“Christ! I’ve Had a Happy Life!”
His excitement grew rather than diminished as he got out of the train.
He gave up his ticket to an elderly stationmaster, whose air, at once fussily inquisitive and mildly deferential, suggested the manner of a cathedral verger. He watched his luggage being deposited on the Lovelace Bus; and there came over him a vague recollection of some incident of those early years, wherein his mother, standing by that same shabby vehicle, or one exactly resembling it, with a look of contemptuous derision on her formidable face, said something hard and ironical to him which lashed his self-love like a whip.
Opposite the station were the railed-in Public Gardens. These also brought to his mind certain isolated trivial occurrences of his childish days; and it struck him, even in his excitement, just then as being strange that what he remembered were things that had hurt his feelings rather than things that had thrilled him.
In place of following the bus round the west of the Gardens, where the road led to the Hotel, and then on past the police-station to the Abbey, he turned to the east and made his way across a small river-bridge. Here, again, the look of a certain old wall against the water, and certain patches of arrowhead leaves within the water, stirred his memory with a sudden unexpected agitation.
It was over this very bridge that twenty-five years ago he had leaned with his father while William Solent showed him the difference between loach and gudgeon, and in a funny, rambling, querulous voice deplored the number of castaway tins that lay in the muddy stream.
But Wolf did not lean over the bridge this time. He heard the Abbey clock striking one, and he hurried on up Saint Aldhelm’s Street. Newly-budded plane-trees cast curious little shadows, like deformed butterflies, upon the yellowish paving-stones; and over the top of an uneven wall at his side protruded occasional branch-ends of pear-blossom.
He came at last to a green door in the wall.
“Is it possible,” he wondered uneasily, “that Selena Gault lives here still?”
He allowed a baker’s cart to rattle negligently past him while he made two separate hesitating movements of his hand towards the handle of the green door.
It was queer that he should have had an instinct to look sharply both up and down the street before he brought himself to turn that handle. It was almost as though he felt himself to be a hunted criminal, taking refuge with Selena Gault! But the street was quite deserted now, and with a quick movement he boldly opened the gate and entered the garden.
A narrow stone path led up to the door of the house, which resembled a doll’s house, brilliantly painted with blues and greens. Blue and white hyacinths grew in masses on either side of the path; and their scent, caught and suspended in that enclosed space, had a fainting, ecstatic voluptuousness which was at variance with the prim neatness around them. A diminutive servant, very old but very alert, with the nervous outward-staring eyes of a yellowhammer, opened the door to him, and without demur ushered him into the drawing-room.
He gave his name and waited. Almost immediately the little servant came back and begged him to take a chair and make himself comfortable. Miss Gault would see him in a few minutes. Those few minutes lengthened themselves into a quarter of an hour, and he had time to meditate on all the possibilities of this strange encounter. Miss Gault was the daughter of the late Headmaster of Ramsgard; and Wolf had heard his mother for twenty-five years utter airy sarcasms at her expense. It appeared she had had some tender relation with his father; had even attended William Solent’s deathbed in the workhouse and seen him buried in the cemetery.
Wolf sat on Miss Gault’s sofa and set himself to wonder what this rival of his mother’s would look like when she entered the room. The servant had not quite closed the door; and when fifteen minutes had elapsed, it opened silently; and Wolf, rising quickly to greet his hostess, found himself confronted by three cats, who walked gravely and gingerly, one after another, into the centre of the apartment. He made some awkward gesture of welcome to these animals, who resembled one another in shape, size, breed, and temperament—in everything except colour, being respectively white, black, and grey; but instead of responding to his advances they each leapt into a separate chair, coiled themselves up, and surveyed, with half-closed languid eyes, the door through which they had entered. He felt as if he were in the house of the Marquis of Carabas and that the three cats were three Lord Chamberlains.
He sank back upon the sofa and stared morosely at each cat in turn. He decided that he liked the black one best and the grey one least. He decided that the white one was its mistress’s favourite.
