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Title: The Kingfisher
Author: Phyllis Bottome
Release date: July 18, 2026 [eBook #79126]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: George H. Doran Company, 1922
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79126
Credits: This eBook was produced by: Mardi Desjardins, John Routh & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net It was produced from images generously made available by HathiTrust.
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[Cover Illustration]
THE KINGFISHER
BY
PHYLLIS BOTTOME
AUTHOR OF “THE DARK TOWER,” “THE
CRYSTAL HEART,” “A SERVANT OF
REALITY,” “THE SECOND FIDDLER,” ETC.
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1921, 1922,
BY THE DESIGNER PUBLISHING COMPANY, INCORPORATED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
The Kingfisher
CHAPTER I
Jim was not sure when it first dawned on him that there was such a thing
as security. When he did realise it he supposed it to be like one of
those things, procurable for others, but unprocurable for him, which
were marked at a shilling in the shop windows.
He had never known bodily safety except for the first few weeks of his
life, when his mother by a species of enlightened tact threatened to
come to pieces altogether and was retained by a reluctant matron in the
hospital beyond her allotted time. When they returned home they promptly
resumed the cup-and-ball existence produced by Tom Barton’s
intemperance.
Tom Barton was quite good-tempered when he was sober, and he was rarely
drunk except during the week-ends, but from Friday to Monday the house
rose and fell in the tempest of his intoxication. He was a good workman,
and their income see-sawed between affluence and penury.
Nothing was more normal to Jim than the appearance and disappearance of
the furniture. Wash-stands floated in and out of rooms, sofas
precariously furnished shelters for games, and then, like Rachel’s
children, were not. Mantelpieces held clocks, china dogs and thrilling
blue-beaded mats, and at a turn of the wrist—nothing but the
bread-knife.
Hazily, like a far-off dream, a mute piano broke over his baby
consciousness, and as swiftly and irrevocably vanished.
‘’E’s drunk it,’ was the explanation presented to Jim by a sympathetic
neighbour.
As regular, and more noticeable than the migratory flight of tables and
chairs, were the kicks and bruises which descended upon the human
portions of the family.
Only Mrs. Barton was at all permanently bruised. Tom never hit the
children unless they came in his way. When he was mad with drink he
frequently expressed a wish to kill them, but beating his wife always
did instead.
There was no convenient substitute for Mrs. Barton. Every now and then
she screamed till the police came, which was very exciting for the
children, but ordinarily she was very quiet, and then the interest of
these occasions palled.
Mrs. Barton had had a great deal of spirit as a girl, and it lasted her
nicely till she became a mother; then she alternated between melancholy
and exasperation.
She meant to be kind to her children, and she always loved them, but the
methods of her affection became as frayed as her nerves.
She kept them tolerably clean, and fed them as well as she could. She
called them in at night and hit them perfunctorily and without
spitefulness when they cried.
She was not an ideal mother but she had the maternal instinct.
Family life as far as Jim was concerned vacillated between tears and
curses, and as soon as he was capable of choice he threw his weight upon
the side of curses.
He cried when he had to, but he became conscious in himself of
formidable gusts of ferocity which were as exciting as a game; they
intimidated his equals and even at times his physical superiors.
He had all the habits of a badly teased stable kitten; whenever he was
approached he prepared to strike, for almost as soon as he had learned
anything he had learned that the only successful attitude of defence is
attack.
His sister Eliza was easily quelled by him, though she was five years
his elder. Her long hair put her out of court. Jim had only to wind his
little hand in it and pull. Bert, his younger brother, cringed at the
sight of him. Even his mother did not hit Jim after he was five years
old and had gone for her with a knife.
Awful tussles took place between Jim and his father, and though they
naturally ended in the complete victory of Mr. Barton they left his
parent as a rule rather breathless and severely bitten.
Tom, unless he was drunk—when he feared nothing—had a secret dread of
his baby Jim’s blue eyes; they had a way of looking blazing mad like a
tortured animal’s and the child did not seem to know that when you are
beaten, you really are beaten.
Jim’s idea was that when you could retaliate no more you waited till
exhausted nature re-equipped you—and then you burst out afresh.
He had no respect for a parent’s ‘that’s enough,’ and seemed incapable
of recognising any finality but his own.
Something within him, very violent and unbreakable, never felt itself
quelled. Jim did not know it was his spirit, because neither the word
nor the thing was recognised in his circle.
Nothing was ever explained to him about anything.
He took blows, food, and curses from the same source; only he learned to
dodge the blows and if possible steal the food; the curses were neither
here nor there, except that they were sometimes useful as premonitory
symptoms. He could often guess from the tone in which they were screamed
whether there was a blow or bread and jam behind their easy utterance.
Jim’s mother loved him, but Jim did not know she loved him; he knew only
that he could reckon upon her, as far as he could reckon on anything, to
supply certain of his wants.
He hated his father, but he did not know that that hot, menaced feeling,
which sprang into his heart when he saw his father appear, was hate. He
only knew that he did not ever wish to see his father.
Toward the rest of the world Jim felt, and exhibited a wary
indifference.
Some children in the neighborhood seemed to be cleaner than the little
Bartons, and had more food, but Jim did not like them any better for
that. Occasionally children of another class altogether appeared in the
street—strange visions of smiling faces and smart apparel, safeguarded
by nurses, loomed sickeningly upon Jim’s sight. They could not be stoned
nor rolled in the gutter. Something mysterious but formidable, called
‘law,’ was behind them.
Jim cast surly and incredulous glances at them. Later on he attached to
their infrequent appearances phrases caught up from the steps of public
houses, expressive of derision and tinctured with envy.
But Jim himself was not envious of the rich. He preferred the tested
violence of his dirty fists and well-developed muscles.
They might, these denizens of the upper air, have force behind them—but
it was easy to see that they had no force in them. They were more
vulnerable than Eliza. Jim knew that he could quickly reduce them below
fighting level if he were given the chance.
He himself, even with both eyes blacked and the wind completely knocked
out of him by a forcible descent of a flight of stairs, had never
reached the abyss at which the fighting instinct stopped.
If his father couldn’t down him nobody could. Deep in his hard and
stubborn heart he nursed the feeling that the rich were soft.
Swanhill was a small town, or a big slum, whichever way you chose to
look at it, set between two larger towns in a factory district. Four
miles behind it lay the green, unvisited country, and in front of it
were the river and the factories. Eighty chimneys soared, with a sodden
incapacity for grace, into a smudge of sky. They seemed to be fumbling
in their own smoke for a way out into the open air, but they never found
it.
The town had six long, grimy streets filled with newspaper, orange-peel,
smoke, small and overcrowded cottages, and the flashing windows of
gigantic public houses. A handsome stone church perched ineffectually
upon the hillside.
The population of Swanhill was seven thousand. Three hundred of it went
to church. Fourteen belonged to the Salvation Army; there were fifty
Catholics, and perhaps another fifty intermittently visited two
nondescript chapels. This was the little leaven, and it did nothing
whatever to interfere with the whole lump.
Jim had no preference for any particular scenery; but he liked the
river, where he could get wet always, and in the summer very nearly
drowned. He did not know what anything looked like, nor that anything
else could look any different.
Eliza taught him something about school. She had to be clean for it, and
in time, sooner or later you had to give in to the teachers, though you
could with impunity take it out of the other children at stated
intervals in a yard.
She did not tell Jim what she had learned in school because she made a
habit of relaxing her attention the instant the cane receded. Nothing
remained in Eliza’s mind after lesson hours but a little empty clamour
and a few meaningless phrases.
She was not an easy child to teach because all the powers of her
nature—and Eliza was by no means deficient in power—were concentrated
upon inattention. She carried blankness of mind to a fine art.
Eliza’s treasures were in the street, and that was where her heart was.
She cared only for accidents, funerals and the arrival of babies, and
upon none of these stimulating realities did her teachers touch.
Lessons seemed to Eliza’s active and mature mind to be twaddle from an
underworld.
She sat in school because she had to, and she was never one to waste her
kicks upon the inevitable. When she thought that she could evade
compulsion, Eliza was swift to evade it, but if she saw that compulsion
had a longer reach, she gave in to it immediately.
Nor did Eliza mind giving in to compulsion as Jim did because she had a
practical nature and she saw that it was no use minding. She was not an
idealist. When she fought it was for a tangible object like an apple. An
apple was worth a certain amount of physical inconvenience to Eliza; a
principle was not. And as to fighting for the vanity of the thing in
order to discover which was the stronger, Eliza gave to these
inconclusive reckonings the derision which all good women keep for
masculine triumphs.
When Jim had once beaten her, Eliza never fought him again, but she
frequently circumvented him. Jim did not like Eliza, but he preferred
her to any one else.
They often combined quite successfully against the dangers of the open
road or the exigencies of family life, which were rather more dangerous
than the road.
Jim did not start school until he was five years old, and for the first
year or two he agreed perfectly with the standpoint of Eliza.
School was one more thing that happened, like drunkenness or bedtime. It
fell upon the just and the unjust with the same continuous ineptitude.
School was duller than the street and sweeter than home. Sometimes you
got something extra out of it, say another child’s marbles; or a
hymn-tune fell with an unexpected pleasantness upon the ear.
Once or twice a week a queer man dressed in black, with a habit of
strange words and a voice incomprehensibly and dreamily low, with no zip
in it, came in, and gave them all a lesson about a Person or People
called God. The headmaster remained in the room with his cane
inconspicuous but handy, so that you could not even yawn; but you did
not have to listen, nor did God interfere with you in any other way. The
creature in black seemed to think He would, but He didn’t. A word called
crucifixion slid off Jim’s attention like water off a duck’s back.
More interesting things leaped at him daily out of a Reader.
When Jim was nearly seven he suddenly found that cats, dogs and other
odd combinations of letters could be mastered. He actually saw them for
himself as they were in books, and he began to like these odd gymnastics
of the intellect.
School ceased to be an unbroken restless blank punctuated by the blows
of an exasperated grownup.
He felt the dawn of a creative spirit; he could make words come right by
himself. Figures spun themselves alive for him, and he began to grasp
incredulously that geography was about the real earth.
History never seemed very sensible to him, though he liked to hear, of
course, about the fighting. The causes seemed inadequate, for who cared
about kings? But it was nice to think that almost everybody fought about
something from the beginning of the world, and would probably go on
fighting about it until the end.
Jim lost the sense of outwitting his teachers by complete absence of
mind. All kinds of strange, responsive things rose up in him, questions
hammered at his hard little head all day long.
He began to doubt if everybody had to be hit so much; he read about
extraordinary outbreaks of kindness. He even experienced one of them.
Another boy gave him a humming top which he thought—mistakenly, as it
happened—had ceased to hum. When the other boy found that Jim’s
superior manipulation had brought back its powers, he naturally tried to
repossess himself of the top, but he was easily fought into
acquiescence.
The other boy’s name was Erb Badger, and the humming top cemented the
first real affection of Jim’s life.
It stirred all the generosity of his youth. Jim became suddenly aware
that you could at a pinch really like people, and a strange feeling
began to dawn in him for his mother. She smiled at one of his copy-books
with obvious pride, and it hurt him when his father took the smile off
her face by a casual blow.
One summer evening behind a persevering lilac-bush choked in smuts, Jim
astounded Eliza by asking her if she had ever liked anybody.
Jim was nine years old at the time, and Eliza was a well-grown girl of
fourteen.
She looked at him with wary, unflinching eyes—that had rather the
effect of highly polished black buttons—then she said—
‘Garn, y’ere soft!’
But Jim wasn’t really soft. He hit Eliza severely and without
compunction till she was forced to say, ‘Give over!’
Then he gave over, but he still wondered if it wasn’t possible to like
somebody without being soft.
CHAPTER II
Nobody ever answered Jim’s questions. They rose rank upon serried rank,
behind the barrier of his fists.
He had two worlds to dwell in; the world of the streets, swift, violent
and public, which he thoroughly understood and took his part in without
effort; and the world within his opening mind, intensely private,
confused and tentative.
There were no connecting links and he was precipitated from one to the
other without conscious volition. Jim’s complications were not shared by
Eliza.
Eliza did not care how the earth was made or why we got here.
She knew that she had not received all she wanted, but that some of it
could be acquired by strategy. The only problem that gave her any
serious intellectual misgiving was how to obtain feather boas and
jewellery while remaining within the law. Sometimes, in her more
imaginative moments, she wondered what would happen if she went beyond
it.
Tom Barton knocked his son down for asking him why he wanted to get
drunk.
It was not a filial question, nor was Mr. Barton’s an analytical mind.
He did not know that he got drunk from a variety of reasons. The size
and frequency of public houses; the extreme dryness of his throat from
working in chalk; the lack of horizon beyond Saturday night; and the
fine feeling which intoxication gave him of a temporary mastery over
mind and matter, supplied a certain authority for these aberrations.
Besides, there was nothing to stop him getting drunk.
Jim’s questions were taken more kindly by his mother. She told him
repeatedly to ‘get along,’ but her tone was one of admiration, and he
often found her eyes resting on him with more alertness than her sunken
gaze usually held, as if—like that Mother of old—she was pondering his
questions in her heart.
There was no one outside the family circle to whom Jim could appeal. The
Grove in which the Bartons lived was divided from any intercourse with
Dives by an impassable gulf. The Grove did not know what was on the
other side of the gulf. Nor apparently did Dives.
There was the church, of course, but though the Grove had no antagonism
to the church none of its inhabitants ever went inside it except
automatically shortly after a birth, if the birth was respectable—it
was considered bad form to baptize illegitimate children—and after a
death as reluctantly as the law allowed.
The teachers in the school looked on education as the insertion of a
series of facts; they wished to lift a lid and press all that they could
into an empty receptacle, and they resented in Jim’s mind the presence
of anything they had not put there.
Perhaps Jim might have given up the search for wider knowledge as
useless if he had been the type of character which can give anything up.
But the quality behind his fists which made him unbeatable in physical
combat gave him also a queer, blind power of continuing any losing game,
and those who continue losing games long enough may win them. Accident
or fate, or some sublime intent, plays into their hands. But there is no
convention about such visitants; they seldom appear in an appropriate
guise.
Miss Masters came to call at Number 8, the Grove. There was a new vicar
at the church, and Miss Masters, who lived out of the smoke two miles
away, was a fresh ecclesiastical broom. She had not done much sweeping
for the former vicar, a toothless scholar who took his services and left
people alone; but this younger and most energetic Christian had rallied
round him several good women who realised the presence of opportunity
and had not too much to do at home.
Jim was lying in a corner of the kitchen when he heard a doubtful
knocking at the door. He knew it was not a neighbour, for his neighbours
had no doubts; nor was it a rate-collector, for rate-collectors thunder.
Mrs. Barton opened the door cautiously and explained to a confused and
flushed young lady, anxious to make a good impression, and not catch
anything, that Jim had merely been trod on by a horse.
The young lady came in and sat down on the edge of a chair. She smiled
without ease, and Mrs. Barton, who had been washing and was in the
middle of mangling, stood fingering the kitchen table. Jim had never
seen a lady so near before. He didn’t think the teachers at the school
were really ladies; he could understand their voices, and they hadn’t
very bright patent-leather shoes.
‘I don’t know whether you know,’ said Miss Masters impressively, ‘that
the Rev. Arthur Atkinson has just come to this parish?’
Mrs. Barton saw that something was expected of her, so she said, ‘Really
now?’ and hoped she wasn’t going to be asked to pay a penny for a
magazine which she didn’t want, like some one in the next parish. Their
late vicar had been restfully uninterested in the spread of light
religious literature.
‘Yes,’ said Miss Masters cheerfully, ‘and he’s given me the Grove!’
Mrs. Barton stared hard at this dubious piece of clerical generosity.
She did not wish to look a gift-horse in the mouth, but what had this
poor young woman in front of her, in her very well-tailored blue serge
suit, done, to be saddled with the Grove? In her mind’s eye Mrs. Barton
saw the Grove as it was between eight and nine o’clock of a Saturday
night. She had herself been trailed, screaming, from end to end of it
several times.
She recalled the Grove speaking its mind in its Sunday leisure; and if
she had been capable of as much thought as her son, who was listening
with all his ears, she would have wondered at the curiously different
angles from which two people may see the same object.
‘To visit, you know,’ went on Miss Masters more brightly still. ‘He
thinks we all ought to make friends with each other.’
‘I dessay ’e’s young,’ interrupted Mrs. Barton sympathetically. ‘’E’ll
get over all that.’
Jim drew a deep breath—he wished this visitor would not clip her words
and lower her voice at the end of her sentences. She was saying things
which ought to be carefully followed.
‘He told me to be sure and look you up,’ went on Miss Masters. ‘He has
heard all about you.’
Jim was not surprised to see that his mother was annoyed. ‘To hear all
about a person’ in the Grove meant to hear a great deal to their
disadvantage.
Mrs. Barton stiffened with sudden ferocity.
‘’Oo ever said anything about me,’ she said sharply, ‘lied—and that’s
all there is to it! There ain’t nothink no one _can_ say! I take what
lodgers the law allows, and I ’ave my marriage lines in the tea-caddy.’
‘Oh, nothing against you,’ cried Miss Masters hurriedly. ‘Quite the
contrary! It was the police, you know, told Mr. Atkinson about your
husband—Saturday nights, and all you have to suffer——’
She looked vaguely at Jim, who returned her gaze with a fascinated,
impenetrable stare.
‘I’m afraid you are not very happy, Mrs. Barton?’
Mrs. Barton licked her dry lips and then looked down at her black and
broken finger-nails. She felt resentful. She didn’t see that the clergy
had any call to talk over Mr. Barton with the police; nor did she see
what Saturday nights, and their sometimes too public history, had to do
with this neat coat and skirt in front of her.
Mrs. Barton was hot and choleric with the family wash, and she had been
brought up rather short by the irrelevant word ‘happy’—but she
smothered her feelings politely and spoke tolerantly after a moment’s
pause.
‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘I suppose we must all take the rough with the
smooth, mustn’t we?’
She did not add that the proportions are sometimes strangely different.
Jim’s mind leaped upon the charm of this new word ‘happy.’ Of course he
had heard it before, but the sense was new; he had never heard it
applied to his mother.
