‘I tell you what I must do. I must come up here tomorrow if it’s a fine day, and bring my painting things and try and paint all this. I’ve sketched it often enough so I ought to make a good thing out of it, don’t you think so, little water rat? Ah! that’s what you are, a faithful little water rat.’ The scene before him was certainly one of remarkable, if somewhat melancholy, significance. Dark laurel bushes were reflected in sombre greenish-black water, and a group of scotch-firs, looking strange and exotic in that Sussex landscape, stood out against the mossy buttressed wall of the farm building. Where the buildings ended there arose another wall, composed not of masonry but of clipped ilex, solid and impenetrable, a living fortress of perennial darkness, at this time of the year lightened just a little by the sprouting of new evergreen leaves.
Between both these walls, the animate one and the inanimate one, and the edge of the pond, there grew in rank profusion a mass of succulent umbelliferae, their transparent stalks and greenish-white flowers looking as if they were plants of darkness and moonlight enduring for a while the unnatural rays of the sun, while they waited for the diurnal return of their native obscurity.
‘That’s what you are, a faithful little water rat!’ repeated the painter, looking jeeringly into the great eyes of the ugly dumb child. ‘And what’s more, I’m afraid you won’t have a very happy life unless you learn to betray and change and flatter and tell huge howling lies.’
The child made ghastly movements with its throat and palate and emitted a sound like the noise made by the corn-crake.
‘What’s that, Sally-Maria; what’s that you’re saying? You don’t want to live a happy life unless you can be faithful and keep promises and not deceive? Go and eat hemlock roots then, little water rat, like the great Socrates, and leave this world of human beings to lie and lie and lie and be pretty and happy! Socrates wasn’t a beauty, Sally-Maria. He was very very ugly. He was the ugliest person ever born. But he couldn’t bear to deceive people. He spoke right out what he thought. Perhaps that’s why they turned him into an owl. You hear owls at night, don’t you Sally-Maria? Do you remember when we saw that great white one over there? I told you what it was then; I told you not to be afraid. Whenever you hear that old fellow now, when you lie in bed, you must say to yourself: he’s a kind one, he’s an honest one, he never eats little faithful water rats. He just hoots and hoots and hoots because human beings are so false!’
Two men came round the hedge corner at that moment and stopped by their side. ‘You’m talking to our little Sal, mister, I see, same’s usual,’ said one of them, the simple-headed foreman of the place. ‘Yes, sure enough. I most always sees ‘un talkin’ wi’ the maidy when ’ee comes hereabouts,’ remarked the other, a frail wraith of a man but heavily bearded, as though a human beard should grow upon a ghost-face and be more palpable and real than the countenance to which it belonged.
‘Making a picture there I see, mister?’ continued the foreman – ‘I’d had the old place cleaned a bit for ’ee and polished up like if I’d a’ known you was goin’ to do it. ’Tis a queer old place like to live in, day in, day out. But, lord alive, we’ve got to live as well as we may somewheres, so’s to die comfortable and as late as us may. That’s what I sez to Passon Moreton, I sez.’
‘Ho! Ho! Ho!’ laughed the wraith-like carter, while his goat-beard wagged and shook. ‘That’s what a’ sez – nothing short o’ that. A terrible old hole, a’ sez, and his Reverence had to take it from ‘un.’
‘Live as well, day in, day out, as the belly allows for, in these up-down times, so’s to die as late as the Lord be willing,’ repeated the foreman, planting his feet wide apart and leering at the universe through little screwed-up eyes. Once more the carter’s frail form shook with merriment, at this daring piece of wit. That’s just what ‘ee sez and Passon Moreton ’eed a got to take it from ’un, ’ee ’ad, meek as a lamb.’
The young artist made as though he would resume his work, but the two men seemed disinclined for some reason to leave his side, Behind his back, as he sat hunched up upon a fallen log, they were now making mute signs to each other, while the little dumb girl stared in amazement at them.
‘Tell ’im plain out,’ whispered the bearded shadow to the burly confounder of parsons, ‘it mayn’t be as us thinks it is, anyway knowing is knowing and the written word’s the written word.’
The burly man fumbled in his pocket and produced a dirty scrap of newspaper.
