cider in great
content, re-read the precious letter, filled his pipe, and reflected
peacefully on the great harmony of things. The hopelessness of his own
love for Norma struck no discord. The Stephen so closely connected with
the life of Saint Catherine of Siena did not love with less hope or more
devotion.
He paid the few coppers for his reckoning, took up his stick and little
black bag, and trudged on refreshed, and as he neared Berneval the
expectation of Aline's welcome gladdened him. He had rented for the
month a cottage with a straggling piece of ground behind, from an artist
friend whose possession it was. The friend had fixed the figure absurdly
low; the modest living under Aline's experienced management was cheap,
and the _bonne à tout faire_ cooked divinely for a few halfpence a day.
By a curious coincidence Mr. Anthony Merewether had also pitched
upon Berneval as a summer resting-place. He had come on
business, he gave out, and every morning saw him issue from the hotel
by the beach, armed with easel and camp-stool, and the rest of the
landscape-painter's paraphernalia, and every evening saw him smoking
cigarettes on Jimmie's veranda. Whether the hours of sunshine saw him
consistently hard at work, Jimmie was inclined to doubt. He certainly
bathed a great deal and ran about with Aline a great deal, and Jimmie
read the pair moral lessons on the evil effects of idleness. But Tony
was a fresh-minded boy; his ingenuous conversation provided Jimmie
with much entertainment, and his presence on their holiday gave him the
satisfaction of feeling that Aline had some one of her own age to play
with.
The ramshackle vehicle, half diligence, half omnibus, that plies
between Berneval and Dieppe, passed him with great cracking of whip and
straining of rusty harness and loud _hue_'s from the driver, just as he
entered the village. It was late afternoon, and the trim white and green
of the place was bathed in mellow sunshine. The short cut home lay up a
lane and through the churchyard, a cluster of grey slabs around a
little grey church; and many of the slabs bore the story of the pitiless
sea--how Jean-Marie Dulac, many years ago, was drowned at the age of
nineteen, and how Jacques Lemerre perished in a storm; for it has been
from time immemorial a tiny village of fisher-folk and every family has
given of its own to the waves. The pathos of the simple legends on the
stones always touched him as he walked by; and now he paused to decipher
some moss-grown letters of fifty years ago. He stooped, made out the
same sad tale, moralised a little thereon, and rose with a sigh of
relief to greet the sunshine and the fair earth. But the sight that
suddenly met his eyes banished dead fishermen and hungry sea and sunny
tree-tops from his mind. It was a boy and a girl very close together,
his arm about her waist, her head upon his shoulder, walking by the
little church. Their backs were towards him. He stared open-mouthed.
“God bless my soul!” said he, in amazement.
Then he dropped his stick, which clattered upon a gravestone.
The foolish pair started at the sound, assumed a correct attitude with
remarkable swiftness, and turning, recognised Jimmie. Tony Merewether,
who was a fair youth, grew very red and looked sheepish; Aline awaited
events demurely, with downcast eyes. Jimmie pushed his old Homburg hat
to the back of his head, and in two or three strides confronted them. He
tried to look fiercely at Tony. The young man drew himself up.
“I have asked Aline to marry me, sir,” he said frankly. “I was going to
speak to you about it.”
“Good Lord!” said Jimmie, helplessly.
“We can't marry just yet,” said Tony, “but I hope you will give your
consent.”
Jimmie looked from one to the other.
“Why did n't you let me know of this state of things before?”
“I have n't done anything underhand. I thought you guessed,” said Tony.
“And you, Aline?”
She stole a shy glance at him.
“I was n't quite sure of it until just now,” she replied. And then she
blushed furiously and ran to Jimmie's arms. “Oh, Jimmie dear, don't be
cross!”
“Cross, my child?” he said.
The world of tender reproach in his tone touched her. The ready tears
started.
“You are an angel, Jimmie.”
The hand that was on her shoulder patted it comfortingly.
“No, dear, I am a blind elderly idiot. O Lord, Tony, I hope you feel
infernally ashamed of yourself.”
“As Tony says, we sha'n't be able to get married for a long, long time,”
said Aline, by way of consolation, “so for years and years we'll go on
in just the same way.”
“I only ask you to consent to our engagement, sir,” said Tony,
diplomatically. “I am quite willing to wait for Aline as long as you
like.”
The abandonment of Jimmie by Aline had been the subject of the last
half-hour's discussion between the lovers. The thought of Jimmie alone
and helpless appalled her. She was a horrid selfish wretch, she had
informed Tony, for listening to a word he said. How could Jimmie live
by himself? She shuddered at the dismal chaos of the studio, the gaping
holes in his socks, the impossible meals, the fleecing of him by every
plausible beggar in frock coat or rags, the empty treasury. He needed
more care than a baby. She would marry Tony, some day, because her head
was full of him, and because she had let him kiss her and had found a
peculiar, dreamy happiness during the process, and because she could not
conceive the possibility of marrying any one else. But she was more than
content to leave the date indefinite. Perhaps, in the stretch of aeons
between now and then, something would happen to release her from her
responsibilities. She had made the position luminously clear to Mr.