Why should she be happy? She hadn’t been to a circus. Did people like
this lady go normally to such quantities of circuses that they were
always happy? What did his mother mean by taking the rough with the
smooth?
Probably she didn’t mean anything; she had only spoken with the
deep-seated courtesy of the poor, desiring to relieve any discomfort
caused by too sharp a contrast between her life and that of her
visitor’s. Grown-up people often said things like that they didn’t
mean—but Jim never did. What he said he meant, and he always expected
the same radical and abnormal sincerity from others.
‘I really came to speak to you about your difficulties,’ Miss Masters
began again; ‘but oughtn’t we to go into another room?’
She looked significantly at Jim, who scowled horribly at this possible
deprivation of experience; but he was relieved when he remembered that
their only other room was the scullery, which must be more or less under
water from the wash.
‘Oh, ’e don’t matter,’ said his mother easily. ‘Yer can’t keep ’em out
of it, and ’e’s going on for ten, Jim is.’
‘Mr. Atkinson thinks,’ Miss Masters said in a low, embarrassed voice,
‘and so do I, that your life as it is now must be very brutalising. We
quite understand how hard the question is for you, and we deeply
sympathise with you. The very idea of breaking the sacredness of the
marriage tie is awful; but these weekly scenes, before the children,
too, and the actual danger to your own life. Ought you not to think of
leaving your husband, Mrs. Barton?’
Mrs. Barton stared at her. She was bewildered by the innocence of her
visitor’s question; also the word ‘sacred’ and the phrase ‘marriage tie’
were not easily comprehensible to her. Some people might be married like
that, of course, but these were not her difficulties.
‘What would I do,’ she asked doubtfully, ‘with the children? They ’ave
to be fed. There’s Eliza, now, out of work again—I don’t know what’s
ter become of that gel. Seems as if I couldn’t get her in, off the
streets, try as I may—and ’er father’s ’and’s so ’eavy. I don’t seem
ter hardly like to ask ’im to beat ’er.
‘An’ Jim, ’e’s at school still—and Bert—’e’s too young to go yet, and
the baby not weaned nor won’t be while I ’ave anythink for ’im with the
price of milk what it is. Yer can’t leave babies ter work out, and
there’s so few places hereabouts anyhow ter work in—and Tom ’e’d take
up with another woman. That’s what ’e’d do. A man ’as ter ’ave some one,
if it’s only to shy things at. I shouldn’t get a penny out of ’im again,
not once I left ’im.’
Miss Masters looked shocked. She had naturally not regarded the question
quite in this light; she had meant to be strictly practical, and she had
actually gone to the Free Library and looked up the Separation Laws.
But she had expected questions of the heart to predominate—memory,
affection, romance—that was one of the reasons why she had offered to
undertake the interview. She had murmured to Mr. Atkinson that only a
woman could understand another woman’s heart; but she found it a little
difficult to follow Mrs. Barton’s.
‘You could take a room, couldn’t you,’ she suggested, ‘with the
children, and I think after a fortnight the court would bring a
maintenance order against your husband?’
‘’Oo’s ter let me ’ave a room for nothing for a fortnight?’ demanded
Mrs. Barton. ‘And ’ow’s the law going to tackle Tom when ’e won’t have
no money, ’E’ll drink it up, or move on somewheres where ’e can’t be
’ad. Once yer ’ooked, yer ’ooked, as far as I can see; and now, if
you’ll excuse me, miss, I must get back to my mangle.’
Mrs. Barton smoothed her rough hand along the top of her working apron.
She hesitated before she left the room. She could not believe that there
was no help or wisdom in so well-dressed a visitor.
She looked wistfully at the flushed face and confused eyes of Miss
Masters; but nothing came from them. Miss Masters wanted to get away
too, but she hadn’t got a mangle.
She asked instead, if she mightn’t stay for a few minutes with the poor
little boy. She was so fond of children. Mrs. Barton nodded and slipped
into the scullery.
In another fortnight she must go into the hospital. Frequent kickings
had put something wrong inside her. It was very painful and would have
to be taken out.
She would like to have talked to her visitor about it, but after all she
hadn’t liked to bother her. She was unmarried and there were
details—quite familiar to Jim—which would perhaps be out of place
presented to a mind so ignorant of the basic laws of marriage. You could
not be too careful with ladies.
‘Leave my ’usband!’ said Mrs. Barton grimly to herself. ‘A pretty fool I
should look leavin’ a ’usband! Me with four children to keep, and ’alf
of me inside ter be took out!’
Miss Masters, left alone with a fierce-eyed, tow-headed and perfectly
silent urchin in the corner, wondered if after all she was very fond of
children, and longed to take the nearest tram home to a quiet tea. Jim’s
blue eyes held her; it was the crisis of his life. He could not speak,
but his mind seethed with questions.
‘Was it really a horse that kicked you?’ Miss Masters asked
ingratiatingly. ‘Do tell me about it.’
‘Yus—’e trod on me,’ said Jim automatically.
He did not see how he could tell her anything more about it than that.
Out of all his seething questions he drew one hurriedly and flung it at
her.
‘Are you ’appy?’ he asked with fierce intensity.
The suddenness of this question took Miss Masters’ breath away—but she
agreed after a moment’s pause that she was. She had a disagreeable
mother, three sisters prettier than herself, and much too small a dress
allowance. Still, she shuffled out of these disadvantages and claimed
her birthright.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said smiling, ‘perfectly happy. Aren’t you?’
‘I dunno,’ said Jim doubtfully; ‘not if I know what ’appy is. I were
once; I looked at a circus through a ’ole in the tent.’
Miss Masters let this opening into bliss slide past her. She was rather
a perfunctory young woman, and she preferred the surface of things. She
asked Jim’s name and if he was fond of reading. He said with another
flash of conviction—
‘Gord, I sh’ud think I was——’
It occurred to Miss Masters to wind up this interview successfully by an
offer to lend Jim books. One always felt more comfortable after one had
really _done_ something for the poor. The sudden light in his face
clinched the matter.
Miss Masters remembered about the books. Unconsciously she became the
cornerstone of Jim’s life, and though she was at the time thinking much
more seriously about tennis, she kept his soul alive.
In a few months’ time Jim’s stubborn, insistent little figure was given
the run of the Masters’ library—they were well-to-do middle-class
people who had to have some books.
Miss Masters rejoicing in her conquest of a boy famed for being the
worst in the district, lent him a summer house full of earwigs to read
in. Jim dared not take the books home, for his father would have pawned
them—or even his mother, if she hadn’t cash enough for a meal. In the
winter they let him have hay in the summer house and an old blanket.
He tore the heart out of their books, but he never became intimate with
the Masters. They said, ‘Hullo’ when he appeared, and patted him on the
shoulder, and Jim watched speculatively their family manners. He even
mimicked in private their clipped accents. They said—
‘Oo do yer do? Haow gled I _em_ to see you.’
But he never really liked them.
He went once or twice to church as an experiment, but he soon gave it
up. He was bored by the cryptic and unintelligent prayers. He preferred
to listen to hymn-tunes outside the door if it wasn’t too cold, and
though the Rev. Arthur Atkinson was a good man he was no preacher.
He took, however, a special interest in Jim, and often when he gave
those queer lessons about bunches of Divinity, at school, he would
single out Jim for appreciative and casual talk. His interest in Jim
became infectious, the headmaster caught it. Some—a very few—of Jim’s
questions got answered. There was talk of secondary education, and even,
if this succeeded, of the university.
Jim’s mind soared steadily on toward undreamed-of goals. The future
appeared for him so wide that he might have fallen through it quite
comfortably and never been anything but a nice young man if it hadn’t
been for an accident—quite a normal accident except in its
consequences—which took place in a minute and changed everything.
CHAPTER III
Mrs. Barton, whose admiration for her eldest son had become the one
light in a drab existence, was herself the innocent cause of its total
eclipse.
She was getting tea ready when the accident happened. They were all
there except Mr. Barton. The baby, scarlet in the face with nettle-rash
and bad temper, had been soothed into temporary calm by the illegitimate
use of a dummy.
Bert was contentedly sucking the paint off a toy horse under the table.
Most of it was already worn off by the friction of his constant tongue,
but there was still a streak of vermilion on its tail. Eliza was making
eyes and faces of no uncertain meaning at the grocer’s boy over the way.
It was that black day of the week known as a half-holiday.
The March wind ran dryly to and fro in the Grove, carrying a harvest of
scraps of newspaper, rags, and orange-peel.
Mr. Barton had started home in an irritated mood. He was not a
sentimental parent, but what feeling he had was centred upon his
children—he never drank more than half his earnings out of
consideration for their welfare; and he always regarded them with that
resentful affection common to people who have made great sacrifices for
an unworthy cause.
If he had a favourite, it was Eliza. There was something about the
metallic glean of Eliza’s roving eyes which appealed to her father. It
was the eye of one who sooner or later ‘got there.’ She did not ask
doubtful questions nor expect impossible virtues as her brother Jim did.
Mr. Barton had never done Eliza any harm—for she was an expert at
dodging blows—and yet he had never had to go out of his way to do her
any good. It was a soothing relationship. So it was most unfortunate—on
a Saturday afternoon—that one of his mates should have chosen to give
him some very drastic hints upon the character of his daughter.
Mr. Barton made up his mind to beat his favourite child, and drank a
good deal of rather bad beer to get his spirit up.
No one should say he was a parent complacent of his daughter’s shame.
Not that Eliza had any shame, but if half what his mate suggested was
true she would be a good candidate for it. He would beat Eliza first to
show her what was what—and then he would beat his wife, because after
all, being the child’s mother, she was directly responsible for her
morals.
The moment he pushed the door open his whole family knew that there
would be what was popularly known in the Grove as ‘trouble.’
There were kippers for tea, but no one could taste a kipper until the
trouble was over.
Bert began to cry and flattened himself against the wall. The children
looked like a covey of flustered partridges, prepared to shoot out into
space at a moment’s notice.
Mrs. Barton put her hand up to her head and then let it fall again,
realising that it was not likely to be of more use to her there than
anywhere else.
Mr. Barton’s legs were fairly steady, but his thoughts were uncertain.
He pronounced one word in the direction of Eliza. It was an explanatory
word, and Eliza poised under it with an eye on the scullery door.
But Mr. Barton’s attention focused more readily upon his wife. He
approached her to ratify his sentence upon Eliza with a blow. He knew
that Mrs. Barton would not spring to avoid it as Eliza would. She had no
spring left in her.
Jim had been watching his father steadily in order to effect his own
escape if necessary, when something suddenly went queer before his
eyes—it was as if a thin, protecting screen were withdrawn between him
and his own emotions. He saw his mother’s face in a mist—very white and
sick with anticipation, he heard her say, ‘Ah, don’t Tom——’ and all
desire for personal escape went out of him. He sprang suddenly forward
and struck at his father’s head with Bert’s toy horse.
Mr. Barton swayed back with astonishment, but before he had recovered
from it Jim struck again. This time he had a better weapon, for Eliza,
with a woman’s readiness of wit and hand, had thrust the poker toward
him. Jim dropped the toy horse and struck savagely with the poker.
The blow caught Mr. Barton so that he spun once like a very heavy,
silent top, and then sank in a heap on the floor. Jim struck at him
again and again; he was in a panic now—a panic of accumulated rage; and
all the terror of the household was behind his lifted arm. If his father
got up again not one of them would escape.
But Mr. Barton made no attempt to get up again. He lay there quietly in
a pool of his own blood. Then he shuddered once or twice as if something
had to be shaken off—shook it off and lay quite still.
Jim was not sure what had happened, but the heap on the floor did not
look like his father any more. It looked like a bundle of old clothes
which ought to be cleared away.
There was nothing terrible or powerful in it, and yet there was
something very terrible and powerful in the room, which seemed to take
up all the air.
Mrs. Barton sat there, looking at the heap with her mouth open and her
eyes curiously fixed.
Eliza screamed readily and dramatically till the neighbours rushed in.
Some one sent for the police, and when they came Eliza pointed an
accusatory finger at her brother, for she realised that the situation
was exceptional and that in exceptional situations some one had better
be accused.
The police lifted Mr. Barton up, and Mrs. Barton screamed—a curious,
flat scream, not at all like the full-dress successes of Eliza. She was
still screaming, with no meaning at all behind her voice when the police
took Jim away. He was a very small criminal, and they were not at all
unkind to him. When he told them he was fourteen years old one of them
said in a reassuring manner,—
‘Well, sonny, you won’t swing for it this time!’
The magistrate was more severe, and the court was a still, dreadful
place where all the dust was tidy and as if kept there very carefully to
make the benches look sad.
The magistrate finished by saying that the penitentiary would be just
the place for Jim.
They put him in for three years with criminals of every sort and kind,
and feeble-minded, whose crimes were only blunders. Jim’s questions
faded for a time under his new destiny.
It was no use asking questions about such unreasonable things. Only he
remembered his books, and there were pictures in his mind which blotted
out the eternal whitewash of the walls.
He missed the life of the streets most. Life was still there under the
massive dullness of the institution, but it ran subterraneously and
without freedom, and some of it was very, very nasty.
Jim could not keep his hopes alive in it, but he kept his stubborn
pictures. He could see the Miss Masters playing tennis in white drill
skirts on a green lawn crying ‘Forty love’ to the curate, and the
contents of his book, tropical lands under curious skies with birds
flying, knights in armour who were brave and kind; and there was always
at the back of his mind that unfinished picture of his father lying in a
dishevelled heap on the floor and not getting up again.
Jim had meant to be a schoolmaster, and he went on with his education in
the penitentiary. Mr. Atkinson had spoken for him to the magistrate and
so had the headmaster. They had called him promising.
Common or bad language, Jim knew already, but now he learned the vivid
phraseology of thieves.
What carefully brought-up people call vice and get excited over, Jim
knew as unreflectively as he knew rancid butter. He got used to both
these things, but he never took any interest in them.
He was beaten sometimes very hard and quite justly by the authorities.
He fought his way from the first into perfect security from the other
boys. Nobody could do him any more harm than he could them, and he had
the splendid reputation of a murderer to back him. He was not underfed,
and he had a healthier and more open-air physical life than he had ever
known.
His only starvation was of the spirit, and all his growing senses
starved in company with his soul. He was approaching the age of beauty,
and no one ever spoke or thought of beauty, nor was the penitentiary
furnished with any single object framed for that purpose.
After two years his mother died. Eliza disappeared, and Bert and the
baby were swallowed up by excellent orphanages.
These facts were communicated to Jim quite kindly by the master of the
penitentiary himself, in a parlour which smelled musty, and was used
only for visitors or the breaking of calamities. He was given a black
crepe band and the addresses of the orphanages.
Jim was sixteen when his family disappeared. He had killed his father,
which never gave him any particular regret; but the complete wiping out
of his domestic circle was a more unsatisfactory business. They had not
been a particularly nice family, but they were all he had.
Jim felt as if certain starved roots which bound him to the earth had
suddenly been cut. All his memories rushed up on him and haunted him
with loneliness.
He did not cry, but he kept tucked away in the corner of his retentive
brain the addresses of the orphanages.
Eliza had probably landed on her feet; but he often wondered where this
attitude had placed her. He would have looked her up if she had been in
his place and he in hers, but he did not expect this weakness from
Eliza.
Jim had received quite a lot of religious instruction by now, so that
when he said—and he was obliged to say it at least twice a day—‘Our
Father Which art in Heaven,’ he knew he was referring to a possible old
gentleman who in some unknown and rather large place might or might not
keep an eye on him. This was God. He did not seem very get-at-able, and
most of the boys in the penitentiary took the view that He was invented.
You could not have bad language without a Deity, but you could have
everything else.
Jim, however, was not a positive atheist. For one thing, he had read
more than any one, even the penitentiary schoolmaster, so that he knew
the whole idea was not in the nature of a scholastic invention on
purpose to cause friction—which was the accepted view of his new
companions. There was more to it than that. Some one, when you came to
think of it, was probably behind something—but you couldn’t quite tell
what.
The sky, the clouds, the stars, the common grasses of the distant
fields, the blue spread vision of the sea, and the swift, interminable
flow of water between river banks—could these things happen by
accident?
They were like creatures—were they not created? And if they were
created, was there not a Creator? What would happen if you fell into the
sky? (Jim received a bad mark for this irrelevant question.)
What did happen to people when you hit them too hard with a poker? They
were there just before—what became of them afterward?
Their bodies were dead, of course; but they weren’t dead, were they?
They’d gone as if they passed through their bodies, as people at a
railway station slip in and out of trains.
Where did they go? The chaplain was quite nice; he did not punish Jim
for asking this question. He said, ‘Heaven or hell’ without a moment’s
hesitation. But he preferred talking about cricket.
Apparently Heaven and hell hadn’t much meaning except when you used them
with the direct intention of being bad. What was it that meant inside
people to be good or bad? Something meant inside Jim—something as
fierce as his fighting instinct and as plain as a pair of compasses. It
was always going about its business, meaning something, and it very
seldom meant to be bad.
This something in Jim did not shrink from badness as weak boys did, with
tears; it looked steadily at it and resented it. It pushed him toward
friendly relations with all his world—often quite uselessly, because
all he had learned and read made his companions hostile to him. It
pushed him forward through his work, and never rested in him till he had
done his best.
He heard the master say once of him, to a member of a committee, ‘That
boy over there has got character——’ but he did not know what character
meant. He knew only that somebody had put something inside him which
belonged to him and was never satisfied.
He was not consciously unhappy; he associated unhappiness only with
physical mischance. Yet there was one spot in his mind vulnerable to
pain, and over which he always hurried.
It was not his crime; he acknowledged that simply as a blunder—and on
the whole it was a successful blunder. But it hurt him to think of his
mother. She had been to see him twice since he had been in the
penitentiary, and each time she had brought him things to eat and had
cried over him, and before she went she had said between her tears,—
‘Gord—they needn’t have took you away from me.’
Now she was dead and couldn’t come any more, so there was, of course, no
use bothering about it.
But the sore place in Jim’s mind remained. It was the nearest point he
reached toward that broken image of the mind of God—human love.
CHAPTER IV
The Rev. Arthur Atkinson never got on in the Church of England. He took
his profession too seriously, and often acted without forethought, by
the Gospels.
