§
It was impossible for young Carruthers, having been vouchsafed a vision
of Sally, to stop himself from trying to have another. He was drawn as
by a magnet. His walks, after that Sunday, took him daily down to St.
Mawes, where, having briskly gone the length of the front swinging his
stick, he would lean awhile--as long as he dared without becoming
conspicuous--against the sea-wall, smoking and ostensibly considering
the horizon, but really missing nobody who came or went along the road.
The Sealyham Sally was left at home, but other dogs were brought because
they are such wonderful introducers, and the road to acquaintanceship,
young Carruthers knew, is paved with good dogs.
He wasn’t sure that any profit would come of it if he did see the
honeymooners and get into conversation,--probably not; but he couldn’t
help it; he had to try; he was drawn. And very soon he discovered which
house they were staying in, because the other loungers, smoking and
gazing out to sea, rare figures at ordinary times and scattered sparsely
over a quarter of a mile, were now considerably increased in numbers,
and thickened into a knot at one particular point. That point,
Carruthers unhesitatingly concluded, was where she lived.
Unwilling to be seen doing this sort of thing, he held himself aloof
from the knot, smoking his pipe at a decent distance; but none the less
nothing escaped him that happened at the windows or the door of the
little house. The house, he knew, for his family had lived in the
neighbourhood for many years, was the house of the fisherman Cupp. And
he thought, thrice happy Cupp, and three times thrice happy Mrs.
Cupp,--for she would be constantly in and out of the very room, and be
able to look at--no, he wouldn’t, he couldn’t say Sally, not with his
own four-legged Sally so grotesquely profaning the name.
He was all wrong, however, about the Cupps. They were not at all happy;
at least, Mrs. Cupp wasn’t, and unless Mrs. Cupp was happy Cupp, though
he only dimly apprehended this truth and explained the fact of his
discomfort in many ways that were not the right ones, couldn’t be happy
either. For Mrs. Cupp, who beheld Sally with astonishment on her first
appearance, no one in the least like that ever yet having been seen in
St. Mawes, quickly began to have doubts as to whether her lodgers were
married. Everybody in St. Mawes was married, except those who were going
to be or had been, and it disturbed Mrs. Cupp terribly, who all her life
had held her head high and looked people in the face, to think she was
perhaps harbouring and cooking for a person who was neither virgin,
wife, nor widow.
For a brief time, so brief that it could be counted in hours, Sally’s
nightgown had reassured her, because it was essentially the nightgown of
the really married, a nightgown that Mrs. Cupp herself might have worn,
and the most moral laundress had not to blush over. Up to the chin, down
to the toes, long-sleeved, stiff, solid, edged at the throat and wrists
with plain scallops, this nightgown did at first help Mrs. Cupp to hope
that her lodgers were all right; but back came her doubts, and more
insistent than before, when she perceived that Cupp too was noticing the
young person’s appearance, and, though he said nothing, was beginning to
behave all sly; and they deepened finally into certainty on her becoming
aware of those thickening clusters of loungers constantly hanging about
opposite her house. Even young Mr. Carruthers. Oh, she saw him plain
enough, and knew all right what he was after; for she hadn’t been to the
pictures over at Falmouth for nothing, and she had learned from them
that that sort of girl got men come buzzing round her as if she were a
pot of honey and they just so many flies. Cupp shouldn’t, though. Cupp
shouldn’t get buzzing. Cupp, after fifteen years of being a steady
husband, wasn’t going to be let buzz--not much, said Mrs. Cupp to
herself, scouring her kitchen with violence.
She said nothing to him, however, for two, as she would soon show him,
could play at his game of acting sly; but when at the end of the first
fortnight of the Lukes’ stay Jocelyn, on her coming in to clear away the
breakfast, got out his money and was preparing as usual to pay her the
next week’s lodging in advance, she told him without wasting words that
the rooms were let.
‘Let?’ repeated Jocelyn, taken aback.
