It was at this moment that Cecil came groping silently down the staircase, as if he were a thief in his own house, breaking not in, but out. Mr Mallow was possessed of a resonant voice, a gift that is singularly fortifying when a slim, fair, and possibly slightly feline young woman is sharing its charms. The young man on the other side of the drawing-room wall now had his ungloved fingers on the latch.
‘Face the facts?’ Eirene was trembling. ‘How very interesting, Mr Mallow. I should love to read it. There are some novels, you know, that really are rather awful. Still, I believe’ – she opened her blue eyes wide just to show how much she meant it – ‘I believe I almost prefer some of my facts done up in pretty paper. Is that very weak of me? Men like things so dreadfully bare!’
Cecil was so much engrossed in his private affairs that he did not pause to wonder why Eirene never talked with this particular timbre in her voice in her intercourse with himself. Mr Mallow’s robuster tones broke out once more. ‘You see, dear young lady, nowadays novelists may be said to be divided into three camps. On the one hand we have these deplorable realists who think that by calling a spade a spade they are bound to use, and are justified in using, the most deplorable language. On the other we have what I should call the serio-sentimentalists, who try to show life devoid of shadows and who therefore cannot see it whole. And last we have the Shocking School merely out to pull any leg that shows. As for the Feminists – but I am not suggesting, of course …’
But Cecil had by now released the catch of the lock and the heavy door had been softly shut behind him. He was free. And his one desperate desire now was to make that freedom secure. It being Professor Flaxman Smith’s parlour-maid’s afternoon out, she was given no opportunity to open her bright blue eyes wide with astonishment at the sight of ‘that young Mr Jennings’ positively running, even though at best it was but a shambling run. But he was covering the ground.
All the peculiar paraphernalia of his life – cracks in the pavement, little windy orgies of dust and straw and dried dung, that same dust stilled and sodden after the night’s rain, hair-pins of every shape, metal, size, and degree of elegance, dead leaves, running ants, scraps of paper, sparrows, drowsing cats, questioning dogs, area railings, basement bars, cooks, kitchen tables, meat on them, fires in summer – all these phenomena now floated past his downcast eyes unheeded. It was Thursday. It was early closing day. With nothing but a name in his mind, and no address, with only the most meagre of hopes in the old trysting-place, he hastened on, determined that unless somehow or other Grummumma managed to circumvent him, he was going to assure himself of one single thing before he returned home. What exactly that thing was, he did not attempt to put into words. He wanted to say something, but first he must find the human being whom he wanted to say it to.
If the rather starchy-looking, blue-spectacled, elderly Cecil Jennings of thirty years later had ventured out on a similar quest, he would have had an extra hour of daylight, of Summer Time, to help him. This particular evening Cecil’s allowance of light was by that much the more brief. But the skies were fair, the air was fresh and gentle. And after a narrow escape from being run over by a brewer’s dray, he safely circumnavigated the rectory garden wall, and when he had pushed on along the river path to within a few hundred yards or so of the row of bright green lime trees, immediate risk of recognition was safely over.
The quality of the town were not accustomed to enjoy the river path at so late an hour. Maybe too because the day was Thursday and its usual frequenters were farther afield, or maybe because fortune was for that one evening in league with him, very few wayfarers indeed were about. The flowers of the dying grass from the first hayswathes in the meadow beyond the stream burdened the air with their strange sweetness. Swallows with tiny clash of beak and skirr of wing were hawking up and down the placid water; gnats in their dervish dancing drifted softly in every caprice of the breeze.
With little breath left either in body or spirit, Cecil came to a standstill. His mind was like a deflated balloon. The whole brave venture had suddenly become the stupidest goose chase. What preposterous self-confidence had brought him here? What justification, for that matter, had he for being a mere makeweight in the world at all? The burning heart had suddenly become like lead within him. An ailing half-wit dazzled by a shop-girl – the miserable folly of it all! The very beauty of the scene was a mockery and a sneer.