Merewether before she had consented to be foolish and walk about with
her head on his shoulder.
“No, until Jimmie gets properly suited,” she said, quickly following
Tony's last remark.
“My dear foolish children,” said Jimmie, “you had better get married as
soon as ever you can keep the wolf from the door. What on earth is the
good of waiting till you are old? Get all the happiness you can out of
your youth, and God bless you.”
The young man bowed his head.
“I will give my life to her.”
Jimmie touched him on the arm, waved his hand around, indicating the
little grey church, the quiet graves.
“This is not the place where a man should say such a thing lightly,” he
said.
“I am not the man to say such a thing lightly in any place,” retorted
the youth, with spirit.
Jimmie nodded approvingly. “My dear,” he said to Aline, “that is the way
I like to hear a man talk.”
He turned and collected the fallen stick and the black bag which he had
deposited by the side of the slab. He had gone into Dieppe that morning
partly for the sake of the walk and partly to purchase some odds and
ends for the house. Aline, not trusting to his memory, had given him a
list of items with directions attached as to the places where he was to
procure them, so that when he came to “pepper,” he should seek it at
a grocery and not at a milliner's establishment. Now, without saying
a word, he opened the bag and rummaged among its queer contents, which
Aline regarded with some twinges of a tender conscience. She ought to
have gone into Dieppe herself, and made her purchases like a notable
housewife, instead of sending Jimmie and passing the day in selfish
lovemaking. The twinge grew sharper when Jimmie at last fished out a
little cardboard box and put it in her hands.
“At any rate, I can give you an engagement present before Tony,” he said
with a laugh.
It was only an old filigree silver waist-buckle he had picked up at a
curio shop in the town, but it was a gem of infinite value to the girl,
for she knew that Jimmie's love went with it. She showed it to Tony
Merewether, who admired the workmanship.
“If you can give me anything I shall prize more, you will be a lucky
fellow,” she said in a low voice.
The three strolled quietly towards the cottage, and it was Jimmie's arm
that Aline clung to, and Mr. Merewether who carried the black bag. That
night, after she had dismissed the young man, she sat a long time with
Jimmie on the veranda, telling him in one shy breath of the wonder that
had suddenly come into her life, and in the next that she would never
leave him until he was rich and famous and able to live by himself.
Jimmie, unguileful in the nature of men and maidens and the ways of
this wicked world, kept on repeating like a refrain his formula of
astonishment:
“It never entered my head, dear, that you two children would fall in
love with one another.”
“You don't think I ought n't to have done it, do you, Jimmie?” she said
at last.
He broke into his happy laugh, and kissed her. “If you want to please
me, you'll go on doing it,” he said.
It was some time after he had gone to bed that sleep came. Yes; Nature,
the dear mother, had spoken, and who could gainsay her? A clean, bright,
healthy English lad, and a clean, bright, healthy English girl had read
truth in each other's eyes. It was one of the sweet things in the world,
for which we who live in the world should be thankful. The dimly seen
white curtains of his bed became gossamer veils that enveloped him with
beauty. Now, on either side, his inner life was touched by the magic of
romance: the fair dream of these two children, and the love of the other
betrothed pair. It was on happy eyelids that sleep settled at last. And
Aline, too, lay awake, her young cheeks burning at the delicious yet
frightening memory of a kiss in the little churchyard, and her heart
swelling at the thought of the infinite goodness of Jimmie.
Meanwhile, unconscious of these idyllic happenings and romantic
speculations, Norma was enjoying herself in her worldly way at Lord
Monzie's place in Scotland. Lord Monzie, a dissipated young man who had
lately come into the title, had married a well-to-do young woman in very
smart society. Consequently there was no lack of modern entertainment
in the house. So modern was everything that the host had got down Mr.