When Miss Masters said to him,—
‘Isn’t it too awful about Jim Barton? After all we’ve done for him, to
murder his own father? It almost makes you lose your faith in human
nature, doesn’t it?’
She caught for a moment in her vicar’s eye that dangerous look, so
rarely seen, of the consistent Christian.
Miss Masters was a practical woman and she gave up from that hour the
thought of Arthur Atkinson as a husband.
He said a little crisply, ‘Something will have to be done for Jim,
certainly,’ and she saw that it was going to be far too much.
Arthur Atkinson went to see Jim twice in the penitentiary, but he found
the crust of suspicion and contrast between them too heavy to break
through.
Jim only looked at his boots, swallowed nervously and lied. Arthur might
have got at the boy by breaking down his defences, but he was not the
type of man who could take liberties even with a child’s defences. He
looked wistfully at the wall of Jim’s frightened pride and left him
alone.
‘I can’t,’ he said to himself, ‘do anything with him while he is in this
place. If I make him human he will only suffer more. Better let him take
the precaution of the deep-sea fishes who lose their eyes in the dark.’
Jim was quite unaware that he possessed a friend. He thought of his
vicar as only ‘another of Them’; and by Them he meant mysterious people
who asked embarrassing questions, and out of whom nobody that he knew
had ever got anything better than a prayer-book.
As Jim’s term neared its end he grew nervous. He was only seventeen and
had done so well at the penitentiary school that the committee had
decided to offer him two years more and a pupil teachership.
The master of the penitentiary told him that his future was secure. He
might, if he worked long and hard enough, and stayed where he was, even
become a schoolmaster. Very few penitentiary boys had ever won such a
position.
It was so wonderful that it was almost incredible. How could Jim
possibly refuse, and would he even be allowed to refuse? Dared he tell
one of Them, that in his reprehensible heart he wanted to go on a barge?
He winced at the thought of their incredulity. What! A shiftless,
useless life which only appealed to his ignorance, as the stage appeals
to silly girls in their teens?
He shrank from expressing this dream, which, with bated breath, he
allowed himself at times to dwell on.
A barge—water under him, the open sky—no rules!
What did it matter if it included occasional kicks and curses? The
bottom of kicks and curses were easy to plumb—you got out of the way or
you retaliated. You didn’t stay under them; they were but irrelevant
matter in the wrong place; they formed no atmosphere; they did not
paralyse the heart and will.
If he was too poor to serve an apprenticeship and must therefore be
content with never being anything better than a barge-boy at a pound a
week, what did that matter when you had had nothing a week and a pound
spelled independence and a way of life? You could float forever on a
barge with no walls hemming you in.
Jim lay awake all night wondering how he could best escape a noble
career and sink into insignificance.
He could actually, if he liked, run away. Long ago he had worked out the
whole problem. He had the nerve for it and he knew precisely how it
could be done.
But once you had escaped there was the shadow of the police behind you.
You would find that without money you would have to reappear, and
reappearances are usually fatal.
You had to have friends or money to stay disappeared.
Jim had been told of a burglar who would help him—a very good burglar
who had made him a sporting offer through a young pal in the same
dormitory. His pal would, of course, return to the burglar directly he
got out, and he strongly advised Jim to enter the same profession.
Burglary is an intelligent, adventurous career. Still, there again you
aren’t really free. Something hangs over you which may, sooner or later,
drop.
It would be better, even if it was less amusing, to take up some career
which put the law off noticing you at all. Not to be noticed! That was
what Jim longed for. Not to be tied to a whistle or a bell, but to go
where you liked with no one to see or care where you were at the end of
it! It was a fierce longing, and it held the whole of Jim’s heart.
It would be quite impossible to explain it to the master. The master was
considered a first-rate master, but he made a point of listening to no
explanations but his own. He had a gift for epigram, and he often
thought he had got to the bottom of a subject by expressing one of his
own ideas.
The master was a good disciplinarian; he knew what was in the boys’
pockets, but he never knew anything that was in their minds—the rules
were what mattered, and he had force behind him. He did not care how his
horses came to the water, for he knew that he could make them drink.
‘Now if you give trouble,’ he used to say in a sharp, jocular voice to
the sullen newcomer, ‘you’ll have to take trouble—that’s what it comes
to here!’
He received Arthur Atkinson with that assumed respect which honest
members of the clergy most shrink from.
Arthur Atkinson saw at a glance that Mr. Wickham accepted religion as a
whipper-in.
‘Ah, yes, sir,’ the master said benignly, ‘come to see the boy—Jim
Barton? You were quite right about that boy, sir; I recollect your
saying that he was an exceptionally intelligent lad—so he is, most
unusual! My schoolmaster says he never has to tell him a thing twice. In
fact his intelligence is so exceptional that we are prepared to keep him
on permanently—on the staff, as it were.
‘If that boy sticks to it and does his part of the business—why, by the
time he’s five-and-twenty he’ll be an educated man earning perhaps two
hundred a year! It’s a wonderful outlook for the boy, sir—princely!
That’s what I said to him last night.
‘“Barton,” I said, “you can move if you wish to, out of your class.”
‘I did indeed, sir; those were my very words.
‘“This is a democratic country, Barton,” I said. “In a sense—in a
certain sense—as far as the penitentiary goes—you have the world
before you. Of course there is the stigma”—I made a point of mentioning
that to the boy; you must never let them get above themselves—“but here
it would be at any rate _partially_ overlooked.”
‘There have been no outbreaks on the part of the lad since we had him;
none at all. I said to him the night he arrived. “Now, Barton, if you
_give_ trouble, you know you’ll have to _take_ trouble,” and that was
final.’
Arthur Atkinson nodded patiently. He was never much interested in
anecdotal finalities.
‘Do you know what the boy wants to do himself?’ he asked.
The master stared at this irrelevant question. If it wasn’t the clergy
all over to go asking aimless questions of a busy man after everything
had been quite clearly explained to them!
If he didn’t guide this particular specimen with great care he might go
and put ideas into the boy’s head—then where would they be?
Mr. Wickham explained painstakingly and with great tact that a boy’s
best interests and what he wanted were totally different things. In
order to fulfil the former you had to ignore the latter.
It didn’t do to ask the boys what they wanted. The Rev. Arthur Atkinson,
however, though he seemed quiet, was one of the obstinate kind. He
waited for Mr. Wickham to finish speaking, and then he repeated,—
‘Still, I should like to see the boy first and find out what he wants.
His sentence is over, you see.’
The master shrugged his shoulders.
‘Oh, quite so, sir, in a sense,’ he said, ‘but if you’ll excuse my
giving you a hint, I shouldn’t harp upon that point. His plans are
settled, and I assure you that short of what we offer him he’ll have no
chance at all. Not what you or I could call a chance.
‘It’s, if I may say so—to use a vulgar expression—neck or nothing with
the boy, sir, and he’s remarkably lucky to have such a piece of neck
offered him. He is, indeed, sir.’
Arthur Atkinson did not dispute the point. He was feeling extremely
uncomfortable. There is nothing in the world so dangerous as to be a
real liberal, and unfortunately, it is not dangerous to yourself alone.
If he was prepared to offer Jim any other chance he must be prepared to
see him take any other risk; and it is not a reassuring state of things
to propose risks to boys of seventeen who have been in a penitentiary
for three years.
Nor did Jim look like a suitable subject for freedom. He stood at the
door of the visitors’ parlour in answer to his summons, reluctantly
shuffling from one foot to the other and fingering his cap.
It was four o’clock on a June afternoon. The windows of the parlour were
tight shut to keep the dust off a bright-blue tablecloth, and a fly
buzzed unhappily across the dirty pane of glass, tantalisingly between
it and the summer air. Jim was more silent than the fly, but he looked
quite as desperately shut in.
‘There’s your kind friend, Mr. Atkinson,’ said the master in a cheery
voice, with rather a sharp glance at Jim’s lowered eyelids.
He disliked a cowed look at moments when he had no intention of cowing.
‘He’s come to have a little chat with you about the future, and I’ve
just been telling him your prospects. Rose-coloured, that’s what I call
them—rose-coloured. You can put your cap down.’
Jim put his cap down. The master shook hands cordially with Mr. Atkinson
and said,—
‘Well, sir, I’ll see you again later.’
Then he withdrew after another still sharper glance at Jim.
Neither Mr. Atkinson nor Jim moved till the door shut.
Then Jim’s furtive eyes raised themselves cautiously to the face before
him. Usually people like Mr. Atkinson set all his wits flying by trying
to put him at his ease.
But the man before him, stooping a little, thin, with dreamy eyes and
clear-cut sensitive mouth, was not thinking about anybody’s ease. He
held out his hand gravely.
At first Jim did not know what to do with it. He had not shaken
anybody’s hand for several years—but in the end he clutched nervously
at it, dropped it, and as he was told to sit down, took the extreme edge
of a chair, and returned defensively to the investigation of his
square-toed boots. He was very unhappy and as nervous as a wild animal
under human observation for the first time.
Mr. Atkinson was unhappy, too, but he knew better what to do with it.
‘It’s quite true,’ he said slowly, ‘I have been talking to the master
about you, Jim. He’s been telling me what he wants you to do, but what I
want to know is—what do you want to do yourself?’
Jim’s furtive eyes wandered all round the room and then fixed themselves
suddenly with a glance of startling honesty upon his visitor’s face.
‘Do?’ he asked breathlessly. ‘Gord! I want ter get aht!’
He had put his case in a nutshell, and having said all he had to say he
dropped his wild, speaking eyes and started trembling. Perhaps he had
made a dreadful mistake. This man was only one of Them after all, and
wouldn’t want to help him. Perhaps the vicar was only asking questions,
and had chanced to light upon the key question of Jim’s heart by
accident.
‘You know what they offer you?’ Mr. Atkinson continued quietly. ‘You
realise that it’s a good job, better than you could get outside? It may
be worth—before you are thirty—two hundred a year, and it’s an
educated profession.’
Jim’s faint hope sank still more. But something in the unassuming, quiet
voice tempted him to one more effort.
The man before him did not speak as if he was perfectly certain he was
right and every other notion was absurd and wrong. He might be
accessible to another point of view, however unreasonable it sounded.
Jim flung the whole of his spirit into his last appeal.
‘I ’ate it!’ he muttered between shaking lips. ‘I want ter get aht.’
The words fell startlingly into the dirty, conscious, respectable little
room. They struck at a system, and they struck in vain.
But the man in front of Jim was not an advocate of systems. He said very
quietly—
‘Very well, then—I’ll help you to get out.’
It was almost as if he himself had been caught in a trap and knew the
frantic compulsion of its teeth upon the quivering spirit.
Jim raised his eyes to Arthur Atkinson’s, and held them there for a long
moment. He gave him in that one glance the scared-off, accumulated
confidence of all his fighting years.
Youth launched him out upon a sea of faith, it gave him the generosity
to trust, in spite of all experience, in a man of a different class. Jim
had never trusted Miss Masters; he had profited by her. But he did not
even ask himself what profit lay in the new feeling for the man before
him. He gave him, without barriers, the freedom of his soul.
Arthur Atkinson returned his glance, but he was still more afraid. He
looked deep into the confident, blue eyes fixed upon him and wondered if
what he saw there was really the Call of the Wild.
It is a favourite phrase with those who have all their lives answered
unconsciously the easier and more persistent Call of the Tame.
Was he confronted once more by a fugitive aspiration of youth—or was
Jim an exception? Did he really want to get out?
Would he, if he was chained up a little longer, grow sleek and contented
and be the first to shrink back in horror from the attacks of the open
world?
‘You’re safe here, you know,’ Arthur said gently. ‘You won’t be safe
outside.’
‘I’ll be safe enough,’ said Jim fiercely. ‘It ain’t no use being safer
than you want to be.’
A gleam of answering fierceness came into the eyes of the man who had
never got out.
‘Have you thought at all,’ he asked, ‘what you want to do for a living?
I suppose they’ve taught you some kind of trade haven’t they?’
Jim’s eyes became vigilantly expressionless again. It seemed to him
probably the moment to lie. Jim’s nature was essentially truthful, but
he could tell a lie at a pinch, and a pinch came when you saw the truth
wouldn’t be understood.
How could you explain a barge to a clergyman? You could not, when you
came to think of it, explain a clergyman to a barge.
Arthur Atkinson saw the dangerous veil of class obstruction descending
between him and the boy; he cleared it away with a quick gesture of
appeal.
‘I shan’t mind,’ he said hurriedly, ‘what you want to do. Tell me
anything you like. You see, if you don’t tell me the truth I shall go
and make a mistake, and if we’re to be friends you can’t afford my
mistakes.’
Jim did not understand the last part of the sentence, but he saw that
the pinch had been miraculously removed; as far as this man went there
would be no more pinches.
He gave immediately the whole of his mind.
‘I _could_ be a burglar,’ he explained, ‘but I’d rather get on a
barge—I don’t want the law after me. I ’ave done a bit of carpentering,
but they’ve kept me mostly at books. I don’t want ter do—what they’ve
kept me at.’
Arthur Atkinson let the burglar drop, but he had to let the books drop
too, and he had counted on the books.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘that’s settled then—we’ll try for a barge. I
want you to come straight to me when you get out to-morrow. Will you?’
Jim nodded. He fumbled with the address given him by the vicar, read it,
and put it carefully into his pocket.
‘Do you think as ’ow,’ he asked nervously, ‘you _reelly_ can get me
orff?’
‘You tell them you are coming to see me to-morrow,’ explained Arthur
Atkinson, ‘and go on saying it—then I can manage. Don’t sign anything,
and here’s your car fares.’
They exchanged a more successful grip of the hands, and parted.
It was not very easy for either of them to manage the getting out.
The master plainly told Arthur Atkinson that he was ruining the boy’s
splendid prospects for a mare’s nest.
He added that he wouldn’t be responsible for the boy’s soul, clergyman
or no clergyman. Then he lost his temper and referred Mr. Atkinson to
the committee.
The committee were pained, they were astonished, they were very
explanatory, and when they saw they weren’t going to be successful they
became offended.
They were all that a committee should be. Even the magistrate was
referred to, but the boy’s sentence was over. He was a good boy, no one
could prevent his going out if he had a clergyman to go to. This was the
worst of the legal bond between Church and State. They ought to back
each other’s horses, but they were not obliged to.
Mr. Atkinson was assured of the disapproval of all the penitentiary
authorities, but he got his own way.
They flung at him as parting shots, ‘Of course if anything goes wrong
you will be held directly responsible,’ and that even more dire threat,
‘I suppose you will be prepared to pay for the boy out of your own
pocket?’
But Mr. Atkinson unexpectedly asserted that that sacred commodity, his
own pocket, was a mere detail. Nobody could say anything after that, but
when he had gone they all decided that Mr. Atkinson couldn’t be at all
rich.
Then the authorities tackled the boy. They told him first that, of
course, he was a free agent; then they explained how unpractical the
clergy—excellent in the pulpit or for the next world—were in everyday
life.
They painted everyday life for Jim. They reminded him of his unfortunate
stigma. A boy who had killed his father was not likely to get on
anywhere. Such stories crop up. They took away his freedom as an agent.
Then the chaplain, a wily man, who was used to human nature and knew
what a weapon you can make of dreams, wrung the barge out of Jim and
mocked him with it.
Jim, sullen and wild-eyed, outfaced this raillery. Then they stopped
laughing and told him abruptly that he was insubordinate, ungrateful,
and appallingly ignorant of life.
Nothing answered. They did all round the very best they could for Jim
and they met with the usual reward of the benevolent—the complete
failure of their victim to appreciate their noble purposes.
Apparently Jim did not even know that they were being kind to him. He
wanted to get out.
It didn’t quite come to his making this astonishing confession. He
cloaked it under the blessed form of words left him by Mr. Atkinson. He
repeated with the awful persistency of a ticking clock—
‘Please, I want ter go ter Mr. Atkinson termorrer.’
Nothing more and nothing less.
They told him plainly he could never come back if he did, and he did not
blink an eyelid. Then they suggested his signing a paper to say he would
come back after all. But he only repeated his formula without signing
the paper, and in the end it got him off.
Bewildered, disgraced, without a handshake, Jim left the safeguards of
his only home.
It was an excellent institution in many ways. It did wonders for some of
its inmates, and it had done something for Jim. It had taught him to
love liberty and to ignore danger, and this is not a poor equipment.
The door shut behind him with a solemn clang. He had four shillings and
Mr. Atkinson’s address in his pocket.
It was raining a little, but the earth looked very green and young.
There was nothing unfriendly in the air, and nothing watchful. It was
the first time he had been alone for three years.
Jim flung up his head and started down the road whistling.
CHAPTER V
Arthur Atkinson had no difficulty in finding an obliging skipper.
He was well known on the water side as a parson who came on your decks
without malice; he never looked into things or suggested mission
services. He simply sat harmlessly and smoked good coarse tobacco which
he shared alike with the just and the unjust.
He did not offer drinks or take them; in fact he did not deal in ready
money at all, so that from the first it was realised that he wasn’t
going to get anything out of anybody—nor was any one, however wily,
going to get anything beyond tobacco out of him. It was a restful
situation. The parson simply became an accustomed and friendly figure.
In time his advice was asked upon Saturday night disputes, and later he
was successfully promoted to domestic brawls. He was remarkably useful
in a deal, and it was discovered that superior lawyers of low reputation
and large practice couldn’t get round the parson. He seemed simple
enough, but he knew things.
He read contracts and, with an unerring instinct, put his broad,
tobacco-stained finger on doubtful clauses. He would push his hat back
from his dreamy forehead and say with deadly mildness—
‘Now just explain this, will you? I don’t quite follow this clause.’ And
it had to be explained to him.
Nothing glib ever got by him. He would swing his tall figure in the
direction of a liar, listen with careful attention, shake his head
vaguely—not in the least reproachfully—and drift away from the
speaker, leaving a disappointing sensation of exposure and flatness
behind him.
The parson was a valued repository of deeds. I. O. U.’s and last wills
and testaments lay carefully labelled in cardboard boxes all over his
bedroom floor.
Joe Moucher, the skipper he had chosen for Jim, was among his best
friends. The skipper’s language was reported to be the worst on the
river; he was considered by the port authority, not without reason, to
be a hard-drinking, doubtful and rather disreputable person. But he had
never done any one else any particular harm. His boys liked him, his dog
never winced at his voice and it was not the first time that he had
actively co-operated with the parson to give some one or other a ‘turn.’
