The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes

by Израэль Зангвилл

  III.

  He was kept very busy for the next few days, and could only exchange a passionate letter or two with her. For some time the examination fever had been raging, and in every college poor patients sat with wet towels round their heads. Some, who had neglected their tutor all the term, now strove to absorb his omniscience in a sitting.

  On the Monday, John Lefolle was good-naturedly giving a special audience to a muscular dunce, trying to explain to him the political effects of the Crusades, when there was a knock at the sitting-room door, and the scout ushered in Mrs. Glamorys. She was bewitchingly dressed in white, and stood in the open doorway, smiling-an embodiment of the summer he was neglecting. He rose, but his tongue was paralysed. The dunce became suddenly important-a symbol of the decorum he had been outraging. His soul, torn so abruptly from history to romance, could not get up the right emotion. Why this imprudence of Winifred's? She had been so careful heretofore.

  "What a lot of boots there are on your staircase!" she said gaily.

  He laughed. The spell was broken. "Yes, the heap to be cleaned is rather obtrusive," he said, "but I suppose it is a sort of tradition."

  "I think I've got hold of the thing pretty well now, sir." The dunce rose and smiled, and his tutor realised how little the dunce had to learn in some things. He felt quite grateful to him.

  "Oh, well, you'll come and see me again after lunch, won't you, if one or two points occur to you for elucidation," he said, feeling vaguely a liar, and generally guilty. But when, on the departure of the dunce, Winifred held out her arms, everything fell from him but the sense of the exquisite moment. Their lips met for the first time, but only for an instant. He had scarcely time to realise that this wonderful thing had happened before the mobile creature had darted to his book-shelves and was examining a Thucydides upside down.

  "How clever to know Greek!" she exclaimed. "And do you really talk it with the other dons?"

  "No, we never talk shop," he laughed. "But, Winifred, what made you come here?"

  "I had never seen Oxford. Isn't it beautiful?"

  "There's nothing beautiful here," he said, looking round his sober study.

  "No," she admitted; "there's nothing I care for here," and had left another celestial kiss on his lips before he knew it. "And now you must take me to lunch and on the river."

  He stammered, "I have-work."

  She pouted. "But I can't stay beyond to-morrow morning, and I want so much to see all your celebrated oarsmen practising."

  "You are not staying over the night?" he gasped.

  "Yes, I am," and she threw him a dazzling glance.

  His heart went pit-a-pat. "Where?" he murmured.

  "Oh, some poky little hotel near the station. The swell hotels are full."

  He was glad to hear she was not conspicuously quartered.

  "So many people have come down already for Commem," he said. "I suppose they are anxious to see the Generals get their degrees. But hadn't we better go somewhere and lunch?"

  They went down the stone staircase, past the battalion of boots, and across the quad. He felt that all the windows were alive with eyes, but she insisted on standing still and admiring their ivied picturesqueness. After lunch he shamefacedly borrowed the dunce's punt. The necessities of punting, which kept him far from her, and demanded much adroit labour, gradually restored his self-respect, and he was able to look the uncelebrated oarsmen they met in the eyes, except when they were accompanied by their parents and sisters, which subtly made him feel uncomfortable again. But Winifred, piquant under her pink parasol, was singularly at ease, enraptured with the changing beauty of the river, applauding with childish glee the wild flowers on the banks, or the rippling reflections in the water.

  "Look, look!" she cried once, pointing skyward. He stared upwards, expecting a balloon at least. But it was only "Keats' little rosy cloud," she explained. It was not her fault if he did not find the excursion unreservedly idyllic.

  "How stupid," she reflected, "to keep all those nice boys cooped up reading dead languages in a spot made for life and love."

  "I'm afraid they don't disturb the dead languages so much as you think," he reassured her, smiling. "And there will be plenty of love-making during Commem."

  "I am so glad. I suppose there are lots of engagements that week."

  "Oh, yes-but not one per cent come to anything."