Joseph Ascherberg, the financier, to hold a roulette bank every night
against all comers; but he took care that he himself, or his own
confidential man, turned the wheel and spun the marble. Most of the
people had unimaginative nicknames, the extremes of the Submerged
Tenth and the Upper Ten thus curiously meeting. Lord Monzie was called
“Muggins;” his bosom friend, and, as some whispered, his _âme damnée_,
Sir Calthrop Boyle, was alluded to as “The Boiler;” and Ascherberg
responded to the appellation of “Freddy.” There were also modern
conveniences for the gratification of caprices or predilections that
need not be insisted upon. In fact the atmosphere was surcharged with
modernity; so much so that Norma, who would have walked about the
Suburra of Imperial Rome with cynical indifference, gasped a little when
she entered it. One or two things actually shocked her, at which she
wondered greatly. She regarded Mr. Ascherberg with extreme disfavour,
and winced at the women's conversation when they were cosily free
from men. For the first day or two she held herself somewhat apart,
preferring solitude on sequestered bits of terrace, where she could
read a novel, or look at the grey hills that met the stretch of purple
moorland. But gradually the sweeter tone of mind which she had brought
with her lost its flavour, and having won sixty pounds from Ascherberg,
and having told the feminine coterie what she knew of the Wyniard
affair, she began to breathe the atmosphere without much difficulty. Yet
occasionally she had spasms of revolt. In a corner of the drawing-room
stood a marble copy of the little Laughing Faun in the Louvre, put there
by the late baron, and every time her eye fell upon it, the picture of
another faun arose before her, and with it the memory of a homely man
with bright kind eyes, and she seemed to draw a breath of purer air. But
she called the fancy foolishness and hardened her heart.
Still, had it not been for Theodore Weever, the American man of affairs,
she would probably have found some pretext for an abrupt departure. He
alone was a personality among the characterless, vicious men and women
of the house-party. Short, spare, alert, bald-headed, clean-shaven,
clear-featured, he was of a type apart. Norma, who had a keen
intelligence, divined in him from the first an adversary upon whom she
could sharpen her wit and a companion who would not bore her with dreary
tales of sport or the unprofitable details of his last night's play. And
from the first Theodore Weever was attracted towards Norma. Their lax
associates, in spite of her engagement to Morland being perfectly well
known and in spite of Morland's expected arrival, recognised their
pairing with embarrassing frankness, and said appalling things about
them behind their backs. For a few days therefore they found themselves
inseparable. At last their friendship reached the confidential stage.
Mr. Theodore Weever avowed the object of his present visit to England.
He was in search of a decorative wife.
“It ought to be as easy as turning over a book of wallpapers,” said
Norma.
“And as difficult to choose,” said he.
“You must know what scheme of colouring and design you want.”
“Precisely. I don't find it in the books of stock patterns, either here
or in America. And I've ransacked America.”
“Is n't the line--I believe in commercial circles they call it a
line--is n't the line of specially selected duchesses for the English
market good enough for you?” she asked with a smile.
He was about to light a cigarette when she began her question. He lit it
and blew out the first few puffs of smoke before he replied. They were
sitting in Norma's favourite nook on the terrace, where he, solitary
male who had not gone forth with a gun that morning, had been
gratuitously told by an obliging hostess that he would find her.
“The American woman makes a good decorative duchess,” he said in
his incisive tone, “because she has to sweep herself clean of every
tradition she was born with and accept bodily the very much bigger and
more dazzling tradition of your old aristocracy. She can do it, because
she is infinitely sensitive and intelligent. But she is a changed
creature. She has to live up to her duke.”
He puffed for a moment or two at his cigarette.
“Do you see what I am coming to?” he continued. “I am not an English
duke. I am a plain American citizen. No woman in America would make it
her ideal in life to live up to me.”
“I don't mean to be rude,” interrupted Norma, with a laugh, “but do you
think any Englishwoman would?”
“I do,” he replied. “Not to this insignificant, baldheaded thing that is
I, but to what in the way of position and power I represent. An American
woman would bring her traditions along with her--her superior culture,
her natural right to be enthroned as queen, her expectation that I would
take a back seat in my own house. It is I that would become a sort of
grotesque decoration in the place. Now, I may be grotesque, but I will
not consent to be decorative. I fully intend to be master. I am not
going to be Mrs. Theodore Weever's husband. I want an Englishwoman to
bring along her traditions. She will be naturally _grande dame_; she
will come to my house, my social world, frankly the wife of Theodore
Weever, and ready to support the dignity, whatever it may be, of
Theodore Weever, just as she would have supported the dignity of Lord So
and So, had she been married to him in England.”
“You will find thousands of English girls who can do that,” said Norma.
“I don't see your difficulty.”
“She must be decorative,” said Weever.
“And that means?”
“She must be a queenly woman, but one content to be queen consort. Your
queenly woman--with brains--is not so easy to find. I have met only
one in my life who is beyond all my dreams of the ideal. Of course the
inherent malice of things screws her down like one blade of a pair of
scissors to another fellow.”
“Who is the paragon?” asked Norma.
“It wouldn't be fair on the other fellow to tell you,” said he.
“Is it sheer honesty, or the fear of being cut in half by the pair of
scissors that keeps you from coming between them?”
“I think it's honesty,” he replied. “If I can guess rightly, the
scissors have n't so fine an edge on them as to make them dangerous.”
“They may be desperately in love with one another, for all you know.”
