The Tea-Party
He found on his arrival that his mother had already appeared. To his great surprise he discovered her standing by their kitchen-stove, with Gerda’s apron over her dress, helping to make the toast. He was still more surprised at the way Gerda received him. She was flushed and happy—laughing and jesting as if they had parted the very best of friends.
“How’s Christie?” she asked casually. “What do you think, Mrs. Solent, of his going off to see Miss Malakite when I’ve got company? I’m sure that’s not what you’d approve of.”
“I don’t approve of his saying nothing about that pretty frock you’ve got on! What do you think of it, Wolf? Do you know, when I got here, she was upstairs, crying her lovely eyes out? And all because she thought she hadn’t a proper dress to welcome her grand mother-in-law in! We soon settled that little job, didn’t we, my dear?” And Wolf beheld, to his amazement, his mother putting one of her strong arms caressingly about Gerda’s waist, and Gerda responding to this with a lingering, provocative glance, such as he himself was wont to receive when the girl was in her most docile mood.
“I heard her crying up there in her room,” went on the elder woman, “and I ran straight up, and there she was, pretty as a picture in her white shift, and all the bed covered with frocks! She says she’s had this one since she was sixteen; but it suits her perfectly, doesn’t it, Wolf?”
Wolf surveyed the girl gravely. She wore a long, straight muslin dress, with short sleeves, creamy-white and covered with pale little roses. Never had she looked so enchanting.
“You’re certainly a good lady’s-maid, Mother,” he said solemnly.
“She’s told me you’re expecting another mother this afternoon,” continued Mrs. Solent, releasing Gerda and proceeding to arrange the slices of toast upon a plate. “Now then, where’s that loaf? I’ll cut the bread-and-butter.”
It became Wolf’s destiny to stand for the next quarter of an hour, figuratively speaking, “upon one leg,” while he watched what seemed to resemble the most piquant of flirtations going on between these two.
The tea-tray was “laid” at last, in the most approved manner, on that very parlour-table round which he had pursued the girl in such troubled agitation so short a time before; and Mrs. Solent, Gerda’s apron removed, showed herself in the most fashionable of all her garden-party gowns. Gerda seemed unable to keep her eyes off her, and kept touching with the tips of her fingers first one elegant frill and then another, hovering about her like a slim white butterfly round a purple orchid.
“There’s Mother!” she cried at length. “Fetch the kettle, Wolf!”
The countenance of Mrs. Torp was as a book in which one could “read strange matters,” as she contemplated the scene before her. Wolf, with the teapot in one hand and the kettle in the other, vociferated a boisterous welcome, drowning the politer words of his mother.
Gerda, having removed Mrs. Torp’s tasselled cloak, sat her plumb-down at the table, straightening with a familiarly affectionate jerk the ribboned bonnet which adorned her head.
“Don’t ’ee fidget wi’ me old hat, Gerdie,” murmured the visitor. “ ’Tis a very good hat, though maybe ’tain’t as aleet as some folks can afford. So thee be Mr. Solent’s mummy, be ’ee? Well, and ’a favour’n about the cheeks, ’sknow! A body could reason there was some blood twixt ye; though in these which-way times ’tis hard to speak for sure.”
“Well, we must do our best not to quarrel, Mrs. Torp, as they say all mothers do,” threw out Mrs. Solent briskly, watching with some anxiety the unusual amount of sugar that Gerda was placing at the bottom of all the teacups.
“How much milk, Mrs. Solent?” enquired the girl lightly. “I don’t expect our Blacksod milk is as good as yours at King’s Barton.”
This society-tone was so obviously put on to impress the young lady’s mother, that Mrs. Solent hadn’t the heart to explain, till the time for her second cup, that she couldn’t bear sugar. She swallowed the sweet mixture in hurried gulps; and Wolf chuckled to see her trying to take away the taste by rapid mouthfuls of bread-and-butter.
