“I want a ring for this lady, Mr. Cranston.”
“Ex-actly. Now—as to stones—diamonds, sapphires, rubies, emeralds? Sapphires. Thank you. Now here is a very elegant thing—an exquisite thing. Such superb colour.”
With Mr. Cranston’s sympathetic assistance they managed to find the one miraculous ring that was to change its velvet bed for Janet’s hand. It cost Pierce Hammersly forty guineas. He began to look around the shop for other plunder.
“May I have the pleasure of showing you something else, sir? Bracelets, pendants, ladies’ watches——?”
“Have you a watch, Janet?”
“Yes. And I don’t care for trinkets.”
She looked at him tenderly, but meaningly.
“What about——?”
“No, really—I won’t have anything else.”
Mr. Cranston effaced the merchant in himself, most delicately.
“Will you wear the ring, madam, or shall I——”
“I’ll wear it, thank you.”
Mr. Cranston handed it with great stateliness to Pierce, who slipped it on Janet’s finger. Cranston beamed on them, and slid round the counter to open the door.
“Pierce, I almost feel married!”
They laughed joyously.
“It was quite a rite of the church——bless you, my children—what? There is quite a good shop down by the Guildhall.”
She stood firmly by the car.
“I am not going to let you buy me anything else.”
“Why not?”
“Pride, dear. I am not going to let anybody say——”
“Oh, you sensitive goddess! But you are adorable. All right; I surrender.”
“Thank you, dear man.”
They reached Orchards about twelve o’clock, and found old Porteous sitting under the weeping ash near the porch, and pretending to read the paper. He had been waiting for them, determined that the house of the Hammerslys should meet Janet with a smile.
He flourished the paper at them.
“Here you are! Delighted to see you, my dear. Let me open the door.”
He was very gallant and fatherly, and the aloofness melted out of Janet’s eyes. She went into the house with one hand resting in the crook of Porteous’s arm, and her heart wholly his from that moment.
“Sophie, here are our young people.”
Sophia Hammersly rose slowly from her chair. It was obvious that she had decided to make the affair as formal and unintimate as was possible, without risking a further battle with her son. She gave Janet a high and drooping hand to shake, and stared at her with hard and observant eyes.
“I am glad to meet you, Miss Yorke. I hope you will make my son—happy.”
A slight emphasis on the “hope” trailed a flicker of doubt after it.
Janet behaved admirably, and with the utmost nerve. She began talking quite calmly and frankly to Mrs. Hammersly. They sat opposite each other, Janet on the chesterfield, Mrs. Sophia on a high chair, and Pierce’s mother seemed the more nervous of the two. The girl’s repose was the repose of the well-bred woman of the world. She did not fidget, did not chatter, and her eyes looked straight at Sophia Hammersly as though her pride had nothing to fear.
The two men loitered awhile, and then drifted out into the garden. Porteous Hammersly had a whimsical smile on his face.
“Pierce, that girl’s splendid. Did she know——?”
“She knew that mother and I had issued ultimata to each other on her account.”
“No! That was a bit of fine breeding, real breeding. I don’t care if Yorke was a fraudulent idiot; he passed on some good blood.”
“I haven’t thanked you yet, Pater.”
“What for?”
“The way you met Janet. You should have seen the way her face softened.”
“Tut, tut; the great thing in life is not to hurt people. Let’s go and choose the child a rose.”
Though Mrs. Sophia remained a mass of ice, that lunch proved much less of an ordeal than Janet had expected. Porteous was in great form. In fact, he most thoroughly enjoyed himself, and even made a boast of it under the cold eyes of his wife.
“I suppose you young people want the afternoon to yourselves.”
“Not a bit of it. What’s the plan, Pater?”
“Why shouldn’t we take the Rolls-Royce, and run over to Imping Water for tea.”
Janet turned bright eyes to his.
“I should have loved it, but mother is all alone. You see, she’s an invalid.”
