by Hugh Walpole
The little church stood back from the cliff; it stood as though it had faced a thousand years of storm and rain, as an animal stands with its feet planted wide and its ears well back ready for attack. Its little tower was square and its stone was of weather-beaten grey, only the little windows with deep blue glass caught the haze from the sea and shone like eyes through the stone and across the grass.
The little rectory stood on the other side of the road. It also was minute and absolutely exposed to the elements; here lived the Rev. Mark Anstey, aged eighty-two, quite alone except for the company of five dogs, six cats, three pigeons, a parrot, two tame rabbits, a hedgehog and a great many frogs, these last in a pond near by.
When Maradick came up the road he saw the old man standing in his garden watching the sea. The mist had been drawn back, as a veil is drawn back by a mysterious hand, until it lay only on the horizon. The sea was still grey, but it hinted, as it were, at wonderful colours. You fancied that you could see blue and gold and purple, and yet when you looked again it was still grey. It was as though a sheet of grey gauze had been stretched over a wonderful glittering floor and the colours shone through.
The old man was a magnificent figure of enormous height. He had a great white beard that fell almost to his waist and his snow-white hair had no covering. Three of his dogs were at his side and the five cats sat in a row on his doorstep. He was standing with his hands behind his back and his head up as though to catch the wind.
Maradick introduced himself and stated his errand. The old man shook him warmly by the hand.
“Ah, yes; come in, won’t you? Very pleased to meet you, Mr. Maradick. Come into my study and I’ll just take down details.”
His voice was as clear as a bell, and his eyes, blue as the sea, looked him through and through.
“Here, this is my room. Bit of a mess, isn’t it? But a bachelor can’t help that, you know; besides, I like a mess, always did.”
Whatever it was, it was the right kind of mess. The fireplace was of bright blue tiles; there were books, mostly, it seemed, theological, fishing tackle cumbered one corner, guns another, a writing-desk took up a good deal of the room. The old man filled the place. He really was enormous, and he had a habit of snapping his fingers with a sharp, clicking noise like the report of a pistol. Two deerhounds were lying by the fireplace, and these came to meet him, putting their noses into his hands.
“Ah, ha! Hum — where are we? Oh! yes! Sit down, Mr. Maradick, won’t you? Oh, clear those things off the chair — yes — let me see! Anthony Gale — Janet Morelli — what? Morelli? How do you spell it? What? M-o-r-e — oh! yes, thanks! Thursday — 1.30. Yes, I know the boy; going to be married, is he? Well, that’s a good thing — can’t start breeding too young — improves the race — fill the country with children. Married yourself, Mr. Maradick? Ah! that’s good.”
Maradick wondered whether the name, Morelli, would seem familiar to him, but he had obviously never heard it before. “We don’t have many weddings up in this church here, nowadays. They don’t come this way much. Just the people down at the cove, you know. . . . Have some tea — oh, yes! you must have some tea.”
He rang the bell and a small boy with a very old face came and received orders. “Remarkable thing, you know,” said Mr. Anstey when the boy had gone out again. “That boy’s twenty-three. You wouldn’t think it, now, would you? But it’s true. Stopped growing, but he’s a good boy; rings the bell in the church, and digs in the garden and all the rest of it. We’ll have tea outside. It’s warm enough and it’s going to be fine, I think. Besides, I always must have my eyes on the sea if it’s possible.”
They had tea in the little porch over the door; the honeysuckle was still in flower and there were still roses in the beds, a mass of red hollyhocks at the farther end of the garden stood out against the sky. The old man talked of Tony.
“Yes, I’ve met him several times; a splendid boy, a friend of Garrick’s who’s brought him up here. Ah, you know Garrick?”
Yes, Maradick knew Garrick.