He was occupied in this harmless manner when Selena Gault herself came in. He rose and advanced towards her with outstretched hand. But it was impossible for him to eliminate from his expression the shock that her appearance gave him; and it did not lessen his surprise when she received his gesture with a formal bow and a stiff rejection of his hand.
She was a tall, bony woman, with a face so strikingly ugly that it was impossible to avoid an immediate consciousness of its ugliness; and it was borne in upon him, as their conversation proceeded, that if only he had been able to contemplate her countenance with unconcern, she would have enjoyed one of the happiest moments of her life.
She made a sign for him to resume his seat; but as she herself stood erect in front of the fire, which in spite of the warmth of the day still burned on the hearth, he preferred to remain on his feet. Like a flash he thought to himself, “Can my father have actually embraced this extraordinary person?” And then he thought to himself: “The poor woman! Why, she can’t be able to meet a single stranger anywhere without giving them a shock like this.” But he had already begun speaking quietly and naturally to her, even while he was thinking these things.
“I knew you would know who I was,” he said gently. “I’ve just been invited down here. I’m going to do some work—I can’t tell you quite what it is—out at King’s Barton. I’m going to drive over there this afternoon; but I thought I would come and see you first.”
While she listened to him, he noticed that she kept pulling her white woollen shawl tighter and tighter round her black silk dress. The effect of this was to give her the appearance of someone caught unawares in some sort of fancy costume—some costume that rendered her ashamed and even ridiculous.
“And so I just came straight in,” he went on, beginning to feel a very odd sensation, a sensation as if he were addressing someone who was listening all the time in a kind of panic to a third person’s voice—“straight in through your little green door and between those hyacinths.”
She still made no observation and he noticed that one marked quality of her ugliness was the dusky sallowness of her cheeks combined with the ghastly pallor of her upper lip, which projected from her face very much as certain funguses project from the brown bark of a dead tree.
“I’ve decided that your favourite cat is the white one,” he brought out after an uncomfortable pause.
She did relax at this, and, moving to the chair occupied by the grey cat, took up the animal in her arms and sat down, holding it on her lap.
“You’re wrong, wrong, wrong!” she whispered hoarsely. “Isn’t he wrong, Matthew?”
The cat took not the least notice of this remark or of the fingers that caressed him; but it did impinge upon the consciousness of Miss Gault’s visitor that this singular woman’s hands were of a surprising beauty.
“What are the names of the others?” Solent enquired.
“The black one is Mark,” replied the lady.
“And the white one Luke?” he hazarded.
She nodded; and then, quite suddenly, with an effort as though a gust of wind had swept aside a mass of dead leaves, uncovering the fresh verdure below, her whole face relaxed into a smile of disarming sweetness.
“I’ve never had a John,” she said. “And I never will.”
Wolf Solent was quick enough to take advantage of this change of mood. He moved across to her, bent down over her chair, and scratched Matthew’s head. “I thought I’d like to go over and see where the grave is.” His words were low-pitched but without any emotional stress. His intonation could hardly have been different if he had said, “I think I’ll go to the Abbey presently.”
Selena Gault gave a deep sigh, but it seemed to Solent like a sigh of relief rather than sadness.
“Quite right, quite proper,” he heard her murmur, with her head held low and her hands occupied in smoothing out the shawl beneath the body of the somnolent cat.
“The best thing you could do,” she added.
Since she said nothing more and persisted in keeping her head lowered—a position which accentuated the enormity of her upper lip and the dark sallowness of her face—Wolf began to feel as if he were an impertinent intruder stroking the pet animal of some proud, secretive being whose peculiarity it was to prefer beasts to men.
He straightened himself and squared his shoulders with a sigh. Then he moved across to the sofa and laid his hand on his hat and stick, which he was rather surprised to notice he had brought with him into the room.