Porteous’s eyes said “Good girl.” His wife gave a faint, cynical sniff. Little hypocrite, making fools of the men!
“Mrs. Yorke is not strong enough to motor? If she would ignore formalities——”
“She really is not fit for it, Mr. Hammersly. She has a heart——”
“Dear, dear. I know that’s serious.”
After lunch they sat in the big veranda and talked, the three of them, for Mrs. Sophia had a headache, and went to lie down. Old Porteous, horribly afraid of finding himself de trop, jumped up twice, and was ignominiously held by the coat-tails by his son.
“Don’t go, Dad.”
“But, my dear boy——”
“Janet, tell him he has got to stay.”
“Am I boring you, Mr. Hammersly?”
Her roguish, happy eyes reassured him.
“Bless my soul, bored indeed! Well, I like that! So you went to old Cranston for the ring, did you? I suppose he blessed you?”
They brimmed with laughter while Pierce imitated Mr. Cranston’s well-known episcopal and benedictory manner.
“And Janet winked at me.”
“I didn’t.”
“I almost think she did, Pierce.”
Pierce walked back with Janet to Heather Cottage, a man wholly delighted with the woman of his choice. He stayed to tea with the Yorkes, made himself charming to Janet’s mother, and talked with a humorous yet fiery abandonment that made them both laugh. He told them tales of the amateur army, yet there was a tinge of bitterness in his voice. “If only we were like the French,” was his cry.
After tea Mrs. Yorke shepherded them abroad.
“I know Mr. Hammersly would like a walk.”
They wandered out together into the woods, and it was still Pierce who talked, wittily, facetiously, but sometimes with passion. Janet had slipped into a silent mood, with a shadow as of much thinking in her eyes. This new-won man of hers puzzled her not a little, challenged her curiosity. He was an egoist, with a sensitive temperament, generous, fiery, proud, much more impassioned than the ordinary Anglo-Saxon, less stupidly passive, less tolerant of restraint.
He noticed her silence and linked an arm in hers.
“What a garrulous idiot I am! And this wise goddess thinks the more.”
“I am considering my new responsibilities.”
“Me?”
“The whole house of Hammersly.”
His eyes flashed laughter.
“Oh, the mater! You need not take her seriously. The mater patronises everybody. If she weren’t my mother, I should hate her like poison. Father is different.”
“He’s a dear,” she confessed, “and you are like him in some ways, and yet not the least bit like him.”
“This is getting interesting. Let’s sit down here, and go into the matter thoroughly.”
They lay facing each other in the bracken under the sweeping branches of an old and stunted Scots fir. Janet unpinned her hat and laid it between them. It was very still and peaceful in this great wood.
“Now, you are going to analyse me.”
“I’m serious, Pierce. In some ways, you don’t seem quite English.”
“I’m not. I take it as a compliment. My great grandmother was a Frenchwoman.”
“Was she?”
“Yes. And I’m supposed to be absurdly like a great uncle of mine, Gerard Hammersly. We have got his portrait in the library; I’ll show it you. He was rather notorious in his day.”
“How?”
“Uncle Gerard was in the army. He was one of those restive, fiery men who cannot stand a blackguard. There was some general or other—in one of those Indian campaigns—who ought to have been in jail instead of at the head of a brigade. Uncle Gerard was under him. There was an almighty row about something, and Gerard Hammersly did a thing which was right morally, but utterly wrong according to regulations. They broke him for it—threw him out. The thing caused a sensation for a time; there were squabbles in Parliament over it.”
“And what happened to your uncle?”
“He became a Frenchman, fought for France, and was killed at Sedan.”
She sat up, with her chin resting on her crossed arms that rested on her bent knees; she stared into the shadowy deeps of the wood.
“And they say you are like him?”
“I have noticed it myself. And I have an idea that I am like him in temperament. I have learnt that already in the army. I can’t stand being hectored by a man whom I don’t like or respect. My brain gets red hot, and I feel like boiling over.”