  "Really? Oh, how fickle men are!"

  That seemed rather question-begging, but he was so thrilled by the implicit revelation that she could not even imagine feminine inconstancy, that he forebore to draw her attention to her inadequate logic.

  So childish and thoughtless indeed was she that day that nothing would content her but attending a "Viva," which he had incautiously informed her was public.

  "Nobody will notice us," she urged with strange unconsciousness of her loveliness. "Besides, they don't know I'm not your sister."

  "The Oxford intellect is sceptical," he said, laughing. "It cultivates philosophical doubt."

  But, putting a bold face on the matter, and assuming a fraternal air, he took her to the torture-chamber, in which candidates sat dolefully on a row of chairs against the wall, waiting their turn to come before the three grand inquisitors at the table. Fortunately, Winifred and he were the only spectators; but unfortunately they blundered in at the very moment when the poor owner of the punt was on the rack. The central inquisitor was trying to extract from him information about a Becket, almost prompting him with the very words, but without penetrating through the duncical denseness. John Lefolle breathed more freely when the Crusades were broached; but, alas, it very soon became evident that the dunce had by no means "got hold of the thing." As the dunce passed out sadly, obviously ploughed, John Lefolle suffered more than he. So conscience-stricken was he that, when he had accompanied Winifred as far as her hotel, he refused her invitation to come in, pleading the compulsoriness of duty and dinner in Hall. But he could not get away without promising to call in during the evening.

  The prospect of this visit was with him all through dinner, at once tempting and terrifying. Assuredly there was a skeleton at his feast, as he sat at the high table, facing the Master. The venerable portraits round the Hall seemed to rebuke his romantic waywardness. In the common-room, he sipped his port uneasily, listening as in a daze to the discussion on Free Will, which an eminent stranger had stirred up. How academic it seemed, compared with the passionate realities of life. But somehow he found himself lingering on at the academic discussion, postponing the realities of life. Every now and again, he was impelled to glance at his watch; but suddenly murmuring, "It is very late," he pulled himself together, and took leave of his learned brethren. But in the street the sight of a telegraph office drew his steps to it, and almost mechanically he wrote out the message: "Regret detained. Will call early in morning."

  When he did call in the morning, he was told she had gone back to London the night before on receipt of a telegram. He turned away with a bitter pang of disappointment and regret.

  IV.

  Their subsequent correspondence was only the more amorous. The reason she had fled from the hotel, she explained, was that she could not endure the night in those stuffy quarters. He consoled himself with the hope of seeing much of her during the Long Vacation. He did see her once at her own reception, but this time her husband wandered about the two rooms. The cosy corner was impossible, and they could only manage to gasp out a few mutual endearments amid the buzz and movement, and to arrange a rendezvous for the end of July. When the day came, he received a heart-broken letter, stating that her husband had borne her away to Goodwood. In a postscript she informed him that "Quicksilver was a sure thing." Much correspondence passed without another meeting being effected, and he lent her five pounds to pay a debt of honour incurred through her husband's "absurd confidence in Quicksilver." A week later this horsey husband of hers brought her on to Brighton for the races there, and hither John Lefolle flew. But her husband shadowed her, a
nd he could only lift his hat to her as they passed each other on the Lawns. Sometimes he saw her sitting pensively on a chair while her lord and thrasher perused a pink sporting-paper. Such tantalising proximity raised their correspondence through the Hove Post Office to fever heat. Life apart, they felt, was impossible, and, removed from the sobering influences of his cap and gown, John Lefolle dreamed of throwing everything to the winds. His literary reputation had opened out a new career. The Winifred lyrics alone had brought in a tidy sum, and though he had expended that and more on despatches of flowers and trifles to her, yet he felt this extravagance would become extinguished under daily companionship, and the poems provoked by her charms would go far towards their daily maintenance. Yes, he could throw up the University. He would rescue her from this bully, this gentleman bruiser. They would live openly and nobly in the world's eye. A poet was not even expected to be conventional.

