None So Pretty

by Margaret Irwin

  Oh, once I get into the briary bush,

  I’ll never get out any more.

  That was the wrong way round, she had never got it wrong before. But wrong it stayed, dancing round and round, while she gazed down at the man that was asleep or stunned or dead or only drunk, and wondered why she did not move to go to Mr. Cork. Still she looked at him and still she held the curtain.

  Oh, hangman, stay your hand,

  Oh, stay it for a while.

  Another ring of words had danced in on the same tune. She dropped the curtain and the man on the floor was now only a dark and shapeless lump beneath it.

  There he lay, blotted out.

  She stole out of the room and down the passage to the long gallery. In the grey darkness lay seven squares of moonlight. She stood hesitating, fearing to pass through them; at last she moved, walking slowly at first, and then broke into a run, in and out of the white squares, now a shadow, now a ghost, flitting faster and faster down the long gallery and through the door at the end.

  Mr. Cork sat there, staring at the opened door. His books lay on the table before him. He stood up. His face had gone chalk white round the deep shadows in it.

  Nan’s teeth began to chatter again, she stood there wringing her hands and looking at him, she could find nothing to say.

  At last he said, “So you have come.”

  She wanted to tell him why, but she could not find the words; she began to, but he was not listening, and it did not now seem important that he should know why she had come. That scene in her room had by now happened so long ago that she could scarcely recall it. Only in the tumult of her brain there still whirled that senseless chorus as of idiot children dancing on the green, dancing round her in a nightmare, pointing their fingers at her, mopping and mowing.

  Oh, hangman, stay your hand,

  Oh, stay it for a while.

  She stood before him, baffled, in some way cheated, as though this were not the man she had come to find.

  His lips moved but no sound came from them; she wondered if he were praying. He was, but for strength, not to be virtuous, but to be wicked. So many hours he had sat watching that door, thinking, “What if I should hear her step in the gallery coming towards me, what if I should see the door open and herself standing there?”

  So he had luxuriated in his thought until at last he had brought this moment towards him by the sheer power it seemed of his will and imagination. And like some novice in the Black Art who has at last succeeded in raising the devil, he stood aghast at his wizardry, terrified of its consequence. This moment, that he had resolved not to promote by any word or action, but that he had desired with a fervour capable of working a miracle, might well bring his ruin and hers.

  But now it was here, and all that it might bring, inevitable. To look back and regret, to look forward and fear, was as useless as it was cowardly. All he could do now was to take the present moment for what it brought, but to his nature this was the most difficult thing that he could do, even though it brought the only woman he had ever desired with passion.

  Where another man would have seen only her immediate presence offered to his arms, he remembered the rage of tenderness for her and hatred for her husband that had all but impelled him to descend from the pulpit and carry her off from him before the congregation. He cursed himself that he could not now feel as he did then, but must look before and after, fear the future and worst of all the present, lest he, for the first time a lover, should fail to please her, should make himself ridiculous and find her regarding him with that mocking, bird-like air. So he had sometimes seen her regard her husband. And to her consternation, he slid on to his knees, and encircling her with his arms, leaned his bowed head against her shivering body, saying in a strange voice like that of a sobbing child, “In true love there should be no fear.”

  She did not know how to comfort him nor why she should have to do so; she had come to be comforted herself; it was she who wanted to crouch and sob, to be picked up by strong arms and made to feel that they would hold her safe for ever. She was not sure now that he had wanted her to come, she wished she had not come, she wished she had gone to Nurse instead. “You had better go,” she said to herself, “yes, you had much better go,” and again that queer, fluttering sense of freedom came upon her, for she was still her own, she had after all given her heart as yet to no man, and could keep it for her true lover whoever he might be. Yet her hurt vanity could not keep the disappointment out of her voice as she said,

  “So you don’t love me truly. Then I’ll go,” and turned, her eyes smarting with angry tears, though still that strange lightness at her heart.

  But his arms tightened round her, he raised his head, crying, “Not love you?” and she looked again into his white and cavernous face. Then all power of volition seemed drawn out of her by his burning eyes, she stood as if enchanted; somewhere far away a small voice still repeated, “You had better go,” but she could not move, that fluttering freedom had all died within her, and she was glad of it, her will was lost, swallowed up in a greater.

  She heard him say again, “Not love you?” and then in a harsh and tearing voice, “I am ravenous for you.” At the same instant he rose, lifting her with him, and she was lost in his embrace, “lost for ever,” that small voice echoed far away, but she could scarcely hear it before the silence quenched it, the urgent and terrible silence of his love.

  Part III

  When Ned Tarleton woke the next morning he found his bed very hard and himself very cold. He presently perceived that he was lying on the floor, but he could not think where. His head ached not merely from drink but from some blow he must have received, possibly in falling. He dragged himself up and to the windows, and pulled back the shutters. Here he saw the reason for his shivering plight. Winter, which had not come till late that year, had fallen in a single night. Frost had covered each pane so thick he could not see through it.