“I suppose,” he said, as he turned round with these objects in the hand, “there’ll be someone out there at the cemetery, some gardener or caretaker, who’ll know where the grave is? I shouldn’t like to get out there and not be able to find it. But I don’t want to let this day pass without trying to find it.”
Selena Gault tossed the grey cat from her lap and rose to her feet.
“I’ll come with you,” she said.
She uttered the words quite quietly, but he noticed that she avoided looking him in the face.
She stood for a time staring out of the window, motionless and abstracted.
“If it would be a bother to you—” he began.
But she suddenly turned her distorted countenance full upon him.
“Sit down, boy,” she rapped out. “Do you think I’d let you go there alone, if there were fifty gardeners?”
She stared at him for a second after this with a look that seemed to turn his bodily presence into the frame of a doorway through which she gazed into the remote past.
“Sit down, sit down,” she said more gently. “I’ll be ready soon.”
The door had not closed behind her for many minutes when the elderly servant entered, carrying a silver tray, upon which was a plate of Huntley and Palmer’s oaten biscuits and a decanter of sherry. Wolf had poured himself out as many as three glasses of this excellent wine and had swallowed nearly all the biscuits before Miss Gault returned. She found him stroking Mark, the black cat.
Her appearance in hat and cloak was just as peculiar as before, but more distinguished; and Wolf soon found out, when presently they passed the front of the Abbey, where several townspeople greeted her, that the power of her personality was fully appreciated in Ramsgard.
Their way to the cemetery took them straight past the workhouse. This building was on the further side of the road; but Solent was unable to restrain an impulse to turn his head towards it. The edifice was rather less gloomy than such erections usually are, owing to the fact that some indulgent authority had permitted its façade to be overgrown with Virginia creeper.
He found himself reducing his pace so that he might familiarize himself with every aspect of that heavy, sombre building behind iron gates. As he lingered he became suddenly aware that his companion had slipped her gloved hand upon his arm. This natural gesture, instead of pleasing him or rousing his sympathy, made him feel curiously irritable. He quickened his pace; and her hand fell away so quickly that he might easily have supposed that light pressure to have been a pure accident.
They walked side by side now, with such swinging steps that it was not long before they were beyond the houses and out into what was almost open country. It annoyed him that she remained so silent. Did she suppose he had come to see his father’s grave in a vein of sentimental commiseration?
“What’s that?” he exclaimed, pointing to a ramshackle group of sheds that seemed fenced off from the road with some unnatural and sinister precaution.
Selena Gault’s reply made his touchiness seem captious and misplaced.
“Can’t you see what that is, boy? It’s the slaughterhouse! You’ve only to take the shadiest, quietest road to find ’em in any town!”
They were soon skirting the edge of the neat oak palings that ran along the leafy purlieus of Ramsgard Cemetery.
“I let them bury him at the pauper’s end,” she remarked gravely. “It’s nearer. It’s quieter. It’s hardly ever disturbed. This is the way I generally go in.” With a sly, quick glance up and down the road, a glance that gave an emphasis to the whites of her eyes such as made her companion think of a crafty dray-horse edging into a field of clover, Miss Gault stooped down and propelled herself under a rough obstruction that blocked a gap in the oak palings.
Solent followed her, confused, a little surly, but no longer hostile.
She did not wait for him, but made her way with long, rapid strides to the extreme corner of the enclosure. Her swinging arms, her gaunt figure, her erratic gait, set the man’s mind thinking once more of various nonhuman animals.
He came up to her just as she reached her goal. “William Solent,” he read, on the upright slab of sandstone; and then, under the date of birth and death, the words, “Mors est mihi vita.”
Wolf had no difficulty in recognizing the particular hyacinths that stood in an earthenware pot. “She must have come here for twenty-five years!” he thought, with a gasp of astonishment; and he gave her a hurried, furtive, prying look from under his bushy eyebrows.