“How be thee’s schoolmasterin’ getting along, Mr. Solent? My old man—that be our Gerdie’s Dad, ma’am—do always say them Grammar boys be above theyselves, what with one thing and t’other. He cotchit two on ’em, the last buryin’ ’ee had, stealing of they bones. Not that they were proper human-like bones … if ’ee understand … for ’ee do always bury them religious-deep. They were hosses’ bones, seems so, from what ’ee do calculate. But they were more impident, them Grammar boys, when ’ee were arter they, than if they’d been the bones of King Balaam.”
“What’s Lobbie been doing lately, Mother?” enquired Gerda, feeling vaguely conscious that the subject of bones, whether human or otherwise, was inappropriate at that moment.
“Lob, do ’ee say? Thee may well ask what Lob be doing, the young pert-mouthed limb! He be bringing his Dad’s hoar hairs down to bedlam, and mine wi ’em, that’s what the owl’s pellet be doing!”
Gerda hurriedly enquired in a ringing voice whether Mrs. Solent wanted any cake. “Pimpernel hadn’t any fresh kinds except this. I expect you are so used to London confectionery, Mrs. Solent—”
But the visitor seemed more interested in her fellow parent’s conversation than in anything else just then.
“Sons are troublesome beings, Mrs. Torp,” she said, “but it’s nice to have them.”
“What has Lobbie been doing?” enquired Wolf, heedless of Gerda’s frowns.
“He’s been going over with that imp of Satan, Bob Weevil, to Parson Valley’s. His Dad told ’en he’d lift the skin from’s backside if he did it; but he was see’d, only last night, out there again.”
“It sounds very innocent, Mrs. Torp, visiting a clergyman,” remarked the lady.
“Innocent!” cried Gerda’s mother indignantly. “Innocent thee own self, though I do say it! ’Tis pagan deviltries, worse nor Paul on Corinthians. I tell ’ee, they do play blasphemous play-actings out there, same as Lot’s wife were salted for.”
“Miracle-plays, is it?” asked Wolf.
“How do I know what they call ’en? ’Tis small matter for the name. Wold Dimity, up to Otters’, told I that one girt gummuk of a lad dressed ’isself up as Virgin Mary. If that hain’t a blasphemous cantrip, I’d like to know what be!”
“I expect Mrs. Solent knows better than any of us, Mother, what’s going on out at King’s Barton,” put in Gerda diplomatically.
“I did hear something about a miracle-play,” said the visitor lightly; “but if the subject’s a teasing one, for heaven’s sake let’s drop it! I think it was Mr. Urquhart who mentioned it to me; and if I remember right he took rather the same view of it as Mrs. Torp.”
“Squire Urquhart ain’t got so much standing his own self wi’ decent folk for him to be top-lofty,” remarked the other. “They do tell down our way ’twas that man’s wicked tempers and sech-like, what drove poor young Redfern into’s grave; but maybe, as darter says, you know more’n we, ma’am, about King’s Barton ways. I be glad for my part that I lives in a God-fearing daily-bread town like Blacksod.”
“By the way, Wolf,” said Mrs. Solent, speaking in her most high-pitched voice, “I met your friend Jason the other day in Lenty Lane, and we had quite a walk together. We went as far as the ridge-road to Ramsgard … you know? … by one of those little fieldpaths.”
“Mr. Jason, ma’am?” commented Mrs. Torp. “I do know he. I’d a-seen he, many a fine evenin’, a-traipsin home from Three Peewits.”
“I hope you enjoyed your walk,” said Gerda, gravely and politely, frowning at her mother.
“How did you and Jason get on?” asked Wolf. “I somehow can’t imagine you two together.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Solent, “I can’t quite tell whether my company pleased him or not. He talked most of the time about my neighbour, Roger Monk. He seems to have got into his head that the poor man spies upon him. I tried at first to disabuse him of that idea; but he got so agitated that I just let him go on. In the end he became quite charming. He recited to me a poem about a woodpecker, which I thought very pretty. He has such a nice voice when he recites, and the evening was so lovely after the rain that I really enjoyed it all very much.”
“No doubt Mr. Otter were sober as a jackdaw when ’a walked with ’ee, ma’am. I’m not saying he isn’t a nice-spoken gentleman, for he is. It’s not so much the drink they talk of, along of he, down where I do live, it’s—”
“Oh, Mother, please!” interrupted Gerda. “Do look, Mother, how nicely Mrs. Solent tied my sash!”
