The Quick or the Dead?
Gerda was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, when Wolf got into bed beside her that night on February the twenty-fifth. He was physically so exhausted with walking and so drowned by exposure to the wind, that he soon sank into oblivion himself; and all night the two lay side by side, their heads, their hips, their knees frequently touching, but their souls restlessly wandering far apart.
The first feeling he had when he awoke was a faint impression of moss and earth-mould. Then he realized that the sky between the curtains was of a deep blue. He had opened the window wide before getting into bed; and the room was full of a delicious relaxed air that must have blown over leagues of Somersetshire pastures.
“It’s impossible,” he thought, “that I shouldn’t be able to deal with everything, when Nature can produce mornings like this!” He propped himself up on his arm and gazed down upon the figure by his side, struck once again, as he always was, by the freshness of her beauty. She stirred in her sleep and turned her head.
“Her profile is flawless,” he thought. “How do these classic faces come to exist in these parts at all?”
He bent down over the sleeping girl as tenderly as he might have done over the first cuckooflower of the season. “It’s happened at last,” he said to himself. “She’s let him have her … just to revenge herself about the cheque and about everything else she endures in her life with me! I’m a cuckold at last. I’ve always wondered what it would feel like; and now I know. I don’t feel anything! I’m just a mirror for her feelings. It’s been so bad for her that it’s of her I think … entirely … absolutely!”
The girl stirred again, more uneasily than before. There came a frown between her eyebrows, and her nostrils quivered. She turned her head from side to side, like a person in a fever or a person whose limbs and arms are paralyzed. Deep in Wolf’s heart, as he stared at her, there gathered a fundamental decision. Formless at first, it rolled together in the recesses of his nature like a rack of clouds on a misty horizon. Then suddenly it tossed forth a coherent resolution. “I won’t let the water-rat keep her. Cuckold or no cuckold, I love her. She’s been miserable about it. I won’t give her up!”
At that moment, disturbed by the magnetism of his look, Gerda opened her eyes. He bent and kissed her; and as he lifted his head again, he saw a lovely smile flicker across her face. “She’d forgotten the whole thing!” he thought, as he watched this smile vanish away and the same rigid, unhappy look come back. She made a movement to extricate her arm from the bedclothes, but the look upon her face was sufficient. He scrambled to his knees and slipped out of bed.
The day being Sunday, there was no need for them to have their breakfast as early as this; but the bright sunshine and the warm, spring-scented air made the hour seem later than it really was.
All that morning they were both like persons on the deck of a becalmed ship, who move restlessly, hurriedly, through familiar tasks, in preparation for some drastic event. Over and over again Wolf was on the point of launching forth into a passionate declaration that what had occurred made no difference … that he loved her just the same … that he blamed himself over the matter of the cheque. But every time he formulated such words and was on the verge of expressing them, that look of hers froze them in the utterance. She held him helpless and mute by that look. It was like a ceremonial death-cloth wrapped round a living head.
When the housework was quite done—and he noticed that she did it much more conscientiously than usual, as though making excuses to prolong it—she announced her intention of going over to Chequers Street. “If Lobbie hasn’t gone out yet,” she said, “and I’m pretty sure he won’t have, I’ll get him to go down by the river with me.”
“You’ll be back for lunch, won’t you, honey?” He threw into these words all the supplication he could.
“No, Wolf, I don’t think so,” she replied slowly. “I think I’ll get mother to make up some sandwiches, like she used to in the old days, when Lob and I went down to the Lunt. I’ll be back for tea, though. You can put on the kettle at five, if I’ve not come then. I won’t be much later than that.”
Wolf’s memory rushed away to that March evening by the banks of the river … to the shed in the middle of the wet grass … to the yellow bracken. It struck his mind as ominous, if not tragic, that at this juncture she should instinctively revert to Lobbie and the Lunt. But he made no attempt to dissuade her. “She thinks it’s pride in me that I don’t,” he said to himself. “It isn’t that! It’s respect for her. It’s respect for her life. It’s respect for her identity.”
“Where will you get your dinner?” she said at last, standing between the crocuses and the pink hyacinths, while Wolf still held their front-door open. His heart leaped up at this word. Was it an overture, a motion towards him?
“Oh, I expect I’ll find enough in the cupboard, sweetheart,” he said lightly; but into these words also he threw a caressing supplication. “If not, I’ll see if my mother’s in … or Christie,” he added.
At the sound of Christie’s name she did fumble for a second with her gloved fingers upon the top of the iron gate, while her head sank down in intense thought.
“Wait a minute, Gerda!” he cried, noting this hesitation. He ran back into the hall and returned with his hat and stick. “I’ll come with you as far as their house.”
She made no objection to this; and as he shut the gate behind them, the particular feel of the ironwork and the noise of the latch brought back to his mind some occasion in the past when they had embraced each other, just there, in a rush of happy reconciliation. He glanced at the pigsty across the road. There wasn’t a hint upon the air today of anything but the spring.
“Gerda,” he said, when they were well past the street-corner, a vantage-ground that served the idlers of their quarter in lieu of a tavern-bar, “I don’t want you to think I’m a bit jealous of poor old Bob. It’s only fair you should have a friend you’re fond of, in the sort of way I’m fond of Christie.”
She was silent for a couple of seconds; and his words seemed to make the lines between the paving-stones, as he stared at the ground, turn into the rungs of a ladder upon which it was necessary to place his feet very carefully, because the space between gaped and yawned.
Then she said slowly: “There … would … have … been … a time … for telling me … that, Wolf. Better say no more about it today.”
He held his peace after that, and they reached the monument-maker’s house just as the “five-minutes” bell of the parish-church began to ring, indicating that it was service-time.
The warmth of the day was phenomenal. A light, vaporous mist, balmy and fragrant, as though millions of primrose-buds had opened beneath it and millions of jonquils had poured their sweetness into it, hung over the lintels of the houses and floated in and out of the doorways. Filmy white clouds, so feathery that they faded into the air at their outer edges, swept northwards over the roofs of the town; while the liquid blue of the sky, visible in fluctuating pools and estuaries between those fleecy vapours, seemed to obliterate everything that was hard and opaque from the whole terrestrial globe. So flowing and so diffused was the heaven above, that it seemed to spill and brim over, making the pavements underfoot appear like clouds too, and the patches of grass in that or this little garden like interstices of another, a second sky, whose receding depths were green instead of blue!
Groups of churchgoers were moving languidly past the gate of the Torp yard under the urge of their various pious purposes; and in his growing distress at the set, indrawn look on his girl’s face, Wolf felt mocked and taunted by the somnolent leisureliness of those people’s voices and by the fresh neatness of their clothes.
Not another interchange of real feeling could he obtain with her until they knocked at her father’s door; and it was a sharp stab to him to think that this was actually the first time since their marriage that they had presented themselves together at this threshold.
Lobbie himself opened the door to them, and they found the whole family collected in the front-room. Mrs. Torp, having obviously finished making the beds and tidying up the kitchen, for she wore a dirty apron over her Sunday dress, had recently dropped into a chair opposite her husband, from which island of peace she had clearly been flinging abroad volleys of belligerent eloquence; for the plump shirt-sleeved monument-maker had a fixed expression upon his face, at once crushed and protesting—an expression that remained visible even after the stir of their arrival.