She certainly did nothing on this occasion to cause him any discomfort. She just muttered in quite a conventional tone, “I never like to see plantains in the grass”; and bending down, she proceeded to pull up certain small weeds, making a little pile of them behind the headstone.
Swaying thus above the mound and scrabbling with outstretched arms among the grass-blades, her figure in the misty afternoon sunshine took on, as Wolf stood there, a kind of portentous unreality. There was something outlandish in the whole scene, something monstrous and bizarre that destroyed all ordinary pathos. Twenty-five years? If she had come here regularly for all that time, how could there be any “plantains,” or any clover, or any moss either, left upon his father’s grave? He was so conscious of the personality of this woman, so amazed at a tenacity of feeling that seemed to pass all limits of what was due, that his own sensibility became hard and rigid.
But though his emotions were cold, his imagination worked freely. The few feet of Dorsetshire clay, the half-inch of brittle West Country elm-wood, that separated him from the upturned skull of his begetter, were like so much transparent glass. He looked down into William Solent’s empty eye-sockets, and the empty eye-sockets looked back at him. Steadily, patiently, indifferently they looked back; and between the head without a nose looking up and the head with so prominent a nose looking down there passed a sardonic wordless dialogue. “So be it,” the son said to himself. “I won’t forget. Whether there are plantains or whether there aren’t plantains, the universe shan’t fool me.” “Fool me; fool me,” echoed the fleshless skull from below.
“There!” sighed Selena Gault, rising to her natural perpendicular position. “There! There won’t be any more of them for a fortnight. Shall we go back now, boy?”
When they were once more in the road, Miss Gault became a little more talkative.
“You’re not like him, of course—not in any way. He really was uncommonly handsome. Not that that had any weight with me. But it had with some. It had with Mr. Urquhart!” She paused and glanced almost mischievously at her companion. “I’m sure I don’t know,” she remarked, with a funny little laugh, “what Mr. Urquhart will make of you!”
“The idea seems to be,” said Wolf gravely, while his estimate of his new friend’s perspicacity became more respectful, “that I should help him with some historical researches. It appears he is writing a History of Dorset.”
“History of fiddlestick!” snapped the lady. And then in a more amiable tone, “But he’s no idiot. He has read a little. You’ll enjoy going through his library.”
Wolf felt himself experiencing a rather cowardly hope that his companion would pass the slaughterhouse this time without comment. The hope was not fulfilled.
“I suppose you eat them?” she asked in a hoarse whisper; and Wolf, turning towards her a startled face, was struck by an expression of actual animal fear upon her extraordinary physiognomy. But she did not linger; and it was not long before they were once more opposite the workhouse.
“Do you know what he said when he was dying?” she began suddenly. “He didn’t say it particularly to me. I just happened to be there. He said it to everyone in general. He said, ‘Christ! I’ve enjoyed my life!’ He used the word ‘Christ’ just in that way, as an exclamation. There was a young clergyman there, straight down from Cambridge, an athlete of some sort; and when your father cried out ‘Christ!’ like that—and he was dead the next second—I heard him mutter, ‘Good for you, Sir!’ as if it had been a fine hit at a cricket-match.”
Wolf would have been entirely responsive now if Miss Gault had touched his arm or even taken his arm, but she walked forward without making any sign.
“I expect your mother has abused me pretty thoroughly to you since you were a child,” she said presently. “Ann and I were never fond of each other. We were enemies even before your father came. She cut me out, of course, at every turn; but that didn’t bring her round! She couldn’t forgive me for being the headmaster’s daughter. You’ve no idea of the savage jealousies that go on in a place like this. But wherever we were we should have hated each other. Ann is flippant where I’m serious, and I’m flippant where Ann is serious.”