“Well, there’s a man! God made that man all right, even though he isn’t often inside a church. He worships in his own kind way, you know, as most of us do, if you only look into it. God’s more tolerant than most of us parsons, I can tell you, and understands people a lot better, too. Not that we parsons aren’t a pretty good lot on the whole, but we’re a bit apt to have our eyes fixed on our little differences and our creeds and our little quarrels when we ought to be having our eyes on the sky. Ah, if I could get a few of those gentlemen who are quarrelling there up in London and just set them here in this garden in rows with that to look at!” He waved his hand at the sea.
The hill bent at the end of the garden and disappeared, and beyond the bend there was nothing but the sea. The blue was beginning to steal into it in little lakes and rivers of colour.
“That’s God’s work, you know; take your atheist and show him that.”
He talked about Tony.
“A nice boy, if ever there was one. But what’s this about marriage? Well, I suppose I mustn’t ask questions. You’re a friend of his and you’re looking after him. But that’s a boy who’ll never go wrong; I’d trust any woman to him.”
Soon Maradick got up to go. This man had impressed him strangely; he had got that thing that Tony and Punch had got, but he had used it in the right way. There was not only the sentiment, the emotion of the view, there was the strength of the tower as well.
Maradick left him standing gazing at the sea. His figure seemed to fill the sky.
On his way back the sky grew clearer, and although the sun was never actually to be seen its light was felt in the air and over the sea. There was a freshness about everything around him. The sheaves on the hills, the grass waving on the moor, the sheep clustered in their pens, the hard white clean lines of the road surrounded him with new life. He felt suddenly as though he had been standing during these last days in a dark, close room with the walls pressing about him and no air.
And yet he knew, as he neared the town, that the fascination, the temptation was beginning to steal about him again. As the door of the hotel closed round him, the tower, the clear colours of the land and sky, the man standing gazing at the sea — these things were already fading away from him.
He had nearly finished dressing when his wife came into his room. She talked a little, but had obviously nothing very much to say. He was suddenly conscious that he avoided looking at her. He busied himself over his tie, his shirt; it was not, he told himself angrily, that he was ashamed of facing her. After all, why should he be? All that he had done was to kiss another woman, and most men had done that in their time. He was no saint and, for that matter, neither was she. Nobody was a saint; but he was uncomfortable, most certainly uncomfortable. Looking into the glass as he brushed his hair, he caught sight of her staring at him in a strange way, as though she were trying to make up her mind about something.
Puzzled — puzzled — puzzled about what? Perhaps it was just possible that she too was just discovering that she had missed something in all these years. Perhaps she too was suddenly wondering whether she had got everything from life that she wanted; perhaps her mind was groping back to days when there did seem to be other things, when there were, most obviously, other people who had found something that she had never even searched for.
The thought touched him strangely. After all, what if there was a chance of starting again? Lord! what a fool he was to talk like that! Didn’t he know that in another two hours’ time he would be with the other woman, his pulses beating to a riotous tune that she, his wife, could never teach him; you couldn’t cure the faults, the mistakes, the omissions of twenty years in three weeks.
Dinner that night was of the pleasantest. Tony was at his very best. He seemed to have recovered all his lost spirits. That white, tense look had left his face, the strain had gone out of his eyes; even the waiters could not keep back their smiles at his laughter.
They discussed the
hour of departure and Tony did not turn a hair. Mrs. Lester glanced for an instant at Maradick, but that was all.
“I’m afraid I shall have to go up on Thursday night,” said Lester. “One’s publishers, you know, need continual looking after, and if I don’t see them on Friday morning it may be some time before I get a chance again. But I’ll leave my wife in your hands, Lady Gale. I know she’ll be safe enough.”
“Oh! we’ll look after her, Lester,” said Tony, laughing; “won’t we, Milly? We’ll look after you all the time. I’ll constitute myself your special knight-errant, Milly. You shall want for nothing so long as I am there.”
“Thank you, Tony,” said Mrs. Lester.