It was to his barge that Jim was conducted, replete with tea, after the
initiation of a long silent hour with his new friend. It could not be
said that their conversation had been either brilliant or instructive,
but it left Jim with the feeling that he wasn’t in any direction being
‘got at.’
Arthur had provided him with an outfit of second-hand clothes—clothes
that had no possible hint of penitentiaries—that breathed of barges,
and in which Jim saw himself in a small, dusty mirror as beautifully
like any other rough and independent boy who never had to escape being a
schoolmaster.
The parson did not have a house; he had two large rooms, full of books,
fishing-rods, dust and unanswered letters.
He could get a spare room when he wanted it, and he explained to Jim
that he should like him to turn up between his voyages, if he had
nowhere better to go.
Then he dragged down half a dozen volumes from a shelf, tied them
inefficiently with string, and put them under his arm.
‘You might sometimes want to read,’ he explained apologetically. ‘One
does, you know.’
Jim scowled frankly. He was not going to read; reading led to
schoolmastering; he was relieved when the skipper objected to the books
more strongly still.
Joe Moucher was a man of few words, fewer ideas, and incredible
superstitions. He said there was something not quite right about books
on a barge. He couldn’t exactly remember a case in point, but if
anything did happen he should know at once it was the books. Arthur had
dropped them upon the deck, and the skipper turned them over gingerly
with his foot. He said he didn’t mind a Bible—with a Bible and a black
cat you were more or less safe, even with a raft in mid-ocean; but
anything less than sacred was dangerous truck on the water and might
lead to their fouling an anchor.
‘Any’ow,’ he finished moodily, ‘wot’s the use of bringing me a bloke fer
me ter break into a barge while you’re a-trying ter break ’im inter
books? ’E won’t know which way ’is nose is put on ’is face. Not that it
much matters with ’is features bein’ wot they are. ’Is nose looks like
something washed up by the tide nah; and it’ll look worse by the time
I’m done with ’im!’
The skipper gave a deep growl, which was promptly echoed by his dog
Cadger, but in both cases it was an empty threat and preceded the direct
benevolence of kippers.
The skipper prepared these delicacies himself with a grimy but agile
paw.
‘Arter this you do the cooking,’ he explained to Jim, ’an’ wot yer don’t
cook right yer’ll ’ave to eat, stummick or no stummick, ter teach yer to
be light-’anded.’
Jim’s duties were arduous only by fits and starts. He was to cook all
the meals, keep the barge as clean as, and no cleaner, than the skipper
required.
‘I don’t want no baby’s bassinetts,’ the skipper explained, ‘same as
these ’ere yachts they call ’emselves, that I wouldn’t take on in a
puddle. You get some of the coal off and when I ’oller, “Nuff,” yer stop
using up good water as could be mixed with rum if I carried any, as
a-course I don’t!’
The skipper looked defensively at the parson. He had smuggled rum
regularly and successfully up and down the river for many years, and he
often felt uncomfortably uncertain whether the parson knew it or not. He
could be trusted not to say anything if he did suspect it, but he could
not be trusted to sympathise. He had ideas which were all right in a
pulpit, but out of place on a barge.
Jim was to keep a look-out on deck and learn to use the poles in the
narrow waterways. He would be shown how to tow when the occasion arose,
and he was to manage the steering-gear when the skipper wasn’t on deck.
Finally, he was not to make the kind of nuisance of himself which the
skipper knew he would.
In return for these attentions he was to receive board and lodging for
two voyages, and if he was efficient he would then gradually arrive at
the princely wage of a pound a week. If he wasn’t efficient he would go.
‘Religion or no religion,’ the skipper finished, ‘if yer ain’t fitted
for life on the water yer’d better get off of it, even if the Gospels
says the direct con-trary.’
Arthur ate one kipper in their company and wandered thoughtfully away,
leaving the books behind him.
The scheme of the barge was not his scheme, and he was more favourably
inclined to it than if it had been.
Here was a case of a bruised reed, and it would choose its own method of
getting over its bruises.
Arthur would have proposed for Jim a good grammar school with special
coaching for a year, and then, if he could have afforded it, the
university; but he saw that the iron of enforced education had eaten too
deeply into the boy’s spirit.
He associated all learning with the penitentiary, and until he
discovered for himself that freedom lay in knowledge, he was safer
without it. If he were really intelligent he would discover this primary
truth quickly. Fortunately, he was young enough to spare time for the
lessons of experience.
The skipper, with Cadger at his heels, left the _Water-Lily_ in Jim’s
charge, and slouched slowly away up the narrow Greenhithe Lane toward
his favourite public house.
It was a sweet-scented June evening. Jim leaned over the barge’s side
and washed the tea things in the Thames. Footsteps and shouted jokes
reached him like music across a stretch of water. All the summer sounds
were soft and slow. Around him was a waste of sun-illumined water,
colourless and light.
A ball of red fire settled down slowly and mysteriously into an evening
mist.
Other barges passed with their orange sails growing dark. The river
lapped against the boat’s side, singing the persistent low song of
moving waters.
Jim lay motionless upon the deck, soaked in the immensity of his
freedom.
Not even the parson had guessed what solitude would mean to this child
of crowds and baffled privacies.
Jim had never been alone in his life. In his childhood there were always
Eliza and the other children, and the streets were never empty. In the
penitentiary there were twelve boys in each dormitory; and supervision
all day long. Privacy is expensive. It is usually supposed that people
who can’t afford it don’t want it, but Jim had always wanted it.
He lay crouched into the deck as if he thirsted to be forgotten.
He longed even for the vanishing of the friendly colour in the sky. He
wanted the dark to envelop him with great wings, and hide him out of
sight. Nobody was after him now.
An ache, that had been so long a part of his being that he had not
discovered it was pain, felt suddenly at ease.
For the first time without flinching he thought of his mother’s face.
He saw again the rare smile which altered her expression like an
unexpected ray of light, and which only he could rouse.
He wondered how death had come to her, and if it was quick and kind.
Like all children of the poor he knew death and love without illusion.
They were concrete to him and unaccompanied by fancies.
Jim had a healthy animal’s horror of extinction for himself, but not for
her. His mother was too tired of life to know fear. It couldn’t have
made it much harder for her, his father being gone, but it wouldn’t have
been much easier without the money. She had taken in washing.
Eliza had not been any help to her. Eliza was like an open mouth without
eyes. She saw nothing, but she took what she could get.
Jim had asked Arthur about her, but Arthur had not been able to tell him
very much. He believed that she had disappeared before Mrs. Barton died.
Rats could teach nothing to Eliza. She always knew a sinking ship by the
feel of her self-preserving feet.
Oddly enough it was Jim who had the maternal instinct of the family. It
had been a little smothered by the acuteness of his personal struggle,
but the moment the pressure was removed it sprang into life again. He
wanted to save and protect all his scattered family, even Eliza.
He had never forgotten Bert’s and the Baby’s addresses. Arthur said they
were quite safe, Margaret in a sisterhood, and Bert with the waifs and
strays. Sisters were very religious women, generally quite good, who
looked after children, and though they were called sisters they did not
bear the least resemblance to Eliza.
Jim had to make a few voyages before he would have earned enough to take
the children a humming top and a doll, as well as pay his fares. Bert
was six years old—a perfect age for a humming top—and he hoped
Margaret, who was now three and a half, would like almost any doll.
The future opened before Jim as the dark descended—wide and without the
limitations of experience.
He had never seen the night before; something wrenched his heart with
pleasure.
At first he thought the stars were human lights—London perhaps—and
then he saw how much farther off they were, and how high, and knew that
they were stars.
Jim had learned fluently and superficially about stars from books, but
if you always went to bed before the dark, or with the blinds down, you
did not see them.
They were pointed and alive, in endless circles through the soft sky,
not large and luminous like southern stars, which seem so near a hand
could touch them, but sparkling and cold, and very far away.
What place had they in the great darkness of the universe? And what had
he who watched them for the first time? Had he any kinship with the
stars?
Where would he be if he fell into the sky? He held his breath with awe,
for suddenly, as he asked himself the question, one of the sparkling
lights detached itself and fell. Fell—and he could watch it fall, flash
down and down in one great silvery plunge—into the dark!
It vanished. Rank upon rank the other stars remained, unshaken and at
peace. The heavens composed themselves anew; there was no gap. Where was
the fallen star?
It must be somewhere—or could you get where there was nowhere?
It had detached itself as suddenly and hurriedly as his father’s soul
under the blows of the poker—that, too, must have fallen somewhere.
Was it terrible to fall? Jim had not meant to make his father rush so
suddenly into the dark.
Perhaps nobody ever knew the only things that you wanted to know.
Far away a bell rang out. It was a clock striking. Each note fell on the
light air with a long reverberation. Nothing had to be done about it.
Jim crouched still lower on the deck; the velvet dark grew thick and
nearer; the stars swam mistily before his eyes.
‘Wot I got on my barge,’ Joe Moucher was saying complacently to his
friends, ‘is a murderer. Yus! Murdered ’is father at the age of fourteen
as if ’e was a rat—with a fire-iron. That’s what ’e is! Another two
years and ’e’d ’ave swung for it! Parson brought ’im along.
‘“Give him a chanct,” he says, and I laughs at ’im, fer I knows ’is
ways.
‘“Yus!” I says. “An’ then anover chanct! And then anover chanct! Gord!
Yer’d give a pack of wolves a chanct if yer ’ad ’em ’andy!”
’owsomdever, I took the boy on in the end, and that’s why I shan’t ’urry
back. No fear! Stands ter reason if yer can do your father in at
fourteen, at seventeen yer must be ’arf-way ter a watchdog! There ain’t
no need fer me to ’ang about on board, now I got a murderer ter look
after me barge.’ And the murderer, his heavy eyes closed in sleep,
turned as softly upon the deck of _The Water-Lily_ as if he slept upon
his mother’s breast.
CHAPTER VI
The skipper’s face looked as if it were made out of rough mahogany
insufficiently planed. His nose had been broken in a far-off fight, and
had settled crookedly at an angle of forty-five degrees. Has slouching,
heavily-built figure and somnolent eyes gave no hint of alertness, and
yet no craft on the river escaped his appraising glance.
Hie gave his orders monosyllabically and without any air of authority.
They were only orders because fatalities lay on the other side of them.
Jim’s irritated fighting spirit found infinite repose in a master who
made no claims beyond the obvious ones of common sense. He could obey
and yet forfeit nothing of his self-respect.
Even the skipper’s bad language, when Jim failed to carry out
successfully any of his new duties, was perfunctory and without malice.
He could not do much to teach Jim the river lore beyond swearing,
because he knew it like the back of his hand and had worked for forty
years on a barge.
Everything that was new to Jim had faded into unconsciousness with the
skipper.
He had long ago forgotten the reasons for his automatic skill, his rules
were perfectly successful, but they were all rules of thumb.
In his bottomless mind there were no visible landmarks. He pushed his
way through obstacles as if they were the incidents of dreams. Dangers
were no more to him than awkward corners, and the river was the only
personality he had definitely studied.
The skipper had very few dealings with his boys beyond seeing that they
were fed, and keeping a jaundiced eye upon their carrying out his
orders. He looked upon boys in the lump as a kind of tool which is often
not where you expect to find it, and continually liable to go wrong.
Some boys were more liable than others, and when they were below this
shifting standard the skipper got rid of them.
His new boy was different. He was at first more like a half-drowned
kitten than a boy. He had been badly handled, and was panicky and
sometimes clumsy from fright—but he had none of the ordinary tricks of
boys. When he understood his work he did it thoroughly and with method,
and he did not fly into mischief the moment it was over.
When they were moored offshore he did not vanish for hours to play with
other boys and leave on his skipper the burden of the barge; and
finally, he did not tease the skipper’s dog—he made friends with him.
The skipper vaguely observed all these things, but the last made the
deepest impression upon him.
Cadger had never been known to make friends with a boy before. He
instinctively and reasonably disliked them.
Boys had once tied a tin can to his tail and nearly driven him mad.
The skipper had rescued him at a critical moment; released his tail,
carried him gently, all trembling and slobbery with panic, into a dark
quiet place, given him a drink, a sense of mastership and well-being,
and rounded off the affair with a bone. From that moment Cadger had
chosen the skipper’s heel as the exact spot in the universe most
suitable for a small yellow dog. He was not otherwise ferocious, but he
would have disputed with a tiger his right to the skipper’s heel.
At first Cadger looked the other way at Jim’s approach, and stiffened
with a curious and unnatural daintiness of step, but Jim passed by him
without offence or menace.
No names or surreptitious stones were shied at Cadger by this stranger.
His bones were not only left in his favourite corner, but fresh bones
were sorted out from dishes and placed before him. He ended by doubting
if Jim were a boy at all.
He made up his mind to investigate him more closely. He approached Jim
gingerly with the intention of sniffing as he passed him; perhaps he
would not quite sniff; something redolent of boy might reach him in time
to prevent him from lowering his dignity to this direct approach.
But nothing revealing happened. Jim sat with unblinking eyes, gazing at
a green bank.
Cadger decided to sniff. He came still closer. Jim did not turn his
head. Cadger sat within reach of his hand, ready to leap away at the
faintest threat, but there were no threats. It was a warm day, and by
and by his attention relaxed; he slept.
When he woke up Jim’s hand was moving slowly and gratifyingly behind his
ear. It was a hard hand, but it knew instinctively how to handle a dog.
It was not bitten; instead, after a momentary pause, a rough tongue
touched it, the brief curled tail—a misplaced feature on the part of
Cadger’s mother—wagged beneficently. Cadger had recognised a boy.
Cadger was never faithless to the skipper, but he enlarged his world.
From henceforth he had another heel to follow, another human eye to
watch; and though a man may fail to serve two masters it is well within
the powers of a small yellow dog.
There were occasionally awkward moments when Cadger could not get his
human beings to herd together nicely; when the skipper went off in one
direction and Jim remained obstinately in another, and Cadger would have
to make up a frantically conflicting mind as to where his allegiance was
most due. But these crises were infrequent, and Cadger surmounted them
successfully.
The skipper’s signal for Cadger was a growl. Jim expressed his need by a
whistle. Mercifully, they had the sense to avoid making counter
demonstrations at the same time. If the skipper growled, Jim withheld
his whistle, and if Jim whistled it almost seemed as if the skipper
purposely withheld his growl.
Few barges on the river showed less domestic friction.
It was the month of June, and all the life of the earth was new to Jim.
He had been born in mean streets full of smoke and dirt, and then shut
away in a building as solid and lifeless as a steel safe.
It was incredible to wake in the early mornings to the easy sliding
motion of the barge, and to look into a free world brimming over with
light.
A buttercup field by the waterside came upon Jim as suddenly as an act
of creation, the thick, wet green of the grass loosened to let the light
of the flowers through—each cup a glistening yellow world. The elms
above the little cups broke in a mist of green parted by sudden breezes,
and the sunbeams fell through in shifting showers of gold.
Heavy coral buds and high pink loose strife lined the river banks; the
bulrushes whispered incessant secrets; meadow-sweet wound deep down to
the water’s edge, spreading its fragrance far and wide.
Blue forget-me-nots burned in ardent patches of colour under cool green
reeds, and flat-headed, wide, white cups of water-lilies floated out
serenely upon the surface of the stream.
All the boy’s stunned senses were alive and filled themselves with what
he saw.
He had been for years like some menaced sea anemone cramped into a
perpetual ball. Now at last the menace was removed; and like the sea
anemone when it realises that only its own element surrounds it, Jim’s
whole being expanded to meet the friendly tide.
He pushed out in all directions, tentatively tasting his freedom.
He had no sense of equilibrium. Everything he fell into astonished him.
He did many clumsy and awkward things, but on the whole no cruel ones.
He had a rough common sense which showed an aptitude for dealing with
fact, and a strong feeling of compassion which showed a deeper aptitude
for dealing with human beings. His errors were the leniently regarded
waterside errors of getting drunk and fighting.
Whenever the barge moved near his old home Jim found his shadowed
history again—a careless taunt stirred his heart like fire, and he
returned to the barge covered with blood and bruises.
His great physical strength made him a dangerous opponent, but he was
often set upon by half a dozen boys together.
He met these attacks fiercely and without complaints, and by and by they
ceased. But not the memory of being attacked.
Farther down the river the world knew nothing of Jim, but he did not
take advantage of their ignorance. He was morose to strangers. It seemed
to Jim that human justice did not know when to stop. It invented
punishments that had no relation to crimes, and when they were over it
was dissatisfied with its own inventions and forgot to ratify them by
forgiveness. Jim would not make friends with people who, if they knew
his history, would look askance at him.
He took the edges of crowds and listened without comment to the fiery
talk of public houses.
His head was a jumble of ideas and instincts; he was like a prisoner
from an underground dungeon who, when he comes out into the day,
stumbles and is drunk with light.
He caught at socialism raw, and thirsted for revolution.
The wrongs of the world were as plain to Jim as the strength of his
hands, and he felt there should be a direct correspondence between the
two. He saw the gaps in human mercy and he wanted to be used to stop
them.
But though his mind was full of hard and angry questions, his sensations
were more and more peaceful and normal. The life of the barge and of
nature beat down his inward ferocity. Something strangely like a sense
of happiness pervaded him.
The badinage of river-craft is very infectious, and though Jim never
laughed aloud, the spirit of laughter touched him. He developed a power
of repartee, egged on by the skipper. His heavy mouth took an ironic
twist, his hard eyes lit with occasional sparks of laughter and
friendliness. They were an astonishing pair of eyes, dark-blue and very
open, and they gazed out upon the world and man searchingly and without
surrender.
Jim’s world was narrow but it was deep. He loved his parson with
reverence, his skipper with indulgence, Cadger with protective
companionableness.
He had no Sunday clothes, but he had a cap with a brim and a cap
without, and when he went to see Arthur Atkinson he wore the cap with a
brim.
Jim put the skipper to bed when he was drunk, and he caught water-rats
on the river banks with Cadger every Sunday. His outer life was
complete, but something else soon began to stir in him.