‘There’s an end to everything,’ said Mrs. Cupp enigmatically, as she
cleared the table with great swift swoops.
‘But,’ protested Jocelyn, annoyed and surprised, ‘we intended to stay at
least another week.’
‘I say there’s an end to everything,’ said Mrs. Cupp even more
emphatically, crowding the plates noisily on to a tray. ‘And one of
them’s my patience.’
Jocelyn stared. Sally, raising her head from her daily task, on which
she was at that moment engaged, looked on with the air of a mild,
disinterested angel.
‘But what on earth has happened? What’s the matter?’ asked Jocelyn.
‘You only got to cast an eye out of the winder to see what’s the
matter,’ said Mrs. Cupp, jerking her elbow in its direction. ‘_They_
don’t collect like that round parties that’s respectable.’
And dropping some forks off the overloaded tray she clattered out of the
room.
Jocelyn turned swiftly to Sally. ‘You see?’ he said.
‘See wot?’ asked Sally, who was about to stoop and pick up the forks,
but remembered not to just in time.
Yes; see what, indeed. That it was her fault? That this disgrace had
been brought on him through her fault? Was that, Jocelyn asked himself,
shocked at the tempest of injustice that had for an instant swept him
off his feet, what he wanted her to see?
‘I meant,’ he said, ashamed of his unfairness, ‘you heard. You did hear,
didn’t you, what the horrible woman was saying?’
Sally nodded. ‘Thinks we ain’t married,’ she said. She seemed quite
undisturbed. ‘Well, it ain’t much use thinkin’ we ain’t when we are,’
she remarked.
‘Unfortunately she’s sure we’re not, so that we are being turned out,’
said Jocelyn, dropping her hand, which he had taken, for this placidity,
which seemed to him evidence of inability to grasp a situation, instead
of soothing made him angry again.
He strode across to the window, and grabbing at the blind pulled it down
still lower. How inexpressibly humiliating to be turned out, how
unendurable to have people thinking Sally wasn’t respectable, and that
he, _he_ of all people, would come off with a girl for that sort of
loathsome lark.
‘It ain’t much use bein’ sure, when I got my marriage lines,’ said Sally
with the same calm. ‘Let alone my weddin’ ring.’ And she added
complacently after a minute, ‘Upstairs in my box.’ And after a further
minute, ‘I mean, my marriage lines.’
Then, supposing that the interruption to the lesson might now be
regarded as over, and that it would therefore be expected of her that
she should get on with it, she applied herself once more with patient
industry to her task.
‘_H_-usbands _h_-in’abit _h_-eaven,’ she began again, assiduously
blowing.
‘Oh, my God,’ said Jocelyn, under his breath.
§
They left St. Mawes during the dinner hour. When Jocelyn told her they
were going to leave almost at once, and she had better pack, Sally
merely said Right O, and went upstairs to do it.
Right O, thought Jocelyn. Right O. Not a question, not a comment of any
kind. Convenient, of course, in a way, but was this companionship? Could
there be much character behind such resistlessness? Yet if she had asked
questions and made comments he would, he knew, have flown at her; so
that he was being unfair again and unreasonable, and he hated himself.
He usedn’t to be unfair and unreasonable, he thought, standing in front
of the fireless grate, a wrathful eye on the loungers clotted on the
other side of the road; and as for being angry, such a disturbance of
one’s balance, whenever he had observed it in others, had seemed to him
simply the sign of imperfect education. The uneducated were swept by
furies, not scientific thinkers. Now just the contrary was happening,
and the uneducated Sally remained serene, while he was in an almost
constant condition of emotion of one kind or another. Marriage, he
supposed gloomily; marriage. The invasion of the spirit by the flesh. So
absurd, too, the whole thing--God, how absurd when he thought of it in
the morning, and remembered the cringing worship of the night before.