The girl got up from her chair and turned herself round. This gesture was evidently adored by Mrs. Solent, for she stretched out her arms and caught her by the waist and pulled her down upon her knee.
“I shall spoil your lovely dress,” Gerda cried nervously.
“You’re light as a feather, you sweet thing! You’re soft as swan’s-down.”
“She weren’t that light, ma’am, when she made herself stiff as pikestaff, on the day us bundled she down church-aisle for christening,” said Mrs. Torp. “But she were light enough, God-sakes, when she did play carry-me-over wi’ the lads!”
All this while, Wolf was pondering in his soul how it was that Nature had placed in the minds of all mothers, refined or unrefined, so large a measure of the heart of a procuress.
“And she were light enough—” Mrs. Torp was beginning again, when Gerda, jumping up in haste, ran round the table and clapped her hand over her mouth.
“Hush, Mummy, I won’t have it!” she cried.
At that moment there was a loud knocking at the front-door, and Wolf went across the passage and opened it.
Bob Weevil and Lobbie hurried into the room together, their caps in their hands. The young grocer looked a little embarrassed at the scene before him, and made a stiff bow to Mrs. Solent.
“Afternoon, marm,” he muttered.
But Lobbie was quite unperturbed.
“Dad’s comed home afore his time,” he cried, “and ’a be mumbling about his supper.”
“Shake hands with Mrs. Solent, Lob,” said Gerda severely.
But the boy had turned to his own parent.
“Mr. Valley said I was to ask you proper and right for promission,” he said eagerly, “promission for—”
“For what, ye staring toad?”
“Promission,” the boy went on, “for thik girt play next Thursday. The day arter tomorrow ’tis; and all the gentry be coming. And I be John the Baptist, what lived upon honey and the honeycomb!”
“Ye’ll live upon cabbage and the cabbage-stalk, ye impident sprout! I’ve a-heerd too much of your Mr. Valley and his goings-on.”
“Mother … Mother!” protested the unabashed Lob. But Mrs. Solent interrupted them.
“Don’t you worry, Mrs. Torp. I’m going to that entertainment myself, and I’ll see that this young man comes to no harm. I understand just what you feel. These clerical junketings are sometimes incredibly silly. But you can trust me. We’ll keep each other in sight, won’t we, Lobbie?” And she put her hand on the boy’s shoulder.
“Well, of course, if you answer for him, ma’am, I reckon I must be satisfied,” grumbled the monument-maker’s wife.
“Oh, I’ll look after him. Won’t I, Lobbie? And if Mr. Valley keeps us all up till midnight, you shall sleep at Lenty Cottage.”
Lob looked a little nervous at this prospect, but he expressed his thanks politely, and the incident appeared closed.
Meanwhile Wolf overheard the following conversation going on between Mr. Weevil and Gerda.
“Why, if that isn’t the very frock you wore, Gerdie, when we went to Weymouth, that grand excursion-day, years ago!”
“Yes, it is, Bob. Fancy your remembering! Mrs. Solent made me put it on.”
“And to think of that! And to think how we climbed down those slippery steps at the ferry, and how frightened you were of the green seaweed getting on you, and how we saw sea-anemones in the pools by Sandsfoot Castle, and you couldn’t abide the gun-firing out Portland-way. Think of that, Gerdie, the very same dress!”
“Do you think I’m too old to wear it now, Bob?”
“Ask me another, Gerdie! But it do make anyone feel sort of queer to see you like this. You know? It’s all the things it brings up, what a person’s clean forgotten.”
“You got no more memory than a pig, Bob Weevil.”
“Depends who and what and when,” was the grocer’s retort.
“Well, don’t you worry any more about it, Mrs. Torp,” repeated the lady in purple. “I promise to keep Mr. Valley in order. Or if I can’t, I’ll get someone who can. Lob shan’t make a fool of himself, or disgrace either John the Baptist or you. I quite look forward to it. We’ll have a fine bit of sport together, Lobbie, you and I, flirting across the footlights!”