The preoccupied painter, glancing up at the child in front of him, caught such a look of alarm upon her face that he turned his head sharply. ‘Anything the matter?’ he inquired.
The foreman walked slowly round and stood in front of him, while the carter, shuffling uneasily after his superior, peered round at the hedge, the bushes, the pond and the hemlocks, as if expecting a sudden onrush of interested spectators hurrying to witness this dramatic occurrence.
‘Us seed ’ee from the yard, us did, mister,’ murmured the second man, giving his stammering companion a little dig in the side, ‘an us thought the sooner we’d ’a told ’ee what ’twas ’as been and got itself brought to light in them newspapers, the sooner ’ee’d be acquainted with the injured party, like.’
‘’Tweren’t I and’twern’t Charley as read about this terrible thing,’ murmured the lusty foreman in a tone of profound apology, evidently fearing, as some ancient slave of the house of Oedipus might once have feared, lest the bearer of evil news should himself meet with disaster.
‘No! ’tweren’t Mr Priddle and ’tweren’t I what discovered that your mother had been runned over by a railway train.’ Twas old Miss Stone what lives over the hill ‘as told us.’
Robert Canyot leapt to his feet and snatched the bit of paper out of the man’s hand. It was a brief statement that a lady who gave a London address had been knocked down by a shunted track at Selshurst Station and had been carried to the hospital. Her name was given as Mrs Canyot of Maida Vale. A horrible cold shiver ran down the spine of the young man and for a moment he felt dizzy. His poor sweet darling mother! She must have wanted to pay him a surprise visit. But why? It was hardly credible that she should do such a thing at her age and with her methodical habits. It couldn’t be true! He looked at the notice again, holding it with a hand that trembled. Maida Vale? There could hardly be another Mrs Canyot who lived in that district. It must be his mother. And yet – to come like that – without telling him. It was utterly and entirely unlike her. He stood gazing helplessly at the paper in his hand calculating remote chances.
Robert Canyot was an only son. His father had been a wine merchant, a man of the same type as John Ruskin’s father, combining shrewdness, puritanism, and a certain queer turn or twist for what he regarded as ‘art’.
The little lady of Maida Vale had done all she could to give her boy everything in this mad world that youth could desire. She had let him run wild. She had sent him to school and removed him from school; sent him to Oxford and removed him from Oxford. Finally she had made over to him half of her income and let him follow the delight of his eyes and the fancies of his heart unrestrained by any responsibility. The result was that the sharp contrast, between his mother’s unbounded infatuation and the rough shocks of the world that cared nothing what became of him, made out of quite sound material a sort of cynical misanthropic queer one.
It was not however a very cynical Robert who gazed now, agitated and startled, into the narrow eyes of Silas Priddle and the great watery eyes of Charley Budge.
‘Hoping there’s no offence, mister, in us having taken the liberty of showing ’ee that there bit ’o news. It may be as it’s your poor dear Mother what’s runned into a railway train, and it may be as ’tisn’t. If ’tis, ’tis God’s will. If ’tisn’t I reckons ’tis somebody else’s mother; but seeing how it’s upset ’ee like I be afeerd it is as ’tis there writ’ down.’
Saying these words the foreman of Toat Farm planted his feet firmly in the long grass, screwed up his eyes, scratched his hea
d, and whistled a few notes of the particular call with which he was accustomed to summon his wife’s ducks at the hour of sunset.
‘Charley,’ he remarked after a long pause, during which the young man read and re-read the bit of newspaper, ‘us must be getting on with the beasts, us must.’
‘Aye, aye, Mr Priddle,’ agreed the other. ‘Beasts must be served funeral days same as wedding days, as old Farmer Patchem used to tell us every time ’is missus ’ad a still-born. “Life is as ’tis, Charley,” ’ee used to say, “and them as takes it quiet’ll last longest and their children’s children’ll call ’em blessed.”’
Having uttered these words of wisdom the two sages moved away. ‘The poor lad be dazed-like,’ said the foreman. ‘Did ’ee mark, Charley, how ’ee squinnied with the eyes o’n, when ’ee got tellin of funerals? A reckon ‘ee might o’ bashed it out, ’ee did, too point, Charley, than ’ee was. Sort o’ bashed it out, ’ee did, too plumb and positive. Maybe the old woman isn’t broken up complete. Some of them elderly females is wonderful hard to kill; same as cats I reckon.’