Absurd, absurd, this nightly abdication of the mind, this abject bowing
down of the higher before the lower.... The worst of it was he didn’t
seem able to help himself. Whatever his theories were in the daytime,
whatever his critical detachment, he only had to be close to Sally at
night....
And in the daytime, instead of at least in the daytime being tranquil
and able to get back his balance, every sort of annoyance crowded on
him. Were all honeymoons like this? Impossible. They hadn’t got Sally in
them. It was Sally who----
The door opened, and there she was again, not ten minutes after having
gone up. For Sally’s things being of the kind that are quick to pack,
owing to their fewness, she was ready and down before he had had time,
hardly, to be sure she was going to keep him waiting. So that he
resented this too, because he wasn’t able to be angry with her over
something definite and legitimate. He wanted to have a legitimate excuse
for being angry with her, for it was really all her fault that they had
been insulted and turned out. Of course it was. If he had been with his
mother, Mrs. Cupp would have been deference itself, and that confounded
sea-wall empty. It was all Sally. Looking like that. Looking so
different from any one else. Looking so entirely different from the
accepted idea of a decent man’s wife. Besides, she ought anyhow to have
had more things to pack. That one small tin trunk of hers was a disgrace
to him. Beastly thing, how he hated it. All yellow. He must get her a
proper trunk, and fill it properly, before he could appear with her at
Almond Tree Cottage. There certainly were drawbacks to taking a wife in
her shift, as one’s forbears called it.
Yet, when she came in ready to start, she looked so astonishingly
_right_, tin trunk or not, and quite apart from her face. She looked
right; her clothes did. She might have been a young duchess, thought
Jocelyn, who had never seen a duchess. He hadn’t an idea how the miracle
was worked. Not by dressmakers and cleverness, of that he was certain,
for the poor Pinners would have to buy clothes off the peg. Perhaps
because she was so reedy tall. Perhaps because of the way she moved.
Perhaps because she was so slender that there hardly seemed to be
anything inside the clothes, and they couldn’t help, left in this way
almost to themselves, hanging in graceful folds. But _he_ knew well
enough what was inside them--the delicate young loveliness, just
beginning to flower; and at the thought his anger all left him, and he
didn’t care any more about the Cupps or the sea-wall, and the feeling of
humility came over him that came over him each time he saw her beauty,
and he went to her and took both her hands, her little red hands, the
only part of her that had been got at by life and spoilt, and kissed
them, and said, ‘Forgive me, Sally.’
‘Wot you been doin’?’ asked Sally, surprised.
‘Not loving you enough,’ said Jocelyn, kissing her hands again.
‘Now _don’t_,’ said Sally very earnestly, ‘_don’t_ you go thinkin’ that,
now----’ for the idea that she, who had been being loved almost more
than she could stand on this trip, and wouldn’t have been able to stand
if it hadn’t been for knowing it was her bounden duty, might have to be
loved still more if Mr. Luke got it into his head that she ought to be,
excessively alarmed her.
§
The departure was not unmarked, as is sometimes said, by incident. Cupp,
when the luggage had to be brought down, wasn’t to be found, Mrs. Cupp
seemed incommunicably absorbed over a saucepan, and Jocelyn, with some
sharpness refusing Sally’s help, whose instinct after years spent doing
such things was to lay hold of anything that had to be laid hold of and
drag it, got the tin box and his suitcase downstairs himself, and said
Damn very loud when he knocked his head at the turn of the little
staircase.
Sally heard him, and was enormously surprised and shocked. This was
swearing. This was what she had been most carefully taught to look upon
as real sin. Nothing else had shocked her on the honeymoon, because she
had nothing to go by when it came to husbands other than her father’s
assurance that, except in the daytime, they weren’t gentlemen, and her
own solemn vows in church to obey; but she knew all about swearing. It
was wrong. It was strictly forbidden in God’s Holy Word. That and drink
were the two evils spoken of most frequently in her home, and with most
condemnation. They went hand in hand. Drink ruined people; and, on their
way to ruin and when they had got to it, they swore.