He found his inner life again, the life he had had in his early
childhood, behind the blind efficiency of his fists; but it was deeper
now and more unquiet. Jim was not sure what he wanted; it was not the
girls upon the river banks, though they came into his dreams and
confused his mind with new sensations. He had not the courage to make a
directer approach to them than dreams—he was afraid they might taunt
him with being a murderer, and he could not knock them down if they did.
Besides, he was proud and had no money—almost all the girls he could
think of expected glasses of beer or ices. Jim was too young to be
indiscriminate, and lovely girls in muslin frocks despised boys without
Sunday clothes. His dreams went farther than his instincts.
It was six o’clock and the sunlight lay faint and pink upon the silvery
dew-drenched fields.
Jim left the barge and strolled down the towing-path under the shifting
sunbeams. His eyes rested vaguely on a weeping-willow across the stream,
when something splendid and vivid, which made him hold his breath for an
instant, darted out upon the river.
He could not see plainly what it was. It passed in a flash, but he saw
that it had wings, and was blue.
It was like watching a sapphire tossed from bank to bank in the sun;
only this creature was more alive and more entrancing than any jewel.
For a long time Jim never moved. His stirred senses settled slowly over
the vision.
Public houses and curses, water-rats and riverside baths, were not
disturbed by his vision, but they were less real to Jim afterward than
the blue wing of a bird.
They belonged to the order of things he knew and could deal with; but
beauty stood for the world he did not know—and craved with all the
force of his being to master and to understand.
CHAPTER VII
For three years in the penitentiary Jim’s inner life had stopped; he had
had no dealings with it. All his consciousness was in his hot rebellious
pride; slavery numbed his imagination. He could force himself to obey
only by trampling out his thoughts. His hands and the mechanical part of
his mind lived, not his heart. He did not want to understand anything
because if he had understood it he could not have borne it. He was like
a bird that will not sing in the dark.
Now, at the signal of beauty, a rush of new questions came upon him; the
floodgates of his inner life swung back. Jim would have liked to talk to
the parson about his new experiences, but he had no words for his
thoughts.
There was a new language to meet this new life, and he had not yet
mastered it.
When the parson took him off for a long country walk behind the smoke,
and Jim first saw an apple orchard in the spring break like dawn across
his bewildered vision, the only thing he could say was,—
‘Gord! Look at them sheep under the ruddy trees!’
Arthur understood that Jim really knew and felt more than he could
express; but not even Arthur knew how much more.
Books came to Jim’s rescue. Books were full of his new life; they had
something which was outside himself, but they corresponded as well with
what he had within.
When he understood words better he knew that what he felt in them was a
sense of inclusion and of permanence.
Something that stood behind time broke through and claimed him;
something that stood behind space put out a friendly hand.
Jim could not think easily—letting his thoughts go like water through a
sieve, leaving no trace behind. The abstract was merely the concrete at
a distance to him.
When he had a thought he put it into instant execution, and gripped on
to a fresh conception like a dog on to a bone. He never succeeded in
understanding people whose thoughts come readily and drop; it was easier
for him to follow the skipper’s processes, who had no ideas at all but
moved unconsciously from instinct to habit. The skipper at any rate
wasted nothing that came to him; though Jim wished he could sometimes
make the skipper explain what things meant.
The skipper had never read a book in his life. All the attention he had
was spent on the river traffic. He gave his new boy the benefit of a few
rough river rules, and did not leave him in charge until he saw that he
understood them, but he was seldom to be tempted beyond the moment’s
need.
The river, he admitted, was a bag of tricks, and no mistake. She was
like a woman. Sometimes she had to be studied and others she’d be better
left alone. She was never twice alike, and when she looked most secure
and bland she was apt to upset you by starting a new current.
A barge was all right in the open water, except for the traffic. It was
the bridges that caught you out; the bridges, and of course the fogs.
The skipper was not a person to whom forethought made any appeal, but he
agreed that Jim had just as well think out what he’d do if he were alone
in a fog with no lights visible to guide. You had to keep the river in
your mind and then feel your way along, as a blind man feels his way
across Trafalgar Square at noon; keeping your ears well open—and
luck—pulled you through.
Things were mostly luck, the skipper explained, unless you upset them.
People said there were rules—to hear a pilot talk you’d think the river
was like a flight of steps without a bend to them; all you had to do was
to get your foot on them right, and climb up. But you couldn’t make
rules about water; you had to have sense for it; and even when you had
sense there was traffic.
‘Nah, traffic,’ the skipper said in his leisurely drawl, steering to
avoid two lighters and a wobbling line of barges tossed unevenly behind
them; ‘you got ter get used to traffic, same as a man gets used to
putting on his trahsers. ’Abit, that’s what saves a man at a pinch;
don’t you forget it.
‘Don’t you never trust a fellow as does things differently each time.
Flighty, that’s wot ’e is—and it don’t do ter be flighty on a barge.
Yer want ter do things the same till you _can’t_ do ’em no different
when there isn’t time to think—and things is going crooked all arahnd
you.
‘Everythink on this ’ere river knows its own mind, or oughter. You get
to know yours and stick to it.
‘Ladies and ’ens are the worst traffic dodgers I know on—’cos why? ’Cos
they won’t keep still and see wot the other person’s doin’ of. Every
collision I ever come acrorst was ’cos somebody started movin’ out of
turn. ’Oot and wait! ’Oot and wait; that’ll bring a man out of the worst
mess a dark night ever shoves ’im inter!’
They were going up to London for the first time, and Jim watched the
thickening traffic with fascinated eyes. No more river banks now, no
more towing and rat catching and hours of slow surrender to sunshine and
to dreams. They were out on the broad reaches of the Thames, surrounded
by its unhindered, multitudinous life. The great stream of outgoing and
incoming boats never seemed to jostle; all the smaller fry manœuvred
briskly, as at her appointed hour an ocean-going liner claimed her
unfettered way. The tramps got all the sea-room they had a right to
expect and no more, though they squealed for it.
The police boats darted in and out like swallows catching flies on
summer evenings.
The ineffable sluggish slowness of the drifters was short-circuited by a
series of light-handed miracles.
The flat incapacity of a barge to turn, when there is oceans of room for
her to do it in, passed without mishap in showers of fiery language.
Row-boats hovered in and out of the broad stream of traffic like
mosquitoes, threatening at every turn to get run down, and skilfully
pulling from under at the last conceivable and abusive moment.
The skipper stood on the deck with his somnolent eyes half open, giving
his quiet, perfunctory orders. Jim’s mind surged with doubts and
questions. He wanted to understand the river. He wanted to learn the
landmarks; he craved for direct instructions, which were as flatly
denied him.
‘Gord!’ the skipper replied to his insistent questions, ‘wot’s the
damned use of all that scum on the top of the beer? It don’t reach
anywhere, and it’s windy. You’ll learn in time. You do what I says when
I says it, and if you don’t see why it don’t make no odds to the river,
does it?
‘Wot you want is an _’ead_. In a tight place if you ’ave an ’ead you get
aht, and if yer ’aven’t an ’ead yer get under. That’s all there is to
it.
‘’Ow does a dog learn to swim? Don’t listen ter no chat aht of a book
abaht it, does ’e? Nah! Fro’ ’im in! Fro’ ’im in!
The skipper spat past Cadger’s head, barely grazing an ear.
He was not more communicative about the city which lay before them.
‘Yus,’ he said, pointing to a great smudge that lay upon the horizon,
‘that’s London. Don’t yer give no back talk to nobody and they won’t do
you no ’arm. It ain’t no different to any other place, as fur as I can
see.’
But to Jim it was already different. He had often thought about London;
and the burglars, the prison boys had told him about, breaking into
houses full of jewels. It was where books were made; and all the great
laws, that when you broke them, whether you knew them or not, you got so
heavily punished for.
He was in London now, though it was only houses in a bunch. There were
more of them than Jim had ever seen before; line upon line of uncertain
grayness stretched before him, broken as an old man’s teeth. Here was a
tall tower, and a big square building, and next to it small, squat
houses like the shells of inconspicuous fishes.
Immense warehouses brooded over empty docks. Chimneys sprang up like a
forest and died suddenly into insignificant spaces full of tin cans.
Bridges and boats blocked the way, and opened out at intervals into
curious vistas—a black wharf; a row of houses like disused biscuit
tins; a long, corrugated iron caterpillar, where men and women worked
furiously under a great glass roof, like creatures in a hive. But their
fury and their ugliness passed quickly into a sudden arbour of greenery
out of which rose a great cathedral, and a road as wide as a river, down
which the traffic roared and fumbled its blind way. Jim watched the road
till it, too, lost itself in miles and miles of small, gray houses,
sucking up all the life around them into an indistinguishable dirty
sponge. This was London.
The barge put in at a dock near the Radcliff Highway, and the skipper
remarked briefly that Jim had better sleep on board, and that they
wouldn’t begin to unload until to-morrow. Then he dropped into a small
boat which shot out suddenly from under them like an offertory plate for
a six pence, and Jim and Cadger were left alone.
It was curious that Jim felt more alone than he had ever felt before,
when there were so many people around them.
The night would have been dark in the country, but it was not dark in
London. The river was ablaze with lights—they hung like a gigantic
string of pearls on a dusky neck, glittering all night long.
Jim could not sleep; the hours were too full of life and colour. He
could hear all round him the shouts and songs of human beings, their
laughter and their curses. It seemed to him that he was surrounded and
invaded by a million lives. None of them left him alone and yet none of
them belonged to him. He was as disconnected as a separate bead, and
yet, he, too, was in that perpetual moving circle of lights and human
beings.
The sounds died down with the passing of the night, but the lights still
burned on, furtive and mysterious, until the colourless dawn.
Everything was very still for a time, like a child that has cried itself
into an exhausted sleep, and then far off the rumble of the country
carts began, and one by one the sounds returned and fixed themselves
into the voice of London.
The barge unloaded all that day and all the next, so that Jim had plenty
of time to see what the city was like; but it never looked any
different—gray houses and more gray houses, and a noise like a
persistent hammering upon a door that no one ever opened.
Far away up the river, beyond anything Jim could ever reach, there were
shining towers.
CHAPTER VIII
All day there had been wisps and banks of fog. The ground was as wet as
a sponge, and the sky was low and very heavy. The river banks seemed
extraordinarily near and still. Sound was as muffled as footsteps at a
funeral.
Jim had been six months on the river now, and he was used to every
change in her perpetual variety. He looked about him with the settled
look of eyes that study water and search out wind. But there was no
advantage he could take of the heavy, breathless day, no stir upon the
water; even the leaves on the November trees, those brittle and fugitive
last children of the year, hung safe and still. Jim worked his pole
steadily in and out of the thick water.
The barge moved very slowly, as if through treacle. The banks slid away
from her like the last solidity of earthly things.
Fog came up from the sea, at first with a deceptive air of leisure,
blotting out the landmarks one by one, and then, in a sudden stroke,
hiding the last vestige of the day. The sky was gone, the day was gone;
even the water was lost.
Jim could not see the end of his pole. His hand slipped away from him
into space, and reappeared mysteriously out of clammy whiteness.
Cadger, the moisture standing in big drops all over him, became nothing
but a shadowy point. He kept up a dejected sniffing to remind Jim that
he was but a reluctant companion. The skipper was downstairs, warm with
an oil-lamp behind him, like a creature in another world.
But Cadger, with the code of the perfect lover, knew that his duty was
with the more uncomfortable of his two gods. He regretted the
discomfort, but it never occurred to him to evade it.
All around them, from far and near, tortured sirens hooted their unquiet
thoughts, sometimes far away and flabby, with the piteousness of
creatures lost and insecure, sometimes with an imperative shriek, right
above them out of the dense wall of fog. Jim’s ear was trained—he knew
which siren could be ignored and which his whole being must respond to,
without the loss of a second. Nothing is safer than a barge ninety-nine
times out of a hundred, and nothing more helpless in that hundredth
moment when the fog blinds her, and her heavy bulk can neither see nor
turn.
Jim was soaked through, and cold, but all his senses were alert. He held
the river in his mind as a backwoodsman holds the dense reaches of a
primeval forest; but he did not know her under-water secrets. The river
tricked him in the dark. He was being borne down by the shifting of an
invisible current, straight against the side of an iron bridge.
The first sign by which Jim knew that the current had shifted was the
unexpected pressure on his pole. He tried to withdraw it, and was picked
off the barge as clean as if a hand had plucked and tossed him into
midstream.
He had no time to think before the icy water caught him, and began to
play its awful strangling game upon him in the dark.
He shut his mouth and beat upon the water with his feet and hands until
he reached the surface; then he struck out in spite of the weight of his
clothes, and felt his powerlessness.
He had not been frightened till then. But now he had a moment of sheer
panic when it seemed to him cruel and a shame that his feeble strength
should be pitted against such a heavy weight of water. He knew he must
be overwhelmed. The odds were too strong against him. All his strength
and courage would be sucked down and blotted out.
He set his teeth and shuffled his leaden limbs through the water without
hope. If he was going to be drowned he wouldn’t let go before he had to.
He would pay something back.
He shouted once or twice but his voice beat feebly into the fog and was
lost.
He went on with the swimming, a weight of iron contracted his arms, and
his feet dragged under him as if they were anchors anxious to fasten him
to the bottom of the river.
It wasn’t any good struggling, but he went on struggling. His mind moved
as swiftly as his limbs moved slowly. It grasped a thousand broken
flying thoughts, and let them go again. Eliza with her hard eyes and
pullable hair fled through his brain; and Bert and little Margaret,
clean and colourless, guarded by sad-faced Sisters in black robes. They
had had nothing to say to him when he saw them, and they had nothing to
say to him now—they seemed only, like Eliza, to reassert that it didn’t
matter where he was; the bottom of the Thames would do.
The water rose to his lips and ears and dragged him under, drenched and
stiffened.
His hands clutched emptily at fog.
Then his limbs relaxed—fear slipped away from him. He became conscious
of a great relief. It was as if he were being withdrawn by a sure hand
into safety—to a fresh place, below the reach of fear. Nothing weighed
on him any more, not his water-sodden clothes, nor the rebellion of his
fighting senses.
He felt curiously light and free, and as if his mind was full of music.
A sound struck hard against his withdrawing senses—the slap of a rope
upon the water. He heard from an infinite distance the skipper’s voice
calling—
‘Jim! Jim! You there, Jim!’
It was impossible to say where he was; but he didn’t want to come back.
A feeble voice sounded somewhere in his brain, and a hand seized the
rope—a curious, heavy hand that felt the pull and jerk of the rope’s
wet length run through fumbling fingers.
Then he felt the skipper’s arm under him, and was hauled over the boat’s
side like a sack. There was nothing now but a great white darkness
inside him and without.
When he came to himself Jim found that he was lying in the skipper’s
bunk, warmed and dry, with burning rum trickling down his throat. The
skipper was roused out of his ordinary taciturnity into direct
expression.
He recounted for the third time the story of Jim’s rescue, decorated
with his favourite expletives.
‘It was that dawg that saved yer. I ain’t never seed ’im in such a
fantag. ’E ’ad me on the floor out of me bunk as quick as an oath.
Shriek! ’E fair tore the blanket orff of me and a-screamin’ steady as if
’e was arter a rabbit. Orff ’e flew onter the deck and back ag’in ter
drag at me trahsers, an’ then made as if ’e’d lep into noffin’ arter
yer.
‘’E didn’t arf worry me to get the boat aht! Current, that’s wot it was.
Shifted. An’ the barge she just got clear of the bridge, abaht a knife’s
edge between ’em.
‘I came on the pole arter I ’ad you inter the boat ’ave some more rum?
‘Gord! My boy, you won’t never ’ave no closer call than wot you’ve ’ad
ternight, and don’t you forget it!’
Warmth and light flowed back upon Jim’s shaken senses. He felt grateful
for Cadger’s rough tongue against his hand, and the kindliness of the
skipper’s eyes welcoming him into human companionship.
This, too, was safety; it was a warm, good safety, but not as deep as
the safety Jim had felt before.
He had come out of a place safer than the cabin of the barge—safer and
kinder and deeper.
He was comfortable and grateful, but he missed something.
‘You must ’ave put up a fight for it,’ the skipper continued admiringly,
‘wot wiv’ yer boots on an’ all.
‘I never thought I’d see yer ugly mug agen. Not arter twenty minutes
knockin’ abaht in the river—twenty minutes proper, wot with gettin’ the
boat aht an’ all. Not many boys—nor men neither—would ’ave ’eld aht
that long, I will say that fer yer.
‘Born ter be ’ung, that’s what you are!’
‘I had a funny feeling,’ said Jim weakly. ‘I fought as ’ow I’d get ter
’eaven er somethink arter I’d stopped choking.’
‘No fear,’ said the skipper kindly. ‘Wot you struck was the river, an’
an uncommon narsty piece of ’er—thick as soup and not arf so
nourishing.’
‘Where’d I ’ave got to,’ Jim persisted, ‘if I ’adn’t ’ung onter that
rope?’
‘Bottom of the Thames,’ said the skipper with conviction. ‘’Ave some
more rum?’
Jim took the rum thankfully. Everything that he could touch and feel was
friendly to him.
But he knew that he had been somewhere deeper than the bottom of the
Thames.
CHAPTER IX
Jim stood in the National Gallery looking vaguely about him. It had
occurred to him that he might test one of the great conveniences of
London. It was pouring with rain—and there was nothing to pay. The
walls were a blur of scarlet and gold, and there was a deadness in the
air which took the edge off his not very sharp appetite for pictures. He
wandered through the rooms uneasily, feeling that his blue jersey caught
the eye of the custodian without attracting it.
Finally, he found an inner room where he couldn’t see the custodian and
there was a red velvet seat.
There was only one other person in the room, a tall, neat girl in a
well-cut blue coat and skirt, who seemed no more interested in the
pictures than Jim was. She sat on the red velvet seat and from time to
time she moved a little so that she could see several of the rooms at
once.
She was a lady, and Jim seldom looked very carefully at ladies. But
something in the bend of her head struck him as strangely familiar. He
moved forward so that he could see first her profile, and then her full
face. She raised her eyes and shot a quick, furtive glance at him, like
the lick of a flame.
He would have known her anywhere whatever she wore; and whoever she
successfully pretended to be—she was Eliza.
Eliza was equally sure of Jim, but it took her a moment or two to decide
to show it. Her eyes, without seeming to move, took in with caution the
surrounding emptiness. Then she leaned forward.
