Chapter III: Part IV: An Evening of the Same Day 299 (3)

‘But, Jim!’ She frowned again, struggling to believe the best of him. ‘Jim, you didn’t tell me anything until other people had begun to make scandal.’ The idea hardened her. ‘I don’t believe you’d ever have told me. You would just have gone on deceiving us both.’

A gesture of impatience, and that was all. He did not give way to anger. ‘My dear, I realize how hard it is for you to listen to the voice of reason in a crisis like this, but you will try, won’t you? It all began in the most innocent, the most human way. I was overwhelmed by my compassion for the poor child--virtually imprisoned, as she is, with a husband she can’t even respect, let alone love. And then the affection ripened. She stimulates me wonderfully. She is an inspiration, just the inspiration that I need. Our minds are so beautifully attuned.’

And still Elsie was not satisfied. ‘You know I don’t grudge you anything, Jim. It’s the deceit that worries me. She ought to know about me. You ought not to take her under false pretences. It’s not like you, Jim, to be content with a vulgar intrigue.’

‘There is nothing vulgar in love.’ He softened the rebuke by taking her hand, which she instantly withdrew. ‘And nothing guilty,’ he added, with a note of sternness.

Her laugh was of a kind that could not but shock him. ‘How clever you are at putting me in the wrong!’ she remarked, when her bitter mirth had subsided. ‘But I’m not wrong.’ Emotion induced in her a vitality that made him almost admire her. ‘I’m not sticking up for Respectability or any of the seven deadly virtues, as you call them. You dethroned these gods for me long ago. But there _is_ something I believe in. I do believe in honour, and I hate a liar.... You’ve deceived her as well as me.’

Wyvern sighed. It was sometimes hard to be patient with women. ‘Elsie, why do you say things which you know to be untrue?’ His tone was still gentle.

‘Well, isn’t it true?’ she retorted. ‘Have you told her about me? Have you explained that a man so many-sided as yourself needs the love of more than one woman? Have you told her that the human heart is capable of almost infinite expansion? You know you haven’t.’

‘I respect you too much,’ he replied, cold with a new dignity, ‘and I respect myself too much ever to discuss you with another woman. I thought you understood me better, Elsie.’

The fire in her seemed to die down. Vitality vanished, leaving her limp and listless. She rose, a frail slip of a girl with colourless skin and a halo of light brown hair like a dim mist--items so negligible compared with the lilies and roses of Marion’s robuster person, the flaming glory of her hair, the seductiveness of her brimming youth. Wyvern could not resist making a mental comparison even in this moment. He hated himself for making it, and he recorded it to his credit that he hated himself. It was so like him to be merciless to his own faults. He watched Elsie narrowly, from behind a curtain of cigarette smoke.

‘Very well, Jim. I shan’t stand in your way; you know that. To-morrow I’ll go away somewhere. Good night.’

He was pained and yet elated. She would go away to-morrow. Fortunately she had plenty of friends and, thank heaven, he had long ago settled an adequate income upon her. He had nothing to reproach himself with. She would go away to-morrow. They would meet again--oh, frequently. They would always be friends. He felt more warmly towards her than he had done for months, and yet he was dissatisfied. The victory he had won didn’t seem so good to him as it had seemed in prospect. He shrank from the suspicion that he had, in some inexplicable way, sunk in her esteem. The idea was unbearable.

‘We’ll discuss that another time. You’re not angry, darling?’ he said. ‘You see how inevitable it all is?’

With her hand on the door knob she turned to say: ‘Yes, Jim. I’m not blaming you.’ And she went out, closing the door softly behind her.

So that was all right. He smoked his cigarette out in something like peace of mind. Not perfect peace, however; the thought of losing something--even something for which he didn’t care--was distasteful. Old associations would cling. It was an insufferable social order that pressed this cruel alternative on a sensitive man, ordaining that he must release one woman before he could take another. ‘It’s all so niggardly, niggardly!’ said Wyvern, as he stepped out into the sweetness of that June evening. He felt the need, as he had never felt it before, of Nature’s soothing touch, her sunset’s balm for his eyes, the caress of her delicate breezes on his brow.

For the sake of the walk he set out in the direction of his studio, a walk that would take him away from suburban houses into little lanes surrounded by open fields. There one could get close to Nature and to Beauty. He had often been grateful to his own foresight for having provided him with a studio not only separate from his residence but distant from it by many miles. Only in solitude, he murmured to himself, can the human spirit grow to its full stature; and he knew that the rather recondite art whereby he supplemented, or failed to supplement, his substantial private income could never have flourished in the vicinity of Elsie, who was, when all was said, ‘a dear little woman, but no artist.’ In his studio he could work undistracted; and once or twice, when the tide of his inspiration had been at the full, he had stayed there for several days, sleeping at nights upon a little canvas folding-bed. There was something Spartan about the practice that appealed to him. Elsie exhibited a suitable distress at these absences, but she encouraged his painting and applauded the results, though without revealing any real critical understanding of them. James Wyvern professed allegiance to no school, and to that fact attributed his failure to obtain recognition. He dealt too exclusively in subtleties to be able to please the multitude, even the multitude of art-critics. It was his declared purpose to demonstrate by his work a familiar French aphorism: _La vérité consiste dans les nuances._ ‘The Boot Cupboard’ and an unnamed picture representing amethyst-blue houses were perhaps his most successful productions. ‘Representation, no. Symbolism, if you like. Representation is an artistic vice.’ Yet he had his lapses and was deliciously conscious of them. ‘My dear, I am daring. I am taking the gravest risk. What do you think--a ploughed field! Positively a ploughed field! The danger is simply colossal.’ To his artist-friends he was in the habit of saying: ‘Fundamentally, I suppose, I’m a novelist.’ Just as, three years before, during his literary period, he had fended off praise by murmuring: ‘I’m happiest, after all, with my palette and brush.... Oh, that little box of paints!’