And now that the little sacred wooden bench would soon come within hail, every vestige of confidence forsook him. He felt as helpless and forlorn as a butterfly perishing in the vain attempt to extricate itself from its chrysalis skin. In the innocent hope of disguise, he had crammed on to his head an old soft hat discarded at least five years before. Nor were his clothes of his latest punctilious cut. It was no use. The whole attempt was fatuous. Nothing he could ever do would carry him farther than halfway. He might as well return to the High Street and apply at the Town Hall for a list of drapers and landladies and knock them up one by one. After the deliberate insult of that tea-party, even if he were successful, would she so much as consent to speak to him again? He buttoned his coat, shifted his eye-shade a little from the fretting line it had in his haste bitten into his forehead, and plodded on.
The lime tree was already disclosing the buds of its green-gold dangling racemes that would in a day or two be filling the air with a liquid sweetness as delicious as that of the withering grass. Here and there circlets of ripples showed where rising fish had rent the silken surface of the water. The river flowed on under the evening skies without haste between its banks. Summer comes, and goes. How was it possible that, only a few days before, this lovely, gentle, melancholy retreat had shown him a glimpse of Paradise, a paradise ablaze with lightning and shaken with thunder. The very bench, its timber still dark with a shower that had fallen, was eloquent with deprecation.
It was anguish to linger here, useless to venture farther, futile to go back. He must just give the problem up, that was all. And all this concern, this fatuity, interjected a sardonic voice (and one not entirely unlike Grummumma’s), from somewhere within his mind – all this for the sake of a green-sick shop-assistant! A young woman ineligible even for the parochial guild. A horrid Jesuitical Cartholic! A Cartholic, too, who for curiously conscientious reasons had only just escaped becoming the wife of one of the young puritans of the ‘Parade’. He listened with absolute calm to this harangue, as he stood leaning against the trunk of the tree. ‘But it doesn’t matter, my dear,’ he muttered as if in hope his whisper might penetrate to the ear of the secret Dryad slumbering beneath its smooth, dark rind. ‘Nothing in the world would matter if only you would come!’
Humanity for the most part is so confident in the skill of its senses that it seldom realizes how severe are their limitations. Not to be able to divine where the long-sought-for lost thing lies concealed in one’s own small earthly house; not to be able to see through even a sheet of paper; not to be aware that one’s nearest and dearest at but a hundred paces’ distance is in deadly danger; not to hear the faintest echo of the burning or icy thoughts in a close companion’s mind – such is man’s queer fate in his inexhaustibly rich environment. And yet poor Cecil never regretted the agony of the next few minutes of irresolution and despair, even though, as he was to discover when they were over, it was only a universal insensitiveness that was keeping him unaware.
Unaware, that is, that not twenty yards distant, and seated on the damp grass on the shelving bank of the river, her hands clasping her knees, was the young woman he longed for, her head turned towards him at an acute angle, her dark, quick eyes drinking him in. It seemed that she had made up her mind to give him time, and to give him his own time. Without otherwise stirring, she turned her head away again, and once more steadily surveyed the flowing water.
The narrow cheek-bones under the low brow and the straight black eyebrows were as pale as ivory in the reflected light of an almost colourless sunset. It was in part the usual pallor of shop life and in
part the result of poor food and indifferent sleep. But then ivory itself does not take to itself this particular bloom until the animal that grew it has gone into the dark. Peace itself to be sitting here now after the awful conflict, inward and outward, of the last few days. Other battles had left ugly indelible scars, and yet she had come through – what was left of her. The long agonized inward conflict of the last few days was over. All was lost. And yet the world had never looked so lovely, so hard to abandon, nor had she herself ever been so utterly at rest. She had never much cared what became of her, not at least until that absurd morning when her missing glove had been all but restored. And now, after a black, exhausting night, when dreams in the shallow sleep that had at last closed in upon her mind at the first cheeping of the sparrows had only increased her torments by a conviction of hopeless inefficiency, she knew exactly what was to become of her. But she had never for an instant foreseen that in the meantime she would meet again the one human being who had been the final cause of her decision.
