Soon the car was running full-tilt from the shadow to the fume of yellow light at the terminus, where shop on shop and lamp beyond lamp heaped golden fire on the floor of the blue night. The car, like an eager dog, ran in home, sniffing with pleasure the fume of lights.
Coutts flung away uphill. He had forgotten he was tired. From the distance he could distinguish the house, by the broad white cloth of alyssum flowers that hung down the garden walls. He ran up the steep path to the door, smelling the hyacinths in the dark, watching for the pale fluttering of daffodils and the steadier show of white crocuses on the grassy banks.
Mrs. Braithwaite herself opened the door to him.
“There!” she exclaimed. “I expected you. I had your card saying you would cross from Dieppe to-day. You wouldn’t make up your mind to come here, not till the last minute, would you? No — that’s what I expected. You know where to put your things; I don’t think we’ve altered anything in the last year.”
Mrs. Braithwaite chattered on, laughing all the time. She was a young widow, whose husband had been dead two years. Of medium height, sanguine in complexion and temper, there was a rich oily glisten in her skin and in her black hair, suggesting the flesh of a nut. She was dressed for the evening in a long gown of soft, mole-coloured satin.
“Of course, I’m delighted you’ve come,” she said at last, lapsing into conventional politeness, and then, seeing his eyes, she began to laugh at her attempt at formality.
She let Coutts into a small, very warm room that had a dark, foreign sheen, owing to the black of the curtains and hangings covered thick with glistening Indian embroidery, and to the sleekness of some Indian ware. A rosy old gentleman, with exquisite white hair and side-whiskers, got up shakily and stretched out his hand. His cordial expression of welcome was rendered strange by a puzzled, wondering look of old age, and by a certain stiffness of his countenance, which now would only render a few expressions. He wrung the newcomer’s hand heartily, his manner contrasting pathetically with his bowed and trembling form.
“Oh, why — why, yes, it’s Mr. Coutts! H’m — ay. Well, and how are you — h’m? Sit down, sit down.” The old man rose again, bowing, waving the young man into a chair. “Ay! well, and how are you? . . . What? Have some tea — come on, come along; here’s the tray. Laura, ring for fresh tea for Mr. Courts. But I will do it.” He suddenly remembered his old gallantry, forgot his age and uncertainty. Fumbling, he rose to go to the bell-pull.
“It’s done, Pater — the tea will be in a minute,” said his daughter in high, distinct tones. Mr. Cleveland sank with relief into his chair.
“You know, I’m beginning to be troubled with rheumatism,” he explained in confidential tones. Mrs. Braithwaite glanced at the young man and smiled. The old gentleman babbled and chattered. He had no knowledge of his guest beyond the fact of his presence; Coutts might have been any other young man, for all his host was aware.
“You didn’t tell us you were going away. Why didn’t you?” asked Laura, in her distinct tones, between laughing and reproach. Coutts looked at her ironically, so that she fidgeted with some crumbs on the cloth.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Why do we do things?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. Why do we? Because we want to, I suppose,” and she ended again with a little run of laughter. Things were so amusing, and she was so healthy.
“Why do we do things, Pater?” she suddenly asked in a loud voice, glancing with a little chuckle of laughter at Coutts.
“Ay — why do we do things? What things?” said the old man, beginning to laugh with his daughter.
“Why, any of the things that we do.”
“Eh? Oh!” The old man was illuminated, and delighted. “Well, now, that’s a difficult question. I remember, when I was a little younger, we used to discuss Free Will — got very hot about it . . .” He laughed, and Laura laughed, then said, in a high voice:
“Oh! Free Will! We shall really think you’re passé, if you revive that, Pater.”
Mr. Cleveland looked puzzled for a moment. Then, as if answering a conundrum, he repeated:
“Why do we do things? Now, why do we do things?”
“I suppose,” he said, in all good faith, “it’s because we can’t help it — eh? What?”
Laura laughed. Coutts showed his teeth in a smile.
“That’s what I think, Pater,” she said loudly.