  She, on her side, was no less ardent for the great step. She raged against the world's law, the injustice by which a husband's cruelty was not sufficient ground for divorce. "But we finer souls must take the law into our own hands," she wrote. "We must teach society that the ethics of a barbarous age are unfitted for our century of enlightenment." But somehow the actual time and place of the elopement could never get itself fixed. In September her husband dragged her to Scotland, in October after the pheasants. When the dramatic day was actually fixed, Winifred wrote by the next post deferring it for a week. Even the few actual preliminary meetings they planned for Kensington Gardens or Hampstead Heath rarely came off. He lived in a whirling atmosphere of express letters of excuse, and telegrams that transformed the situation from hour to hour. Not that her passion in any way abated, or her romantic resolution really altered: it was only that her conception of time and place and ways and means was dizzily mutable.

  But after nigh six months of palpitating negotiations with the adorable Mrs. Glamorys, the poet, in a moment of dejection, penned the prose apophthegm, "It is of no use trying to change a changeable person."

  V.

  But at last she astonished him by a sketch plan of the elopement, so detailed, even to band-boxes and the Paris night route via Dieppe, that no further room for doubt was left in his intoxicated soul, and he was actually further astonished when, just as he was putting his handbag into the hansom, a telegram was handed to him saying: "Gone to Homburg. Letter follows."

  He stood still for a moment on the pavement in utter distraction. What did it mean? Had she failed him again? Or was it simply that she had changed the city of refuge from Paris to Homburg? He was about to name the new station to the cabman, but then, "letter follows." Surely that meant that he was to wait for it. Perplexed and miserable, he stood with the telegram crumpled up in his fist. What a ridiculous situation! He had wrought himself up to the point of breaking with the world and his past, and now-it only remained to satisfy the cabman!

  He tossed feverishly all night, seeking to soothe himself, but really exciting himself the more by a hundred plausible explanations. He was now strung up to such a pitch of uncertainty that he was astonished for the third time when the "letter" did duly "follow."

  "Dearest," it ran, "as I explained in my telegram, my husband became

  suddenly ill"-("if she had only put that in the telegram," he

  groaned)-"and was ordered to Homburg. Of course it was impossible to

  leave him in this crisis, both for practical and sentimental reasons.

  You yourself, darling, would not like me to have aggravated his

  illness by my flight just at this moment, and thus possibly have his

  death on my conscience." ("Darling, you are always right," he said,

  kissing the letter.) "Let us possess our souls in patience a little

  longer. I need not tell you how vexatious it will be to find myself

  nursing him in Homburg-out of the season even-instead of the

  prospect to which I had looked forward with my whole heart and soul.

  But what can one do? How true is the French proverb, 'Nothing happens

  but the unexpected'! Write to me immediately Poste Restante, that I

  may at least console myself with your dear words."

  The unexpected did indeed happen. Despite draughts of Elizabethbrunnen and promenades on the Kurhaus terrace, the stalwart woman beater succumbed to his malady. The curt telegram from Winifred gave no indication of her emotions. He sent a reply-telegram of sympathy with her trouble. Although he could not pretend to grieve at this sudden providential solution of their life-problem, still he did sincerely sympathise with the distress inevitable in connection with a death, especially on foreign soil.

  He was not able to see her till her husband's body had been brought across the North Sea and committed to the green repose of the old Hampstead churchyard. He found her pathetically altered-her face wan and spiritualised, and all in subtle harmony with the exquisite black gown. In the first interview, he did not dare speak of their love at all. They discussed the immortality of the soul, and she quoted George Herbert. But with the weeks the question of their future began to force its way back to his lips.

  "We could not decently marry before six months," she said, when definitely confronted with the problem.

  "Six months!" he gasped.

  "Well, surely you don't want to outrage everybody," she said, pouting.