“I’ve only come in for a moment,” said Wolf, taking Mrs. Torp’s vacated chair, as the lady led her daughter away to pour her troubles into a feminine ear; “but I think Gerda intends to stay. Well, Lobbie, you certainly caught a big fish yesterday! I must congratulate you. Season or no season, it’s the biggest perch I’ve ever seen!”
“My old woman have been skinnin’ the poor lad like a fish ’isself, just as you were coming in,” said Mr. Torp. “She says I encourage he in they scallywag larks. I don’t encourage yer, do I, Lob Torp?”
The boy glanced uneasily at the kitchen-door, from behind which his mother’s voice was still audible.
“She were out for mischief, Mister,” he whispered solemnly, “else she would never have meddled wi’ I! What did she reckon she wanted, walking in they wet fields afore ’twas light? And she spoke to I twice afore I hooked thik girt fish. Be I’d been little, like I were wunst, she’d have made I run home quaking and shaking! Do ’ee know what she said to I, Mister? Her came ’long o’ thik hedge-side path what leads from Farmer’s Rest to Pond Lane. I saw she coming and I wished myself anywhere; for I reckoned the wold chap had gone and hid ’isself; and her were after he; both on ’em nigh crazy, as you might say! Her came walking straight to where I were, stepping silent, like any wold cow, and when she’d looked at that cold water awhile her kind o’ shook. ‘Have ’ee seen it?’ she said. ‘Seen what, Miss Bess?’ I said. ‘The face under the water,’ said she, ‘what they all talk of up at Rest.’ ‘I bain’t looking for no faces,’ said I. ‘I be fishing for perch.’ ‘ ’Twill be seen,’ she said, ‘ ’Twill be seen, till one that be living now be where it be … then ’twill fade out.’ It were when she were saying ‘fade out,’ just like that, that I saw me float bob down. You can believe, Mister, that a fellow had no time then for a woman’s foolishness! But ’twere naught to she what my float were doing. ‘ ’Twas thik face in this here water,’ said she, ‘what worrited uncle. Thik face will be seen by all and sundry,’ said she, ‘till the time come when—’ ”
Lobbie’s discourse was interrupted by a sudden movement by his father. Mr. Torp got up from his chair. “You stop that now!” he roared. “You stop that or I’ll call you mother to ’ee! Sunday be Sunday, I say, and Mr. Solent be our visitor. If Providence have on’s mind to afflict such a gentleman, ’tis his wone concern! This house be my house, Lob Torp; and this morning be Sunday morning. So shut thy mouth about faces in ponds!”
So loud was the voice of Mr. Torp, that no sooner had he resumed his seat than his wife and Gerda burst in.
“What’s this about Sunday, John?” said the lady sharply. “Can’t you leave that boy in peace for a moment when my back’s turned? If it be Sunday, what of it? Here’s our Gerdie asking for nice meat-sandwiches for to take the lad picnicking. Mr. Solent says he can’t stay, so me and you can do what I was telling ’ee just now … go quiet and natural to Nevilton meeting. What do ’ee think I went to the trouble of putting my best dress on for? To hot up yesterday’s Yorkshire pudding? If some can eat cold meat, others can eat cold meat. There’ll never be, all Spring I tell ’ee, such a day for me and you to cover them quiet miles.”
Mr. Torp permitted himself a swift, humorous leer at his preoccupied son-in-law.
“What is Nevilton meeting, Mrs. Torp?” enquired Wolf, with forced vivacity.
“ ’Tis Mother’s favourite preacher,” interposed Lobbie. “Old Farmer Beard, Mr. Manley’s friend, fetches he in dogcart, from Ilchester. ’A be a Baptist, mister, the kind that washes grown folk all over like babies. Mother goes to hear he, because ’a says all drinking-men, like our Dad, will be burnt cruel, come Judgement. Mother likes for Dad to hear they things; but Dad be a churchman, same as I be, what don’t hold with such conclusions. Dad and me be High-Church. Mother be Evangelic.”
Mrs. Torp untied her apron and began folding it up. It was clear from her expression that wrath at her offspring’s impudence was qualified by pride in his capacity for fine theological distinctions. She began a rambling eulogy upon the preacher from Ilchester, punctuated by irritable exclamations, as she hunted in vain about the room for some tract or hymnbook connected with this celebrity.
But Wolf had no attention just then for anybody but Gerda, whose abstracted look of settled misery, as she sat upright upon a straight-backed chair against the wall, pierced him to the heart.
“She’s given herself to that little ass,” he thought, “out of pure spite; and it’s broken up all her self-respect.”
Mrs. Torp’s project of making Mr. Torp walk five miles that afternoon to hear himself damned became a desolate background now—like that marble table in the Weevil villa—to this wretched crisis in his life. The idea of some stuffy little room in Nevilton—a village he particularly admired—resounding to the voice of this protégé of Mr. Beard, on a day like this, seemed to paint the whole Dorset landscape with a mud-coloured pigment. A bitter, masculine anger stirred within him at the destructive emotionalism of these women, unable, as they always were, to “leave well alone.”
And it did not lessen his agitation to think of Gerda’s blind, desperate instinct to take refuge with Lobbie, her old childish companion, down there in those Lunt meadows! Just exactly a year ago since the three of them had come home through the spring twilight … and now she was to carry her sandwiches to the very spot, eat them with Lob on the trunk of that very tree, set eyes, perhaps, on that very shed, and nothing to persuade her to let him join them.
A pitiful craving came upon him to take her in his arms and purge her bedevilled memory of every trace of that lecherous water-rat. And Christie too—why must Christie, in some crazy psychic mood, go and stir up the villainous fires of that old man’s smouldering lust? The words that he had read in that fatal exercise-book wrote themselves on the Torp wall as he stared at it. If he hadn’t made love to her and then drawn back in the way he did, she’d be still just as she used to be, immune as the flowers on her mantelpiece to that old satyr’s approaches.
Gerda’s abstraction had by this time become so extreme, her face so sad, that he couldn’t bear it any longer. He walked across to her; and in a low, emphatic voice, under cover of Mrs. Torp’s voluble hunt for her lost pamphlet, he begged for leave to accompany them on their excursion.
“It’s too late, Wolf!” she repeated, looking at him with eyes that seemed five years older than they’d been yesterday. “Haven’t I told you it is? Why do you keep teasing me so?”
He bent down above her now and lowered his voice to a whisper.
“It isn’t too late, Gerda. You’re taking everything much too hard! I love you far too much for anything to be too late!”
But the tenderness in his voice only seemed to irritate her. She flashed a look at him of aversion, of contempt. “You are a fool, Wolf,” she whispered. “I never supposed you were quite such a fool!”
Then she jumped to her feet. “Come on, Mother! Never mind those Nevilton hymns. Lobbie and I want to start in a minute. Come, both of you, and let’s make the sandwiches!”
