Why couldn’t she have drawn back honestly from him, and emphatically and plainly made it clear to him that the whole thing had been a mistake, her mistake, her unpardonable, inconsiderate, blind mistake?
But the poor boy, harassed and terrified over this accident, how could she do anything else but pity him and be sympathetic? But she could have been sympathetic, without – without kissing her hand to him! But she wanted to kiss her hand to him. She wanted, at that moment – he looked so wretched, poor darling! – to give him a very nice kiss. Was she a bad girl? Was she an unnatural horrid creature, able to love two men at the same time?
Nelly pondered long and deeply as she walked slowly home. So many contrary emotions had seized her and shaken her during the last twenty-four hours that her young brain was in a whirl. This unexpected hesitation in herself, in her own heart, in the very depths of her soul, was a quite new element in the situation. What had happened? Had she got out of her trap, broken its iron teeth, tossed it away from her, only to find herself regretting her freedom? The more she tried to analyse her feelings the more puzzled she became. She had never suspected that any appeal from Robert could move and stir her as she had been stirred. She had imagined him getting angry, calling her evil names, abusing her, and going off in a rage. She had called up all her pride, in advance, to meet the onslaught of his pride.
But it had not been like that at all. He had shown no pride, no anger. He had only shown a pitiful gentleness, a puzzled unhappiness. And it was nice, it was soothing and sweet, to be hugged so tight by him and to feel his poor dear unlost arm so strong and firm about her.
What an ironic thing it would be, she thought, if the pity she felt for him as soon as she had made up her mind to jilt him brought her at last, for the first time, really to love him!
She did love him, in a way. She knew that well enough. But it wasn’t the ‘in-love’ way. It was different perhaps from his being a brother – but not very different. Was it, after all, a horrid and unnatural thing to love a young man one wasn’t ‘in love’ with? Ought one to have hated being touched by him, being hugged and kissed by him? She certainly hadn’t hated it. She had liked it. But that was only as long as she could stop it just when she liked! But when you were married to a person you couldn’t stop these things just when you liked. Therefore it was not right to marry someone you only loved, but weren’t in love with – because of not being able to arrange these things! Nelly reached home thoroughly confused, a little ashamed of herself, and very remorseful because she had talked so freely to Mrs Shotover. That had certainly been a mistake! If, as the old adage says, ‘it is better to be off with the old love before you are on with the new’ it is certainly a very unsafe thing to talk about ‘the new one’ before you have made up your own mind! She wished most heartily that she had waited a little before going to West Horthing. As a matter of honest fact, if Nelly’s guardian angel could have been induced to reveal to us what the girl hid scrupulously even from her own heart, it would have been shown that the cynical assumptions poured into her ears by Mrs Shotover had in an imperceptible manner dropped a tiny drop of poison into her vague delicious dreamings about Richard Storm. She seemed to know where she was so well with Robert, and to know so little where she was with the more shadowy figure of the visitor from Paris!
Chapter 5
An aeroplane traveller armed with a good telescope would have been able to observe from his airy watchtower during the midafternoon hours of that eventful day three separate groups of human beings linked together by thoughtwaves but completely ignorant of each other’s movements. He would have seen Nelly among the roses of her friend’s garden. He would have seen Canyot talking to the farm men by the edge of Toat Great Pond. And finally he would have seen, seated in absorbed conversation under the churchyard wall, the Reverend John Mbreton and Mr Richard Storm.
His telescope would have revealed these various persons and he would have regarded them with the Olympian indifference of the high careless gods of the Epicurean hierarchy.
What he would not have seen – unless he had been a god himself – were those quivering invisible magnetic waves, which it is difficult not to believe must pass backwards and forwards, fast as thought itself, between persons who are linked together by some impending dramatic crisis.