This is what Sally had been brought up to believe, so that when,
standing in the doorway of the parlour watching Jocelyn labouring down
the stairs with her trunk and longing to give him a hand, she heard him,
after knocking his head, say a most loud clear damn, she was horrified.
Her husband swearing. And not been drinking, either. Just had his tea as
usual at breakfast, and been with her ever since, so she knew he
couldn’t have. Next thing she’d have to listen to would be God’s name
being taken in vain; and at the thought of that the blood of all the
Pinners, that strictly God-fearing, Sunday-observing, Bible-loving race,
surged to her cheeks.
‘Mr. _Luke_!’ she exclaimed, throwing his teaching as to the avoidance
of this name to the winds.
‘Hullo?’ said Jocelyn, stopping short on the stairs and peering down at
her round the edge of the tin trunk, arrested by the note in her voice.
‘You didn’t ought to swear,’ said Sally, taking all her courage in both
hands, her face scarlet. ‘There’s no call for it, and you didn’t ought
to swear--you _know_ you didn’t ought to.’
‘But I only said damn,’ said Jocelyn. ‘Wouldn’t you, if you bashed your
head against this confounded sticking out bit of ceiling?’
‘Mr. _Luke_!’ cried Sally again, her eyes filling with tears. That he
should not only say bad words himself but think her capable of them....
Often she had been bewildered by things he said and did, but now she
looked up at him through the tears in her eyes in a complete
non-comprehension. It was as though she were boxed away from him behind
a great thick wall, or cut off across a great big river, alone on an
island, while he stood far off and unreachable on the opposite bank, and
she had somehow to get to him, to stay close to him, because he was her
husband. Dimly these images presented themselves to her mind, dimly and
confused, but nevertheless producing a very clear anxiety and
discomfort.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Jocelyn, carefully coming down the remaining stairs
and depositing the trunk sideways in the narrow passage, for though the
trunk, as a trunk, was small, the passage, as a passage, was smaller;
and in his turn as he looked at her he grew red, for he had just
remembered that he never said damn in the presence of his mother or of
the other ladies of South Winch, which was a place one didn’t swear in,
however much and unexpectedly he chanced to hurt himself. Was this
_laissez aller_ in Sally’s presence due to his consciousness that she
wasn’t a lady, or due to the fact that she was his wife? Jocelyn
disliked both these explanations, and accordingly, in his turn, grew
red.
‘Forgive me, Sally,’ he said for the second time within half an hour.
This time she had no doubt as to what had to be forgiven.
‘Promise not to do it no more,’ she begged. ‘Promise now--do.’
‘Oh Sally, I’ll promise anything, anything,’ said Jocelyn staring at
her, caught again into emotion by the extraordinary beauty of her
troubled face.
‘Father says,’ said Sally, still looking at him through tears, ‘that if
somebody swears, then they drinks. An’ if they drinks, then they swears.
An’ it goes ‘and in ‘and, and they don’t stop ever, once they starts,
till they gets to----.’
She broke off, and stood looking at him in silence. The picture was too
awful a one. She couldn’t go on.
‘What do they get to, my angel, my beautiful angel?’ asked Jocelyn,
kissing her softly, not listening any more.
‘’Ell,’ whispered Sally.
‘Now _you’re_ swearing,’ murmured Jocelyn dreamily, no longer fully
conscious, shutting her eyes with kisses. ‘Your sweet, sweet eyes,’ he
murmured, kissing them over and over again.
No, Sally couldn’t make head or tail of Mr. Luke. Better not try. Better
give it up. _She_ swearing?
§
She longed very much for the company of Mr. Pinner.
‘Father,’ she thought, while Jocelyn was fetching the car, and she was
standing alone in the passage watching the luggage, for she had been
bred carefully never to leave luggage an instant by itself,
‘Father--_’e_ could tell me.’