Striding along between fragrant hedges, he luxuriated in the joy of the open air and in his new sense of freedom. Everything had been explained to Elsie, and she had taken it, on the whole, beautifully. He was really grateful to Elsie. And now he was a free man. ‘Freedom, the deep breath!’ he quoted in rapture. He was free now to rescue Marion, his imprisoned princess, from her dungeon of despair. He would take her away, far away. Away from censorious England to the magic air and blue skies of Italy, where life should become an exquisite indolent dream. ‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘Como! Como shall be the _mise-en-scène_.’

* * * * *

Dreaming of Como, he entered the studio.

‘What the devil----!’ There she was, Marion herself, in his wicker-chair. ‘My darling, _you_!’ He was amazed to find her there, and amazed by the unearthly beauty of her. She rose to meet him, excited fear shining in her large eyes.

‘Hullo, Jimmy! You won’t be glad to see me.’ How the deuce did she know that? ‘John has found out about us. He made a scene. He’s dangerous. I’ve fled the house.’

‘Marion, what a wonderful girl you are! What a study in contrast--your fragrant English girlhood, and your exotic chintz dress!’ He enfolded her in arms of solicitude. ‘My dear, tell me it all.’

‘That’s all. People have been talking to him. He threatened me. So I came here.’

He could see her nostrils dilate and her breasts flutter in the intoxication of the danger. ‘Like netted fish they leap,’ he quoted to himself. Aloud he murmured: ‘Darling, you came here. Yes, of course. But how....’

‘Oh, I found out where it was and just came. There was a woman here----’

He was startled. ‘A woman?... Oh, Mrs. Phillips, perhaps, the woman who cleans up.’

‘Yes. I told her I was a friend of your wife’s, and she let me stay. Cheek, wasn’t it! Invented a wife for you. Just bluff, but it came off.... Do give me a cigarette.’

But this would never do. Here they were alone together, in a most compromising situation, while her husband--positively a dangerous fellow--raged round the countryside looking for her, perhaps with a pistol. At any moment----‘But, my darling girl, is it wise?’

With no sign of having heard the question, she rested her head on his shoulder. ‘Darling Jimmy, what shall I do?’

It was surely the most beautiful moment of his life. He was touched almost to tears by her perfect trust in him. All her dewy freshness, all her passionate beauty, all her vital young womanhood, was his for the taking. He had but to say: ‘Come with me now.... Como!’ and she would come. But was it wise to act so hastily? He plunged into a delirium of pleasurable emotion only to emerge with that question in his mind. With his lips clinging to hers he asked it. Was it wise? They would go away sooner or later: that was inevitable; but to go now, would it not be precipitate? To take a woman from her husband was a serious matter, involving unexampled responsibility. He would be bound to her more surely than by any legal marriage. And the scandal, the hateful publicity, the dragging of one’s name through the divorce courts--it was all so intolerable to a sensitive man. He would incur the enmity of many people, and he would lose Elsie. Elsie would divorce him, would perhaps forget him and re-marry....

He released Marion from that mad embrace.

‘What am I to do, darling?’ she repeated.

‘Let me think, dear,’ he said, stroking his troubled brow. ‘Let me think. Above all we must listen to the voice of reason. So much depends on this. Don’t you think it would be best for you to go back? Only for a while, of course.’

She stared as though he had spoken in an unknown tongue. ‘Go back? Go back to John?’

‘Only for a few weeks, darling, until I can see daylight, and make all arrangements.’

She stepped back from him a few paces, as if to survey him the better. Her eyes had the surprised and stricken look of a child unaccountably hurt.

‘I don’t think I understand. Are you telling me to go back to my husband? _You_, are you telling me _that_?’

‘My darling girl, don’t you see....’

‘Do you understand what that means? Go back to my husband who, when I last saw him, was raging like a beast. Go back to him and, if he doesn’t kill me, be his woman.’

‘Dear heart, for a few weeks only.’

She trembled violently for a moment, and then became rigid with scorn. ‘I agree with you perfectly. I had better go.’