It was a fine enough night for them all to go into the garden, and very soon Maradick and Mrs. Lester were alone. It was all about him once again, the perfume that she used, the rustle of her dress, the way that her hair brushed his cheek. But behind it, in spite of himself, he saw his wife’s face in the mirror, he saw Tony, he saw the tower, and he felt the wind about his body.
She bent over him and put her arms about his neck; but he put them back.
“No,” he said almost roughly, “we’ve got to talk; this kind of thing must be settled one way or the other.”
“Please, don’t be cross.” Her voice was very gentle; he could feel her breath on his cheek. “Ah, if you knew what I’d been suffering all day, waiting for you, looking forward, aching for these minutes; no, you mustn’t be cruel to me now.”
But he stared in front of him, looking into the black depths of the trees that surrounded them on every side.
“No, there’s more in it than I thought. What are we going to do? What’s going to happen afterwards? Don’t you see, we must be sensible about it?”
“No,” she said, holding his hand. “There is no time for that. We can be sensible afterwards. Didn’t you hear at dinner? Fred is going away on Thursday night; we have that, at any rate.”
“No,” he said, roughly breaking away from her, “we must not.”
But she pressed up against him. Her arm passed slowly round his neck and her fingers touched, for a moment, his cheek. “No; listen. Don’t you see what will happen if we don’t take it? All our lives we’ll know that we’ve missed it. There’s something that we might have had — some life, some experience. At any rate we had lived once, out of our stuffy lives, our stupid, dull humdrum. Oh! I tell you, you mustn’t miss it! You’ll always regret, you’ll always regret!”
Her whole body was pressed against his. He tried to push her away with his hand. For a moment he thought that he saw Tony watching him and then turning away, sadly, scornfully. And then it swept over him like a wave. He crushed her in his arms; for some minutes the world had stopped. Then again he let her go.
“Ah!” she said, smiling and touching her dress with her fingers. “You are dreadfully strong. I did not know how strong. But I like it. And now Thursday night will be ours; glorious, wonderful, never to be forgotten. I must go. They’ll be wondering. You’d better not come back with me. Good-night, darling!” She bent down, kissed him and disappeared.
But he sat there, his hands gripping his knees.
What sort of scum was he? He, a man?
This then was the fine new thing that Tony and Punch had shown him. This the kind of world! This the great experience. Life!
No. With all his soul he knew that it was not; with all his soul he knew that the devil and all his angels were pressing about his path — laughing, laughing.
And the moon rose behind the trees and the stars danced between the branches.
CHAPTER XVII. MORNING AND AFTERNOON OF THE TWENTY-SEVENTH — TONY,
MARADICK, JANET, AND MISS MINNS HAVE A RIDE
AFTER THE WEDDING
But Mrs. Lester had not the courage of her convictions. Those convictions were based very largely on an audacious standing up against Providence, although she herself would never have seen it in that light. In each of her “affairs” she went breathlessly forward, as it were on tiptoe, with eyes staring and heart beating; wondering what would be the dangers, gasping at possibly startling adventures.
But the real thing had never met her before. The two or three men who had been concerned in her other experiences had understood quite as well as she did that it was only a game, pour passer le temps, and a very pleasant way of passing it too. But this man was taking it very differently. It was no game at all to him; he did not look as though he could play a game if he wanted to. But it was not Maradick who frightened her; it was herself. She had never gone so far as this before, and now as she undressed she was suddenly terribly frightened.
Her face seemed white and ghostly in the mirror, and in a sudden panic, she turned on all the lights. Then the blaze frightened her and she turned them all out again, all save the one over the mirror.
She sat gazing into it, and all the dark corners of the room seemed to gather round her like living things; only her white face stared out of the glass. If Fred hadn’t been so horribly humdrum, if she hadn’t known so thoroughly every inch of him, every little trick that he had, every kind of point of view that he ever had about anything, then this never would have happened. Because, really, he had been a very good husband to her, and she was really fond of him; when one came to think of it, he had been much better than a good many husbands she had known. She leaned back in her chair and looked at herself.