Wolf tried in vain to imagine on what occasions Miss Gault would display flippancy, but he knew well enough what that word meant in regard to his mother. He was seized at that moment with an irresistible temptation to reveal to this woman the picture of her character with which he had been regaled for the last twenty-five years. It was a picture so extraordinarily different from the reality, that it made him wonder if all women, whether flippant or otherwise, were personal to the point of insanity in their judgments of one another. What his mother had told him was not even a caricature of Selena Gault. It referred to another person altogether.
“My mother has a lot of friends in town,” he began, rather lamely. Miss Gault cut him short.
“Of course she has! She’s a brave, high-spirited, ambitious woman. Of course she has!” And then, in a low, meditative voice that seemed to float wistfully over the years, “She was very much in love with your father.”
This last remark, coming at the moment when the Abbey clock above their heads struck four, produced considerable bewilderment in Wolf’s mind. The idea of his estranged parents having been “in love” with each other made him feel curiously in the cold, and strangely alien to both of them. In some obscure way he felt as if Selena Gault were practising an indecent treachery, but a treachery so subtle that he couldn’t lay his finger upon it!
“Let’s go in here for a minute!” he said. “And then I must keep my appointment with Mr. Otter.”
They entered the great nave of the Abbey-church and sat down. The high, cool, vaulted roof, with its famous fan-tracery, seemed to offer itself to his mind as if it were some “branch-charmèd” vista of verdurous silence, along which his spirit might drift and float at large, a leaf among leaves!
There was a faint greenish mist in that high roof, the effect of some cavernous contrast with the mellow warmth of the horizontal sun pouring through the coloured windows below; and into that world of undulating carving and greenish dimness, Wolf now permitted his mind to wander, till he began to feel once again that mysterious sensation which he called his “mythology.”
He felt free of his mother, and yet tender and indulgent towards her. He felt bound up in some strange affiliation with that skeleton in the cemetery. He felt in whimsical and easy harmony with the queer lady seated by his side. The only thing that troubled him at all just then was a faint doubt as to what effect this return to the land of his birth would have upon his furtive, private, hidden existence. Would he be crafty enough to keep that secretive life-illusion out of the reach of danger? Would his inner world of hushed Cimmerian ecstasies remain uninvaded by these Otters and Urquharts?
He felt as though he were tightening his muscles for a plunge into very treacherous waters. All manner of unknown voices seemed calling to him out of this warm Spring air; mocking voices, beguiling voices, insidious voices—voices that threatened unguessed-at disturbances to that underground life of his which was like a cherished vice. It was not as though he heard the tones of these voices so that he could have recognized them again. It was as though a wavering crowd of featureless human figures on the further side of some thick opaque latticework were conferring together in conspiring awareness of his immediate appearance among them!
The atmosphere was cooler when they came out of the church. Its taste was the taste of an air that has been blown over leagues and leagues of green stalks full of chilly sap. It made Solent think of water-buttercups in windy ponds, and the splash of moorhens over dark gurgling weirs.
He parted from his companion by a grotesque little statue under the lime-trees representing the debonair ancestor of the Lovelaces whose name, though intimately associated with Ramsgard, had slipped into something legendary and remote. Selena Gault gave him her hand with a stately inclination of her unlovely head.
“You’ll come in and see me and my cats before long and tell me your impressions of all those people?”
“I certainly will, Miss Gault,” he answered. “You’ve been very good to me.”
“Tut, tut, boy! Good is not the word! When I come to think of it, standing like that with your hat off, you have a kind of look—”
“That’s under your influence, Miss Gault,” he hurriedly said; and they took their separate ways.
There was far less embarrassment for Wolf in his encounter with Mr. Darnley Otter than he had expected. They were the only men in that massive old-world sitting-room, decorated with hunting-scenes and large solemn prints of Conservative statesmen, and they found it easy and natural to sit down opposite each other at a round table and to enjoy an excellent tea. Wolf was hungry. The bread-and-butter was fresh and plentiful. The solidity of the teapot was matched by the thinness of the cups; and the waiter, who seemed to know Mr. Otter well, treated them both with a dignified obsequiousness which had about it the mellow beauty of centuries of feudal service.