The door slammed behind her before Wyvern recovered his wits. He ran forward a few steps as if to pursue her ... and stopped. ‘My God, I shall never see her again!’ He buried his face in his hands. ‘Perfect harmony, complete understanding, all lost. That was the moment, the moment of my life, and I let it pass. Como ... I shall never bear to look on Como again.’ Painful as his sensations were, they were undeniably interesting. If ever he wrote a novel he would make that incident the pivot of the plot, the crisis, the turning-point. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men.... By Jove there is!’ Why had he not taken it at the flood? It was all too sudden--no arrangements made, and a picture half-finished. Marion--he must forget Marion. Perhaps he had been mistaken in her. Her scorn for him had been so undeserved; he writhed at the recollection of it. He yearned now for some haven of refuge. Bruised and broken by life, his heart cried out for comfort. Ah, Elsie--she did not scorn him. A stab of fear lest the impossible had happened, lest he had alienated his wife’s love, sent him flying out of the studio and on the road for home. Forsaken by both women, he would be homeless indeed, and with no balm for his wounds. What if it were his fate to be misunderstood again? He began rehearsing the speeches he would make to Elsie. He conjured up the scene: Elsie in her night-dress, sitting up in the rumpled bed, just disturbed out of sleep. Perhaps she would be a little cruel at first: women were like that. ‘If my little wife is not kind to me now I shall go mad with the pain of it all.’ At that she would relent, and weep upon his breast. And she would love him more dearly than ever for having been so near to losing him.

MISS LETTICE

MISS LETTICE

Needing some stakes for my new fruit trees, I called on Saunders, who knows everything, to ask him where they could be obtained. Saunders is something more than a rector: he is a shepherd of souls. He has an extraordinary capacity for listening, and listening, he tells me (without any irony), is the most important of his duties--far more important than preaching church doctrine Sunday by Sunday. This is fortunate, for in my belief Saunders’s orthodoxy would not survive a very minute scrutiny. The villagers go to him with their most secret troubles, their most lurid sins, and come away with hearts eased, comforted by a platitude or two or by wordless sympathy. His mind must be quite a filing-cabinet of what are called human documents. With so much silent listening to do, perhaps he finds me as useful as I find him interesting; for I am always willing, when he is with me, to keep my ears open and my mouth shut. He is a good talker but not a garrulous one: it is the things he leaves unsaid, or half-unsaid, that interest me most in his discourse.

As I had expected, he put me at once in the way of getting my stakes. ‘Bowers, of Yew Tree Farm, is the best man. He’s a good fellow, Bowers. For your own soul’s sake you’ll have to keep an eye on his charges: they’re generally much too low. Yew Tree Farm--you know the place? It’s not really a farm at all: it’s a ramshackle wooden house standing by the side of a timber-yard. Near poor Miss Lettice’s cottage.’

‘Why do you call her poor?’ I asked. For Saunders was not in the habit of using that epithet without cause.

‘Ah, haven’t you heard? She has been taken away, you know. You spend too much time among those books of yours, my friend. Why, it happened over a week ago. Pitiful affair. She lapsed suddenly into a kind of grotesque babyhood.’

I can never hear of such an event without shuddering. ‘But she wasn’t an aged woman!’ Already one spoke of her in the past tense as of the dead.

‘She was fifty-eight,’ said Saunders; and though genuinely shocked by the disaster I couldn’t help being amused for a moment by the exactness of his information--it was so characteristic of him that he knew the woman’s age to a year. ‘No,’ he added, ‘it wasn’t the sort of thing that should happen in the ordinary course of nature.’

‘She had some shock,’ I suggested.

Saunders nodded. ‘The most cruel shock.’

‘And you no doubt were in her confidence,’ I insinuated.

Observing the curiosity that I tried politely to dissemble, he looked at me for one silent moment and smiled. ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. You’re a discreet fellow, and if you weren’t such a misguided heretic I could find it in my heart to like you. Well, the cause of Miss Lettice’s collapse was a psychological phenomenon that has a very old-fashioned name.’

I waited for him to go on.

‘A broken heart,’ said Saunders. ‘Miss Lettice is the victim of a hopeless passion.’

‘A hopeless passion,’ I protested, ‘at fifty-eight!’

Saunders drew his left hand from his jacket pocket and with it a pouchful of tobacco, which he tossed into my lap. ‘You’re not in a hurry for ten minutes?’

I am never in a hurry when Saunders settles down into his chair with that air of pensive reminiscence; so, when we had both got our pipes going, he told me the story.

1

You are surprised (said Saunders) at being asked to associate Miss Lettice with the idea of passion, requited or unrequited. And, if you recall her small plump figure, and the nun-like pallor of the face that peered placidly from under her black bonnet, you will readily believe that hers was no ordinary passion. But it was passion: let there be no mistake about that; I’m not going to fob off some remote mystical ecstasy upon you under that name. It’s hard enough to credit that the heart of that staid, quaint, curtseying old spinster was aflame with a hunger that ultimately destroyed her, but the evidence is overwhelming. It is twofold, that evidence: there is the evidence of her words and the evidence of my own eyes.

My interest in Miss Lettice was first roused by a disquieting rumour that reached me, by a devious route, from a neighbour’s wife who was employed by Miss Lettice to come in and do the rough housework for her. According to this rumour Miss Lettice was, for no stated reason, afraid of me. This puzzled me, as well it might, because at that time I didn’t even know who she was: if we had met in the street I could not have recognized her. But it was more than puzzling: it was distressing. I knew that if I were to be of any use to the parish at all, fear was the very last emotion I must inspire. I examined the few sermons I had preached, for there, I thought, since they were the only communications I had had with the lady, the solution of my problem must lie. I looked for unsound doctrine, or for traces of hell-fire, or for anything else that could have alarmed a timid soul; and I found nothing. You must remember that I was new to the job, and totally without experience, and altogether too disposed to take trifles seriously. To-day I should soon find a summary method of dealing with such a situation, but at that time it baffled me. I accepted it for a while as a permanent minor discomfort.