  He looked back at the room in the encrusted light and saw that he had never been here before, nor could he remember how he had come to be here now. He stared at the unfamiliar bed-curtains of rough old tapestry, woven in some barbarous design of trees and stags, at a half-open door into a passage leading to nowhere that he could imagine. He turned again to the window and rubbed the frost from one of the panes until, in a miniature, diamond-shaped frame, he could see a small picture of an outside world, bleak, grey, and unfamiliar; of trees blown in an icy wind, their last leaves torn from them, hurrying distractedly from the crazy skeletons that stretched their crooked fingers after them.

  “Brrr,” shuddered Ned, blowing upon his own blue fingers. His ring was still there. At least he had not been robbed. Looking down on his satin coat he observed a recent wine stain and a remembered dissatisfaction stole upon him. That dress had not been suitable for a cock-fight in a barn. That was where he had been yesterday, at a cock-fight some miles off to which my lord had taken him and some others of their party. My lord’s birds had come off victorious, and a great deal of money had changed hands, and their loutish host had expressed his annoyance freely in many oaths of an expression and enunciation so rude and rural, Ned could scarcely understand him. He had however shown a cordial hospitality in pressing them all to stay to supper and with so steady a persistency that the others had had difficulty in making their escape.

  Only Ned’s insatiable curiosity as a rising young playwright had caused him to fall a victim, and here he was shivering in a bedroom where he had been too drunk to go to bed but fallen and cracked his head on the floor. The bed indeed presented an extraordinary disarray. It looked as though he must have had a pillow-fight with himself. Never had he known what it was to be as drunk as that.

  He walked across to the half-open door, and stopped, arrested in mid-stride by a remarkable spectacle. Across the back of a chair was spread a woman’s dress, the sleeves hanging limply forward over the seat in an attitude that suggested a lifeless figure with a broken spine. Beneath the chair was a small pointed c
log, kicked over to one side. He picked it up. It was fastened with a thong of scarlet leather. There were traces of mud on it that had been insufficiently cleaned. He began to look for its fellow; if he did not find it, he should carry off the solitary clog as a hostage, he did not know for what. There was a story he had heard told in France by Perrault, the Superintendent of the King’s Buildings, of a prince who found a slipper, and by its means, his true princess, although she was disguised as a kitchen-maid, sitting among the cinders. But he had no excuse to take it, for he found what he could recognize as its fellow, though it was tied with a thong of green, not scarlet, leather.

  By now he had remembered something of the supper of the preceding night, a great deal of drink and noise and bragging, ending in some sort of tumult. Had there been a fight? It was as difficult to recall as a dream. And how had he got himself into a lady’s room? He was sure that no woman had taken part in last night’s proceedings, though there had been a good deal of the talk about them natural to such occasions. He fancied his host had spoken of them with the contempt and irritation of one who seeks to enhance his manhood in a manner which Ned’s superior wisdom and experience, in spite of his far fewer years, could now compare with that of a callow youth whose pimples have prevented the favour of the fair.

  He went out into the passage and down a broad flight of stairs. The shutters were still closed and he felt his way with his hand on the banisters. At the bend there was a knob that had split in two; his finger was caught in it with a sharp pinch. As he pulled it out he was sure that he had done this before but with his left hand, not his right. It must have been as he came up the stair, and suddenly he remembered coming up in company with a crowd of others, stumbling and shouting and thrusting each other on, following some chase which had seemed at the time the most exquisite piece of merriment in the world. Had one of them run to hide, and the rest pursued? Country sports were childishly simple. Or perhaps they were all chasing a cat, or possibly a hare. Cats and hares were liable to change into witches when chased, perhaps that was why he now began to think there was some notion about a woman in connection with this drunken pursuit, but he could discover no more, nor could he make it connect with his night in a lady’s chamber.

  Downstairs, in a large, old-fashionedly sombre room, lined with oak, he found his company. A servant must have pulled open a shutter, for the raw daylight lay across the middle of the scene and on the ashes of the dead fire. The air was foul. The slumbering figures in their stiff and cramped positions did not stir; where they sat, there they fell, where they fell, there they lay; not till the trump sounded on the Last Day would they stagger to their feet and stretch and yawn, complaining of the taste in their mouths. That in his own was none too pleasant. He shut the door on them to all eternity, and walked away through the silent and still darkened house, on tiptoe, without thinking why, until it occurred to him that it was well to go softly since at any moment he might discover the explanation of his lodging for the previous night and find it neither to his credit nor advantage.

  He found his way to the kitchens, and here people were alive and stirring. There was a profusion of coarse food but considerable squalor. He could not face beer, and asked for water and some bread and butter from an old man who yammered at him with a loosehung chin that was overgrown with tufts of hair like the tussocks of long grass on a sparse common.

  He went out of doors, where the frosty air surprised him afresh, as though he had been reborn since yesterday into a bleak and strange world.

  The gardens he saw had been planned on a fine scale but had been much neglected and impoverished. In an age which was busy with domestic improvements, this whole place seemed to have been asleep for at least a generation. In the cobbled yards he found a stable-boy to saddle his horse for him. He rode away down the drive between two rows of high and tossing trees. At the bend in the drive he looked back, for at this point it might happen that a female face of tender and entrancing beauty would look from one of the windows. But the house stood there square and solid with no sign of life, and the narrow dark windows looked back at him like blind eyes. “That is a grim place,” he thought, “I shall not come here again.”