Her mother and brother followed her into the kitchen, and Wolf was left alone with Mr. Torp.
“Cold meat for me dinner, and hot damnation for me pudding, seems so!” remarked that good man. “Well, if I’ve got to walk to Nevilton this afternoon, I shall traipsy round to ostler Jim’s this morning. He’ll be finished cleaning up in Peewits backyard by now; and him and me can sit snug for a while … ‘doors all locked and maids all mum,’ as the saying is.”
Even while he was still speaking, Mr. Torp was shuffling into his Sunday coat and straightening his Sunday tie. Wolf picked up his hat and stick.
“Well, I’ll be moving on too, I think.” He spoke louder than was necessary, in order to let Gerda know he was going. But there was no voice or sign from the kitchen.
“Goodbye, Mr. Torp,” he said, shaking his father-in-law’s hand warmly. “Be careful of that ostler’s backroom, or your preacher will catch you on the hop.”
“Don’t ’ee worry, Mr. Solent,” returned the other; “and do ’ee bear in mind thee own self what I told ’ee yesterday. Not a man of us, these shifty times, nor a gentleman neither, can see what bides for’n. ’Tisn’t as ’twere when I were young. Life be a wink of the eyelid, these times; and only them as jumps the ditches goes dry to bed!”
Once back again in the sun-warmed quietness of Chequers Street, Wolf, after walking a step or two, paused to take counsel with himself.
“She’ll be back for tea,” he thought, “and then I’ll talk to her. I’ll make her take this affair lightly. But no more of Weevil. She must be quit of Weevil. Cuckold I am. Wittold I refuse to be!”
He drew pensive patterns on the sunlit pavement with the end of his stick. All manner of contradictory projects floated through his brain as to how to spend the long, tantalizing hours between this and five o’clock. Of these notions one lodged itself finally in his mind as the very thing indicated by the occasion. He would consult the most cynical of all his oracles! How many months was it since he had last been over there … since he had gazed straight down through the clay to where the skull grinned back at him? Too long … too long! Yes, that is what he would do. He would visit “old Truepenny.” Nothing would make the hours pass quicker than that!
He looked at his watch. It was a quarter to twelve; and he knew there was a Sunday train to Ramsgard at twelve-fifteen.
“I’ll have hours for walking back … hours and hours,” he said to himself. “I’ll come by the highroad. I’d like to find a way through the Gwent Lanes, if there be time.”
Then suddenly an idea came into his head that brought a rush of blood and a faint, pricking sensation to the flesh that covered his cheekbones. Why not run in to Christie’s for a second, and see if she’d go with him? Damn!—but there might be somebody he knew on the platform or in the train. They’d probably—just because it was such a heavenly day—find Miss Gault at the cemetery!
No, it was too risky. “But I’ll run in a second, anyway,” he thought, “and see what she says.”
A few minutes later he found himself ringing the bell at the Malakite side-door.
All was silent in the little alley. He could see some brilliant patches of green, swimming in pools of sunlight, in the small garden. Then a faint shuffling of feet came along the pavement, outside in the road. That shuffling and the beating of his heart were the only sounds. All Blacksod lay immersed in a golden mist of quiet. He rang the bell again. “In a minute,” he thought, “I shall hear her coming down! The old man may sleep late o’ Sundays; but she’ll be up.”
The shuffling steps in the road came to a pause.
“Mister!”
He turned towards the voice. It was a little, old-fashioned maid carrying a prayerbook.
“If it’s the Malakites you want, mister, I saw them pass my house, down-street, an hour agone. They were dressed for travel; so it did look to me! I reckon they were minded to catch the eleven-three to Weymouth.”
Wolf left the door and advanced to meet the speaker. He knew her now as one of the shopgirls in Pimpernel’s. He had often bought cakes of her for Gerda. She was reputed to be a Roman Catholic.
“Dressed for an excursion, eh, miss?” he said lightly. “That eleven-three goes straight through to Weymouth, doesn’t it? Well, they certainly have a lovely day!”
The little Catholic walked hurriedly on. “She’ll miss her great miracle if she’s not quick,” he thought. “Don’t they say the words exactly at noon?”
All the way to the station he tried to concentrate his mind on the mystery of the Mass. “The Christ of these priests,” he thought, “is a totally different god from the Jesus of Mr. Beard’s preacher. Which of ’em would help me most at this juncture, ha? Which of them?”
It was only when he was sitting alone in a third-class smoking-carriage, staring out of the window at Melbury Bub, that the full bitterness of this last piece of news grew ripe for tasting.
“She ought to have known I’d look in today,” he thought. “She ought to have known it.” And then he thought: “Natural enough to go to Weymouth on a sunshiny March day! Mr. Malakite … and his daughter … at Weymouth. I expect they’ll lie down on those dry sands where the donkeys are. They’ll probably have lunch at the ‘Dorothy’ and then go for a row, or cross over the ferry to the Nothe and walk to Sandsfoot Castle. Perhaps they’ll go past Brunswick Terrace and walk across Lodmore.”
Oh, it was all natural enough! If only he hadn’t come across that exercise-book. But an imaginative girl like Christie might exaggerate a thousand little nothings. Besides, Slate was a story. It wasn’t a diary. It revealed nothing … nothing at all … except her thoughts!
Gerda too. … He hadn’t seen anything. He hadn’t caught them at anything … except sitting in the dark. What if that also were a fancy of his own? He leaned forward and clasped his hands over his knees. Oh, this was the worst state of all! Not to be quite sure. The train was passing close to King’s Barton now. There was the great perpendicular tower … there was the churchyard! He unclasped his hands and sat sideways against the window, trying to make out Redfern’s headstone; but the train moved too fast. He thought he caught a glimpse of it, but he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure of anything!
Hardly anyone else got out when he reached Ramsgard. “If I meet Miss Gault,” he thought, “I shall be rude to her.”
He skirted the Public Gardens and hurried past the Lovelace. “Is that old waiter there still?” he wondered. At the sight of the workhouse, the personality of his father seemed to beckon him, to welcome him; but it was still only as a skull. The skull knew he was coming, though; and it was glad! The skull of old “Truepenny” was the only brain in the world whose thoughts he could read! Eyeless sockets deceived no one.
He was passing the slaughterhouse now. “I’ve only touched meat once,” he thought, “since she talked to me that day. But if I see her at his grave I shall sheer off and not go near it!”
When he came to the hole in the fence that led to that portion of the cemetery where the paupers were buried, he recalled how startled he’d been when he saw Miss Gault go down on her hands and knees to get through this aperture. So well did he remember that incident as he himself now went down on his hands and knees, that while a clump of dock-weeds struck cold against his face, he became suddenly certain that Miss Gault was there now.
Yes! If she wasn’t there, her spirit was most certainly there. He scrambled to his feet, feeling sure that he would see her; and there she was! She was seated upon a grave over against William Solent’s. On her lap was a paper of sandwiches, in her hands a book. She was munching and reading at the same time, her hat on the grave by her side, her large black boots emerging from beneath a voluminous skirt, whose stiff folds suggested the Melancholia of Albert Dürer.