“I can understand.”
He edged nearer, and put an arm over her shoulders.
“I think there is a bit of the rebel in both of us. But what does anything else matter, dear? We have just four more days.”
The woman in her answered him. She drew close and let her head rest on his shoulder. Her eyes were full of enchantment.
“Just four days! I’ll wait for you, Pierce; I shall be so proud of you. And some day you will come back to me.”
“Dear heart——”
“This war is teaching us how to love.”
CHAPTER VI
For two days they were utterly happy, and then the shadow of the Great War loomed over them with a menace that was not to be ignored. They were conscious of the passing of the hours, and with a quick spasm of pain would come the thought: “At this time—three days hence—we shall be together no longer.” Yet it was during these sadder hours that Janet began to know her man, and in knowing him to fear for him. Love seemed to give her a subtle insight—an insight that was fraught with vague misgivings.
One afternoon he took her into the library to show her the portrait of his great uncle, Gerard Hammersly. It hung over the mantelpiece in a good light—a picture in oils of a man in a dark blue cavalry uniform, his shako in the crook of his arm, one hand on the hilt of his sword. He looked straight out of the picture with dark, fearless eyes—a look that challenged and arrested. Pierce’s likeness to his uncle was remarkable. Janet saw the same proud nostrils, the same restive lift of the head. It was individualism at its best and at its fiercest; the individualism of a D’Artagnan or a Henry the Fifth—no temperament for a machine-made patriotism and the gross hypocrisies of a political adventure.
That portrait disturbed her most strangely. It was as though Gerard Hammersly had repeated himself in his nephew; and given like conditions it was almost possible to imagine that Pierce might act as his great uncle had acted. And civilisation, in the gross agony of its disillusionment, had ceased to value individualism. In fact, it was a danger, a disloyalty to the organised mob; a thing to be crushed, trodden on.
She spoke to Porteous Hammersly about that portrait.
“The likeness is extraordinary.”
He gave her a queer, cautious look.
“Did Pierce tell you about his Uncle Gerard?”
“Yes.”
There was a something behind Porteous Hammersly’s eyes that touched her intuition. He also had been troubled by that portrait and that past; she was sure of it, for old Hammersly had a soul.
“Do you approve of what Gerard did?” she asked him.
“My dear, I can’t tell. It is a question how far the individual has a right to defy the law of the majority.”
“Supposing it had happened in this war?”
Once again he gave her that queer, troubled look.
“We are supposed to be fighting for our existence as a nation, Janet. No, I don’t suppose they would show a Gerard much mercy. We thought we were civilised, and we find that we are savages—clever, devilish savages. Every man must brandish a club—and kill. Of course, there are individual heroisms that are splendid.”
“Somehow, I think there is a nobleness in it all. France is noble, and Serbia, and Belgium.”
“And what of England, child?”
She looked solemn as a Cassandra.
“I have a feeling that England has lost its soul, and has not found it again—yet. Aren’t we horribly selfish still. Isn’t the stuff in the papers just so much talk?”
Old Hammersly looked baffled.
“I don’t know. I can’t make up my mind about things. I feel like a man in a crowd with everyone talking at once.”
And there they left it.
Janet began to glimpse Pierce’s weaknesses, and perhaps she loved him with a new mother-love because of them.
A girl who has suffered and thought and fought things out for herself is so much older than the man of her own age, however clever he may be. In the subtlety of her intuition, and in her intimate feeling of the human heart-beats of life, she is his silent and conscious mistress. Women’s knowledge is from within; most of man’s from without.
Pierce would lie with his head in her lap under some Scots fir, with the bracken making green glooms about them, and talk and talk, with his eyes staring at the sky. He was a lovable, highly-sensed egoist. Soldier that he was, his individualism had remained fierce and critical; it had not learnt to subordinate itself, to sacrifice itself blindly. His very cleverness made him undisciplined—as discipline, or resignation, is understood in modern war. He hated authority; he hated routine; and sometimes his voice was inclined to be querulous.