Storm had arrived at Littlegate not long after Nelly’s departure for West Horthing and he had boldly presented himself at the vicarage door. Grace, issuing forth, in her young mistress’s absence, on an emotional errand of her own, had been reluctantly compelled to turn back into the house and convey the visitor into her master’s study. This she hurriedly did with no anterior warning, flinging open the door and announcing in stentorian tones, ‘Mr Worm to see you, sir!’
Richard, hearing the door closed with a bang behind him and becoming immediately conscious of a vague zoological garden odour caused by the innumerable stuffed birds and beasts with which the room was crowded, felt for the moment as if he had been pushed into the den of some sort of formidable animal. His consciousness of something odd about it all and a little disturbing was not diminished when he remarked the grizzled scalp of the old man and his wrinkled forehead emerging from beyond the edge of a littered table very much as some horrific ‘manifestation’ might materialize at a successful seance.
John Moreton did not get up from his knees to greet his visitor. He just blinked at him and frowned, placing one large hand, like a great paw, upon an open sheet of botanical specimens and the other upon a bottle of glue as if he were apprehensive lest the intruder should pounce upon them and clear them away or carry them off.
He looked so exactly like a medieval miser caught in the act of counting his treasure that Richard was tempted to open the conversation by assuring his host that he was not a thief.
Instead of doing this, however, a happy instinct led him to remove from his buttonhole and display to the old man a little flower, quite unknown to him, which he had picked by the edge of a muddy ditch.
This well-omened plant turned out to be a stray specimen of water avens which the old man assured him must have been carried there, in its embryonic state, by some migratory bird out of a neighbouring county.
To investigate the water avens the Reverend Moreton did get up from behind the table and was induced to give a certain portion of the attention demanded by the flower to the guest who held it in his hand.
To retain his hold upon the naturalist’s attention, thus with difficulty won, Richard hurriedly began putting questions to him, more imaginative than scientific, about the various stuffed birds hanging on the wall. He began, as a matter of fact, to display a genuine curiosity about some of the less usual among these, and in admiring their beauty made a few allusions to such of their kind as he had seen, or fancied he had seen, in his travels through France.
One naturalistic topic led to another, and it was not long before Storm was examining, this time with actual enthusiasm, the vicar’s fine collection of British birds’ eggs. It was delightful to ransack the recesses of childish memories in regard to these beautiful little microcosms of the mysterious maternal forces. He suppressed a mischievous desire to ask the old fanatic some wild Sir Thomas Browne question as to the mother of Apollo or the offspring of the phoenix, and he reverently held up to the light, one by one, the strangely scrawled eggs of buntings, the beautiful blue eggs of redstarts, the olive-green eggs of nightingales and that incredibly small rondure, like an ivory-coloured pellet, out of which, if science had not interfered, should have emerged a tiny golden-crested wren!
He made himself so agreeable to the old man by his sincere delight in the beauty of these things, and his modest relish for the pedantic pleasure of ‘calling them all by name’, that John Moreton did what he very rarely did for any human being – his own daughter not excepted – and invited him to come out into the churchyard that he might show him an inviolate specimen of the nest of a meadow pipit.
Having enjoyed the spectacle of the snug security of the wi
se pipit’s retreat – for the old collector had his full compliment of this species – Richard found no difficulty in cajoling the vicar to sit down with him for a while under the high sunny wall and engage in philosophical conversation.
The writer was indeed quite captivated by the old gentleman’s originality and scientific passion. It puzzled him a good deal that his young friend had not told him more about her father, had not made clear to him what a remarkable and unusual man he was. I bet, he thought to himself, that ass of a Canyot has no idea what a treasure this old fellow is! I hope my little girl is kind to him. If she isn’t I shall give her a very serious scolding. Scolding? I shall whistle her down the wind, for an undiscerning little impious baggage!
From general philosophic topics of a semi-scientific character, in handling which Richard found Mr Moreton to be quite as imaginative and daring in his speculations as the boldest modern thinker, they passed by insensible degrees to the great ‘sphinx problem’ of the unknown reality lying behind it all.