He had vowed he would bolt if he saw her that day, but instead of that he pulled off his cloth-cap with effusive humility and stepped over the intervening mounds.
“Miss Gault!”
She must have marked him down while he was under the fence, and been merely gathering her wits; for all she did now was to raise her eyes and blink at him.
“So you’ve come at last, boy!”
He moved up to her, laid his hand upon one of hers, as it still clutched the paper of sandwiches, and sat down.
“Everyone seems eating sandwiches today,” he threw out.
“Best thing to do, boy,” she replied; “best thing to do! They’re lettuce.”
“What a day it is, isn’t it, Miss Gault?” he murmured vaguely, glancing at the words “William Solent,” upon which the sun was pouring its friendliest benediction.
She peered obliquely into his face. “What’s the matter with you, boy?” she said earnestly; and then, with a nervous apology in her tone, “It’s Emma’s day out; so I thought I might as well have a picnic.”
“Oh, I’m all right, Miss Gault! Tired of school, perhaps. But we’ve all got to feel the pinch somewhere.”
“Take off your cap, Wolf, and let me look at you.”
He threw his cap down on the grass and accepted a sandwich which she held out to him.
“Why, you’ve got grey hairs!” she cried. “You hadn’t one when you came to me a year ago.”
“Dorset air,” he remarked grimly.
“And you’ve got lines there; and your mouth is different; and you’re a lot thinner!”
“Hard work!” he threw out. “I’ve done Urquhart’s book for him though … and I’ve been paid for it.”
She turned round fully towards him now and laid both book and sandwiches on the ground. He noted that the volume was Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. He also noted an empty medicine-bottle beside her, blurred with the whiteness of milk, upon whose orifice three black flies had settled.
“You’re thoroughly unhappy, my dear,” said Miss Gault. “I can see it in everything about you. What is it, Wolf? It’s ridiculous not to confide in an ugly old woman like me! What is it, Wolf?”
A sound of bells came to them at that moment, carried on a gust of soft air that was like dark, sweet rainwater.
“The Abbey,” murmured Miss Gault. “They’re out of church; but they always go on ringing those bells.”
“I like to hear them,” he responded; and then, with a sigh: “I suppose it’s the same with everyone. Life doesn’t get easier.”
A kind of disintegrating softness had fallen upon him. The vaporous sunshine, the dreamy light-blowing air, the imponderable fragrance, seemed to combine to melt some basic resistance in his bones. He felt as if there were arising from that place of mortality a sweet, faint, relaxing breath, full of the deliciousness of luxurious dissolution.
The distant bells suggested the greenish fluidity, flowing and fluctuating, of the fan-tracery under the Abbey-roof. They suggested the centuries of calm, irresponsible repose that weighed on that royal coffin under the Abbey-floor! What did it matter that a girl called Gerda had abandoned her body to a youth called Weevil? What did it matter that a lecherous old bookseller was giving his daughter a day on Weymouth Beach?
So indifferent to all human fates did he feel just then, that, after swallowing the last morsel of his sandwich and wiping his fingers on the grass, he stretched out his feet in front of him, brushed the flies away from the empty bottle, and gave himself up to a physical sensation of being an integral portion of this wide, somnolent landscape!
“I am Poll’s Camp,” he would have said, if the sensation had articulated itself. “I am Lovelace Park. I am the Gwent Lanes. I am Nevilton Hill. I am Melbury Bub. I am Blackmore Vale and High Stoy. It is over me that Gerda and Lob are now walking, down there by the Lunt.”
“Why don’t you tell me what’s the matter, boy?” repeated Miss Gault. “Don’t you care anything about me? Is my friendship of no value to you at all?”
Her words seemed as much a part of the balmy light-fluttering air above him as his own body was a part of the earth-mould below him.
Feebly, with less energy than he had used to brush away the flies from the bottle, he analyzed his inertia. “I have killed my life-illusion,” he thought. “I am as dead as William Solent. I’ve got no pride, no will, no identity left.” He fixed his eyes on his father’s headstone, across which there kept fluttering the shadow of an unbudded branch from a little tree near the fence. He tried to visualize the skull under that mound. It was still of the skull, rather than of coffin or skeleton, that he thought! But this also seemed to have lost its identity. No cynical grin came back towards him from down there. No sardonic commentary upon his predicament rose to mock him or to reassure him.
Suddenly he was aware that Miss Gault was speaking rapidly, excitedly.
“But you needn’t tell me, boy. I keep my eyes and my ears about me. I know where you’re always going! It’s those Malakites have got hold of you. It’s that Malakite girl that’s the trouble. You’re being unfaithful to that wife of yours. I knew it would end like this. I knew it was all a woeful mistake. These marriages out of one’s class never do succeed and never will. The truth is, boy, that you don’t know yourself, or what you really need, any more than that stick of yours does! You’re making yourself ill with remorse, when neither of those little Blacksod hussies cares a fig about your feelings … or about your faithfulness either. Why, they’ve been brought up to be as indiscriminate as flies! You don’t know our Dorsetshire lower classes, boy. They haven’t the same feelings, they’re not human in the same way as we are. And what’s more, Wolf, let me tell you this”—her voice deepened to a discordant harshness, and she seized the Golden Treasury and beat it against the ground—“you’re not really in love with either of them! If you were, you’d choose between them. You’re one of those men like Jason Otter, like Mr. Urquhart, who in their hearts hate women. It was sheer madness your ever picking up this Torp girl. If Ann hadn’t been such a feather-headed fool she’d have stopped you! Ann is so full of her own pranks, that you’re just a pet to her, a great baby-pet! If Ann had been a different sort of person, you’d never have got mixed up with these Malakites. I told her myself what would come of it! I told her in my own drawing-room, while Emma was spoiling the teacakes, that day she called on me. I said to her, ‘If you can’t keep your boy from that bookshop he’ll go the way his father went!’ That’s what I said to her. I remember it because I was unkind to Emma afterwards about the teacakes! But Ann only laughed. That mother of yours doesn’t any more know the difference between good and evil than between—” The excited woman broke off in a half-humorous chuckle.
But before this diatribe had finished, Wolf had pulled in his legs and straightened his back. Something deeper in him than the grin of that skull down there, deeper than the drowsy deliciousness of the day, twitched, contracted, tightened. The ancient, unconscious tug of the navel-string, or what bound his flesh to the flesh that had conceived it, roused him from his torpor.
He saw that hard, ruddy, ironic face. He saw that gallant chin. He heard those light, reckless, defiant tones.
“I’m with you, Mother!” he thought, while his lip trembled. “I’m with you, whatever any of them say! Good or evil, I’m with you!”
Miss Gault paid no attention to this stiffening of the figure at her side. Her thoughts too, it seemed, had wandered to the roots of the past.
“William! William!” she groaned aloud. “I’d have held you. I’d have peaked and pined to hold you. I’d have slaved for you, watched for you, wasted for you, and always forgiven you!”
Completely unaware of the effect of her words upon her companion, she turned her great wild-horse eyes, the whites of which showed desperate in the sunshine, from Wolf to the grave and back again from the grave to Wolf.