I had promised myself to make friends, if I could, with every member of my congregation, and with as many others as I could contrive to visit--no small undertaking in this wilderness of scattered dwellings. Miss Lettice had to wait her turn, of course, but it was a point of honour with me that she should not have to wait beyond it. Nervous, but also curious, I knocked at her front door.

She received me, rather sternly, I thought, but without discomposure. I was shewn into a tiny mottled room, which she called, I believe, the parlour. It was rather crowded by furniture, but the furniture itself was good and old and the mantelpiece was laden with less than the usual cottage assortment of bric-à-brac, though, of course, there was the inevitable lustreware glittering on each side of a marble clock, and, equally inevitable, a pair of china dogs. The pink beflowered walls were hung with very bad pictures, in the Marcus Stone tradition, most of them from Christmas annuals; but there was not a photograph to be seen anywhere. I remembered having heard Miss Lettice described as ‘a real lady in reduced circumstances,’ and I knew that she supplemented a tiny inherited income by giving music lessons.

For half an hour we talked of indifferent things, and I began to fear that I should never succeed in breaking through her armour of frigid politeness. But in those days I was an obstinate young mule and determined to get at the truth behind that rumour. At last she gave me my chance.

‘You have been in the parish three months, have you not, Mr. Saunders?’

I chose to regard the remark as a challenge. ‘Three very busy months,’ I answered, loading my words with all the weight they would carry.

‘Too busy, I’m sure, to visit middle-aged nobodies,’ she retorted. And then, taking sudden pity on my youthful confusion--I was nearly twenty years her junior--she smiled in a way that seemed to betoken forgiveness.

It was a smile almost maternal, and it emboldened me. ‘Miss Lettice,’ I said, smiling in return, ‘why do you dislike me?’ Placidly she shook her head. ‘Then why _did_ you dislike me? Oh, never mind how I know. Things soon get about in a little community like ours.’

She seemed startled. ‘What do you know?’ Her eyes narrowed to gimlet points. The abrupt change in her manner disconcerted me. ‘What do you know?’ she repeated defiantly, and, finding me silent, she flung another question at me, this time a veritable challenge: ‘Do you know about my son?’

Her son! So that was the cause of all the misunderstanding. ‘Nothing at all,’ I assured her. ‘Upon my word this is the first I’ve heard of him. Did you think....’

‘Yes, I did. I thought you disapproved of me, as your predecessor did, or maybe his wife. I thought you were never going to call.’

‘But why,’ I protested, ‘why should I or anyone presume to disapprove of you?’ And I wondered what travesty of religion had been current in this parish before my coming.

She looked unaccountably severe. ‘I think you don’t understand.’

‘I think I do,’ said I, with cheerful arrogance.

‘Mr. Saunders, I am an unmarried woman, and I have a son.’

‘Yes?’ I said, simulating polite interest when in truth I was burning with curiosity. But if I hoped to win her sympathy by this unconventional attitude I was to be woefully disappointed. ‘You don’t seem to realize the gravity of what I tell you,’ Miss Lettice rebuked me. ‘It is mistaken kindness to treat a sin so lightly.’

‘I want to be a friend to the parish, not a judge.’ Priggish remarks rise readily to the lips of a young man such as I was then. ‘Besides,’ I added, ‘if your son was a child of true love there was no worse a sin than indiscretion.’

But the confessed sinner would not hear of such wickedness. ‘You, the vicar, to say a thing like that! That’s not the kind of teaching we want in this parish. Why, I’ve done penance all my life for that indiscretion, as you dare to call it. I forfeited marriage and sent my lover away. Not even for the child’s sake would I condone our sin by marrying. And do you tell me that all my bitter repentance was unnecessary?’

What could I say? It would have been cruel to convince her that she had thrown away her happiness in sheer waste, sacrificed her life on the altar of a false god. I hadn’t the heart to attempt it, so I fell back, I’m afraid, on Scriptural quotations, and left it at that. The familiar words seemed to comfort her and to reinstate me in her eyes as a moralist. None the less she was sufficiently assured of my sympathy to speak of her love, and as she spoke I began to wonder whether after all my pity had not been misplaced. Sin or no sin, the memory of her golden youth was dear to her. She was repentant enough, no doubt, when she remembered to be; but she did not live by morality alone. The woman in her still exulted, the woman’s eyes still shone, in the knowledge that she had, however long ago, been found beautiful. ‘We were very young,’ she said, with disarming simplicity, ‘and we loved each other very much. He was all the world to me.’ Her cheeks flushed; her meagre bosom rose and fell tremulously--and in that moment I saw her as she had been, young, fresh, adorable, alight with limitless ecstasy, the incarnation of a man’s desire. The transfigurement endured only for a flash, and flickered away, leaving me desolated with the stabbing poignancy of life. From that to this, I thought, we must all pass. To hide my emotion I led the talk back to her son. ‘And where is he now?’ I asked. ‘Does he often come to see you?’

She smiled wanly. ‘He’s all I’ve got. You see there’s a place set for him. You’ll take a cup of tea with us?’

The lid of the kettle that stood on the fire was already palpitating. Miss Lettice made the tea and enclosed the pot in a knitted cosy of green wool. For the next few minutes we exchanged only tea-table talk. But afterwards, when I made gestures of going, she confronted me wistfully, her eyes lit up once again. But this was a new light, and one more consonant with her years.