‘Perhaps,’ she said in a gentle, well-bred voice, ‘you would like me to
explain the picture to you, my good lad?’
‘Garn,’ said Jim impatiently. ‘Wot are yer doin’ of ’ere, Eliza?’
Eliza did not answer directly. She rose and moved gracefully toward the
door. As she passed Jim she said aloud, ‘This is the Early Tuscan room,’
and in a quick undertone she added, ‘We’ll go outside and have a
talk—follow me, but not too quickly.’ She raised her hand as if she
were directing him into another room more suited to his uneducated
taste, and moved briskly away.
Jim was in two minds whether to follow her or not. His pride was up in
arms at her subterfuge and at his own appearance.
Probably when he went outside she wouldn’t be there. It would be like
Eliza to have invented a ruse to get rid of him quietly. On the other
hand, if she was there, she wouldn’t mind if he didn’t turn up.
Jim suffered under the disadvantage of caring a great deal more for
Eliza than Eliza cared for him.
He wanted too much to find out what she was up to not to take the risk
of being taken in by her. There was just the chance that Eliza was not
up to anything, but had been decently and successfully married, but this
comfortable solution was unlikely unless it had suited her book.
Jim passed on tiptoe quickly through an avenue of pictured rooms,
dodging behind the custodian’s back, until he found himself on the steps
shared by several undecided pigeons and a sedate and inconspicuous
woman’s figure. After all Eliza had waited for him.
Curiosity or some vague sentiment of childhood had operated upon her
rainproof spirit.
‘Come along, my poor boy,’ she said in her new mincing voice, for the
apparent benefit of the pigeons, ‘and I will give you something to eat
at an A. B. C.’
Jim growled, but he followed her. Eliza never turned her head to see if
he was obeying her or not.
She knew London as a housemaid knows her pantry, and she slid in and out
of the traffic of Trafalgar Square as easily as melted butter slips over
asparagus.
She did not speak to Jim again until she had found the exact place she
wanted in a shop crowded with little tables.
Then, with a grand air, Eliza ordered tea and a poached egg for Jim, and
when the driven waitress hurried off with her order, she leaned forward
and said,—
‘What a rum go to be sure, and when did you get out?’
She had remembered where Jim had been; though her interest was
insufficient to cause her to wait for an answer.
‘I don’t think much of your get-up,’ she added with a disapproving eye,
‘but you always were a guy about your clothes.’
‘Yours seem a bit of all right,’ said Jim with an edge of suspicion in
his voice. ‘Where did you get ’em from?’
‘Ah,’ said Eliza, receiving the handle of a teapot with a gracious
gesture, and curling her little finger delicately as she poured out the
tea. ‘I have plenty more better than these, but I always had a quiet
taste in dress.’
This was an unnecessary lie, and it roused Jim’s worst suspicions. Eliza
loved bright colours, high voices with giggles at the end of them, and
fashions which caused men’s heads to turn after her in the street. Had
she really learned better, or was she merely up to some new game?
‘You ain’t never been near the children,’ he said accusingly. ‘I seed
’em directly I got out. Margaret’s with what they call Sisters—ladies
in black with religion—but they give ’em enough to eat. Bert, ’e’s at
the Waifs and Strays—they say they’re going to make a sailor out of
’im; ’e ’ankers fer the sea; but it’s a rough life. I asked ’em abaht
you—but they ’adn’t ’eard nuffin’.’
‘Oh, I knew they’d be all right,’ said Eliza serenely. ‘Children always
fall on their feet somehow, as long as you leave them alone. If I had
tried to find out about them next thing would have been I should have
been expected to support them.’
‘’Ow did yer leave ’ome an’ all?’ asked Jim sullenly.
‘Oh, I had to make my way in the world,’ said Eliza, thoughtfully
fingering a pink sugar-cake. ‘There was nothing doing at home for a girl
like me. I read of a place in a newspaper at New Cross and I just
applied. They took me on at once, and after six months I heard mother
had gone, and the home was broken up. It was just as well I _did_ leave,
wasn’t it, with you put away and all?’
‘What kind of a place,’ Jim asked implacably, ‘did you find out of a
newspaper?’
Eliza smiled charmingly into a looking-glass and moved her hat the
eighth of an inch forward.
‘It suited me,’ she said reflectively. ‘They called it a “lady’s help.”
There was a widow and her daughter, the widow did the cooking; the
daughter was engaged to a nice young man with a big house and garden.
But soft—they all were, believing all I told them; particularly the
young man. I helped them all right.’
‘How long did you stay there?’ asked Jim.
‘Well,’ said Eliza, ‘the young man broke off his engagement with Miss
Simmons after a while. There was quite an upset about it, so I left.’
‘Don’t tell me you didn’t ’ave an ’and in it,’ said Jim fiercely, ‘’cos
I shouldn’t believe yer!’
Eliza was not pretty, but even Jim was not sure that she wasn’t. He was
less sure than ever when her eyelashes came together suddenly over her
glinting eyes.
‘I daresay,’ she said consideringly, ‘I helped it on a bit. They weren’t
what I called properly suited for each other, on account of their both
being so soft.
‘I was by way of being engaged to that young man myself for a time. In
some ways I might have done worse. I could have married him as easily as
picking up a crumb; but who wants to live with a man who won’t ever do
anything different?
‘He had a mother and three sisters on his hands, too, and whenever I
went there to tea they all started crying. It quite took the edge off my
appetite! Of course I could have got them turned out after a bit, but
Joe, he was the same kind of kiss-and-cry character himself. As far as I
could see he was meant to be the fourth sister, and had been turned out
a man by accident.
‘I didn’t say anything definite to him one way or another, for he was
something to fall back on in case I didn’t do well elsewhere. I told him
I had a dying aunt in London that I’d got to go and nurse, and that I
would write. I daresay he’s still waiting for that letter.’
Eliza swallowed the last pink cake thoughtfully.
‘I had good luck,’ she observed, with another glance at her satisfactory
image in the looking-glass, ‘as you see.’
‘What do you call good luck?’ asked Jim stubbornly. I want to ’ere all
you bin up to.’
‘Would you like another poached egg, dear?’ Eliza replied
sympathetically. ‘You don’t look any too well fed.’
Jim shook his head, his eyes fixed themselves on his sister’s face with
the intentness of a faithful watchdog guarding a perfectly irresponsible
and evasive kitten.
Eliza smiled mysteriously merely to irritate him, for she was not averse
to giving him her confidence. It did not occur to Eliza that there was
anything to be ashamed of in a career that had obviously paid.
‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you,’ she said after a reflective
pause, ‘seeing it’s all in the family. I haven’t seen you for four years
now I come to think of it, and who knows when we shall meet again.’
‘I came up to London as I told Joe I should, but not to the address I
gave him, for I’d made that up; and I walked down Oxford Street and
looked in at the shops. I had a five-pound note in my purse, and without
meaning to spend it, I slipped into a shop to have a little look around.
Evans’, I think it was, but I don’t quite remember.
‘I was always fond of fur, and I saw a nice white boa lying out on a
counter. I hadn’t made up my mind then whether I should go back and
marry Joe or not, but I knew he couldn’t have afforded to buy me that
fur.
‘All the young ladies’ backs were turned—it was the lunch hour, and
hardly any one was about at the moment. I just slipped it off the
counter like, and round my neck; but as luck would have it, as I turned
to walk out, I saw a shop man standing behind a pile of ribbons with his
eyes on me like a couple of gimlets. He stepped forward and I daresay he
would have made quite a little scene over it when a young gentleman,
well dressed and smiling, came up, and said,—
‘“Please bring a looking-glass so that my wife can see if she likes this
fur—I rather think it suits her.”
‘Well, the young man, he had opened his mouth to give me a bit of sauce,
but he shut it again and looks from one to the other of us quite
stupid-like, and I said,—
‘“Well, dear, I should like it, if you don’t think it’s too expensive.”
‘And the gentleman says,—
‘“Oh, not at all. Nothing is too expensive if it really suits you.” And
I said,—
‘“Well, then, I’d like it, and the muff to match, too, please.”
‘I hadn’t thought of the muff before, but I thought I might as well have
both if he was prepared to pay for them.
‘The shop young man, he hovered about until an older one came up, but
nothing happened. The gentleman paid for the furs on the spot, and I
walked out of the shop with the boa around my neck and the muff in my
hand.
‘When we stood outside on the pavement I looked at the young man and he
looked at me, smiling.
‘“It’s not the first time, surely?” he said, and I gave him my word it
was—I had never lifted furs before.
‘We started up a little connection there and then. Poor George, he was a
perfect gentleman always—it was a pity he went in for notes; I never
have believed in forging notes. They’re too easy to track. People being
as careless as they are, too, it isn’t necessary. A note makes a splash
and gets noticed, but a little lifting here and there, if you do it
carefully and have a good place handy to dump your swag, is hardly ever
dropped on. George got five years soon after we’d met.’
‘Then you make your living crooked?’ asked Jim after a pause.
He was unable to pretend any surprise. A strange feeling of insecurity
and helplessness swept over him. He was conscious that what happened to
Eliza mattered horribly to him, and that nothing he could do would ever
influence her destiny.
‘It’s like everything else,’ said Eliza calmly; ‘easy when you know how.
Of course there are drawbacks to it. I wouldn’t really choose to wear
clothes like these that no one ever notices—but that’s part of the
game.
‘I seldom take anything myself. I didn’t start young enough to be sure
of my fingers. You want to be as light-handed as a feather. I just go
where one of my friends is working and he passes the swag on to me—I
know how to take it, and I know how to get rid of it. It’s not every one
I’d trust to work with, but I’ve been fortunate so far.’
Jim’s eyes searched Eliza’s small, inscrutable face, but he did not ask
her any further questions. He had no doubt at all about the absence of
any innocence in Eliza, but he had no wish to have his certainty
reinforced by a direct statement.
There are some women who keep their innocence in spite of all adverse
circumstances, and there are others who part with all they have before
circumstances attempt to influence them. Eliza belonged to this latter
type. She thought that innocence was dangerous as a fact, and
ineffectual, as a precaution. But she had parted with it cleverly, as if
it were a stolen jewel; neither its destination nor its moment of
disappearance could have been traced to Eliza.
‘I always liked the idea of living in a hotel,’ she continued after a
pause. ‘I’ve been abroad once to the Riviera—after pearls, that was.
You’d be surprised at the luxury people live in, and the little sense
they have to look after what they’ve got. I’ve picked up quite a bit of
education and a little French. There is a lot in education. It’s a pity
you don’t put your mind to it, Jim.’
‘There must be,’ said Jim with a grim twist of his mouth. ‘How long do
you think you’ll stick it without getting run in?’
Eliza’s expressionless bright eyes rested on him without change.
‘I’ve been talking careless to you,’ she said quietly, ‘but I’m not
careless. I’ve been on this game for nearly four years. Six of my men
are doing time, but I’ve never been let down. As I was saying to you
just now, I don’t take up with any one.’
‘And you ’aven’t never got married?’ Jim asked cautiously. ‘I see you
got a ring on all right?’
‘Rings are neither here nor there,’ said Eliza calmly. Sometimes I’m a
widow, and sometimes just plain Miss. You can pick up a thing or two
without being married. I haven’t ever had a real husband, of course. I
don’t believe in getting mixed up with the law, and I shouldn’t fancy a
man thinking he can do as he likes with me. Men and women are better on
their own, in my opinion, especially women, if they keep their wits
about them.’
‘Eliza,’ Jim asked, with a sudden flare of a feeling that, though he
knew it was no use showing, he could not for the moment hide, ‘don’t you
ever want to live _different_?’
Eliza stared at him a little, but she remained safe from all
inconveniences—even spiritual ones. Nothing in her mind responded to
Jim’s urgency.
‘I daresay there’s something in being a duchess,’ she said lightly, ‘but
I haven’t tried it.’
‘You don’t seem to have done very well for _yourself_,’ she added,
drawing on her dark suède gloves, ‘by staying respectable, if you _have_
stayed respectable.’
‘Gawd!’ said Jim bitterly. ‘I nearly swung for that poker of yours,
Eliza!’
Eliza had forgotten her manipulation of the poker. She looked at a small
gold watch on her wrist and said,—
‘Dear me, I must be running off—but you shouldn’t have struck so hard
at a bread-winner, you know, Jim. I always have thought that about it.
Shall I pay for the tea or will you?’
Eliza was a thrifty soul and she knew that Jim was a proud one.
He took out his lean purse, and Eliza, who had asked for the bill in a
flute-like voice, leaned over and helped herself out of it.
‘It will look more natural coming from me,’ she observed; and Jim, after
a moment of expostulation, agreed that it would look more natural.
CHAPTER X
Eliza passed out of Jim’s life with the same suddenness and casualness
with which she had re-entered it.
When Jim asked her for her address, outside their tea-shop in the
Strand, Eliza stared at him with open hostility. She said that she never
stayed long anywhere and made a point of never putting anything into
writing, but she agreed, not without kindly contempt, that she would
write to Jim at Arthur’s address, if she should need his help at any
time.
‘I don’t see what use _you_ could be,’ she observed with frankness, ‘but
I don’t mind taking the address if it’ll make you feel any more
comfortable. It’s a pity you give yourself away so easily—but there! It
will never come to anything—and I knew where that parson was, anyhow,
if I’d thought he’d be any good to me. But I didn’t. So long, old dear!’
And Eliza swung herself on to a rapidly moving bus with an expert skill
which won even the hardened admiration of the conductor.
When Jim gave Arthur an outline of his interview with his sister,
Arthur’s only comment was,—
‘Well, on the whole I agree with Eliza—what you want, Jim, is
education. You can’t do much more without it.’
‘Wot do I want with an eddication on a barge?’ asked Jim.
He looked at Arthur with eyes which held a flash of deep self-mockery.
‘I kin push a pole.’
‘Is that all you want to push?’ asked Arthur. ‘Of course it’s all right
if it is.’
Jim relapsed into silence. He was sitting over the parson’s fire on a
winter evening. The shadows darkened around them; their only light was
the small spark at the end of their friendly pipes, and the occasional
spark of the flame eating its way into the blackness of the coal.
Jim was recalling in his mind rather an odd incident which had happened
to him the week before. He was half-ashamed to speak of it even to the
parson, but it had made an impression on him—difficult to shake
off—and Arthur had stirred it up afresh.
Jim had been to a big meeting of dock labourers. There was great unrest
on the river. The dockers were growing aware of the handicap which the
long shifts, loading and unloading, were to their strangled lives. They
wanted shorter shifts and better pay, and the men’s leaders poured
argument and flame upon the mass of their dull resentment.
Jim was, as usual, on the outskirts of the crowd, listening without much
sympathy to the men who had come down from London to address the
meeting.
Their speeches were glib, bitter, and superficial. They had got their
arguments second-hand from newspapers and ill-digested books. They were
there to make trouble; and they were making trouble; but they had not
known trouble. The greatest argument was in the faces of the men before
them—men who had lost the flower of their manhood at thirty; heavy,
slouching figures and pasty cheeks—men worn out and spoiled with
thirty-six hour shifts of ceaseless toil, followed by three days of
sodden laziness. Three heavy, empty days out of the week—sickened with
overwork, and with drink—like a light in darkness, making in their
cloudy minds a few short spasms of exultation and warm forgetfulness.
Jim watched their faces and listened till a strange feeling grew in him,
as if he were being caught hold of and pushed forward by a large, firm
hand.
He was hardly conscious of how he got through the crowd and on to the
platform.
A sea of smoky faces danced before him, lifted and fell, and then
settled into a solid stillness.
Jim stood for a moment in silence with his heavy chin thrust forward and
his blue eyes blazing, and then a torrent of words streamed from him.
Words with an edge and thrust to them that went through the meeting with
the rip of a squall at sea.
He knew what he wanted to say. The ache of their days was in his heart,
and their emptiness. Sudden and astonishing, first-hand and without
hesitation, the words poured out of him. Eliza was part of what he had
to say; prison was part of it. His words did not stick to party
arguments. All the influences of Swanhill, seared into his childhood,
found themselves ready for his use.
And he held the men spellbound, for they knew that what he said was
true. He put in words, with the awful power of words, how they spent
their days, and forced their eyes to see them with his eyes.
He gripped them with his simplicity and by his sudden, odd drops into
irony and laughter—the laughter that sees the fun of the losing game,
and never forgets the pain of it. He held them most by the strange force
that is always behind conviction and by some odd personal magic of which
he was quite unconscious.
The fierceness of their silence was like an empty cup held out for him
to fill. For a time Jim was not conscious of the human element; his
heart was fixed on truth; but suddenly he began to remember where he was
and what he was doing.
The cloudy, blurred faces became significant and human. They were men
from whom, singly, Jim was afraid to ask for a match. Panic seized him;
his legs trembled under him; his tongue stammered and refused to
articulate.
He stumbled off the platform hurriedly, amazed and chilled by his own
audacity.
Jim had got out somehow, but not before one or two of the older men had
spoken to him.
They asked him his name and urged him to join the union. One of them
said,—
‘You got ter get an education; you could be a leader if you got
education.’
Jim had hardy noticed at the time what they said, he was possessed by a
kind of horror at himself, and a longing to get away as quickly as he
could. He had fled back to the river and his barge in an agony of
reaction. For several days afterward he was afraid to show himself on
shore, but the incident had had no sequel; unless his talk to-night was
to be a sequel.
The vicar’s eyes rested on Jim with a steady urgency. Was that really
all he wanted, to push the pole of a barge?
‘Yer can’t git eddication wivaht money,’ Jim said obstinately. ‘A pretty
fool I’d look tryin’ ter git an eddication nah. I ’ad my choice up at
the prison and I chose different.’
‘I don’t think you were in a position to choose then,’ said Arthur, ‘and
as to money—I have enough for two. I’ll give you your chance now, if
you’ll take it. I’ve only been waiting for you to want it.’
Jim stared at him.
‘Money,’ he said with extreme resentment, ‘from you? Think likely I’d
take it? It ’ud be a funny thing to take money from a friend.’
He spat angrily at the fire, though he was perfectly aware that it was a
habit which Arthur did not particularly like.