He was a clean-shaven man, this waiter, with an aristocratic stoop and a face that resembled that of Lord Shaftesbury, the great philanthropist; and Wolf felt an obscure longing to sit opposite him in his own snug parlour—wherever that was—and draw out of him the hidden sources of that superb respectfulness—to be the object of which, even for a brief hour’s tea-drinking, was to be reconciled not only to oneself but also in some curious way to the whole human race!
“We haven’t seen Mr. Urquhart down here lately,” the waiter was saying to Wolf’s new acquaintance. “His health keeps up, I hope, Sir?”
“Perfectly,” responded Mr. Otter. “Perfectly, Stalbridge. I hope you yourself are all right, Stalbridge?”
Wolf had never seen a physical human movement more expressive, more adjusted, more appropriate, than the gesture with which the elderly servant balanced the back of his hand against the edge of their table and leaned forward to reply to this personal question. He noticed this gesture all the more vividly because of a curiously shaped white scar that crossed the back of the man’s hand. But he now became aware of something else about this waiter—something that surprised and rather disturbed him. The fellow’s countenance did not only remind him of Lord Shaftesbury. It reminded him of that face by the Waterloo steps!
“I’ve nothing to complain of, Sir, thank you Sir, since I settled that little legal trouble of mine. It’s the mind, Sir, that keeps us up; and except for the malice and mischief that comes to all, I’ve no grievance against the Almighty.”
The air of courteous magnanimity with which the old waiter exonerated Providence made Wolf feel ashamed of every peevishness he had ever indulged. But why did he make him think of that Waterloo-steps face?
When Mr. Stalbridge had left them, to look after some other guests, both the men, as they finished their tea and lit their cigarettes, began to feel more comfortable and reassured in their attitude to each other.
Darnley Otter was in every respect more of a classified “gentleman” than Solent. He had a trim, pointed, Van Dyck beard of a light-chestnut colour. His fingernails were exquisitely clean. His necktie, of a dark-blue shade, had evidently been very carefully chosen. His grey tweed suit, neither too faded nor too new, fitted his slender figure to a nicety. His features were sharply-cut and very delicately moulded, his hands thin and firm and nervous. When he smiled, his rather grave countenance wrinkled itself into a thousand amiable wrinkles; but he very rarely smiled, and for some reason it was impossible for Solent to imagine him laughing. One facial trick he had which Wolf found a little disconcerting—since his own method was to stare so very steadily from under his bushy eyebrows—a trick of hanging his head and letting his eyelids droop over his eyes as he talked. This habit was so constant with him that it wasn’t until the dialogue with the waiter occurred that Wolf realized what his eyes were like. They were of a tint that Wolf had never seen before in any human face. They were like the blue markings upon the sides of freshly caught mackerel.
But what struck Wolf most deeply was not the colour of Mr. Otter’s eyes. It was their look. He had never in the whole course of his life seen anything so harassed, so anxious, as the expression in those eyes, when their owner was unable any longer to avoid giving a direct glance. Nor was it just simply that the man was of a worrying turn of mind. The curious thing about the anxiety in Mr. Otter’s eyes was that it was unnatural. There was a sort of puzzled surprise in it, a sort of indignant moral bewilderment, quite different from any constitutional nervousness. His expression seemed to protest against something that had been inflicted on him, something unexpected, something that struck his natural acceptance of life as both monstrous and inexplicable.
It was when he spoke to the waiter that this unhappy expression was caught most off-guard, and Wolf explained this to himself on the theory that the waiter’s abysmal tact unconsciously relieved his interlocutor from the strain of habitual reticence.