‘Would you like to see his room?’ she said, almost in a whisper.

I expressed eagerness, and she led me to the threshold of a room so tiny that it made one think of a monastic cell. It was just large enough to contain a small single bed, ready for use, a wash-stand, and a miniature dressing-table. The furniture was all of childish dimensions. In the further corner, under the window, stood a cricket-bat. I glanced round with the vague smile of politeness. ‘So this is Bernard’s room. A snug little place. And I see it’s all ready for his return.’

After a silence Miss Lettice sighed. ‘He would have been eighteen this coming April,’ she murmured.

I stared at her a moment in stupid wonder. ‘He would have been ... do you mean...?’

‘He was stillborn,’ she confessed, and her glance dropped before my stare. ‘It was silly not to tell you at once. But Bernard’s all I’ve got. He’d be a fine big fellow by now.’

To avoid those glistening eyes I turned away, only to encounter a sight but one degree less pitiful: Bernard’s cricket-bat--symbol of lusty young manhood, white flannels, sunlit turf--which no cricketer’s hand had ever grasped. What could I say or do? I was angered as well as touched by the wanton sentimentality of that room, and having murmured words of conventional comfort I hurried back to the vicarage. Not until many hours had passed did I succeed in hustling away my mood of melancholy; and as I entered my own bachelor bedroom I shuddered to hear, in imagination, the Good-night uttered by that fond impossible woman to the ghost with whom she shared her home.

2

Saunders got out of his chair, as though the story were finished, and stood with his back to the fire warming the palms of his hands. There was a moment’s silence, which I saw no reason for breaking, and then he began talking again. After that, he said, Miss Lettice and I were quite good friends. I became a constant and welcome visitor at her cottage: constant because her solitude was something of a pain to me, and welcome because she knew that to me she could talk about Bernard to her heart’s content. And that, by Jove, was a privilege she lost no opportunity of exercising. How many times have I piously lied to that woman assuring her that my interest in her Bernard was insatiable! Often, as you’ll readily understand, I was bored beyond expression, though I never lost my sense of the grotesque pathos of her life. But I must be careful not to let you suppose that she was a mere monomaniac. She knew, as well as I did, that she was playing a game of make-believe: she was not the victim of any sort of delusion, and her obsession never became pathological or threatened to become so.

Things went on like this for ten years or so. She lived untroubled among her dreams until some few months ago. During the war Bernard led an existence even more shadowy than usual. Of course he enlisted, and was wounded, and won decorations for his valour; and Miss Lettice, knitting socks for more substantial soldiers, continued to play her secret game by fancying that they would comfort the feet of her son. The change came, as I’ve said, not many months ago, and it shewed itself first of all in our conversations. From those conversations Bernard was painlessly excluded, and his place taken by a young man weighing twelve stone or more. You’ll know the name well enough--Jack Turnbull, the stationmaster’s son. Jack began to loom so large in the hopes and fears of Miss Lettice that I became uneasy, the more so because I had been the instrument of bringing them together. It was this way. During the latter part of the war, and ever since, Miss Lettice had found it increasingly difficult to manage on her extremely modest income, and music pupils were more in request than ever. I did what I could for her by dropping a recommendation here and there, and among others I enlisted the active sympathy of old Turnbull. Together we hatched a little conspiracy, the upshot of which was that Jack, a big hulking fellow approaching thirty years, was fired with a sudden ambition to become an amateur pianist. Jack had done well in the army, and finding himself in mufti again, at a loose end, and with a captain’s gratuity standing to his credit at Cox’s, he lent himself very readily to the amiable fraud. His three hours tuition a week was very useful to Miss Lettice; but it proved her undoing. For now we come to the hopeless passion I spoke of. And I needn’t stop to assure you that there’s nothing scandalous in this tragic affair. Miss Lettice fell in love with Jack, but the love she yearned to lavish on him was maternal love. If you think me perverse in calling that love a hopeless passion I must disagree with you. It was passion, and it was, in part, physical passion, as all human love must be. Why do we shrink from admitting that maternal love is as deeply rooted in the body as any other? Miss Lettice loved Jack Turnbull for his strength, his masculinity, his youth, and because, by a fatal coincidence, he was born in the same month of the same year as her Bernard. In a sense it was the calendar that killed the Miss Lettice we knew and set in her stead a witless child. No doubt Jack seemed to her a gift from God, a wonderful consolation prize, a token of the heavenly forgiveness. Indeed she told me as much when, with the air of imparting to me her dearest secret, she said that Jack was coming to lodge with her. She had bought some pretty things for his bedroom, worked ornamental bolster-slips with her own fingers, and replaced the dressing-table by a chest of drawers dragged in from her own room. I hardly dared to hint my misgiving. ‘Are you quite sure he is coming?’ I ventured. ‘I fancied he would soon be looking out for a job. Young men can’t remain idle for long nowadays, you know.’ But she wouldn’t hear of my doubts. Jack would get work at the station under his father. He hadn’t exactly promised to come to her, but she had urged it and she knew he would humour an old woman.