“How did you get over today, Mrs. Solent?” enquired Gerda, cutting short Mr. Weevil’s memories with a furtive little movement of her hand—a movement that came as rather a surprise to Wolf, as he noted it in passing.
“Oh, Roger Monk drove me,” exclaimed Wolf’s mother. “And that reminds me … what’s the time, my son? … Good Lord! I’ve kept the man waiting already! I must go at once. I’m to meet him at the Three Peewits.”
“I’ll walk down with you, Mother,” said Wolf, glad enough to get a chance of escape. “Goodbye, Mrs. Torp. I know you’ll excuse me. Don’t hurry off, Bob. Why don’t you keep him for supper, Gerda? And Lobbie, too, if Mrs. Torp will let him stay?”
Mother and son walked leisurely down the clattering High Street.
“She’s certainly beautiful, your Gerda!” exclaimed the lady, after prolonged silence.
“She is,” admitted Wolf.
“But oh, dear! What an awful woman! Does she worry you much, my dabchick?”
“Worry me, Mother? Not one little bit! I very rarely see her, you know.”
There was another long pause between them.
“What’s going to happen when the History’s done, Wolf?”
“It may never be done, Mother! He’s got really interested in it at last, thank the Lord!”
“Wolf, dear—”
“Well, Mother?”
“I wouldn’t let Gerda have a child for quite a long while yet.”
“No, Mother.”
“I didn’t know that she and this Weevil boy were such old friends.”
Wolf swung his stick. Something about the inflexible determination of his mother’s profile, especially of her clear-cut chin, at that moment, roused an obscure feeling of rebellion in him.
“Why the devil not?” he cried. “Bob’s a mere kid. Gerda treats him exactly as she treats her brother.”
His voice had become high-pitched. That curious, furtive little movement of the hand, full of old familiarities, returned to him most teasingly.
“Don’t talk too loud,” murmured his mother. “We’re not in Lenty Lane.”
“Why did you say that?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said lightly. “Don’t take it too seriously. I only know from old experience that men never can be made to realize how susceptible women are except where they themselves are concerned.”
“Even when they love a person?” he enquired.
“What is love?” said Mrs. Solent.
He was silent; and the conversation between them took a less personal tone, till he saw her safely mounted in Mr. Urquhart’s dogcart, beside the tall manservant.
Instead of going straight home, he walked meditatively and slowly past the Malakite bookshop, and then at a more rapid pace followed the road that led up Babylon Hill. He did not turn, till, in the slanting rays of the sinking sun, he reached that corner of the ascent which he had noted from Christie’s window.
Could he distinguish her house among the rest? He was not sure. The rays of the great June sun were almost horizontal, as it sank down towards Glastonbury; and it was all he could do, even with his eyes shaded by his hand, to identify the portion of the town where the bookshop was. As to seeing Christie’s window, it was impossible.
Annoyed by this refusal of Nature to humour his mood, he advanced obstinately still further up the road, and finally reached the stile into the field-path that led to the turfy ramparts of Poll’s Camp.
There he sat down among the tall, uncut grasses of the wayside, and allowed the double stream of memories—those connected with Poll’s Camp and those connected with that invisible window below him—to contend for the mastery in his thoughts. The extraordinary thing was that all that poetry of his first encounter with Gerda seemed like something that had happened to some external portion of his nature, whereas this strange new understanding with Christie sank so deep into his being that it invaded regions of which he himself had hardly been aware.
He soon found out, as he sat there, with his back against that stile and the pungent smell of herb-Robert in his nostrils, how far this new feeling had gone.
His life had become so agitated since his arrival at Ramsgard, that now, at this moment, he felt he had more on his mind than he could disentangle. The spirit of the evening fell upon him with a burden that was mysteriously sad—sad with a multitude of gathering omens and indistinct threats. With all the evening noises around him—noises, some of them faint as the sighing of invisible reeds—he became once more conscious that between the iron-ribbed gaiety of his mother and the fixed grin of that paternal skull in the churchyard there was an ambiguous struggle going on, the issues of which remained dubious as life itself.
He found himself crying out to that irresponsible skull under the plantains; but the skull answered him with nothing but cynical mockery. He found himself turning restlessly towards his mother; but he felt that just at the point where he needed her sympathy most the very basic rock of her nature flung him contemptuously back.