‘It would be a funnier thing not to,’ said Arthur calmly, ‘when your
friend has it and you haven’t. You wouldn’t like to be cheated of your
chance to set a man free if you were in my place, would you?
‘I don’t believe you know the value of money, or the value of life.
People seldom do, who have too little—or too much of it. The value of
money is what you can do with it, in order to set life free; and the
value of life is to set free what there is in a man.
‘It is the act of a criminal and a maniac combined to let any human
power run to seed.
‘Education acts on power like a corkscrew; you can’t get the wine out
till you’ve pulled the cork. All I’m doing is to hand you the corkscrew.
Are you going to say you won’t take it?’
Arthur seldom spoke with energy, but there was something in his voice
now which Jim had never heard before—it was the anguish of all his own
ineffectual years. There was no sound within the room but the faint vent
of little flames in the grate.
Outside in the street were the usual Saturday night noises, shouts and
songs and an occasional wavering scream.
‘Are you contented with life as it is?’ Arthur asked slowly. ‘Or do you
want to put your back into it and try to make it better?’
Jim had a vision in the quiet, twilit room. He saw Arthur’s life—its
stagnation and its futility, the stored wisdom of his mind, the deep and
tender feelings which had had no visible outlet. He saw pain sweeping up
in waves, and human pity fighting through it and engulfed in the
breaking surf.
In that very room he felt the tenseness of the life-line that pulls back
the half-drowned and so often slips from the hand of the rescuer.
Jim’s youth rebelled against this desultory process of compassion—it
seemed like asking him to turn out of the direct current of life. Why
should he not take the easy, vivid way, work and drink, love and fight,
deal directly with daily labour and the reaction of daily labour?
He didn’t want to be a criminal like Eliza, but he was sure his own way
was easier than Arthur’s. Why should he force himself to join the
brittle line—that pitiful, half-defeated, struggling line of rescuers?
Why not let the defeated go? Weren’t there always derelicts and rubbish
heaps?
Arthur had given his life, and Arthur had failed—Arthur, with his
education, his intuition, his selfless kindliness.
Was there a drunken man the less for Arthur, or a woman with more
honour, or a child safer from flinching at a blow? His fighting spirit
chafed at the futility of sacrifice.
‘What’s the use of it all, parson?’ he muttered. ‘What’s the damned
use?’
Arthur put out his hand and laid it on Jim’s shoulder. But he gave him
no audible answer.
Jim’s muscles tightened under the touch of that light, friendly hand;
but for a long time he did not speak.
He was wrestling with himself to give up freedom for affection.
‘All right,’ he said at last gruffly; ‘I don’t mind if I do take yer
money. I don’t know what I’ll ’ave a go at yet, but I dessay I’ll ’ave a
go at somethink. Gawd! It’s late. I must be getting back to the barge.’
CHAPTER XI
When Jim moved a little uncertainly and heavily on to the platform at
Withers he was instantly pounced upon by Mr. Bligh.
Mr. Bligh was a small, excitable man with short red hair, no eyelashes,
a nose that went a little up, a chin that shelved a little down, a
charming childish mouth, and the blue, swift-moving eyes of a fanatic.
He was dressed in gray flannels with an open shirt and a red tie.
‘My dear fellow! My dear fellow!’ he cried with unaffected rapture. ‘I
am sure it is you! I am sure it must be! I’m Bligh. Where’s dear old
Atkinson? Not come, too? Well, now do you know, I call that rather
shabby? And yet I don’t know—perhaps not—after all, clergyman, you
know?
‘Here, porter, take this suit-case—heavy luggage in the van—oh, _no_
heavy luggage! All right, porter; this does splendidly! People ought
always to travel with no luggage; travel light and you go far—Stevenson
or somebody or other says that.
‘Of course, dear old Atkinson’s a saint and awfully unprejudiced in his
way. Still, hang it, there’s the uniform. Now, I’m against all that. In
the middle ages, you know, all very right and proper—look like crows
and feel like crows—quite the thing for the middle ages, but dashes
conversation now!
‘No standing up against a uniform. I’m all for no differences—down with
class distinctions! We shall have heaps in common, you know! Shall we
walk up from the station?’
Mr. Bligh hardly waited for Jim’s stammered consent before he dragged
him down the platform and launched full tilt into a topic previously
discussed with the station-master. It was difficult for Jim to follow
Mr. Bligh’s conversation; it involved a cottage hospital, the
station-master’s daughter, his opinion of medical men, and a promise of
fresh vegetables. Then it spread to the porter and included a job down
the line, and his mother’s rheumatism. A train put a momentary stop to
it, but all the way to Warren Mr. Bligh kept darting off into cottages,
like an intelligent fox-terrier determined that nothing should escape
him.
‘I must just step in, my dear fellow—I promised Mrs. Green some fresh
eggs. She’s the most delightful woman in the world, but she can’t digest
anything at all except fresh eggs, and she won’t keep chickens. I think
she must have a prejudice against chickens. We must go into it all some
day, but we haven’t time now.
‘Oh, here’s the vicar—I must just talk to him about a meeting. I want
to persuade him to lend me the church rooms for a radical meeting, and
he’s a conservative, you know. So unfortunate. I thought _call_ it a
lecture on the Holy Land and throw in politics like pepper; just a
seasoning here and there; how would that be? I’ve been to the Holy
Land——’
The vicar kept them for some time. He seemed from the first to have his
suspicions of the Holy Land. He reminded Mr. Bligh that his former
lecture on the Alaskan fishing rights had been red-hot socialist
twaddle. Mr. Bligh did not seem at all annoyed by the severity of this
reminder; he merely dragged Jim forward and said,—
‘Nonsense, my dear fellow—nonsense. What about the ark—all went in two
by two, didn’t they? Where was your conservatism then? Here’s one of my
new boys, Jim Barton—I forget if you’re church or chapel, Jim, but it
doesn’t matter. The vicar has a charming old church; eleventh-century
font—you’ll be sure to like it.’
Then he pushed Jim past the vicar, waving his hand behind him and
saying,—
‘Right you are about the Holy Land. Thursday at eight!’ and started off
at a violent pace, talking breathlessly all the time.
‘A new heaven and a new earth,’ Jim caught in flashes, ‘at least let us
have the _earth_ now. That’s what I say—can’t _do_ much about heaven
till we get there! Be a pioneer. Break new ground—don’t be afraid of
what people say! Stand up to your principles.
‘I told you I was a socialist, didn’t I? All my boys are too. We take
the _Leader_ and _Daily News_. My wife takes the _Morning Post_. She
says we must balance.
‘She’s a most marvellous woman! You’ll like her immensely.
Religious—but one can’t help that, you know. Women of her type must
have religion. Religion and the _Morning Post_. But it’s of no
consequence. Her heart’s absolutely in the right place—with the masses.
You’ll see for yourself.
‘She comes from a very old family, the Winstantons of Alderbridge—of
course you’ve heard of them? Conqueror, you know—knights in armour in
the hall—family prayers—frightful prejudices—lost fortunes on the
turf.
‘She absolutely dashed me in their faces. They said—very natural on
their part—“Who’s Bligh?” and she said, “He’s going to be my husband.”
Neat, wasn’t it? And so quiet too.
‘You wouldn’t think she’d got the head she has to look at her. All solid
judgment and no noise. Moves about like a shadow, agrees with everything
I say—except about the Church, of course. But I tone that down before
her—I hope you won’t mind? I’m _with_ you, absolutely.
‘You say, “What’s the Church done for me” don’t you? You’re perfectly
right! The whole thing is a ridiculous mix up—exploded, too—like
hitting a dead cat to talk about it.
‘Bishops’ Palaces now—why, it’s comic opera—look at the
Gospels—nowhere to lay their heads. Can’t imagine an archbishop with
nowhere to lay his head, can you? Think of their modern bathrooms.
‘But I wouldn’t for the world hurt her feelings about them. I just keep
quiet. I even had the children baptized—I’m afraid you’ll think that
rather weak? You don’t? I’m so glad!
‘You see, I look at it this way. It means nothing to me at all—won’t
hurt the baby to have a few drops of water spooned at it. Can’t take in
the words at its age—doesn’t really mind a surplice—cake afterwards,
and godfathers and godmothers with silver mugs—a nice friendly idea. No
harm done—but my wife would be wretched if we didn’t do it.
‘When it comes to confirmation, of course, I really don’t know what I
shall do, because that interferes with the liberty of the subject—don’t
like children taking vows and all that—but perhaps they won’t? Modern
children, you’ll see for yourself; but she brings them up to have
extraordinary manners, reposeful very, though I was against it at first.
Revolt’s such a healthy sign I’m sure you agree with me, but not——’
Mr. Bligh stopped abruptly in the middle of the road; he put his tense,
lean arm on Jim’s shoulder and looked appealingly up at him as if the
entire issue lay in Jim’s hands.
‘_Not_ bloodshed! I _think_, not bloodshed, don’t you?’
Jim’s head was going round and round. He had expected the schoolmaster
chosen for him by Arthur to be an ominous and incomprehensible
power—Mr. Bligh was incomprehensible, but he wasn’t in the least
ominous.
Jim had feared that whatever he said would be wrong, and that oceans of
knowledge would stare him in the face, behind barriers of displeasure.
He had humbly hoped that he might break down the displeasure in time,
and obtain crumbs of knowledge by perpetual efforts, but the man who
confronted him in the middle of the road had no dreadful reserves of
power.
Jim knew, as a dog knows, that this was a man without authority and that
Mr. Bligh had in him neither protection nor any of the forces of attack.
In a sense it was a relief, because there was nothing formidable in him,
but Jim’s heart sank as he realised that there was nothing to be
expected from him either.
Mr. Bligh would be no arbiter of justice between Jim and the other boys.
There was mercy in every line of his weak, intense appearance; a
passionate, blind-eyed mercy that ran into mistakes as lightly as a
sparrow dips itself in and out of puddles.
Jim’s embarrassed eyes rested on him with a curious dumb hardness.
‘’Ose blood,’ he rather naturally asked, ‘don’t you want for us to
shed?’
It seemed a simple question, but it wasn’t. It took them a mile and a
half of perpetual explanation for Mr. Bligh to set forth, as he felt
succinctly and clearly, an enlightened idea of the needs and methods of
bloodless revolution.
‘But you must read Wells,’ Mr. Bligh said hurriedly, as they reached the
garden gate. ‘He isn’t always sound, but he has glimmerings—and Bernard
Shaw and Sydney Webb. They are “vieux jeux,” in a sense; but you ought
to begin with them and take “les jeunes” afterwards; and you’ll feel
perfectly at home with us, and it’ll all be quite simple.’
Then he opened the garden gate.
Jim had tried to prepare himself for luxury; he had recalled the
Masters’ new bright tennis lawn and the inside of their house where
there were rooms in which you didn’t need to do anything in particular;
but he had never seen a garden like Warren Manor. The gate opened on a
tiled Dutch pathway, between two high herbaceous borders swinging with
bloom and sweetness.
In front of them swept a large velvety green lawn, and under a flowering
pink May-tree Mrs. Bligh sat at a tea-table, surrounded by boys in white
flannels.
Beyond the herbaceous borders rose the house itself, a solid Georgian
house of purple-red brick.
Wisteria and climbing roses grew over the front of it. To Jim’s dazzled
eyes it looked as if it, too, were made of flowers. Under the study
window on a square of green grass stood a magnolia-tree. The heavy white
buds were carved hard and perfect, line upon smooth strong line against
the green-black leaves. There was no vagueness in the splendid flowers.
The tea-table was covered with Queen Anne silver and some very good old
Worcester. It would never have occurred to Mrs. Bligh not to use her
best possessions regularly, even out of doors. She took beauty for
granted; it was her daily bread. If anything happened to what she had,
it would be very tiresome, of course, and she would have to buy more.
As her husband and Jim approached her she looked up from the tea-table
and smiled. She did not move, but there was something in the quality of
her smile, so unexpectedly serene and strong, that Jim felt he had never
been welcomed before. He wondered if he should ever be able to smile,
all of a sudden, without looking silly, at some one perfectly strange?
Mrs. Bligh was dressed very simply in some light summer material which
had the effect of pale sunshine. Her shady garden hat was covered with
blue gauze; the colour deepened without changing the untroubled grayness
of her eyes. She had long black lashes and very delicate features. Her
mouth was older than the rest of her face and a little set; but the
corners of it were charming when she smiled.
She had had five children and had lost two. Her voice was very low, with
a curious quality of distinctness, as if she were speaking slowly in a
well-learned but foreign tongue. She said,—
‘I hope you had a pleasant journey, Mr. Barton. This is Mr.
Pritchard—Mr. Wivvle—Mr. Ainley. Do you take sugar in your tea?’
Her eyes, quiet, friendly, and without any hint of criticism, held Jim’s
while she spoke. He said in a hoarse voice that he did take sugar; he
found his throat unexpectedly dry, and his knees shook under him. Mrs.
Bligh did not speak or look at him again for a long time.
All her husband’s pupils loved her. She had no curiosity and no
eagerness; and she kept to perfection, in all the small crises of life,
the steadiness of a person not concerned.
If Jim had dropped the cup she gave him—with a cleverness which he only
afterward perceived—she would not have appeared to notice the accident,
and no one would have guessed from her expression whether he had broken
old Worcester or kitchen china. But she did not let him break it. Her
quiet eyes deflected accidents.
Jim found himself without volition safely seated beside her in an
incredibly comfortable chair. His feet felt enormously large and his
hands unduly heavy; but he was anchored in a sure refuge, and cut off
from the possible tactlessnesses of the outer world.
The other young men looked at him in a non-committal, friendly manner
over Mrs. Bligh’s head. Whatever they may have felt was completely
hidden beneath their sense of form. They took in turns the floods of Mr.
Bligh’s excited companionableness as if it was a thing to which use had
hardened them.
They laughed and chaffed each other over tennis. They had been playing
tennis, and they were going to play again after tea. They seemed to
Jim’s eyes to be incapable of anything else.
He looked at their fine hands, ostentatiously smooth and clean, and yet
not weak. Wivvle in particular had hands like iron. He looked at their
smooth, young faces; their controlled, untroubled eyes.
Nothing in them had been broken.
Wivvle was the handsomest; he was almost too stupid for Eton and had
left to be crammed for the army. Mr. Bligh, who under all the flood of
his contemporary thoughts was in command of his job, had warned the
young man’s parents to give him plenty of time over Wivvle.
Wivvle would take two years to learn what another boy could grasp in six
months. He knew how to behave, but he didn’t know how to concentrate,
except of course upon the playing-fields of Eton.
Ainley was extremely intelligent, a dark, haughty-looking boy with a
lively eye. He had delicate lungs and had been defrauded of half his
school life, but three years of Switzerland had saved his health.
He was as strong now as the rest of them, as lifted above the pinch of
life, and as unconcerned with anything disagreeable. He was more
vivacious than the other two, but it was only in his manner; beneath it
lay a solid block of conservative instincts with which neither his
vivacity nor his intellect had anything whatever to do.
Pritchard had neither Wivvle’s good looks nor Ainley’s brains. He was
born a gentleman and would always be rather better off than most people.
He took himself very seriously and didn’t want to be bothered. The
presence of Jim was decidedly a bother. If he had not been attached to
Mrs. Bligh and accustomed to the coaching of her husband, he would most
certainly not have submitted to the presence of a boy off a barge. He
would have left the place.
The other boys thought it rather a lark, but Pritchard didn’t. He didn’t
like larks out of his own class. But Mrs. Bligh held him as she held
each of them, by the invisible thread of her knowledge of how to live.
Barge-boys might be sprung upon Warren Manor at any moment, but she
could be trusted to prevent their being a nuisance.
She was a woman who took life with gravity and presence of mind. She
never underrated an obstacle or failed in the end to subdue it.
She believed in eternal verities, and used her articles of faith as
carefully as if they were matches. She found the arrangements of
temporary and material things—especially as regarded her
husband—needed perpetual watchfulness and self-control, and she had
acquired both these qualities to perfection.
Mr. Bligh adored her primarily and completely, but he adored very easily
and with ardour a great many other contradictory things. Mrs. Bligh
disliked ardour and she loathed contradictions, but she had never told
her husband that she had these dislikes.
Her perpetual fencing with nature never passed the barrier of her rather
set small mouth. She had kept the innocence of her girlhood untouched,
and she neither understood nor sympathised with passion. Her husband
thought her possessed of an immaculate virtue, and her submissiveness
partially hid from him the reluctance of her spirit.
Mr. Bligh tried to live up to her, and it cost him a great deal;
sometimes he couldn’t do it. Mrs. Bligh forgave him his lapses; but she
never knew what it was that he had to forgive her. Nor did Mr. Bligh
himself. His forgivenesses were always unconscious.
The centre of his wife’s heart was her religion and her children. She
knew nothing beyond what she had to know. Her resentment against the
dual nature of life took the form of a cloistered and preserved
ignorance.
She judged inflexibly; and she had never faced the bottom of either her
own or any one else’s heart.
She had made her husband successful and her children delightful.
Every one in her small world respected and admired her. She obeyed her
religion as unobtrusively as she poured out tea. Her self-control was so
great and so constantly successful that she had never discovered her
lack of moral courage. Nor had any one else.
It would have been as difficult to convince Mrs. Bligh of sin as to
break the shell of an oyster with a roseleaf. Sin was a thing she turned
instinctively away from, and you can not convince any one of things
which they instinctively evade; especially if they believe that there is
something rather handsome in evasion.
A small boy of five sauntered out upon the lawn; he had Mr. Bligh’s red
hair, and his father’s impetuosity of spirit looked out from his
mother’s gray, long-lashed eyes. He darted forward when he saw Jim.
‘Oh!’ he cried, ‘are you the boy who lives in a barge?’
It was the first direct remark which had been made to Jim since he sat
down to tea, and though Mr. Bligh made a quick movement to efface it, it
was wholly unnecessary.
The small hand laid on Jim’s knee, the eager, uplifted face, was the
most reassuring thing that had yet happened to him. His mouth took a
friendly twist.
‘Yus,’ he said; ‘I was on ’er—’er name’s _The Water-Lily_, but she’s
seemingly given me the slip.’
‘Oh,’ said the enthralled listener, ‘but would you—could you ever—in a
most awful kindness—take me in the barge? Because you can’t be going
not to live in her _always_, can you?’