I was by no means so sure, and I made up my mind to tackle Master Jack at the earliest possible moment. I called at his father’s house and left a message asking him to make a point, if he could, of calling at the vicarage. He came the same evening. ‘Well, Turnbull,’ I said. ‘I hear you’re thinking of changing your quarters?’

He looked as guilty and uncomfortable as though I had surprised him with his hand in somebody’s till. ‘Has it got round already? Why, I’ve told no one outside the family. Why can’t people hold their tongues!’

‘My dear fellow,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve annoyed you. But I really don’t see why you should be so secretive about it. And it wasn’t your father who told me.’

‘Who was it?’ He spoke curtly. Four years as an infantry officer hadn’t improved his manners.

‘It was Miss Lettice herself.’

I have never seen a man more astonished. ‘Miss Lettice! Miss Lettice told you! Damn it, sir, she doesn’t know!’ After a moment’s stupefied silence he added, with an air of apology, ‘But perhaps we’re at cross-purposes. What was it that Miss Lettice told you?’

‘Only that you’re going to lodge in her house. Nothing to get excited about.’

He began striding about the room. ‘We are certainly at cross-purposes all right. I thought you meant Canada. I’m leaving next week for Canada.’

‘For a holiday?’ I ineptly inquired.

‘For keeps,’ said Jack. ‘Mounted Police, with a commission soon, I hope. This country’s gone to the dogs, sir.’

Here was a pretty mess! ‘But look here, Turnbull, Miss Lettice has got it into her head that you’re going there as a lodger. Have you given her any cause to believe such stuff?’

At that the swagger dropped off him. ‘That woman, I’m sorry for her, but she gets on my nerves. She gushes too much for my taste. She wants to mother me, if you ever heard such rot. And I won’t be mothered.’

‘That’s all very well,’ I cut in. ‘But why say this to me? Miss Lettice is the person you should complain to. Are you content to let her go on living in a fool’s paradise?’

Well, you can pretty well guess how the conversation proceeded. We argued for the best part of three hours. Jack was determined not to yield to her devouring maternal affection, but he hadn’t pluck enough to tell her so outright. He preferred to save his own feelings by equivocation. The coward does it with a kiss, you know, the brave man with the sword. But I must do him the justice to admit that, short of brutal explicitness, he did all he could to disabuse her mind of its fond fiction. I was aghast when I realized that the secret of his departure was being kept solely in order that he might slip out of the country without bidding her good-bye. After long battle I wrung from him a reluctant promise that he would spare her that culminating cruelty.

And that is the end of the story. I too was a coward, for I did not dare to visit Miss Lettice until Jack had gone. In point of fact I watched him off the premises and then stepped in, unwillingly enough but hoping to afford the wretched woman some comfort, if only the comfort of distraction. The front door yielded to my push: it was seldom locked. I tapped at the door of the sitting-room. There was no sound from within. Gently I turned the handle and looked in.

‘Good morning, Miss Lettice,’ I said, with a cheerfulness that was idiotic, I dare say, but what was one to do?

Miss Lettice sat staring at the wall in front of her, staring fixedly, motionless. Whether she heard my voice or not I don’t know, but she neither moved nor spoke. I became very anxious and called to her again, offering such dry crumbs of comfort as came to hand. ‘Don’t grieve, my dear Miss Lettice. There’s still Bernard left to you.’ Something of that sort I said to her, but it made no difference at all. She was struck down, struck worse than dead, by the colossal and cruel power of love. And while I continued to stare at her with pity and horror, she slowly turned towards me, as though on a swivel, a face marred out of recognition by a smile....

Saunders winced. His lips had hesitated in releasing those last words. Lifting one hand to his eyes, he turned away from me towards his bookshelves. There, with a book in his hand, he shrugged his shoulders as if to shake off the grip of a memory.

‘If it’s standard trees you’re having,’ he remarked, ‘you’ll want light six-feet stakes. Bowers is your man.’

WEDDING-DAY

WEDDING-DAY

Wedding-day. It was curiously unreal. His own face grimaced back at him as he struggled to adjust his tie, a face that no man could feel satisfied with. ‘I sometimes wish Uncle Edgar hadn’t died after all,’ he confided to the looking-glass. Round and pink, with a wisp of light brown moustache that didn’t seem to belong to it, that ghost of himself continued to agonize. Funny, what women could see to admire in men. As for Florrie’s devotion to himself, the unreasonableness of it, the obstinacy, positively vexed him. If it hadn’t been for that little legacy they would have had to wait another five years. Not that he wanted to wait, but still--five years was five years, time to turn round in. That fifty pounds a year had made just the difference; it had brought this day within his immediate reach; his heart’s desire, glowing like luminous fruit upon an inaccessible tree, had bent suddenly towards him, and his hand was already poised to grasp it. Fateful moment. It didn’t bear thinking about. The old man ought not to have sprung it on him like this.

‘Cheer-O, Bert!’ There was a bang upon the bedroom door, and before it could be answered the attacking force entered tumultuously. It was a large red-headed man, dressed unmistakably for the approaching ceremony, tall, clean-shaven, possessing hands a size too big for his body.