“I know we have had to improvise, improvise, but why we do such fatuous things, I can’t imagine. Take my own case: I’m a chap who wants inspiration. I fight on my nerves; I want to feel the men I’m leading are my men; men I’ve lived and trained with, not an anonymous crowd that don’t care a button whether you get hit or not. There are thousands of men like me, and what do they do with us? Send us out like a lot of cockerels in baskets to a strange farmyard! Oh, I know! You can’t categorise temperaments. We English are too stupid for that.”
She stroked his hair.
“I know it’s hard. But they are all British.”
“There you are—at once. There are sorts of English that I hate worse than Germans. I can’t help it. I don’t want to live with them, much less go through such a devil’s ordeal in their company. There were one or two men in my regiment whom I loathed—impossible people. It’s no use talking to me about the King’s uniform and all that. A blackguard giving me orders makes me feel mutinous.”
He kept her thinking of that portrait of his great-uncle Gerard, and she could imagine him defying all customs and regulations just as Gerard Hammersly had defied them.
“Don’t you take things too much to heart, dear man?”
“I? Well, I hate vulgarity and caddishness and red tape, and the beastly cheap cynicism that you hear in the average mess.”
“Why not take them for granted?”
“I suppose I’m a bad soldier, but I haven’t learnt to be meek and resigned. I often wish that I had been born a Frenchman.”
“Why?”
“France has a soul. The French are real soldiers. The average Englishman doesn’t understand passion and patriotism. He just talks sentimental tosh, and feels warm in his tummy. After all, have we anything to be proud of as a nation? Do I, for instance, grudge the Germans East Ham, or Whitechapel, or the Potteries, or half Lancashire? Not in the least. They could not make things any uglier.”
“You remind me of Bernard Shaw.”
“Thanks. But I do wish I could feel proud of my own people, but somehow I can’t.”
A slow and secret misgiving began to take possession of Janet, and she could not help asking herself questions. Would Pierce stand the strain; had he not too restive an i
magination? There was no disloyalty in these doubts of hers; she was very quick and sensitive, and she had an uncanny feeling that these fears of hers were prophetic. She could have wished him less impatient, less ready to let that fiery individualism of his flare out against those in authority.
“Dear girl.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll come up to town with me to-morrow? I’m going to have my khaki drill fitted.”
“Of course I’ll come.”
“I want to say good-bye to Mrs. Hansard and her kiddies this afternoon. Hansard is a great friend of mine; he’s in France. Have you met her?”
“No.”
“She’s a dear, and charming. They live up at Vine Court. She would make rather a good friend for you, Janet, and you’d love the kiddies. Will you drive up with me this afternoon?”
“I should love to.”
The drive to Vine Court took them through the meadows where the long grasses, with the sorrel and daisies, spread a net of silver and bronze. Now and again the road ran close to the Scarr River, a stream of black velvet with green water-weeds trailing under the willows.
Janet noticed that Pierce looked at the country with a peculiar, keen-eyed tenderness. It was like a moving picture slipping out of his life, this England that he had not yet learnt to love.
Vine Court showed itself close to the river, an old Tudor place half hidden in lush greenness, with twisted chimneys, and a broad wealth of old red brick, grey weathered oak and mullioned windows. The road to it led through a meadow planted with huge chestnuts; a high holly hedge shut in the garden.
The drive wound between herbaceous borders that were masses of colour, the blues of delphiniums and anchusas, the white of lilies, the reds of poppies and roses, the gaudy golds of gaillardias, the velvet peach and purple of sweet williams. The whole place smelt of honeysuckle and roses. Ancient trees painted a rich, shadowy background. It was a place of peace and greenness, soft sunlight and honey-hunting bees.
“What a sweet spot!”
“Dick Hansard is a great gardener. He will be back on leave in a week or so, and he’ll spread himself around and love the place. Think of it—after the trenches.”
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