On and on he sat, with that sinking sun growing redder and redder before him, and the evening murmurs gathering in his ears; and as he sat, an immense solitude descended upon him, and he began to realize, as he had never realized before, how profoundly alone upon this planet each individual soul really is.
And with this feeling there came over him a deep, disturbing craving for Christie—a craving so intense that the vision of all the length of all the days of his life without her seemed more than he could bear. “Only one life,” he thought to himself. “Only one life, between two eternities of nonexistence … and I am proposing deliberately to sacrifice in it the one thing that I really want!” He hugged his knees with tightly clasped fingers, and stared at the red orb before him, sinking now over Christie’s very roof.
For the first time in his mortal days this great diurnal spectacle seemed to his mind half-fantastic; as if this were not the real sun, the sun he had known all his life, that was descending; nor the earth he had known all his life that was thus hiding it from his eyes. “If I do give up Christie for Gerda,” he thought, “it will simply mean that the one unique experience destined for me out of all others by the eternal gods, has been deliberately thrown away.”
He bowed his head over his knees and watched the climbing of a tiny beetle up a bending stalk of grass. “To the universe,” he thought, “it matters no more whether I leave Gerda for Christie than whether that beetle reaches the top of that stalk! Gerda? … Christie? … What are they? Two skeletons covered with flesh; one richly and flexibly covered … one sparsely and meagrely covered! Two of them … that is all … just two of them!” And then, bowing his head still lower, so that the beetle and its grass-stalk almost filled up his whole vision, he began to imagine what it would be like if he did make some wild, desperate move. What would happen, for instance, if he were to carry Christie to London and get some job to support them both there, hidden from all the world? Gerda would return to her parents’ house. Old Malakite would get on somehow or other. His mother would … Well! What would his mother do? She had scarcely anything in the bank. Mr. Urquhart could hardly be expected to support her. No, it was unthinkable, impossible! The existence of his mother, her complete dependence on him, tied his hands fast and tight!
And then, with an overpowering surrender, there came upon him all his old childish clinging to that woman whose heart the licentiousness of his father had been unable to quell. He knew his own nature to be tough enough, but compared with his mother he was like an oak-sapling growing in the cleft of a rock. The woman was adamant, where he was merely obstinate. Rock-smooth she was, where he was merely gnarled and knotted and earth-rooted.
“Damn!” he muttered to himself, as he watched the beetle turn back resignedly within an inch of the stalk’s point, and begin a patient descent. “Damn! It’s just pure weakness and habit!”
But, oh, dear! How could he desert Gerda … how could he do it … after three lovely happy months; and without cause or reason save his own fickle madness?
Why had he married her at all? That was the whole blunder! He had married her because he had seduced her. But girls were always being seduced! That was no reason. No! He couldn’t get out of it. He had married her because he had mistaken a mixture of lust and romance for love; and if he hadn’t found Christie, he might, to the end of his days, never have discovered his mistake! Affection would have superseded lust; tenderness would have superseded romance. All would have been well. It was Christie’s appearance that had changed everything; and there it was! Christie and he were bound together now, come good, come ill. But as things were, so they must remain! If his soul was Christie’s, his life must go on being his mother’s and Gerda’s. There was no other issue.
Abruptly he lifted up his head. The sun was so low now that he could look straight into its great red circle suspended above the roofs of the town. It resembled, as he looked at it, a vast fiery tunnel, the mouth of some colossal piece of artillery, directed full against him. With screwed-up eyelids he returned the stare of this bloodred cannon-mouth; and as he fronted it, it seemed to him that a dusky figure took shape within it, a figure resembling Jason Otter’s abominable idol.
There was something so atrocious in the idea of this dusky demon being there at all—being, so to say, the great orb’s final expression as it went down—that he leaped to his feet in indignant protest. His movement brought the blood from his head, and the phantasm vanished. Slowly and inevitably, with a visible sliding descent, the red globe sank out of sight; and Wolf picked up his hat and stick. “It must be long after eight,” he thought. “I must get home to Gerda.”