“And are you still engaged to your Constance?” she asked of Coutts, with a touch of mockery this time. Coutts nodded.
“And how is she?” asked the widow.
“I believe she is very well — unless my delay has upset her,” said Coutts, his tongue between his teeth. It hurt him to give pain to his fiancée, and yet he did it wilfully.
“Do you know, she always reminds me of a Bunbury — I call her your Miss Bunbury,” Laura laughed.
Coutts did not answer.
“We missed you so much when you first went away,” Laura began, reestablishing the proprieties.
“Thank you,” he said. She began to laugh wickedly.
“On Friday evenings,” she said, adding quickly: “Oh, and this is Friday evening, and Winifred is coming just as she used to — how long ago? — ten months?”
“Ten months,” Coutts corroborated.
“Did you quarrel with Winifred?” she asked suddenly.
“Winifred never quarrels,” he answered.
“I don’t believe she does. Then why did you go away? You are such a puzzle to me, you know — and I shall never rest till I have had it out of you. Do you mind?”
“I like it,” he said, quietly, flashing a laugh at her.
She laughed, then settled herself in a dignified, serious way.
“No, I can’t make you out at all — nor can I Winifred. You are a pair! But it’s you who are the real wonder. When are you going to be married?”
“I don’t know — When I am sufficiently well off.”
“I asked Winifred to come to-night,” Laura confessed. The eyes of the man and woman met.
“Why is she so ironic to me? — does she really like me?” Coutts asked of himself. But Laura looked too bonny and jolly to be fretted by love.
“And Winifred won’t tell me a word,” she said.
“There is nothing to tell,” he replied.
Laura looked at him closely for a few moments. Then she rose and left the room.
Presently there arrived a German lady with whom Coutts was slightly acquainted. At about half-past seven came Winifred Varley. Courts heard the courtly old gentleman welcoming her in the hall, heard her low voice in answer. When she entered, and saw him, he knew it was a shock to her, though she hid it as well as she could. He suffered too. After hesitating for a second in the doorway, she came forward, shook hands without speaking, only looking at him with rather frightened blue eyes. She was of medium height, sturdy in build. Her face was white and impassive, without the least trace of a smile. She was a blonde of twenty-eight, dressed in a white gown just short enough not to touch the ground. Her throat was solid and strong, her arms heavy and white and beautiful, her blue eyes heavy with unacknowledged passion. When she had turned away from Coutts, she flushed vividly. He could see the pink in her arms and throat, and he flushed in answer.
“That blush would hurt her,” he said to himself, wincing.
“I did not expect to see you,” she said, with a reedy timbre of voice, as if her throat were half-closed. It made his nerves tingle.
“No — nor I you. At least . . .” He ended indefinitely.
“You have come down from Yorkshire?” she asked. Apparently she was cold and self-possessed. Yorkshire meant the Rectory where his fiancée lived; he felt the sting of sarcasm.
“No,” he answered. “I am on my way there.”
There was a moment’s pause. Unable to resolve the situation, she turned abruptly to her hostess.
“Shall we play, then?”
They adjourned to the drawing-room. It was a large r
oom upholstered in dull yellow. The chimney-piece took Coutts’ attention. He knew it perfectly well, but this evening it had a new, lustrous fascination. Over the mellow marble of the mantel rose an immense mirror, very translucent and deep, like deep grey water. Before this mirror, shining white as moons on a soft grey sky, was a pair of statues in alabaster, two feet high. Both were nude figures. They glistened under the side lamps, rose clean and distinct from their pedestals. The Venus leaned slightly forward, as if anticipating someone’s coming. Her attitude of suspense made the young man stiffen. He could see the clean suavity of her shoulders and waist reflected white on the deep mirror. She shone, catching, as she leaned forward, the glow of the lamp on her lustrous marble loins.