  Yet he rode away slowly as if reluctant; he wondered if he had omitted anything he should have done, so baffled did he feel and frustrated at leaving the house without wresting its secret from it. There were people there that he had not seen, and something had happened that he did not know, and yet he was concerned in it since he must have been the cause that the lady of the house had not slept in her room the previous night.

  But a drunken frolic could not have entailed such consequences as to haunt his imagination with a sense of disaster. That surely was due to the material cause of strong beer and sherry sack, mulled and sweetened in the barbarous rustic fashion, perhaps also to the desolate aspect of the marshes and the snow-filled sky.

  As he rode through the frosty silence of the marshland, through rising mists which hung about in shapes like shrouded figures, through a country which, by process of the sudden changes of our climate and also of his sour mood of alcoholic remorse, had in a single night been transformed into a foreign and forbidding land, it occurred to him to write a play such as no other playwright of his age had dared as yet attempt. For it would be a tragedy but not in blank verse, it would have no historical or legendary heroes in breastplates and plumed helmets, it would be of his own time, taking place in a simple country house not more than thirty miles from London, and not one of the characters should say a single fine or witty thing.

  The play would hold the audience because they would be made to feel that their polite and merry company moving to and fro in comparatively safe streets where it was easy to get a linkboy to light you and a chair or coach to carry you, moving from park to playhouse or coffee-house where the talk was often as good as a play, from drawing-room to court ball or music party or impromptu supper, meeting their friends and greeting strangers as easily as their friends, that all this pleasant and easy-going civilization was closely surrounded by a wilderness of marsh and forest and bad roads which shut off its inhabitants at twice their actual distance from London, making of each isolated home a world so remote, so different from his own life, that he could scarcely even guess at its nature.

  Some weeks ago at the beginning of his visit to Stoking he had found in the library a quantity of old plays, and among them a very simple crude tale of a woman who murdered her husband in some house in the country, and was condemned to be hanged together with her lover. This play was called Arden of Feversham; it was founded on a murder which had been notorious in its time. No one would now remember so stiff and old-fashioned a piece of work. Ned had been more amused by it than impressed. But it showed the writers of its day to be more adventurous than now. There was no enterprise in the theatre today; the most important part of a play should be its rhymed dedication to some wealthy dowager, and its only safe subject a witty comedy, all talk and no action, on the eternal theme of adultery.

  “We’ve grown so mighty clever,” he thought, “that we are afraid to tell a story as it happened lest it should look too simple.”

  Ned Tarleton had been born in exile after his parents had been married some years. They had followed the truant King Charles abroad when the English Court had been no more than a band of gipsies. Colonel Tarleton had been wounded in the leg, not very badly it was thought at first, but the wound grew gradually worse under the treatment of the cheaper doctors in Paris, and he died just after Ned’s eighth birthday.

  He had to lie always on the couch, his back propped with pillows; his hands moved quickly, his expression was alert, his face made a patch of light in the dark mean room where they lodged. He found it increasingly hard to trim the pale reddish golden point of his beard as he would wish, and when Ned was still very small he would help him by holding up the heart-shaped mirror surmounted by cupids that had been a wedding present from the Venetian Ambassador at the English Court. The clipped hairs would
fall on Ned’s hands as fine and glistening as spun glass; he would blow on them and up they would fly in a little cloud. His father invested this performance with the grace and gaiety of a prince’s levée. The slim, young-looking man on the couch seemed only to be waiting for his own whim to rise and dress with the elegance suitable to his rank and appearance and go out to play tennis, fence or dance. He would look into the mirror and then into the solemn face of his little son behind it, and laugh at two such dissimilar reflections of himself.

  “Where would you choose to be if you were not here?” he asked, and Ned, who had never been anywhere but in this room or one just like it, would wish that he were outside, playing with the ragged boys in the gutter. They turned cartwheels in front of the carriages in the hope of a coin, and yelled abuse after them if they did not get it, they made deadly catapults and practised them at a mark. Once he had seen a boy snatch fruit from a stall, dive through the crowd and, shouting “Stop Thief,” dart madly down a side street as if in pursuit of the culprit.

  But his mother did not even like him to stay too long at the window, watching them. Her son should have suitable companions or none at all. His father would tell him of the pleasant times he had had when he was at school in Shrewsbury, how he and the other boys had swum in the river under the great lime-trees and lain in the grass to dry until they grew so hot in the sun that they would roll over and over down the steep banks until they fell splash into the water again, and old Hen-Legs as they called him, the oldest usher in the school, came grumbling up-stream to them saying they had disturbed his fishing. He had been kept on because he could impress the parents by telling them how he had taught Sir Philip Sidney and Fulk Greville; he would point to their two names in Latin in long spidery writing next each other in the school register, and say that it would be enough for him to have it inscribed on his tombstone that he had been their usher.