“I only pray, boy,” she went on, “that you’ll never meet a woman who’ll love you as I loved him down there. If you do, you’ll kill her with the Ann Haggard in your brain. We’re all of us flinty enough, boy—base and flinty; but I’ve never met a person who gloried in it as your mother does! Oh, love him, boy! Love him, love him, as I’ve loved him for twenty-five years!”
Wolf lurched to his feet and stood erect. The struggle that had been going on so long within him between his father and his mother had reached a crisis. He had come here to range himself with that skull, to cry to it for a sign in his trouble; but this woman’s desperation had wrought a change in him. His mother’s words of yesterday rose up in his mind. His father must have lodged himself like an undying snake in Miss Gault’s bosom! Would it be with his mother or with his father that he would range himself now, were this accusing creature with the pendulous lip and the vast black lap the very Judgement of God? With which of them? With which of them?
With his mother! Out of that hard, ironic flesh he had been torn. Good or bad, he was on her side. Good or bad, he would be judged with her!
“I’ve listened long enough,” he said sternly. “I came to him alone. I came for my own reasons. I didn’t come to side with you against her.”
Miss Gault jumped up so impetuously that one of her feet tripped upon the empty bottle. Her intention was apparently to rush over the grave; but this misadventure sent her stumbling towards it, her great body bent forward and her arms outspread, till she fell on her knees against it. Crouched and hunched there like an immense black dog, she emitted a pitiful, hardly human groan. Then she twisted her head round so that one of her troubled eyes was just able to meet Wolf’s indignant stare.
From the depths of this eye—as from a water-hole in the crust of nature—a look shot at him that he never forgot. But he moved forward until he faced her; and she sank then into an easier position, yet still remained upon her knees.
“He had you always in his mind,” she gasped. “You’ve never thought about that, have you? He was too proud to say a word. Oh, he had a soul worth a dozen Anns!”
The challenge of Miss Gault’s spirit, flung at him through that wild-horse look, was a challenge from his mother’s enemy.
It was then that anger overcame pity in Wolf’s heart. “Do you understand,” he burst out, “I happen to care a good deal for my mother? We’ve lived together more closely than anyone knows. Do you understand? More closely than anyone knows.”
The crouching woman jerked out two long, dark-sleeved arms.
“Go back to her, then!” she screamed, waving her hands as if she were driving off a jackal from a dead body. “Take her back to London! Don’t let us see either of your faces again!”
Without a word or a gesture in response to this, Wolf wearily picked up his stick from the grass and strode over the graves to the gap in the fence.
“Back to London?” he muttered, as he went down on all fours and butted his way through the opening. “That’s what Jason said. They’ll get it lodged in my brain before they’ve done! But I won’t go. ‘There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all.’ ”
Once outside in the road, there came to him a troublesome stab of remorse. He had always been so indulgent to what Miss Gault had to say about his mother. Why should he have turned on her like that just then?
He was half tempted to drop down on his knees again and crawl back. He stood still, listening attentively; but there was not the faintest sound from in there. The living woman was as quiet as the dead man. Ay! the god of human sorrow is a man; but Love crucifies women.
Grasping his stick below the handle, he hardened his heart and hurried off towards Ramsgard. When he reached the workhouse, he looked at his watch. It was only half-past two. He had two hours and a half before teatime.
On the side of the road opposite the workhouse was a low stone wall. The garden of some tradesman’s house was separated from the pavement by this wall, on the top of which grew thick green moss. The Ramsgard people being all at their noon-meal, he had the pavement to himself; and he stopped and stared at this coping of moss. Hooking his stick on his elbow, he laid both hands upon the top of this wall; and the life of the moss seemed to pass into his nerves. It was at this moment that he heard a boy’s shrill scream from an unseen playground behind the house which appertained to this garden. The sound was not repeated; but Wolf clenched his teeth. “It’s one of the Houses of the School. It’s a bully,” he thought. And then he found himself muttering a deadly curse. “You brute! you brute!—Never, till you die, shall you dare to do that again!”
Then it suddenly occurred to him that he had his back to the workhouse.
“I wonder if my father could see this wall from the room where he died? I expect he could.” He walked on into the outskirts of the town. The lane which he followed emerged into a narrow road, where the chilly, newly-budded hedges alternated with small stone houses, standing back from the thoroughfare and approached by little stone paths. He caught sight of an old man, sitting on a trim bench in one of those little gardens, with a look of the most supreme contentment on his face as he smoked his pipe and watched the passersby. There was a white cat at his feet and a clump of daffodils in the flowerbed beside him; and bathed as he was in the mellow afternoon light, his leathery, secretive, roguish countenance—he might have been the owner of some little shop or a retired gardener—seemed to gather to itself the whole long history of Ramsgard and its famous school, from the time when King Aethelwolf was buried in the Abbey to the time Miss Gault’s father became headmaster!
This sly, sagacious, whimsical old man had nothing of the taciturnity of a remote village about him; still less had he the urbanity of a large town. He was as much a product of certain peculiar local traditions—in this case urbane gentility mingling with urbane obsequiousness—as if he had been a rare beetle in the hazel-copses of High Stoy or a specimen of the “Lulworth Skipper” butterfly on the Dorsetshire coast!
Wolf couldn’t resist a spasm of envy as he paused for a second to peer up at this old rascal, sucking his pipe, cogitating upon his savings in Stuckey’s Bank, leering at the lads and lasses who passed his gate. … Free from all remorse, all misgiving, how greatly did that old villain enjoy life! Ay, he was as selfish as his cat—as those yellow daffodils in that flowerbed! Before he left him Wolf had a queer hallucination. He saw this perfectly well-behaved old man in the shape of a plump, blunt-nosed maggot, peering out from a snug little crack in the woodwork of a blistering cross, on which hung, all in her long black skirt the form of Selena Gault!
Wolf walked on, but he couldn’t help pondering on the kind of self-centredness that had enabled this old demon to last so long. What would he have made of it if, on some business-trip to London, he had encountered that Waterloo-steps face? Just thought: “That fellow ought to be in the workhouse. They oughtn’t to allow such people here.” Or he would have simply regarded him as part of the station, no more than a door, a post, an iron ornamentation, an advertisement-board!
Very likely this old man was the headmaster’s gardener, and had worked in his day for Miss Gault’s father. Well, which had got the most out of life, Miss Gault, hunched up over there in the pauper’s plot, or this merry old man with his white cat?
Miss Gault loved cats too. Some who loved cats had to eat their sandwiches upon graves. This citizen of Ramsgard had a different destiny. …
Wolf moved on up the road, passing an increasing number of lively Sunday-afternoon strollers. What, he wondered, were Gerda and Lobbie doing at that moment? Where were Christie and the old man? He came to a halt just then. Should he, after all, go to Ramsgard station and take the train, instead of walking? No sooner had this idea entered his head than he decided to follow it. He would have plenty of time to change his mind again if there were no train.