Already in the waning light her face appeared a little duskier, its grave scrutiny fixed on that profoundly lustrous and fluid looking-glass. She speculated how deep it actually was; smiled inwardly at the thought of how shallow it need be. She gazed across the sliding water and watched a moment with a curious spiritual greed in her eyes the haze-swathed fields with their fringe of solemn and gigantic elms. Her nostrils quivered as if with a suppressed sigh or shudder as she breathed in the honey of the first few linden flowers. It was a mysterious thing to be alive, or rather, not so much to be alive as to be one’s only means of sharing all this. When she was gone it would be all gone too – except, of course, what might come after. And she hadn’t much time to think very closely about that.
Still, she was quite accustomed to finding pinned on with a midget pin in the corner of every scrap even of machine-made lace or the flimsiest of handkerchiefs that she proffered across the counter, its precise price to the uttermost farthing. So she was unlikely to fail to realize that not only whatever happens in this world, but whatever one is responsible for in it, and buys or sells of oneself, has had affixed to it its own price also. And that, too, to the uttermost farthing. And yet it was a luxury to feel her hands clasped round her bony shins and to be huddling like this with her limbs and body close together in this quiet, rain-soaked grass that would certainly teach her all in good time not to be so imprudent. An overwhelming remorse for the fate of her own body suddenly swept over her. It would be a pity to waste it.
And then, very cautiously, stealthily almost, as if even the soundless grinding of one sinew of the neck against another might be audible in this intense hush of evening, she turned her head once more and surveyed the stiff, awkward-looking shape now humped up so inanimately on its wooden bench under the tree. It would be silly, as well as unkind, perhaps, to keep him there any longer. She gave a little sort of nod at the water, much the same sort of little nod that she was accustomed to give when she had jotted down the total of a customer’s bill on the piece of cardboard at the end of her shop-book. Then she rose, stole up the bank, and went over to where Cecil was sitting.
‘Good evening,’ she said close to him. ‘Here’s a bad penny, you see.’
His whole body turned round in her direction. He thrust out his hands as if to ward off an unexpected enemy. But she made no move to reassure him.
‘I didn’t know you were there,’ he said. ‘Is there anybody else near?’
She laughed softly. ‘So you have discovered at last, then, that I am not the kind of person to be seen with.’
He rose to his feet and stood perfectly still, his hands trembling a little in spite of himself.
‘I could say things like that too,’ he replied, ‘but I should hate myself for doing so.’
‘Which might be,’ she retorted, ‘the beginning of a perfectly horrid quarrel. But I didn’t mean anything at all. I just said it. One must say something. I learned that the other day.’
‘This is all so horribly open,’ said the young man, sweeping his cane round with an incredibly magnificent gesture as if in proof of it. He might be Satan himself, surveying from his mountain-top the outstretched Kingdoms of the World. ‘Could we go on a little farther, do you think?’
‘Farther!’ she answered. ‘To Land’s End, if you like – if we could. But I’ve got to be out of the streets by ten, or say eleven, or I shall be on them for good on Monday.’
‘I never knew anyone,’ said Cecil, ‘who had such a dreadful way of telling the truth. You must be very young for that.’
An inexhaustible serenity seemed to have descended upon him. It seemed that he hadn’t an enemy in the world, that before them lay an infinity of space fenced in only by an infinity of time. ‘If you only knew what I feel at being with you again,’ he muttered. ‘I have been waiting for you for ages. But had – had given you up. I have been kept in again, you see – idiot that I am.’
‘Well,’ she said in a curiously flattened voice, which yet seemed to conceal an intensity of music, ‘never mind that! Here I am. I don’t mind, I don’t mind even if you have been at death’s door, as long as you too are with me again. You see, I am always more or less contented when I haven’t any decisions to make. I am sick of them, but there are none left now.’