Their meal once over, it did not take them long to get mounted, with all Wolf Solent’s luggage, in Mr. Urquhart’s dogcart. That afternoon’s drive from Ramsgard to King’s Barton was a memorable event in Wolf’s life. He had come already to feel a definite attraction toward this scrupulously-dressed, punctilious gentleman with the troubled mackerel-dark eyes; and as they sat side by side in that dogcart, jogging leisurely along behind an ancient dapple-grey horse, he made up his mind that if it was to be in Darnley Otter’s company that his free hours were to pass, they would pass very harmoniously indeed.
The evening itself, through which they drove, following a road parallel to and a little to the right of that one which had ended with the cemetery, was beautiful with an exceptional kind of beauty. It was one of those Spring evenings which are neither golden from the direct rays of the sinking sun, nor opalescent from their indirect diffused reflection. A chilly wind had arisen, covering the western sky, into which they were driving, with a thick bank of clouds. The result of this complete extinction of the sunset was that the world became a world in which every green thing upon its surface received a fivefold addition to its greenness. It was as if an enormous green tidal wave, composed of a substance more translucent than water, had flowed over the whole earth; or rather as if some diaphanous essence of all the greenness created by long days of rain had evaporated during this one noon, only to fall down, with the approach of twilight, in a cold, dark, emerald-coloured dew. The road they thus followed, heading for that rain-heavy western horizon, was a road that ran along the southern slope of an arable upland—an upland that lay midway between the pastoral Dorset valley which was terminated by the hills and woods of High Stoy and the yet wider Somersetshire valley that spread away into the marshes of Sedgemoor.
Solent learned from a few courteous but very abrupt explanations interjected by his companions, that the only other occupants of the house to which they were proceeding were Darnley’s elder brother, Jason, and his mother, Mrs. Otter. He also gathered that Darnley himself, except on Saturdays and Sundays, worked as a classical under-master in a small grammar-school in Blacksod. By one means and another—Wolf was quick at such surmises—he obtained an impression that this work in Blacksod was anything but congenial to his reserved companion. He also began to divine, though certainly with no help from his well-bred friend, that these scholastic activities of his were almost the sole financial support of the family at Pond Cottage.
“I do wish I could persuade you,” Solent began, when they were still some two and a half miles from their destination, “to give me some sort of notion of what Mr. Urquhart really expects from me. I’ve never made any historical researches in my life. I’ve only compiled wretched summaries from books that everyone can get. What will he want me to do? Go searching round in parish-registers and so on?”
The driver’s gaze, directed obstinately to the grey tail of their slow-moving horse, remained unresponsive to the querulousness of this appeal.
“I have a notion, Solent,” he remarked, “that you’ll get light on a great many things as soon as you’ve seen Mr. Urquhart.”
Wolf pulled down the corners of his mouth and lifted his thick eyebrows.
“The devil!” he thought. “That’s just about what my friend Miss Gault hinted.”
He raised his voice and gave it a more serious tone.
“Tell me, Otter, is Mr. Urquhart what you might call eccentric—queer, in fact?”
Darnley did turn his bearded profile at this. “That depends,” he said, “what you mean by ‘queer.’ I’ve always found him very civil. My brother can’t bear the sight of him.”
Wolf made his favourite grimace again at this.
“I hope your brother will approve of me,” he said. “I confess I begin to be a bit frightened.”
“Jason is a poet,” remarked Mr. Otter gravely, and his tone had enough of a rebuke in it to rouse a flicker of malice in his companion.
“I hope Mr. Urquhart isn’t a poet too,” he said.
Mr. Otter took no notice of this retort except to fall into a deeper silence than ever; and Wolf’s attention reverted to what he could see of the famous Vale of Blackmore. Every time the hedge grew low, as they jogged along, every time a gate or a gap interrupted its green undulating rampart, he caught a glimpse of that great valley, gathering the twilight about it as a dying god might gather to his heart the cold, wet ashes of his last holocaust.