“I’ll go into the Abbey for a minute,” he thought. He turned northward and entered the town by way of a field-path past the massive wall of the Preparatory School. When he got close to the Abbey, he encountered several groups of straw-hatted boys, and the sight of them put him in mind of Mr. Smith. What would he have felt about the marriage of Lorna’s daughter? From the straw-hats his mind slid to Mattie, like a loaded trunk down a ship’s gangway. Would she make Darnley happy? Would she be happy herself?
He caught sight of a pair of immaculately handsome lads, arm in arm, each radiating delight in the touch of his companion. He saw them reject with mechanical indifference the appeal of a dilapidated tramp who had evidently singled them out from the rest, hoping that the happiness which surrounded them like an aura would redound to his advantage.
It was at this moment that he heard himself called by name.
“Wolf! It is you! I saw you first!”
He swung round, and there were Mattie and Olwen.
As he responded to the little girl’s excited embrace, which was so emphatic that it attracted a glance of haughty disapproval from one of the straw-hatted pair, he had time to note that this was the second time today that a person’s presence had communicated itself to him before it appeared in the flesh.
He made no bones about kissing his half-sister very tenderly across Olwen’s woollen cap; and the two straw-hatted ones drew away, evidently feeling that the emotions of the populace were a discordant note in that privileged place.
“We walked over, Wolf,” the girl said. “That’ll do, Olwen! Darnley wanted to have a walk with his mother. Jason’s writing poetry in the back-garden. So I said I’d show her the King’s tomb. She’s been learning about King Aethelwolf—haven’t you, Olwen?”
But Olwen displayed scant interest in royal dust. “I want to sit outside with Wolf,” she remarked, clutching his fingers with an impatient hand. “I want to talk to Wolf while you go back to church.” Mattie took not the least notice of this remark, and they all three moved slowly round the corner of the Abbey towards its front-entrance. The bride’s eyes were brilliantly animated. And Wolf felt as if a warm globe of magnetic power were shooting out rays of exaltation from her strong, virginal body. There was that in her excitement that at once irritated Wolf and touched him to the heart.
“I was going to write to you, my dear,” she said eagerly, “in case I shouldn’t see you before Saturday. We’re going to Weymouth, Wolf!”
He looked at her closely. The heavy, sulky face was gleaming. He commented, with shame in his secret heart, upon his lack of spontaneous sympathy. What did it mean, this cold, tightening sensation within him? Was it that the figure of Darnley, urbane, melancholy, unattached, had become a sanctuary of refuge for him? He found himself responding to the clutch of Olwen’s feverish fingers with a significant and treacherous pressure.
“I’m glad you’re going to Weymouth. What a splendid idea!” he replied, as enthusiastically as he could. “Weymouth has always been—”
At that moment they reached the wide-open door of the church.
“You go in first, my dear,” he said, in a tone of command. “I’ll just smoke a cigarette, on that seat, with Olwen, and then we’ll come. Don’t sit too far in. But we’ll find you. It won’t be crowded. Oh, we’ll easily find you! But Olwen and I have a very important secret we want to talk about.”
He gave her a reassuring little push, half-playful, half-paternal, and watched her figure vanish in the cool dimness of the nave.
Olwen positively danced with glee as they moved across to a vacant seat under a yew-tree, not far from the grotesque little statue of the poet-courtier.
“She thought we were going to talk about her presents, didn’t she?” said the little girl, as they sat down and he lit a cigarette. “But we’re not, are we, Wolf?”
“Perhaps I am,” he replied with a smile. “But how do you like all this marrying, Olwen?”
The child’s eyes were fixed upon the hazy outline of “The Slopes,” just visible in that shimmery air beyond the Public Gardens and the railway. “Oh, don’t talk about it, Wolf! Jason and I never talk about it. Jason says the only nice part of it will be the wine. They’re going to have Sauterne.”
Wolf began to realize that Mattie’s nature was not one that a love-affair expands and widens. It dawned upon him that this little Malakite waif was being thrown more and more upon the indulgence of Jason.
The child’s mood this afternoon was evidently wistful. She seemed to take Wolf’s sympathy for granted; and now, with her hand in his, after uttering the word “Sauterne,” she relapsed into silence.
He too was silent, repeating to himself an imaginary dialogue with Gerda, over their tea in the kitchen. The disagreeable thought came into his head, “Shall I feel any difference when I lie by her side tonight?”
“Wolf!” The little girl’s voice had a solemn intensity, and she stared at him with grave eyes.
“Say on, Princess Olwen.”
“Do you think people are always treated as they treat other people?”
The child’s question, directed against the very heart of the universe, disturbed Wolf profoundly. It was the sort of remark that indicates something materially wrong in the person who utters it.
“I can’t say I do, Olwen. Life is far more unjust than ever King Aethelwolf was.”
“You like Miss Malakite very much, don’t you, Wolf?”
He gave a palpable start and flung away his cigarette. What was coming now? This warm spring air seemed to be bringing all human troubles to the surface as the hot day brings forth the adders!
“Very much indeed, Olwen. Christie is very nice indeed. She’s rather—she’s rather like you.”
“I want to see her, Wolf. I want to tell her that I’m sorry I wouldn’t ever speak to her when I was a little girl.”
“What made you so unkind, Olwen?”
“Shall I tell you, Wolf? You won’t tell anyone, will you, if I tell you?”
He shook his head with all the solemnity he could muster.
“Don’t look at me while I tell you!”
“All right. I’m not looking.”
“Granddad Smith told me when I was very little”—the voice in which the child said this was low and restrained, and her words came slowly—“that … Miss Malakite … was … a … leper.” Having overcome the difficulty of her confession, her expression became entirely different. She seemed as relieved to have brought this thing into the light as if she’d pulled a thorn from her hand.
“But, Olwen darling”—Wolf spoke with as much intensity as if he were addressing an intelligence equal to his own—“your grandfather didn’t mean a real leper! He meant that people shunned Christie because of her father … because of her father’s bad character.”
The child’s eyes opened wide. “Then Miss Malakite is not a leper at all? Not all white and horrid under her clothes?”
“Of course not! She’s sweet and lovely under her clothes … just as you are!”
The child looked away again towards “The Slopes,” her forehead puckered in concentrated thought. Then she turned to him with flushed cheeks. “Oh, Wolf, I want to see her! I want to see her soon … today … tomorrow! I want to tell her how glad I am she isn’t a leper!”
It was Wolf’s turn now to look at “The Slopes” with a pondering frown.
Suppose he did take Olwen to see Christie? What harm could come of that? He rose from the bench. “Come on, sweetheart,” he cried, “Mattie will wonder where we are!”
They met Mattie coming out of the church; and at that same moment the tramp he had observed talking to the two boys drew near. Where had he seen this fellow before? The tramp approached them, and began begging. Good Lord! It was that old, courteous waiter at the Lovelace! Mattie was now pulling Olwen away. “No, no!” she murmured in reply to the man’s supplication. But Wolf fumbled in his pocket. He could tell by the feel of the coins that he had half-a-crown and a few halfpence there. That was all he had. At that moment the great clock in the tower above their heads began striking. It must be four o’clock! He must hurry to the station. Like a flash he thought, “If I give him the half-crown I shan’t be able to buy a ticket!” He put the few halfpence into the man’s hand. As he did so he noticed that very scar which had struck his attention a year ago. The ex-waiter’s eyes met his own, but without recognition. “It must be drink,” Wolf said to himself, as he hurried away after the two girls.