“They are delightful worldlings of our own particular world, dear lady,”
said Weever, with a smile.
Thus was Norma given to understand that the post of decorative queen
consort in Mr. Theodore Weever's Fifth Avenue palace was at her
disposal. A year ago she might have considered the offer seriously; now
that she felt secure of a brilliant position as Morland's wife, she was
amused by its frank impudence. She held other laughing conversations
with him on the subject of his search, but too prudent to commit
indiscretions, she gave no hint that she had understood his personal
allusion, and Weever was too shrewd to proceed any further towards his
own undoing. They remained paired, however, to their mutual
satisfaction, until Morland's arrival, when Theodore Weever took his
departure. In fact, the same carriage that conveyed the American to the
station remained for a necessary half-hour to meet Morland's train, and
Norma, who dutifully drove down to welcome her affianced, shared the
carriage with the departing guest.
She stood on the platform chatting with him as he leaned out of the
window.
“When shall we see each other again?” she said idly.
“Next month.”
“Where?” she asked, somewhat taken aback by his decided tone.
“I am putting in some time at Chiltern Towers. I had a letter this
morning from the duchess, asking me to come and meet the Princess of
Herren-Rothbeck.”
They looked at each other, and Norma laughed.
“Beware of Her Serene Highness.”
“Oh, I've had dealings with her before,” replied Weever. “I reckon I get
my money's worth. Don't you fret about me.”
The guard came up and touched his cap.
“We are off now, miss.”
She shook hands with Weever, saying with a laugh, “I hope you will find
that bit of decoration.”
“Don't you fret about that, either,” he said with a quick, hard glance.
“I'm in no hurry. I can wait.”
The train started, and was soon swallowed by a tunnel a few hundred
yards up the line. Norma patrolled the platform of the little wayside
station waiting for Morland. The place was very still. The only porter
had departed somewhither. The station-master had retired into his
office. The coachman outside the station sat like a well-bred image on
his box, and the occasional clink of the harness, as the horses threw
up their heads, sounded sharp and clear. Nothing around but mountain and
moorland; a short distance in front a ravine with a lazily trickling,
half-dried-up mountain stream. Here and there a clump of larch and fir,
and a rough granite boulder. An overcast sky threw dreariness on the
silent waste. Norma shivered, suddenly struck with a sense of isolation.
She seemed to stand in the same relation with her soul's horizon as with
the physical universe. The man that had gone had left her with a little
feeling of fear for the future, a little after-taste of bitterness.
The man that was coming would bring her no thrill of joy. As she stood
between a drab sky and a bleak earth, so stood she utterly alone in the
still pause between a past and a future equally unillumined. She longed
for the sun to break out of the heaven, for the sounds of joyous things
to come from plain and mountain; and she longed for light and song in
her heart.
She had been watching for the past few days the proceedings of
a half-recognised, irregular union. The woman was the frivolous,
heartless, almost passionless wife of a casual husband at the other end
of the earth; the man an underbred fellow on the stock exchange. She
ordered him about and called him Tommy. He clothed her in extravagant
finery, and openly showed her his sovereign male's contempt. Norma had
overheard him tell her to go to the devil and leave him alone, when she
hinted one night, in a whisper that was meant for his ears alone, that
he was drinking overmuch whisky. It was all so sordid, so vulgar--the
bond between them so unsanctified by anything like tenderness, chivalry,
devotion. Norma had felt the revulsion of her sex.
What would be the future? By any chance like this woman's life? Would
the day come when she would sell herself for a gown and a bracelet,
thrown at her with a man's contemptuous word? Was marriage very widely
different from such a union? Was not she selling herself? Might not the
man she was waiting for go the way of so many others of his type, drink
and coarsen and tell her to go to the devil?
She longed for the sun, but not a gleam pierced the leaden sky; she
sought in her soul for a ray of light, but none came.
At last with a shriek and a billowing plume of smoke the down train
emerged from the tunnel. Norma set her face in its calm ironic mask and
waited for the train to draw up. Only two passengers alighted, Morland
and his man. Morland came to her with smiling looks and grasped her by
the hand.
“You are looking more beautiful than ever,” he whispered, bringing his
face close to hers.
She started back as if she had been struck. The fumes of brandy were in
his breath. Her hideous forebodings were in process of fulfilment.
“The whole station will hear you,” she said coldly, turning away.
The Imp of Mischance rubbed his hands gleefully at his contrivance.
Morland, a temperate man, had merely felt chilly after an all-night's
journey, and, more out of idleness than from a desire for alcohol, had
foolishly taken a sip out of his brandy flask a moment or two before,
when he was putting up his hand-bag.
Norma collected herself, summoned with bitter cynicism her common-sense
to her aid, and made smiling amends for her shrewish remark. She
suffered him to kiss her on the drive home, and strove not to despise
herself.