More and more did the feeling grow upon him that he was entering into a new world where he must leave behind the customs, the grooves, the habits of fifteen long years of his life. “There’s one thing,” he thought to himself, while a sudden chilliness struck his face as their road drew nearer the course of the river, “that I’ll never give up … not even for the sake of the slenderest ‘peeled willow-wand’ in Dorset.” As this thought crossed his mind he actually tightened his two bony hands tenaciously over his legs just above his knees, as if he were fortifying himself against some unknown threat to his treasured vice. And then in a kind of self-protective reassembling of his memories, as if by the erection of a great barrier of mental earthworks he could ward off any attack upon his secret, he set himself to recall certain notable landmarks among his experiences of the world up to the hour of this exciting plunge into the unknown.
He recalled various agitating and shameful scenes between his high-spirited mother and his drifting unscrupulous father. He summoned up, as opposed to these, his own delicious memories of long, irresponsible holidays, lovely uninterrupted weeks of idleness, by the sea at Weymouth, when he read so many thrilling books in the sunlit bow-window at Brunswick Terrace. How clearly he could see now the Jubilee clock on the Esplanade, the pompous statue of George the Third, the White Nore, the White Horse, the wave-washed outline of Portland breakwater! How he could recall his childish preference for the great shimmering expanse of wet sand, out beyond the bathing-machines, over the hot, dry sand under the seawall, where the donkeys stood and Punch and Judy was played!
“I am within twenty miles of Weymouth here,” he thought. “That’s where my real life began … that’s the place I love … in spite of its lack of hedges and trees!”
Then he recalled his tedious uninspired youth in London, the hateful day-school, the hateful overcrowded college, the interminable routine of his ten years of teaching. “A double life! A double life!” he muttered under his breath, staring at the grey rump of Mr. Urquhart’s nag, as it swayed before him, and moving his own body a little forward, as he tightened his grip still more fiercely upon his own bony thighs.
Was he going to be plunged now into another world of commonplace tedium, full of the same flat, conventional ambitions, the same sickening clevernesses? It couldn’t be so! It couldn’t … it couldn’t … with this enchanted springtime stirring in all these leaves and grasses. …
What a country this was!
To his right, as they drove along, the ground sloped upwards—cornfield after cornfield of young green shoots—to the great main ridge between Dorset and Somerset, along which—only a mile or so away, his companion told him—lay the main highway, famous in West Country history, between Ramsgard and Blacksod, and also between—so Mr. Otter assured him—Salisbury and Exeter!
To his left the Vale of Blackmore beckoned to him out of its meadows—meadows that were full of faint grassy odours which carried a vague taste of river-mud in their savour because of the nearness of the banks of the Lunt. From Shaftesbury, on the north, to the isolated eminence of Melbury Bub, to the south, that valley stretched away, whispering, so it seemed, some inexplicable prophetic greeting to its returned native-born.
As he listened to the noise of the horse’s hooves steadily clicking, clicking, clicking, with every now and then a bluish spark rising in the dusk of the road, as iron struck against flint; as he watched the horizon in front of him grow each moment more fluid, more wavering; as he saw detached fragments of the earth’s surface—hill-curves, copses, faraway fields and hedges—blend with fragments of cloud and fragments of cloudless space, it came over him with a mounting confidence that this wonderful country must surely deepen, intensify, enrich his furtive inner life, rather than threaten or destroy it.
Thus clutching his legs as if to assure himself of his own identity, thus leaning eagerly forward by his companion’s side, his eyebrows contracted into a fixed frown and his nostrils twitching, Wolf felt the familiar mystic sensation surging up even now from its hidden retreat. Up, up it rose, like some great moonlight-coloured fish from fathomless watery depths, like some wide-winged marsh-bird from dark untraversed pools! The airs of this new world that met its rising were full of the coolness of mosses, full of the faint unsheathing of fern-fronds. Whatever this mysterious emotion was, it leaped forward now towards the new element as if conscious that it carried with it a power as formidable, as incalculable, as anything that it could encounter there.