Laura played Brahms; the delicate, winsome German lady played Chopin; Winifred played on her violin a Grieg sonata, to Laura’s accompaniment. After having sung twice, Coutts listened to the music. Unable to criticise, he listened till he was intoxicated. Winifred, as she played, swayed slightly. He watched the strong forward thrust of her neck, the powerful and angry striking of her arm. He could see the outline of her figure; she wore no corsets; and he found her of resolute independent build. Again he glanced at the Venus bending in suspense. Winifred was blonde with a solid whiteness, an isolated woman.
All the evening, little was said, save by Laura. Miss Syfurt exclaimed continually: “Oh, that is fine! You play gra-and, Miss Varley, don’t you know. If I could play the violin — ah! the violin!”
It was not later than ten o’clock when Winifred and Miss Syfurt rose to go, the former to Croydon, the latter to Ewell.
“We can go by car together to West Croydon,” said the German lady, gleefully, as if she were a child. She was a frail, excitable little woman of forty, naïve and innocent. She gazed with bright brown eyes of admiration on Coutts.
“Yes, I am glad,” he answered.
He took up Winifred’s violin, and the three proceeded downhill to the tram-terminus. There a car was on the point of departure. They hurried forward. Miss Syfurt mounted the step. Coutts waited for Winifred. The conductor called:
“Come along, please, if you’re going.”
“No,” said Winifred. “I prefer to walk this stage.”
“We can walk from West Croydon,” said Coutts.
The conductor rang the bell.
“Aren’t you coming?” cried the frail, excitable little lady, from the footboard. “Aren’t you coming? — Oh!”
“I walk from West Croydon every day; I prefer to walk here, in the quiet,” said Winifred.
“Aw! aren’t you coming with me?” cried the little lady, quite frightened. She stepped back, in supplication, towards the footboard. The conductor impatiently buzzed the bell. The car started forward, Miss Syfurt staggered, was caught by the conductor.
“Aw!” she cried, holding her hand out to the two who stood on the road, and breaking almost into tears of disappointment. As the tram darted forward she clutched at her hat. In a moment she was out of sight.
Coutts stood wounded to the quick by this pain given to the frail, child-like lady.
“We may as well,” said Winifred, “walk over the hill to ‘The Swan’.” Her note had that intense reedy quality which always set the man on edge; it was the note of her anger, or, more often, of her tortured sense of discord. The two turned away, to climb the hill again. He carried the violin; for a long time neither spoke.
“Ah, how I hate her, how I hate her!” he repeated in his heart. He winced repeatedly at the thought of Miss Syfurt’s little cry of supplication. He was in a position where he was not himself, and he hated her for putting him there, forgetting that it was he who had come, like a moth to the candle. For half a mile he walked on, his head carried stiffly, his face set, his heart twisted with painful emotion. And all the time, as she plodded, head down, beside him, his blood beat with hate of her, drawn to her, repelled by her.
At last, on the high-up, naked down, they came upon those meaningless pavements that run through the grass, waiting for the houses to line them. The two were thrust up into the night above the little flowering of the lamps in the valley. In front was the daze of light from London, rising midway to the zenith, just fainter than the stars. Across the valley, on the blackness of the opposite hill, little groups of lights like gnats seemed to be floating in the darkness. Orion was heeled over the West. Below, in a cleft in the night, the long, low garland of arc lamps strung down the Brighton Road, where now and then the golden tram-cars flew along the track, passing each other with a faint, angry sound.
“It is a year last Monday since we came over here,” said Winifred, as they stopped to look about them.
“I remember — but I didn’t know it was then,” he said. There was a touch of hardness in his voice. “I don’t remember our dates.”
After a wait, she said in a very low, passionate tones:
“It is a beautiful night.”
“The moon has set, and the evening star,” he answered; “both were out as I came down.”
She glanced swiftly at him to see if this speech was a bit of symbolism. He was looking across the valley with a set face. Very slightly, by an inch or two, she nestled towards him.
“Yes,” she said, half-stubborn, half-pleading. “But the night is a very fine one, for all that.”
“Yes,” he replied, unwillingly.
Thus, after months of separation, they dove-tailed into the same love and hate.