‘It would interest me to hear,’ Storm at length ventured to say, ‘how a man of science like yourself reconciles your priestly functions with what we’ve been talking about. I’ve known several scientific priests in France and they do it by keeping the two realms rigidly and inflexibly apart. But I never quite feel as if that were a satisfactory solution. Both views of life are so entirely natural and human; and both, it seems to me, spring from the same fundamental passion in the human soul – the passion to grasp life in its inmost secret.’
The old man looked at him from under his shaggy eyebrows with a look of slow interrogative caution; the caution of an old peasant who hesitates to reveal some piece of instructive local knowledge which to him has a deep inexplicable value.
Richard’s direct candid gaze in answer to this peering scrutiny seemed to satisfy the man; for, prodding the ground with his heavy cane, he searched for the exact words in which to sum up his position.
‘What I’ve come to feel,’ he said, ‘and I speak as an ordinary secular layman in the eyes of the world, for I intend to resign my living (though to myself, as you will doubtless understand, I shall always be a priest), is that there are two entirely separate conceptions – the conception of God round which have gathered all the tyrannies, superstitions, persecutions, cruelties, wars, which have wounded the world; and the conception of Christ round which has gathered all the pity and sympathy and healing and freedom which has saved the world.
‘The conception of Satan has been torn asunder between these two. As Lucifer the Light-Bearer, as the Eternal Rebel, he is an aspect of Christ. As the Infernal Power of malice and opposition to life, he is an aspect of God.
‘To my mind the world is an arena of perpetual conflict between these two forces, one of which I renounce and defy; the other I worship in the Mass.’
‘Pee-wit! pee-wit!’ cried the plovers over the old man’s head as he concluded this strange statement of heresy; and Richard thought to himself – On which side would he put the cry of that bird?
But he answered aloud: ‘Your view is not a new one, sir. William Blake seems to have felt something of what you say – and there are modern French poets, too, who have—’
The old man waved his hand in the air with a proud gesture. ‘What I’ve told you, young man, I’ve learnt from beetles and mosses, from shrikes and redshanks, from newts and slow-worms. It is not a poetical fancy with me. It is my discovery. It is what I’ve been thinking out for myself, for sixty-odd years. And what I’ve got to do now is what all discoverers have to do, I’ve got to pay the price!’
‘Pee-wit! pee-wit!’ cried the agitated plovers, wheeling in circles round the field behind them.
‘It seeems to me,’ remarked Richard after a moment’s hesitation; for his habitual desire to propitiate rather than to contradict made opposition difficult to him – ‘it seems to me that you have avoided the chief problem. Surely the human instinct which has in all ages groped after something it calls God is really seeking a reconciliation between your two forces? Surely, sir, you will admit, constituted as we are, we cannot escape from the notion of some fundamental unity in things? And isn’t it a desperate pathetic desire in us that this unity should be essentially good rather than evil, that has led to the theological conception of a Father of the Universe?’
The old man started up to his feet with an angry leap. ‘Theological!’ he cried beating the top of the mossy wall with his fists. ‘That’s just what it is – theological!’
‘It might just as well,’ muttered Richard, losing his propitiatory manner, for something bitter and personal in the old man’s tone irritated and incensed him, ‘be called human. For not to want the universe to be good at bottom is surely an inhuman feeling.’
‘Pee-wit! pee-wit!’ cried the plovers in the field behind them.
To their intelligence, the appearance of the old naturalist’s grizzled pate, across the familiar saxifrages and pennyworts and kiss-me-quicklys of that old wall, must have been very menacing.
‘You will hardly deny, sir,’ went on Richard, though a secret monitor in his heart kept whispering to him You’re a fool to annoy him; you’re a fool to argue with him, ‘that our Lord himself believed in what we usually mean when we use the expression God?’
The Reverend John Moreton stared down at his visitor with a look of infinite contempt.