Well! no use standing here, thought Canyot. I must off to Sets-hurst. If it is the poor darling, I shall stay the night there. It may be nothing more than a nervous shock, after all. These papers exaggerate so. And it may not be her at all. But if it isn’t, it’s certainly an odd coincidence.
He felt a small hand softly and timidly pulling at the sleeve that hung empty. Robert had lost his arm in Flanders and possessed two medals for courage in the field. He looked down and patted the child’s head, ashamed of having forgotten her. The little dumb girl was making pitiful sounds with her poor mouth.
‘Poor little water rat!’ he murmured. ‘Poor little Sally-Maria! This is a bad day for us, isn’t it? But never mind! Say your prayers for your friend’s Mummy. Let’s hope that when we meet again all will be well.’
The child put her arms around him holding his sleeve tightly and hiding her face.
‘There – there – my little one,’ he said, extricating himself from her clinging arms. ‘Don’t worry any more about it. Run home to Auntie and be a good little kind faithful water rat. We’ll see each other again. Goodbye and God bless you!’ And he broke from her and started off at a run in the direction of Littlegate. I’ll just tell them where I’m going, he said to himself, so if I’m away for the night they won’t be scared. Even to his own heart he used the pronoun ‘they’, but his thoughts circled round Nelly and the sad walk he had had with her the night before. I’ve go to face it, he said to himself as he followed the pack-horse track along the lower slopes of the Downs. If she has never really cared for me as she thought she did, I suppose I can’t blame her. But if she’s simply fickle, and just flattered by that cunning old Frenchy’s blarney – well then, to the devil with her! She’s no better than a flirtatious little cat!
The path Canyot followed through the late afternoon sunshine lay through the open country. Its height above the valley gave him a clear view of many outstretched white roads and lanes. As he approached the widespread park-like slopes that rose up from West Horthing to the crest of the hills he obtained an unimpeded survey over the whole winding length of the narrow chalk track which led from Furze Lodge to Littlegate.
‘Hullo!’ he cried suddenly and came to a dead stop, breathing hard. ‘I seem to know that figure! Am I going dotty with all this fuss, or is it really her? It’s certainly a girl. How absurd I am! It’s probably Betsy-Anne’s Rose taking the washing home for her mother. No! It can’t be Rose. That girl’s walking just the way she walks.’ He ran at top speed for almost five hundred yards. Then he stopped again. ‘She’s picking flowers,’ he cried. ‘It’s Nelly! and he set off at a tremendous pace across the remaining piece of parkland. Through the patches of newly budded bracken-fern he sped furiously, tripping and stumbling over the rabbit holes and taking the smaller juniper bushes in a series of flying leaps. ‘How mad I am!’ he said to himself at last, when bursting through a thicket of hazel bushes and skirting a huge clump of gorse that barred his way, he scrambled down a bank into the white sheep-track he had seen from above. ‘How mad I am!’ She’s probably made up her mind to give me the chuck. She’s as likely as not dead nuts on that ‘free verse’ fellow. Curse his blood, coming here and turning her head! And yet here I am running after her as if she were as fond of me as ever! Running after her to tell her all about mother, as if she would post off to Selshurst with me! I wonder if she will be a little bit shocked and sorry. Maybe she will. Maybe a real shock, and having to sympathize a bit, will do her good. And the young man suppressed one of those funny inhuman impious thoughts that come to the best of us at certain junctures and crises.
He had as a matter of fact no difficulty at all in overtaking the girl. She was so preoccupied with all the queer opinions recentlyflung at her head that she walked along in a careless absorbed manner, stopping mechanically to pick a wild-flower here and there but twisting her thoughts and her anxieties round every new plant she added to her nosegay. She was resting on a sloping bank, yellow with bird’s foot trefoil and cistus when he finally approached her. He lessened his pace so as to recover his breath, and she waved at him the little stick she carried, which he had himself cut from the hedge some months before.
‘I knew it was you,’ he began when he came up to her. ‘I saw you from above West Horthing. I knew you by your walk.’ He wavered and hesitated in front of her for a flickering moment. Then he stooped down and took her gently by the wrist.