She smiled to herself as fondly as a beauty at the image in her glass. ‘I didn’t suppose I should see you again, and yet even impossibilities come true sometimes.’ She turned her head away and went on with an effort: ‘You see, I couldn’t pretend I’m sorry to see you. I ought to. But nothing now, nobody in the world – or out of it either – could make me say that.’ Once more she twisted about. ‘Is that a common and horrible way of telling the truth? Like losing a whole boxful of gloves, I suppose.’
‘You never say anything,’ he replied gently, conscious, it seemed, while they loitered slowly on, of every saw-edged, exquisite blade of grass stooping green under the evening sky and here and there laden with a drop, a crystal universe, of rain-water – ‘you never say anything without saying something different immediately after. I don’t see, I mean, why you should always give a sting to everything. Mayn’t we be – just friends, for now? You see,’ he hastened on, ‘I want to speak to you very badly indeed. I have got to make plans. And I am wondering if you would help me.’
‘Where did you leave Mrs le Mercier,’ she inquired, ‘and – and that other young lady? I enjoyed that tea-party. But I had, of course, heard of Canon Bagshot before – often. He’s a little like a vulture, isn’t he?’
‘I have left them at home,’ he answered amiably, ‘or rather, Grummumma will be at home by now.’
‘Will they be sending a rescue party, do you think – from the street girl?’
‘Oh,’ he said helplessly, ‘you will just break me in pieces if you go on talking like that. You don’t know what I have been through these last few days – knowing what you must have thought of me. I deserve it all.’
For the moment Miss Simcox made no reply. Her inward glance had vaguely returned with a wry little grimace to scan the vista of her own last few days; but she was not going to say anything about that. Instead, and as usual for no clear reason, a flush of colour slowly spread over her pale face. She could feel the heat of it as she blurted out: ‘Then you’ve missed me? Missed me – missed me?’ With a wrench she regained her self-control. ‘Well, then, all I can say is, that I’ve missed you too. I mean, if you are kind enough to talk to me, I like talking to you. In the whole of my life I have never talked to anyone like you. I mean that I have never really talked before to anyone, and that I have never talked to anyone like you. Do you see now what I mean?’
‘I hear what you say,’ said Cecil in despair. It was odd that anything so substantial as the ground upon which they were walking should seem to be at least as precarious yet as buoyant as the water of which it was the restraining buttress. ‘I can’t think what you can find in me?’ he added lamely.
‘And me?’
‘
I don’t find anything, I am you. You are here.’ As if even the sweet, pure air of a summer evening might be a little suffocating in certain conditions, his companion had lightly touched her throat with outspread fingers. ‘Do you,’ he went on hastily, ‘do you understand what I mean?’
He came to a standstill, gesticulating with his hand as if over a mathematical problem. ‘The moment you come, my mind is like another place. I have never seen anything of this before – this green, this loveliness, that water. I don’t even know what they are; they have gone back to their own secrets, as, do you remember – when you were a child …?’
Her only answer to that was a vigorous, tragic little nod he couldn’t see. ‘Don’t let us say any more about that,’ she went on with a shudder. ‘There are worse things than not seeing … I wonder if, do you think, just for this once I might take your arm? I assure you there is not a soul in sight now. There was a blackbird calling on the other side of the river a moment ago, and just now I saw a bat in the air. Up there is the first star. Do you understand what I am saying? All it means is that I have gone to heaven – before I die!’
She had slipped her ungloved fingers through his arm, and the pair of them paced on towards – though they did not know it – towards the sea, and not towards the source of the river. They looked just like what they were – two commonplace sweethearts aimlessly wandering on together. And a sentimental passer-by might have thought how pleasant it was that a young man so severely handicapped should yet have been able to find a future helpmate.
But then this kind of foolish self-sacrifice is expected of the gentler sex, though as a matter of fact there was an odd suggestion of the masculine in the way in which this silk-shaded young man’s companion walked along beside him. There was a hint almost of the athletic in her every movement this evening, which is only to say, after all, that even in the indifferently nourished bodies which civilization is so freely responsible for, some spring of the wild animal may still remain.
Short Stories 1927-1956 Page 18