“You are staying down here?” she asked at length, in a forced voice. She never intruded a hair’s-breadth on the most trifling privacy; in which she was Laura’s antithesis; so that this question was almost an impertinence for her. He felt her shrink.
“Till the morning — then Yorkshire,” he said cruelly.
He hated it that she could not bear outspokenness.
At that moment a train across the valley threaded the opposite darkness with its gold thread. The valley re-echoed with vague threat. The two watched the express, like a gold-and-black snake, curve and dive seawards into the night. He turned, saw her full, fine face tilted up to him. It showed pale, distinct, and firm, very near to him. He shut his eyes and shivered.
“I hate trains,” he said, impulsively.
“Why?” she asked, with a curious, tender little smile that caressed, as it were, his emotion towards her.
“I don’t know; they pitch one about here and there . . .”
“I thought,” she said, with faint irony, “that you preferred change.”
“I do like life. But now I should like to be nailed to something, if it were only a cross.”
She laughed sharply, and said, with keen sarcasm:
“Is it so difficult, then, to let yourself be nailed to a cross? I thought the difficulty lay in getting free.”
He ignored her sarcasm on his engagement.
“There is nothing now that matters,” he said, adding quickly, to forestall her: “Of course I’m wild when dinner’s late, and so on; but . . . apart from those things . . . nothing seems to matter.”
She was silent.
“One goes on — remains in office, so to speak; and life’s all right — only, it doesn’t seem to matter.”
“This does sound like complaining of trouble because you’ve got none,” she laughed.
“Trouble . . .” he repeated. “No, I don’t suppose I’ve got any. Vexation, which most folk call trouble; but something I really grieve about in my soul — no, nothing. I wish I had.”
She laughed again sharply; but he perceived in her laughter a little keen despair.
“I find a lucky pebble. I think, now I’ll throw it over my left shoulder, and wish. So I spit over my little finger, and throw the white pebble behind me, and then, when I want to wish, I’m done. I say to myself: ‘Wish,’ and myself says back: ‘I don’t want anything.’ I say again: ‘Wish, you fool,’ but I’m as dumb of wishes as a newt. And then, because it rather frightens me, I say in a hurry: ‘A million of money.’ Do you know what t
o wish for when you see the new moon?”
She laughed quickly.
“I think so,” she said. “But my wish varies.”
“I wish mine did,” he said, whimsically lugubrious.
She took his hand in a little impulse of love.
They walked hand in hand on the ridge of the down, bunches of lights shining below, the big radiance of London advancing like a wonder in front.
“You know . . .” he began, then stopped.
“I don’t . . .” she ironically urged.
“Do you want to?” he laughed.
“Yes; one is never at peace with oneself till one understands.”
“Understands what?” he asked brutally. He knew she meant that she wanted to understand the situation he and she were in.
“How to resolve the discord,” she said, balking the issue. He would have liked her to say: “What you want of me.”
“Your foggy weather of symbolism, as usual,” he said.
“The fog is not of symbols,” she replied, in her metallic voice of displeasure. “It may be symbols are candles in a fog.”
“I prefer my fog without candles. I’m the fog, eh? Then I’ll blow out your candle, and you’ll see me better. Your candles of speech, symbols and so forth, only lead you more wrong. I’m going to wander blind, and go by instinct, like a moth that flies and settles on the wooden box his mate is shut up in.”
“Isn’t it an ignis fatuus you are flying after, at that rate?” she said.
“Maybe, for if I breathe outwards, in the positive movement towards you, you move off. If I draw in a vacant sigh of soulfulness, you flow nearly to my lips.”
“This is a very interesting symbol,” she said, with sharp sarcasm.
He hated her, truly. She hated him. Yet they held hands fast as they walked.
“We are just the same as we were a year ago,” he laughed. But he hated her, for all his laughter.
When, at the “Swan and Sugar-Loaf”, they mounted the car, she climbed to the top, in spite of the sharp night. They nestled side by side, shoulders caressing, and all the time that they ran under the round lamps neither spoke.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 633