‘Take care!’ she said, smiling, as with her free hand she laid down her nosegay; but she allowed herself to be pulled up on to her feet and to be pressed close to him in the old fierce way, at which she used to laugh so gaily, calling it ‘the one-armed bear’s hug’.
He kissed her cool soft cheeks and her gentle unresisting mouth. He kissed her closed eyelids.
‘That’ll do, Robert!’ she cried at last, making a struggle to release herself.
He gave a sigh and let her go. He had not failed to notice that with the least little movement of her head, in spite of her passivity, she had, before he released her, moved her lips away from his. And even while she had yielded her face to him she had not once kissed him in return.
‘Oh Nelly!’ he cried. ‘My little Nelly! You do care for me just a tiny bit? You haven’t got quite tired of me?’
They sat down together on the bank and she let him keep tight hold of her hand. Her forehead was puckered into a miserable helpless frown and her eyes, dry and clear and sad, gazed far away from him over the receding Downs.
‘You do love me still, Nelly darling?’ he kept repeating in a dull useless chant, as one might go on reading from a book to a hearer who listened no longer. ‘You do love me a little bit still, sweetheart?’
She felt absolutely unable to say a word to him. It was one of those moments when women are driven back to grope after some language that is older than the language of words; older, deeper, sadder, gentler; to call upon it, and peradventure not to find it.
‘If only you love me, still,’ he went on, ‘I don’t care what you do. We needn’t be married, Nelly– not for years and years. We needn’t be engaged any more. You can go quite free of me; absolutely free. If only I can feel that it isn’t your love that has changed I can bear anything!’
Her lips moved. She drew her head away. She picked up the flowers from the grass and began mechanically sorting them in her lap.
Then, stricken by a sharp pang of remorse, he leapt to his feet. ‘Nelly,’ he said, taking the piece of newspaper from his pocket and throwing it on to her knees, ‘read that!’
She frowned for a moment as she smoothed out the printed scrap. Then, when she had read it, she too jumped up, staring at him with wide horrified eyes.
‘Goodbye old girl,’ he said, forcing himself to smile, ‘it’s a bit frightening though, isn’t it? I’m off to Selshurst anyway. Of course it may be nothing at all. I mean it may be someone else’s mother. But I’m off anyway. Goodbye dear. If i
t isn’t mother I’ll let you know tonight, if I’m not back too late. If it is, of course I shall stay with her. Somehow the more I think of it the less I can believe it’s really her. There might easily be, you know, some other people of our name in Maida Vale. You see it only says Maida Vale; and mother’s address is seven Cannerby Place.’
‘But Robert, but Robert—’ the girl gasped. ‘This is dreadful for you. Poor dear, poor dear!’ And this time she did herself kiss him tenderly, though only on the cheek.
He tore himself away from her, and started off, without another word, running at full pace. When he was about a hundred yards away, he stopped and threw his sketchbook into the hedge, making a signal to her to pick it up for him. She waved her bunch of flowers; and then with a quick irrepressible movement she kissed her hand.
He soon was concealed by a great thicket of furze bushes and she got no further sight of him. But as he ran, he could not help wondering to himself whether, if it were his mother and if she were really hurt, this sudden disaster to one person he loved wouldn’t turn again towards him, with a deeper understanding, the wavering heart of the other person he loved. Thus did the movements of those little silvery fish of impious thought that rise from the purest soul shock the mind of this youth with their queer leapings.
His anxiety, his suspension of mind, his growing fear, stretching forward towards the prostrate form of the woman in the hospital, blent as he ran with the image of the young girl standing in the path kissing her hand and waving her bunch of flowers.
And what of Nelly’s own feelings? The very bitterness of the cruel comedy of things was in her heart. Why had she, oh! why had she, let him kiss her like that, in the old manner, with the old freedom? And why must she needs have given way to an impulse like that and have waved him so natural, so spontaneous, so loving a farewell? He would naturally think, how could he help thinking – poor dear! – that all her vague flutterings to escape during their walk of misunderstanding amounted to nothing at all, were a mere feminine mood, a mere girlish caprice.
After My Fashion Page 8