  At first he was outraged himself. What! She who had been ready to flutter the world with a fantastic dance was now measuring her footsteps. But on reflection he saw that Mrs. Glamorys was right once more. Since Providence had been good enough to rescue them, why should they fly in its face? A little patience, and a blameless happiness lay before them. Let him not blind himself to the immense relief he really felt at being spared social obloquy. After all, a poet could be unconventional in his work-he had no need of the practical outlet demanded for the less gifted.

  VI.

  They scarcely met at all during the next six months-it had, naturally, in this grateful reaction against their recklessness, become a sacred period, even more charged with tremulous emotion than the engagement periods of those who have not so nearly scorched themselves. Even in her presence he found a certain pleasure in combining distant adoration with the confident expectation of proximity, and thus she was restored to the sanctity which she had risked by her former easiness. And so all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

  When the six months had gone by, he came to claim her hand. She was quite astonished. "You promised to marry me at the end of six months," he reminded her.

  "Surely it isn't six months already," she said.

  He referred her to the calendar, recalled the date of her husband's death.

  "You are strangely literal for a poet," she said. "Of course I said six months, but six months doesn't mean twenty-six weeks by the clock. All I meant was that a decent period must intervene. But even to myself it seems only yesterday that poor Harold was walking beside me in the Kurhaus Park." She burst into tears, and in the face of them he could not pursue the argument.

  Gradually, after several interviews and letters, it was agreed that they should wait another six months.

  "She is right," he reflected again. "We have waited so long, we may as well wait a little longer and leave malice no handle."

  The second six months seemed to him much longer than the first. The charm of respectful adoration had lost its novelty, and once again his breast was racked by fitful fevers which could scarcely calm themselves even by conversion into sonnets. The one point of repose was that shining fixed star of marriage. Still smarting under Winifred's reproach of his unpoetic literality, he did not intend to force her to marry him exactly at the end of the twelve-month. But he was determined that she should have no later than this exact date for at least "naming the day." Not the most punctilious stickler for convention, he felt, could deny that Mrs. Grundy's claim had been paid to the last minute.

  The publication of his new volume-containi
ng the Winifred lyrics-had served to colour these months of intolerable delay. Even the reaction of the critics against his poetry, that conventional revolt against every second volume, that parrot cry of over-praise from the very throats that had praised him, though it pained and perplexed him, was perhaps really helpful. At any rate, the long waiting was over at last. He felt like Jacob after his years of service for Rachel.

  The fateful morning dawned bright and blue, and, as the towers of Oxford were left behind him he recalled that distant Saturday when he had first gone down to meet the literary lights of London in his publisher's salon. How much older he was now than then-and yet how much younger! The nebulous melancholy of youth, the clouds of philosophy, had vanished before this beautiful creature of sunshine whose radiance cut out a clear line for his future through the confusion of life.

  At a florist's in the High Street of Hampstead he bought a costly bouquet of white flowers, and walked airily to the house and rang the bell jubilantly. He could scarcely believe his ears when the maid told him her mistress was not at home. How dared the girl stare at him so impassively? Did she not know by what appointment-on what errand-he had come? Had he not written to her mistress a week ago that he would present himself that afternoon?

  "Not at home!" he gasped. "But when will she be home?"

  "I fancy she won't be long. She went out an hour ago, and she has an appointment with her dressmaker at five."

  "Do you know in what direction she'd have gone?"

  "Oh, she generally walks on the Heath before tea."

  The world suddenly grew rosy again. "I will come back again," he said. Yes, a walk in this glorious air-heathward-would do him good.

  As the door shut he remembered he might have left the flowers, but he would not ring again, and besides, it was, perhaps, better he should present them with his own hand, than let her find them on the hall table. Still, it seemed rather awkward to walk about the streets with a bouquet, and he was glad, accidentally to strike the old Hampstead Church, and to seek a momentary seclusion in passing through its avenue of quiet gravestones on his heathward way.