What she wanted Mr. Pinner to tell her wasn’t at all clear in her mind,
but she was quite clear that he would tell her if he could, whereas
Jocelyn, who certainly could, wouldn’t. Mr. Luke, she felt in her bones,
even if she had the courage to ask him anything would only be angry with
her because she didn’t already know it; yet how could she know it if
nobody had ever told her? At home they usedn’t to jump down one’s throat
if one asked a question. ‘Snug,’ thought Sally, her head drooping in
wistful recollection, while with the point of her umbrella she
affectionately stroked the sides of the tin trunk, ‘snug at ’ome in the
shop--snug at ’ome in the lil’ shop--’ and whatever else being married
to a gentleman was, it wasn’t snug.
Marriage to a gentleman--why, you never knew where you were from one
moment to another; nothing settled about it; no cut and come again
feeling; all ups and downs, without, as one might say, any middles; all
either cross looks or, without warning, red ears, kisses, and
oh-Sallyings. It was as if words weren’t the same when a gentleman got
hold of them. They seemed somehow to separate. Queer, thought Sally,
wistfully stroking the tin trunk.
She groped round in her hazy thoughts. She was in a strange country, and
there was a fog, and yet she had somehow to get somewhere. _She_
swearing?
§
The car came round, and Jocelyn came in.
‘Hasn’t Cupp turned up yet?’ he asked.
Sally shook her head.
‘I want him to help me cord the luggage on,’ said Jocelyn, squeezing
past between her and the trunk.
‘I can,’ said Sally.
‘No you can’t,’ snapped Jocelyn, striding to the kitchen door and
opening it.
‘Is Mr. Cupp anywhere about?’ he haughtily asked the figure bent over
the saucepan. He needed his help, or nothing would have induced him to
speak to Mrs. Cupp again.
‘No,’ said Mrs. Cupp, without ceasing to stir; but being a good woman,
who tried always to speak the truth, she amplified this into accuracy.
‘’E’s somewhere, but he ain’t about,’ said Mrs. Cupp.
For, having, a short way with her when it came to husbands, she had
turned the key that morning on Cupp while he was still asleep, well
knowing that he wouldn’t dare get banging and shouting lest the
neighbours should find out his wife had locked him in, and his shame
become public. Besides, he was aware of the reason, and would keep quiet
all right, she having had a straight talk with him the night before.
Cupp had been discomfited.
‘Don’t you go thinkin’ you’re goin’ to get adulteratin’ at your age and
after ’avin’ been a decent ’usband these fifteen years,’ said Mrs. Cupp.
’Oo’s been adulteratin’?’ growled Cupp, strong in the knowledge that he
hadn’t, but weak in the consciousness that he would have liked to have.
‘In your ’eart you ’ave, Cupp,’ said Mrs. Cupp, who had her Bible at her
fingers’ ends, ‘and Scripture says it’s the same thing.’
Cupp at this sighed deeply, for he knew it wasn’t.
‘Scripture says,’ said Mrs. Cupp, sitting up very straight in bed and
addressing Cupp’s back as he lay speechless beside her, ‘that ’ooso
looks at a woman an’ lusts after ’er ’as committed adultery with ’er in
’is ’eart. Ain’t you been lookin’ at that there girl and lustin’ after
’er in your ’eart, Cupp? Ain’t you? Why, I _seen_ you. Seen you doin’ it
round doors, seen you doin’ it out of winders. You been adulteratin’ all
over the place. _I’ll_ learn you to get lustin’----’
And when she went downstairs in the morning she locked him in.
So Jocelyn had to carry out the luggage himself, bidding Sally stay
where she was and wait quietly till he called her, and cording it on
without the assistance, curtly refused, of the loungers against the
sea-wall.
His mother’s luggage on their little holiday jaunts had been so neat, so
easily handled, fixed on in two minutes; but the tin trunk was a
difficult, slippery shape, and anyhow an ignoble object. Every aspect of
it annoyed him. It was like going about with a servant’s luggage, he
thought, wrestling with the thing, which was too high and not long
enough, and refused to fit in with his suitcase.