‘Hullo, elephant!’ He resented the fellow’s entry, and yet in some vague way he was glad of it. He wanted to be alone with his dreams, but he feared to be alone with his doubts. Well, in a few hours solitude would be a thing of the past indeed. Florrie and he would be together, sleeping and waking, in sickness and in health, till death them did part. Forty years, perhaps, and never alone. Breakfast with Florrie, the eight-thirteen to town, the six-five back, a late tea with Florrie, conversation with Florrie, supper with Florrie; and week-ends spent going to church or digging in the garden. There was no escape now. Escape! Who wanted to escape? Not he, anyhow. And that was fortunate, for here was Maurice, the jubilant best man, and Florrie’s brother to boot. No escape.

‘You’d better pull your socks up, old feller,’ said Maurice, his face bisected by a grin. ‘You haven’t got as much time to spare as you seem to think. Cab’s at the door.’

It was fortunate, he knew, that the tide of events was sweeping him along, or he would have stood for ever staring at himself in a dream of indecision. Yet he hated to be bustled. He was still a free man, and there leapt to life in him a spark of anger against the man who sought to wrest that freedom from his grasp before the hour had struck. It would strike soon enough, but until then ... it seemed suddenly necessary that he should assert his independence of Maurice. His toilet was already completed, but he would delay a while yet.

‘All right. I won’t keep you a minute.’ He spoke with an affected coolness, as though addressing an importunate commercial traveller. And, without haste, he picked up from the dressing-table a small pair of nail-scissors. With these he began cutting off his moustache.

‘Hullo, what’s the game?’ asked Maurice.

‘Time that thing came off,’ replied Bert, still plying the scissors. ‘Pour me out a spot of water for shaving, there’s a good chap... No, cold’ll do.’

The world without was ablaze with summer, a beacon in the grey waste of infinity, a fire-ball flung into the darkness. The sky flamed beauty down upon the responsive pavements. But he, stubbornly, remained shut in his cold introspection. It was as if he alone of all created things was able to resist the infection of gladness that the warm air held. Forty years, forty years. The dailyness of life terrified him. The amiable Maurice became for him the symbol of all-conquering circumstance.

It was a new Florrie who joined him at the altar, a Florrie veiled, mysterious, and therefore seductive. ‘Therefore’ was the word stressed by the devil in his brain. But she was undeniably pretty, and so fragile, so like a piece of exquisite china, that he held his breath in awe when she yielded her hand to his. This was the lovely ingenuous child that life, day by day, year by year, would bend and break, and finally cast aside. His was to be the dubious privilege of watching that process, of watching the hair go grey, the face wrinkle, the child-dreams die one by one. His heart beat with a profound pity. Poor little devil, they were both in the same boat. She too was swearing her freedom away, taking the veil of everlasting monotony. And, irrationally, he blamed not himself, not her, but the officiating clergyman, the guests, and most of all that fellow Maurice. He was glad that he had not allowed himself to be bustled by Maurice, glad to feel that soreness of the upper lip which bore witness to his not having been bustled.

The clergyman at whose feet he knelt was tactfully gabbling words about the procreation of children. Someone in the pews behind was sniffing tearfully. That would be Florrie’s mother, no doubt, that angular female version of Maurice. He became almost bemused by the drowsy noises, like bees in a bottle, emitted by the priest. The sunlight, pouring through the stained-glass window, cast a luminous many-coloured pattern across the chancel floor. The colours entered him--his eyes, his nostrils, his very veins--and made his blood tingle in tune with their brightness. A faint purple, like wine stains; a rich yellow, like harvested corn--they rang their little bell-melodies in his consciousness till he lost count of time.

‘And I hope you’ll be very happy. Now we’ll go to the vestry.’

With Florrie clinging to his arm he went to the vestry; and there a swarm of relations, like honey-seeking bees, descended upon them. ‘Florrie, you look too sweet!’ ‘Bert, you dear old thing!’ And so on.

Florrie’s younger brother approached, fresh from school. ‘Gratters, old horse. She’s a good girl. I’ve trained her well. But what’s happened to the cricket teams?’

‘The what?’

‘Cricket teams. Eleven a side, you know.’

Florrie translated. ‘He means your moustache, Bert. Why did you shave it off? I wish you hadn’t.’

He experienced a pang of compunction. Curse it, why had he shaved it off? ‘Oh, I don’t know. Thought I’d feel freer without it.’

Maurice, the omnipotent Maurice, bore down on them. ‘Off we go!’ he said briskly. Why was he always in such a devil of a hurry? Bert and his bride began marching down the aisle. He wanted to dance: not with joy, but because it was so difficult to walk against the tempo of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March.

Outside, the world still blazed. And a hundred eyes stared. He handed Florrie into the waiting cab, and leaped in after her, with grains of rice trickling down his back. Maurice, the gaoler, shut the door behind them, and then, with incredible agility, thrust his head through the open window-space, elongated his neck, and kissed his sister on the cheek. ‘Best of luck, both.’ He withdrew. The taxi moved on, gobbling like a turkey. ‘I’m glad I had that shave,’ said Bert viciously. The forty years began.