Half-an-hour later and he was safely ensconced in a crowded carriage, from the windows of which he could see only the blue sky.
“I might have given him that half-a-crown,” he thought. “I could have done it.”
The incident taunted and teased his mind so unmercifully that it was not till he had left the train and was nearly at his own door that he could harden his heart against it.
“It’s just pure chance that I’m not in the same boat as that waiter,” he thought. “He’s got a look … it’s a different expression, but he’s got a look of that Waterloo-steps man!”
He rushed into the house, calling Gerda’s name in a low, eager voice. There was no answer. He went into the parlour, the kitchen, the backyard. He ran upstairs and looked into the bedroom. No one! The familiar furniture wore that peculiar air of desolation that of all things he especially disliked. The beauty of the day seemed to have completely passed it by. It looked cold and unhappy. It looked like a child that has been left indoors when all the world has been out at a festival.
And yet he had to admit there was something dignified, even spiritual, about those quaint, cheap objects, waiting there for their absent mistress. “They are the extreme opposite,” he thought, “of that self-satisfied old rascal with the white cat.”
He busied himself with careful preparations for tea, and grew peevishly puzzled at the unexpected difficulties he encountered. “Girls do things so mechanically,” he said to himself, as for the tenth time he walked round their kitchen-table, altering this and that. When all was ready he opened the dresser-drawer, took the cheque from beneath Mukalog, and placed it under Gerda’s plate.
Then he sat down on a hard, high chair and waited, listening to the clock in the parlour. He felt too excited even to smoke a cigarette.
“What is it that worries me?” he thought. “Not fear lest she has some crazy love for the fellow. I know very well she hasn’t. Damn! I suppose Carfax wouldn’t believe it if I said I was thinking simply and solely about her feelings. But there it is! You can’t sleep with a girl for twelve months and not feel what she feels! I don’t believe his having gone to the limit will change her at all for me. I don’t want to set eyes on the chap again … but that’s another thing. How sleek he looked in that new brown suit! I suppose he hung that brown coat over the bottom of our bed. That’s not a very nice thought!”
Suddenly the idea came to him that perhaps she would never come back—that he would have to eat this meal alone, and all other meals! He hurriedly looked round for something belonging to her wherewith to reassure himself. He saw no sign anywhere of a small workbasket that she was in the habit of using for her occasional young-girl struggles with needle and thread.
Restlessly he got up and began looking about for this. The little work-box became the most important of all objects in the world at that moment. If it were here, why, she would soon be safely home again! Where the devil was it? He went into the parlour. He even went upstairs. Not a sign! “But I’ve seen the thing … I know I’ve seen it … since I came in!”
With a sudden inspiration he opened the dresser-drawer. There it was … and protruding from its edge a ragged glove! He left the drawer open, went to the front-door, and looked out. The light was waning. At the first approach of twilight that lovely day began yielding itself to its death with a precipitate eagerness!
He stood in the doorway listening. Ah, there was the sound of her footsteps coming along the pavement! No. It was the slouching form of their neighbour, the owner of the pigsty. Silence again! Then again footsteps! No. This time it was a pair of lovers, returning from their Sunday stroll, the boy’s arm round the girl’s waist.
He felt unwilling to close the door, and he went back to the kitchen, leaving it wide open.
She was with Lobbie anyway. Surely she would never do anything wild or rash with Lobbie at her side!
Such light wind as there had been during the afternoon had dropped completely now. How still everything was! He and the furniture sat waiting, while this perfect day sank willingly into oblivion.
“Gerda, my precious! Gerda, my darling!” He kept forming words of this kind in his mind, as he fidgeted on his hard chair, facing the hallway. “It was all my fault, Gerda, that you gave yourself to your water-rat!”
He began to long for her coming, as he had never before longed for any human step. He seemed to realize the helpless pathos of her beauty as he had never realized it before. He saw her bending naked over the stove, as he had seen her once, when, for wantonness, he had undressed her downstairs. He saw the calves of her legs, the curves of her thighs. He saw the peculiar loveliness of the back of her neck and the way her eyelid drooped upon her cheek, giving her profile such evasive innocence.
“You must come, Gerda! I don’t care for anything, except for you to come! If you come in now … safe and sound … you can sulk and scold and cry as much as you like!”
How late it was getting. The clock would be striking six soon! She had never been as late as this before. Something must have happened! He got up from his chair and looked round the kitchen. Mukalog lay on his back in the open drawer; and suddenly the sight of the idol’s fleering face transported him with fury. The “god of rain” seemed the epitome of everything that was making him suffer. Jason’s contempt, Gerda’s absence—they were both gloated over in that little monster’s abysmal leer!
Recklessly he seized the idol, as he might have seized a dead rat, rushed with it out of the kitchen, out of the house, across the road, and flung it with all the force of his arm high over the pigsty into the darkening field beyond.
The pigs, aroused by his approach, set up a hideous hullabaloo; and the foul smell of their enclosure followed the indrawn panting of his breath. He paused for a minute, with his hands on the fence of the shed, uttering a foolish malediction upon the screeching snouts raised towards him. Then he turned with a groan and shuffled back across the road.
Standing disconsolately by the table, he mechanically lifted up Gerda’s plate and surveyed the cheque beneath it. He recalled how she had folded it up with cold, indifferent fingers. He pressed it with his clenched knuckles and recovered it. Could he do nothing to make her come now, this very moment? “My ‘mythology’!” he thought. Up went his hands to his eyes; and pressing his eyeballs lightly, so as to blot out everything, he concentrated his whole nature in one terrific effort to summon up that formidable magnetic mystery.
His will, thus strained to its uttermost, gave him a sensation as if an obstinate, taut rope were tugging at a waterlogged bucket. Not a stir, not a vibration, in those dark interior gulfs!
Removing his hands from his face, he swayed a little against the table, dizzy with his mental struggle. It was no use. His “mythology” would never help him again. That ecstasy, that escape from reality was gone. Dorsetshire had done for it!
He subsided into the same chair and waited, his hands outspread, palms-down, upon his knees, his heels together, his head bowed.
A kind of waking-trance took possession of him, in which he had the illusion that the smell of the pigsty and Gerda’s absence were the same thing. “I shall have to go to the Torps’ and ask about her,” he said to himself; but the words only tapped against one another in his brain like dry peas in a sieve.
Then he heard the gate click.
He rushed to the door, out of the house, and, heedless of everything but overwhelming relief, hugged her to his heart.
Her mouth was cold. Her cheek was cold. He pulled her into the hall and slammed the door with a jerk of his shoulder; but not for a second did he let go his tight hold of her. His relief was so great that, as he pressed her against him, he gave vent to several long-drawn breaths that had in them the catch of sobs.