‘Off?’ inquired one of the loungers affably.
‘Looks like it,’ said Jocelyn, tugging at the cord.
What a question. Silly ass. ‘Do you mind standing a little further
back?’ he said with icy anger. ‘You see, if you come so close I can’t
get----’ he tugged--‘any----’ he tugged, setting his
teeth--‘_purchase_----’
Nobody moved; neither the particular lounger he was speaking to, nor the
others.
‘Upon my word, sir,’ said Jocelyn, jerking round furiously, ready to
fight the lot of them.
But they were not attending to him. Their eyes were all fixed on the
parlour window, to which Sally, so anxious not to keep Jocelyn waiting a
minute when he called as to risk disobeying him, had stolen to see how
near ready he was.
There she stood, almost full length, the blind, now that they were
leaving, drawn up, and the sun shining straight on her. St. Mawes had
not had such a chance before. Its other glimpses of her had been
flashes. Nor had the place in all its history ever till now been visited
by beauty. Pretty girls had passed through it and disappeared, or stayed
in it and disappeared equally completely because of growing old, and
there was a tradition that in the last century the doctor had had a wife
who for a brief time was very pretty, and during that brief time caused
considerable uproar; but no one living had seen her, it was all hearsay
from the last generation. This at the window wasn’t hearsay. This was
the thing itself, the rare, heavenly thing at its most exquisite moment.
Naturally the loungers took no further heed of Jocelyn; naturally with
one accord they lifted up their eyes, and greedily drank in.
Jocelyn gave the cord one final and very vicious tug, knotted it
somehow, and ran indoors.
‘What on earth you must go and stand at the window for----’ he
exclaimed, hurrying into the room and catching her by the arm. ‘I was
going to fetch you in a minute. Come along, then--let’s start, let’s get
out of this confounded place. Ready? Got everything? I don’t want any
delays once we’re outside----’
Hastily he looked round the room; there was nothing there. Hastily he
looked over Sally; she seemed complete. Then he rushed her out to the
car exactly as if, head downwards, they were both plunging into
something most unpleasant which had to be gone through before they could
escape to freedom.
‘Monstrous, monstrous,’ said Jocelyn to himself. ‘The whole thing is
incredible and fantastic. I might be the impresario of a prima donna or
a cinema star’--and he remembered, though at the time, like so many
other things, it had drifted past his ears unnoticed, that that
grotesque creature his father-in-law had said Sally had a gift for
collecting crowds.
How painfully true, thought Jocelyn, plunging into the one waiting
outside. What a regrettable gift. Of all gifts this was the one he
could best have done without in anybody he was obliged to be with; for
he hated crowds, he hated public attention, he was thin-skinned and
sensitive directly anything pulled him out of the happy oblivion of his
work. As far as he had got in life, and it seemed to him a long way, he
judged that quite the best of all conditions was to sit in an eye-proof
shell, invisible to and unconscious of what is usually called the world.
And speculate; and discover; and verify.
Well, no use thinking of that now.
‘Get in, get in,’ he urged under his breath, helping Sally with such
energy that she was clumsier at it than usual. ‘Never mind the rug--you
can arrange that afterwards. Here--I’ll hold the umbrella----’
They got off. He could drive perfectly well, yet they got off only after
a series of forward bounds and the stopping of his engine. But they did
get off--through the loungers, past the windows with heads at them,
round the sharp corner beyond the houses, up the extraordinarily steep
hill.
Sally held her breath. This hill terrified her. Suppose the car, which
each time seemed very nearly to stop on it, stopped quite, couldn’t go
on at all, and they rolled down backwards, down, down, straight into the
sea?
But they reached the top safely. It wasn’t the car that rolled down
backwards that day; it was the tin trunk, and with it Jocelyn’s
suitcase.
Unconscious, they drove on towards Truro.