DEARTH’S FARM

DEARTH’S FARM

It is really not far: our fast train does it in eighty minutes. But so sequestered is the little valley in which I have made my solitary home that I never go to town without the delicious sensation of poising my hand over a lucky-bag full of old memories. In the train I amuse myself by summoning up some of those ghosts of the past, a past not distant but sufficiently remote in atmosphere from my present to be invested with a certain sentimental glamour. ‘Perhaps I shall meet you--or you.’ But never yet have I succeeded in guessing what London held up her sleeve for me. She has that happiest of tricks--without which paradise will be dull indeed--the trick of surprise. In London, if in no other place, it is the unexpected that happens. For me Fleet Street is the scene _par excellence_ of these adventurous encounters, and it was in Fleet Street, three months ago, that I ran across Bailey, of Queens’, whom I hadn’t seen for five years. Bailey is not his name, nor Queens’ his college, but these names will serve to reveal what is germane to my purpose and to conceal the rest.

His recognition of me was instant; mine of him more slow. He told me his name twice; we stared at each other, and I struggled to disguise the blankness of my memory. The situation became awkward. I was the more embarrassed because I feared lest he should too odiously misinterpret my non-recognition of him, for the man was shabby and unshaven enough to be suspicious of an intentional slight. Bailey, Bailey ... now who the devil was Bailey? And then, when he had already made a gesture of moving on, memory stirred to activity.

‘Of course, I remember. Bailey. Theosophy. You used to talk to me about theosophy, didn’t you? I remember perfectly now.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘If you’re not busy let’s go and have tea somewhere.’

He smiled, with a hint of irony in his eyes, as he answered: ‘I’m not busy.’ I received the uncomfortable impression that he was hungry and with no ordinary hunger, and the idea kept me silent, like an awkward school-boy, while we walked together to a tea-shop that I knew.

Seated on opposite sides of the tea-table we took stock of each other. He was thin, and his hair greying; his complexion had a soiled unhealthy appearance; the cheeks had sunk in a little, throwing into prominence the high cheekbones above which his sensitive eyes glittered with a new light, a light not of heaven. Compared with the Bailey I now remembered so well, a rather sleek young man with an almost feline love of luxury blossoming like a tropical plant in the exotic atmosphere of his Cambridge rooms, compared with that man this was but a pale wraith. In those days he had been a flaming personality, suited well--too well, for my plain taste--to the highly-coloured orientalism that he affected in his mural decorations. And co-existent in him with this lust for soft cushions and chromatic orgies, which repelled me, there was an imagination that attracted me: an imagination delighting in highly-coloured metaphysical theories of the universe. These theories, which were as fantastic as _The Arabian Nights_ and perhaps as unreal, proved his academic undoing: he came down badly in his Tripos, and had to leave without a degree. Many a man has done that and yet prospered, but Bailey, it was apparent, hadn’t prospered. I made the conventional inquiries, adding, ‘It must be six or seven years since we met last.’

‘More than that,’ said Bailey morosely, and lapsed into silence. ‘Look here,’ he burst out suddenly, ‘I’m going to behave like a cad. I’m going to ask you to lend me a pound note. And don’t expect it back in a hurry.’

We both winced a little as the note changed hands. ‘You’ve had bad luck,’ I remarked, without, I hope, a hint of pity in my voice. ‘What’s wrong?’

He eyed me over the rim of his teacup. ‘I look a lot older to you, I expect?’

‘You don’t look very fit,’ I conceded.

‘No, I don’t.’ His cup came down with a nervous slam upon the saucer. ‘Going grey, too, aren’t I?’ I was forced to nod agreement. ‘Yet, do you know, a month ago there wasn’t a grey hair in my head. You write stories, don’t you? I saw your name somewhere. I wonder if you could write my story. You may get your money back after all.... By God, that would be funny, wouldn’t it!’

I couldn’t see the joke, but I was curious about his story. And after we had lit our cigarettes he told it to me, to the accompaniment of a driving storm of rain that tapped like a thousand idiot fingers upon the plate-glass windows of the shop.

2

A few weeks ago, said Bailey, I was staying at the house of a cousin of mine. I never liked the woman, but I wanted free board and lodging, and hunger soon blunts the edge of one’s delicacy. She’s at least ten years my senior, and all I could remember of her was that she had bullied me when I was a child into learning to read. Ten years ago she married a man named Dearth--James Dearth, the resident owner of a smallish farm in Norfolk, not far from the coast. All her relatives opposed the marriage. Relatives always do. If people waited for the approval of relatives before marrying, the world would be depopulated in a generation. This time it was religion. My cousin’s people were primitive and methodical in their religion, as the name of their sect confessed; whereas Dearth professed a universal toleration that they thought could only be a cloak for indifference. I have my own opinion about that, but it doesn’t matter now. When I met the man I forgot all about religion: I was simply repelled by the notion of any woman marrying so odd a being. Rather small in build, he possessed the longest and narrowest face I have ever seen on a man of his size. His eyes were set exceptionally wide apart, and the nose, culminating in large nostrils, made so slight an angle with the rest of the face that seen in profile it was scarcely human. Perhaps I exaggerate a little, but I know no other way of explaining the peculiar revulsion he inspired in me. He met me at the station in his dog-cart, and wheezed a greeting at me. ‘You’re Mr. Bailey, aren’t you? I hope you’ve had an agreeable journey. Monica will be delighted.’ This seemed friendly enough, and my host’s conversation during that eight-mile drive did much to make me forget my first distaste of his person. He was evidently a man of wide reading, and he had a habit of polite deference that was extremely flattering, especially to me who had had more than my share of the other thing. I was cashiered during the war, you know. Never mind why. Whenever he laughed, which was not seldom, he exhibited a mouthful of very large regular teeth.