He had felt from the very first touch that she would not resist him, that the barrier between them was broken. When at last he got her into the kitchen and she had taken off her things, he was hit to the heart by the haggardness of her face. Till now she herself had been tearless. Emotions must have done their worst with her all that day, and she had nothing left. But the sight of the carefully-laid tea-table stirred up too many old associations. She stood staring at him, her hands hanging down limply by her sides, her grey eyes fixed upon him. Then, without the least contortion of her face, a torrent of tears descended. …
It was after eight o’clock when they got up from their tea-table. Neither of them had said a word about Bob; but Wolf felt convinced that the girl, without using one single articulate syllable about the matter, indicated that henceforth she would close her door to Mr. Weevil.
It was with a strange sensation that he found his thoughts reverting to Christie and her trip to Weymouth—a strange and peculiar sensation. He felt as if Christie had grown thin and frail as a ghost—remote and far-off, too—like that day when he saw her crouched in the Castle lane! She seemed to have become once more what she was in the beginning of their friendship … a disembodied entity, dwelling in his consciousness like a spirit in a cloud, immaterial, unreal … near to him as his own thought and yet far removed in body.
One by one, holding a blue-bordered napkin in his hands, he dried each cup, each saucer, each plate, each knife, each spoon, as Gerda handed them to him out of the wash-pan in the sink. Sometimes in light, sometimes in shadow, as his own figure came between her and the two candles on the table, her face still showed fluctuating signs of uneasiness. But these signs grew fewer and fewer as he told her about Miss Gault and her sandwiches, about the waiter at the Lovelace having become a beggar, about the extreme emptiness of the outgoing train and its crowded state returning, about the crafty old man with a white cat—he suppressed all mention of Mattie and Olwen—until at last an expression came into her face that he knew well, an expression of sleepy, infantile amusement.
He paused in his narration directly he caught sight of that look, and hung up the blue-bordered drying-cloth in its place and proceeded to wash his own hands at the tap.
He got into bed that night some while before she did; and he lay quietly watching her, while she brushed her hair at their chest of drawers between the two half-open windows. This little wooden-framed looking-glass, on this clumsy pinewood object, had been Gerda’s only toilet-table from the start. “She shall have more of these things,” he thought, “when we’ve cashed that cheque!”
As he watched her candle-flame bend towards her in the faint airs that came wandering out of the night into the room—as he watched the careful gesture with which she pushed back the candlestick as she stood there in her long-sleeved nightgown—he pondered upon the death of his “mythology.”
“Perhaps it was an escape from reality,” he thought, “that I was bound to lose, if reality got hold of me! Dorsetshire, at any rate, seems to have got hold of me. No, no, I am not going back to London; and I am not going to drown myself in Lenty Pond!”
When Gerda had finished brushing her hair and had tied it with a thin blue ribbon—he had long since remarked that this was one of the few personal peculiarities she never deviated from—she seemed inclined to loiter awhile before coming to bed. She closed the window at the top, opened it at the bottom, and, drawing a chair close to the sill, sat down there, leaning one of her arms on the woodwork.
It was odd how one single gross image annoyed his mind to the exclusion of all others. This was the image of Weevil in his brown suit, with most of the buttons tightly buttoned, making love to her in that white, high-throated nightgown! Of course, it couldn’t have been in the nightgown … but still he must have … and his brown suit had so many hard, impudent, shiny, cock-crowing buttons!
“Don’t catch cold, sweetheart!” he cried suddenly, while a very disconcerting doubt shot through him. Was it revolting to her feminine life-illusion to slip into his arms, easily, naturally, after the shock of what she had undergone? Did she feel Bob Weevil’s brown suit, his impudent buttons, too nearly, too closely, to bear the thought of any lovemaking that night? He longed to call out to her bluntly and directly. “Come on, you sweet little fool, I won’t touch you!” … or better still perhaps, “Come on, you beautiful distracted creature, I’ll soon make you forget your water-rat!” Instead of uttering a sound, however, what he really did was to jump out of bed, snatch his own warm dressing-gown from the door, and wrap it about her shoulders.
He was very anxious not to bother her with either his sensuality or his sentimentality. His feeling for her at that moment was objective, almost impersonal. He returned to bed, lit a cigarette, propped himself up upon both pillows, and smoked meditatively.
“Christie must be safe back now,” he thought; and there moved slowly across his innermost consciousness the evil suggestion that it was because of what he had read in that exercise-book that the girl’s thin frame seemed to him so unearthly tonight, her shadowy personality so remote. “She’s lodged in my mind, though, come what may,” he said to himself. “I will take Olwen to see her,” he thought. “She shall find out she’s not a leper!”
From Christie his mind rushed away to that little house in Saint Aldhelm’s Street. “I suppose Emma’s come home by now and Miss Gault’s in bed! I wish I’d gone back and kissed her, huddled up like that on his grave—kissed her right on her deformed lip!”
The night-air was stirring again now, and the flame of the candle upon the chest of drawers flickered up and down, throwing queer shadows about the room. The air was sweet with vague earth-odours—not the least tincture of the pigsty perceptible—and as it blew in upon him, past the motionless figure by the window, it seemed like a host of air-spirits journeying on some errand that had no connection with human affairs.
Suddenly he drew in his breath with a startled, hissing sound, and sat bolt-upright, staring at Gerda in rapt attention.
The girl had fallen upon her knees at the window, and was making little, tentative, whistling sounds. She was trying to catch the notes of her blackbird-song! First one note she would try, and then another; and each one, as she tried it, broke off in midair, ineffectual and futile. … Her fingers were clutching the windowsill now, and her head was tossed back. The gown he had thrown over her had fallen away. Her shoulders looked cold and pitiful. Her body trembled and swayed. Her back being turned to him, he could not see that desperately pursed-up whistling mouth; but most vividly he imagined it, and imagined too the piteous contortion of that face against the warm, green-growing darkness outside.
“Gerda … my darling!” This was what he wanted to cry out; but he did not dare to utter a whisper. The room had become enchanted. It was a dedicated place—set apart … and there was he, foolishly propped up on their two pillows, mute, helpless, like a witness at the birth of a stillborn child!
Again and again did the girl make desperate, discordant, whistling sounds; but it was all to no purpose!
“Don’t mind, my darling!” murmured Wolf, when, in a troubled pause after these attempts, he noticed her back shaken by weeping. “Come on to bed, honey—to bed, to bed! You’re lucky not to have started a hoot-owl answering you. I fancied I heard one of those demons, when I woke up in the middle of the night last night. Come on, Gerda; there’s a good girl!”
He had never heard a human sigh so deeply drawn as the one he heard now from that open window. But she got up slowly upon her feet and blew out the candle.
He threw back the bedclothes and smoothed out the pillow for her head. Tightly he held her when she stretched herself out by his side.
“Well, there it is!” he thought. “Life has scotched her just as it has me. Urquhart’s cheque has brought me down. Weevil’s brown suit has done the same for her. Well, we must get on somehow. Shall I say good night to her before I let myself go to sleep? No; better not! Better just hold tight to her … and drift on in our barge—down, down the stream … drift on in our barge!”