It had once been more than mere fondness, it had been quite exciting; she smiled, reminiscences crowded about her . . . dear old Fred!
But she pulled herself up with a jerk. That, after all, wasn’t the point; the point, the thing that mattered, was Thursday night. Out there in the garden, when he had held her like that, a great lawlessness had come upon her. It was almost as though some new spirit had entered into her and was showing her things, was teaching her emotions that she had never been shown or learnt before. And, at that moment, it had seemed to her the one thing worth having.
She had never lived before. Life was to be counted by moments, those few golden moments that the good gods gave to one, and if one didn’t take them, then and there, when they were offered, why then, one had never lived at all, one might as well never have been born.
But now, as she sat there alone in her room, she was realising another thing — that those moments had their consequences. What were they going to do afterwards? What would Maradick do? What, above all, would her own attitude to Fred be? She began, very slowly, to realise the truth, that the great laws are above creeds and all dogmas because they are made from man’s necessities, not from his superstitions. What was she going to do?
She knew quite well what she would do if she were left there alone on Thursday night, and at the sudden thought of it she switched off the light and plunged the room into darkness. She lay in bed waiting for Fred to come up. She felt suddenly very unprotected. She would ask him to take her with him on Thursday, she would make some excuse; he would probably be glad.
She heard him undressing in the next room. He was whistling softly to himself; he stumbled over something and said “Damn.” She heard him gargle as he brushed his teeth. He hummed a song of the moment, “I wouldn’t go home in the dark”; and then she heard him stepping across the carpet towards the bed, softly lest he should wake her. He got into bed and grunted with satisfaction as he curled up into the sheets; his toe touched her foot and she shivered suddenly because it was cold.
“Hullo, old girl,” he said, “still awake?”
She didn’t answer. Then she turned slowly round towards him.
“Fred,” she said, “I think I’ll come away with you on Thursday after all.” But, as she said it to him, she was suddenly afraid of his suspecting something. He would want to know the reason. “It’s not,” she added hurriedly, “that I’m not perfectly happy here. I’m enjoying it awfully, it’s delightful; but, after all, there isn’t very much point in my staying here. I don’t want to after you’re gone.”
But he was sleepy. He yawne
d.
“I’m awfully tired, dear. We’ll talk about it to-morrow. But anyhow, I don’t quite see the point. You won’t want to be pottering about London with me. I’m only up there for business — these beastly publishers,” he yawned again. “You’d be bored, you know; much better stay here with Lady Gale. Besides, it’s all arranged.” His voice died off into a sleepy murmur.
But the terror seemed to gather about her in the darkness. She saw with amazing vision. She did not want to be left; she must not be left.
She put her hand on his arm.
“Fred, please — it’s important; I don’t want to stay.”
And then she was suddenly frightened. She had said too much. He would want to know why she didn’t want to stay. But he lay there silently. She was afraid that he would go to sleep. She knew that when the morning came things would seem different. She knew that she would persuade herself that there was no immediate hurry. She would leave things to settle themselves; and then. Oh! well! there would be no question as to how things would go! She saw, with absolute clearness that this was the moment that was granted her. If she could only persuade him to take her now, then she would have that at any rate afterwards to hold herself back. She would not want to go back on her word again. Her only feeling now was that Fred was so safe. The thought of the evening, the garden, Maradick, filled her now with unreasoning terror; she was in a panic lest this minute, this opportunity, should leave her.
She turned towards him and shook his arm.
“Fred, just keep awake for a minute; really it’s important. Really, I want to go away with you, on Thursday, not to stay on. I don’t like the place. I shan’t a bit mind being in London, it will be rather fun; there are lots of people I want to see. Besides, it’s only a day or two after all.”
But he laughed sleepily.
“What’s all the fuss, old girl? I’m simply damned tired; I am, really. We’ll talk about it to-morrow. But anyhow, you’d better stay; it’s all arranged, and Lady Gale will think it rather funny.”