‘The Christ I celebrate in the sacrament,’ he said, ‘has nothing to do with ignorant repetitions of badly reported misunderstandings. The few great authentic logia which I adhere to make no mention of the Eidolon Vulgaris of which you speak!’
Richard had really lost his temper now. ‘You are a very good example, sir,’ he flung out, ‘of what happens when a Church separates itself from the traditions of Christendom!’
‘It is reason, it is science, it is common sense!’ roared the old man. ‘It is a confounded exhibition of obstinate private judgement!’ shouted the writer back to him.
‘Pee-wit! pee-wit!’ cried the birds behind the wall.
At that moment a faded specimen of the butterfly called a painted lady fluttered rapidly across the graves.
Richard’s outburst had left him with a sense of shamefaced remorse. He certainly had behaved like an arrant fool in contradicting the old gentleman.
He moved forward towards the dilapidated insect that kept wheeling backwards and forwards over the orchis maculata, newly planted on Cecily Moreton’s mound.
‘What’s that, sir? What ever kind of butterfly is that? I have never seen anything like that before!’
He removed his hat and made as though he would pursue the swift-winged creature.
‘A painted lady!’ muttered the old man sulkily. But the naturalist’s vanity was stronger in him than the theologian’s rancour. ‘You’ve never seen one? You young men are very unobservant! Painted ladies are well known in France.’ ‘Not that kind, sir, surely?’ cried the cunning biographer of the poet of the demimonde. Ours in France are lighter on the wing’; and he pursued the faded wanton with more discretion than success.
The old man was completely won over by this boyish display. He stumbled after his antagonist and laid his hand on his arm. ‘Let it go!’ he said chuckling grimly. ‘She’s one too many for you. Many a time have I hunted them for miles over the Downs. In some seasons they’re very rare. They’re interesting little things! Very prettily marked when you get a good specimen.
‘The North American kind is just a little different. Come in, my boy, come in, and I’ll show you how they differ. It must be a case of adaptation. Their woods are thicker, they say – more undergrowth.’ And the two men returned towards the house in perfect unanimity. The painted lady had found the secret.
‘Yes,’ said John Moreton as they sat down together after an exhaustive investigation of marble whites, chalk-hill blues, purple emperors, clouded yellows, green hair-streaks, red admirals; ‘Yes, I shall resign my living. But thanks to the young man to whom my daughter is engaged – I have a daughter
, sir; she’s away somewhere – I don’t know where’; and he waved his hand vaguely – ‘it will not be necessary for me to leave this village. My daughter and this young man – he’s considerate to me; he knows the value of my work – have taken a cottage nearby, north of where we are now, and they propose that I shall live with them. It’s a good plan. The young man will have the advantage of my scientific knowledge. He’s a painter. And I shall … I shall be indebted to him for my humble wants.’
Richard Storm was reduced to a depressed silence by his host’s words. He stared out of the french window at the lawn and the trees. He felt miserably tired, all the spirit gone from him and a vague ennui turning everything to emptiness. Of course that was it! He might have known it. He had known it. Of course she was engaged to this aggressive youth; and of course her marriage was necessary to her father’s happiness!
The point was: did she, in spite of appearances, love the fellow? If so – and it seemed likely enough – there was nothing for him to do but clear off elsewhere. The idea of settling down to write poetry in the neighbourhood of this happy domestic arrangement didn’t appeal to him. His attraction to Nelly had gone a little too far for that Confound it all! What a thing life was. The day before yesterday – even yesterday – he had felt that his great new idea, that high mystical doctrine which had gathered in his mind, was the one important thing in existence. Nelly’s white fragile face and fair silken hair were only traceries upon the tapestry, no more really essential to him than were the green hieroglyphs at the back of the hair-streak’s wings.
But since he had last seen her, at the lodge gate of the close, ‘the perfume and suppliance’ of her personality had been growing steadily upon him, gathering importance, insinuating themselves into his deeper consciousness.
After My Fashion Page 9