‘Like a shot,’ said Jim, ‘if the river’s near enough. I marked ’er
course out on the map; she passes within ten mile of Warren now an’
again. You shall ’ave a kipper cooked below like for you, and watch our
Cadger—’e’s the dorg—ketch a water rat.’
‘Denis, dear, don’t be a bother,’ said Mrs. Bligh with her gentle
distinctness.
Denis’ eyes were wide with delight; the intensity of it almost took his
breath away; his grip on the big knee tightened.
‘Oh,’ he said, turning round to the assembled tea-party with flaming
cheeks and challenging eyes, ‘isn’t this man easily—the kindest in the
world?’
This testimonial broke up the tea-party. The boys strolled off to
tennis—they asked Jim casually if he had brought a racket and they said
‘Really,’ when he explained he couldn’t play. They were too polite to
laugh at his urging, in default of everything which he ought to have
known, that he could knock a ball about at footer!
He had never had a cricket bat in his hands. They were quite kind about
it, but none of them had ever eaten their meals with a young man who had
never had a cricket bat in his hands. Even Mr. Bligh was dashed for a
moment; only Mrs. Bligh appeared to think it was perfectly natural and
even convenient. She said with her unemphatic kindness,—
‘And now you can all go and play, can’t you, while I show Mr. Barton the
house?’
It seemed to Jim as if an angel had taken him by the hand and conducted
him through the many mansions of another world.
Warren Manor was furnished very well. Both Mr. and Mrs. Bligh understood
old furniture. It was not the kind that looks worm-eaten and black, but
furniture which has the careful bloom of pricelessness and time.
Everything shone with a kind of mild, fine radiance, and the carpets
under their feet were as soft and deep as heather.
At first it seemed to Jim as if there were no colour in the curtains and
chintzes, or in the few delicate pictures on the dull-papered walls. It
took him a long time to learn the restfulness of taste, and in his
private heart he reserved a terrible tenderness for turkey red and the
green of billiard tables.
Mrs. Bligh made little comments as they passed from room to room—they
had not the weight of explanations; but they came back to Jim afterward,
as the names on a sign post haunt the cautious mind of the traveller in
unknown lands.
When she left him at the door of his room she said with her faint, sweet
smile,—
‘I hope you will be very happy here, and will tell me anything I can do
to help you.’
She liked him; she liked his honest, troubled eyes; she liked even a
little his helplessness, for she perceived that it was the helplessness
of a strong man at a disadvantage; and secretly, perhaps, she liked what
she then and there received, the homage of his undivided heart.
Jim could get on all right with Mr. Bligh; anybody could; but it was
Mrs. Bligh who after all taught him most.
She taught him so much that in the end he wondered if any one had ever
taught him more.
She was the door by which all his illusions entered.
CHAPTER XII
Jim looked at his suit-case with puzzled eyes; it still seemed to him
enormous. Arthur had provided him with two whole sets of underclothes, a
dozen handkerchiefs, shoes as well as boots, and two perfectly good new
suits.
He had never had so much in his life before, and yet Mr. Bligh, this
master of equality, who saw no visible distinction between man and man,
had spoken of his having no heavy luggage; and Mrs. Bligh had said,—
‘I suppose the rest of your things will arrive later?’
It was true that neither of them had shown wonder when Jim explained
that there was nothing more to come, but he had already learned they
never showed surprise about anything that really surprised them.
Little by little, as he took in the size and aspect of his new room, the
immensity of his suit-case dwindled. There was a shining wardrobe and a
tall piece of furniture, very dark but with a bloom upon it, in which
quantities of small brass handles revealed drawer after empty drawer,
ready for clothes which he hadn’t got. On a side table, under a big
square glass, was a wonderful collection of china utensils, crowned by a
big basin covered with fantastic painted birds, and a charmingly shaped
jug to match it.
A number of little dishes covered with the same pattern stood on the
table—the use of which he did not understand. He gave up in despair the
question of where to put a tooth-brush—they all looked so much too
handsome for tooth-brushes. Arthur had taught him this odd extra for his
toilet; but he hadn’t said where one had better keep it.
It was a long, oak-panelled room with four windows; they were all open,
and curtained with short chintz curtains which swung to and fro in the
light air, as fresh and bright as flowers.
Two windows looked out over the herbaceous borders and the lawn, and two
over a walled garden full of fruit and vegetables, with borders of
herbs, sweet-williams, and heavy-headed pinks.
There was a gleaming paddock beyond the vegetable garden, and beyond the
paddock sloped vague blue hills. Swallows darted to and fro, plunging
out of the open sky in which they bathed, into their hidden nests under
the eaves. They flew so fast and so unerringly that there was no use
trying to mark their flight except by the stir of the leaves which
closed after their passage.
Everything smelled of lavender and was clean, not as Jim understood
cleanness, a painfully acquired, expensive process, chiefly utilitarian,
but clean like an art, and to the point of beauty.
He drew in the fragrant air cautiously as if he hardly had the right to
breathe in so exquisite a place. He did not like to take his boots off
and put them on the highly polished floor, or on the soft, flowered rug
in the middle of the room.
A knock at his door disturbed him afresh. He had never had knocks at his
door before—it was almost as if he had a right to keep people outside.
But it was followed up very quickly by a good-looking, beautifully
starched housemaid. She looked full at Jim, and all the forces of
derision in her took visible form.
She knew he was a boy off a barge.
How she knew it would have been impossible to tell—but little in the
house escaped her non-committal roving eyes, or the trained acuteness of
her well-placed ears.
Every fibre of her being resented waiting upon him. To Jim it seemed
equally strange that this haughty young lady should stand in the same
relation to him as he used to stand to Polly, the Miss Masters’ domestic
mainstay, for whom he often ran errands. But Polly had been kind to him,
and he would have liked to be kind to Emily, only he didn’t know how.
Emily, holding a brass can of hot water in her hand, sneered openly.
‘Wot d’yer use it fer?’ Jim asked nervously as he watched her transfer
it with a sharp effective movement to the basin and deposit the flowered
jug upon the floor.
‘Oh, wash your ’ead in it if you like, I should think by the look of
you,’ said Emily with instant malice. ‘But I’m not ’ere to teach you
manners, thank ’Eaven. Put your boots where they belong and don’t let me
have any of your dirty ways.’
Jim scowled at her heavily.
‘You can go downstairs, my gel,’ he said coldly, ‘where you
belong—wot’s ’appened to you is your ’ead’s turned—that’s your
trouble!’
‘Well, I ’aven’t waited for the likes of you to turn it,’ said Emily
with a high, toneless giggle. She banged the door viciously after her.
Jim poured some of the hot water into a glass and drank it gingerly. He
had never drunk hot water before, but he thought he might be supposed to
drink it, and if Mrs. Bligh asked him, ‘How did you like your hot
water?’ it would be safer to have at least tried it.
Then he examined the books by his bedside. There was a volume of Bernard
Shaw; _The Road Mender_; _Poems of Passion and of Pain_; and a French
novel. They were the most incomprehensible set of books Jim had ever
encountered. He tried them each by turn.
The one by Bernard Shaw had lots of words in it which seemed quite like
words, but they were rattled out at you with the cut and thrust of a man
who is only accustomed to use thoughts like weapons.
He did not know, as Jim knew it, that thought is a discovery and not a
blade. He wounded even in the house of his friends.
As to _The Road Mender_, Jim read solidly page after page and felt
exactly as if he had been eating cotton-wool. He had met road menders
while he was on the barge, but they were not like this one. They were,
as a rule, surly people who drank a great deal owing to the amount of
dust they swallowed, and suffered from rheumatism and sore eyes. What
they really liked—they expressed this with the expletives which came
handiest—was Saturday nights in the Old Kent Road.
_Poems of Passion and of Pain_ were equally thrown away upon Jim. It was
true he found them painful, but he was totally unmoved by what passion
they contained. He came to the conclusion that the people the poems were
about must have got upset rather easily.
Then he heard the boys come back from tennis. They all had separate
rooms on the same floor. Their voices sounded extremely cheerful. He
would have liked very much to go outside and speak to them, but he
didn’t dare.
Wivvle was next door to him.
Emily returned with more brass jugs, and after a sudden pause Jim heard
quite distinctly through the open windows the sound of a kiss. He had
been right about Emily’s head—it was turned.
There was no harm in a kiss, but it surprised and disappointed Jim that
Wivvle should have been the one to turn it. Wivvle was so handsome and
straightforward and looked so much like a lord, and to Jim’s
unsophisticated mind it was mean of a man with overwhelming advantages
to look at a girl with none.
‘’E didn’t oughter ’ave done that,’ Jim said slowly to himself. ‘’E
oughter ’ave let ’er alone.’
The sound of a mellow-voiced gong roused him from these reflections.
If music went off suddenly in the house, what did it mean?
It occurred again after a short interval, and Jim realised that it must
be a modified and harmonious form of the old bells and whistles. It was
a summons, and meant that you had to go somewhere else. In the hall he
was picked up by Mr. Bligh, who literally swept him into the
dining-room.
‘My dear fellow—— No, we don’t dress; only a smoking-jacket, and
that’s not _de rigeur_. You’re perfectly all right,’ Mr. Bligh
explained. ‘Nothing formal here, you know, and practically no rules at
all. We’re in by ten o’clock, of course, out of consideration for the
neighbourhood and all that, you know—and up with the lark. Can you
manage breakfast at eight? _Good!_’
Mrs. Bligh joined them. She floated in from the garden like a
white-winged moth; the neck of her soft, white dress was cut low and a
string of pearls fell from it. She wore a bunch of lavender-coloured
sweet peas at her waist.
She motioned to Jim to sit at her left hand. Wivvle was on her right. He
had beautiful manners, gracious and perfectly natural; his unshadowed
fresh boy’s eyes rested on Mrs. Bligh with frank approval.
‘Yes,’ she said, touching the sweet peas, ‘they were the right colour,
thank you.’
She smiled a little, happy, companionable smile at Wivvle, which she
repeated in turn for Pritchard and Ainley when they flew downstairs a
moment or two later. But it was Wivvle who had given her the sweet peas.
He had found time to think of them and be punctual for dinner; even
though his dressing had been interrupted.
Jim’s first meal at Warren Manor was one of the worst hours of his life.
Every instant of it was a fresh danger and a fresh pain.
The mere eating of it shocked and paralysed him. It was so complicated a
performance; and nobody ate as he was accustomed to eat.
Arthur had warned him never to be in a hurry, and to watch what other
people did. But it was very difficult to copy grace when you had only
clumsiness to do it with.
And it wasn’t only the eating. The talk flowed on all round him like a
foreign language; the words were sometimes familiar but the sense
perpetually escaped him. They all spoke so quickly and none of them ever
repeated what they said and they didn’t stick to anything.
If they began with a cricket match they were apt to end with
vegetarianism or politics, and it was impossible to grasp from the
clipped allusions what they really thought about any of these subjects.
What was vegetarianism, for instance? Mr. Bligh announced that he was
trying it and found it wonderfully clarifying; like cold water at dawn,
he explained.
Jim had fallen once into a canal at dawn, and he thought if
vegetarianism was really like that excessively startling plunge he would
most certainly—as soon as he found out what it was—avoid it. But by
the time he had summoned courage to ask, Mr. Bligh had pounced on to the
Prime Minister and was using language about him which was positively
shocking. Mrs. Bligh said gently—apparently of the Government at
large—‘Yes, those dreadful men——’ and wanted in the same breath to
know who had won at tennis.
This produced a perfect nightmare of untranslatable banter between the
boys, banter of a stiff, intellectual kind without oaths and with a
strange lack of point. Jim was used to sparring matches of wit and came
off extremely well in them—river repartee is a test of wit—but he
wouldn’t have liked to risk a specimen before Mrs. Bligh.
Every one laughed at almost nothing, and they laughed nearly all the
time.
Jim rarely laughed; he could see and perpetrate the best jokes
unsmilingly, and it made his cheeks ache to keep a responsive smile to
the inexplicable mirth around him.
Mrs. Bligh spoke to him twice. Once she said,—
‘Are you fond of gardening?’
(They all had a way of speaking as if you could be fond of anything you
liked, quite as if you had had the opportunity to find out.) Jim said he
liked a flower or two, and later on she asked if he could swim, and he
said, ‘A tidy bit.’ The rest of the time she left him alone, but there
was in her way of doing it a certain protective effect, as if she held a
light screen of friendliness between him and solitude.
Mr. Bligh talked without discrimination to the table at large. It was
true he fixed the name of each boy in turn on to a passing topic, but
there was nothing less casual or more personal in his speech than the
pause of a bird on a twig.
The meal, which was very pleasant and unhurried, lasted three-quarters
of an hour.
Wivvle was the only boy who spoke directly to Jim, and then it was only
to ask him to pass the salt, but he did it so charmingly that it seemed
to Jim—who spilled a little salt in passing it—to constitute a tie.
After dinner every one went out of the door as if there was a rule about
it—not the nearest person first, as would have been natural.
Mr. Bligh held Jim rather firmly by the shoulder, and in the end they
went out of the door together after all the others.
‘Now, my dear boy,’ Mr. Bligh said, ‘we’ll come into the study and have
a go at you. What I must get at now, you know, is what the French call
the bottom of your thoughts. You must learn French one of these
days—charming language—charming people—marvellous polish of manner.
We are rough barbarians as compared to the Latin races, and yet, you
know, there’s something about us—I hope you won’t think me insular—but
I rather think there is something about us—more genuinely polite? We
put ourselves out more—though, of course, we don’t express ourselves
nearly so well.
‘Now, if you’ll just come in here—— You smoke, don’t you? I always
encourage our boys to have cigarettes after meals. Why not? At seventeen
or eighteen you have your growth—and I have a theory that what people
do naturally and without suppression they do in moderation. Now we’ll
come to business.’
To Jim’s surprise they really did come to business. He had not supposed
that they would; he had expected instruction from his arrival on the
railway; but for five hours his expectation had been increasingly
baffled.
But it was not the will-o’-the-wisp it had seemed. Mr. Bligh was a
conscientious scholar and an excellent instructor. In half an hour he
had reached the depth of Jim’s ignorance and saw before him the extent
of his task.
Jim had had a first-rate elementary education and had made very fair
progress in a secondary one. He had added to this foundation by
indiscriminate reading and occasional hours of study with a finished
scholar. He knew some Latin and was well grounded in mathematics and
history.
What he knew he knew with the unflurried thoroughness of a mind which
has no chance thoughts, and no desire to evade facts. He could express
what he had learned simply and directly. He understood more grammar than
he had ever practised.
When he had finished his examination, Mr. Bligh leaned back
thoughtfully.
‘You’ll have a great opportunity,’ he said more gravely than he usually
spoke.
‘I hope you’ll have a great future. I have never seen a mind get its
chance as yours has done, with so little—so little intervention of
culture. You won’t object to my speaking plainly, will you?
‘I think we must have a little intervention of culture; I do really.
‘The best way is for it to filter down naturally, as I always say from
class to class.
‘We each have much to learn from the other. Now, honour, you know;
honour and absolute truthfulness, high-mindedness, the old code of the
perfect knight—that’s all good breeding, you know—but it can be
acquired—it’s what I should like to see open to any man as well as
knowledge.
‘I should recommend you to study Wivvle. The other boys have it
too—Pritchard belongs to an excellent family, and Ainley’s father had
culture as well as brains, but he doesn’t go very far back.
‘But Wivvle! There he is. You can rely on him—our best type—in a sense
without disparaging labour, you understand—of an Englishman. His word
is a rock; his mind is clean. You can see for yourself his manners—and
he’s a _nice_ boy—the sort you can trust through and through in every
relation of life.
‘I like to think all my boys are straight. I’ve kept a good tone here,
but I don’t talk much about it.
‘I give them eugenics to study and I leave ’em alone. Influence—that’s
everything, isn’t it? The influence—I don’t want to boast of it—but
the influence of a perfectly happy married life must carry a certain
weight, mustn’t it?
‘I sha’n’t say much to you either, Barton, but I know you’ve had a
different start from the rest of them—— There are just one or two
things I had better put before you. I’m perfectly modern, you know—open
minded—and nature, you know—I always allow for nature.’
Mr. Bligh looked vainly round the room. He made this statement in
perfectly good faith, but he never _had_ allowed for nature; it always
took him by surprise.
Then he put one or two things before Jim. The boy sat opposite to him
with his head down.
What Mr. Bligh proceeded to say struck Jim as increasingly childish.
Memories of the life of the streets and of the subterranean viciousness
of the penitentiary passed through his mind. It was all silly truck. Mr.
Bligh was right about Latin and French, but he didn’t know what he was
talking about now.
Wivvle and Emily—what kind of honour was that? What kind of
truthfulness? Perfect in every relation in life. Then he ought not to go
round giving sweet peas to ladies who believed in him.
Jim might be ignorant, but he knew enough to know that people like Mrs.
Bligh wouldn’t take sweet peas from boys who kissed their housemaids.
And all the rest of the stuff—morality—it wasn’t a thing off the line
of housemaids, but Mr. Bligh spoke as if it were. It didn’t do any good
to talk about it, unless, so to speak, the housemaid was there too; even
then it probably wouldn’t do any good to talk about it.
The point was, Jim was there for other things—these liabilities were
Jim’s business to put down; he knew he had them; he never ignored
liabilities; but if he didn’t put them down he was a fool. They weren’t
Mr. Bligh’s business.
He looked up suddenly at Mr. Bligh and cut across his carefully veiled
phrases.
‘All right, sir,’ he said with smouldering eyes, ‘you needn’t ter worry.
I’m not ’ere fer all that.’
It pulled Mr. Bligh up short He was a wise and tactful person in his
dealings with boys, and he wasn’t accustomed to being pulled up short;
but when his eyes met the fierce blue ones looking into his with so much
steadiness and with such a quiet mastery of the powers of life, his own
eyes shifted and fell before them.
Mr. Bligh did not know that he was a weak man trying to teach a strong
man things that he had never fully learned himself, but he did feel
curiously certain that he mustn’t say any more.
He suggested rather lamely that Jim should have another cigarette in the
garden before turning in; and then he wondered, in his ignorance of
life, if Jim wasn’t rather a dangerous boy to have in the house.
Jim walked out alone on to the darkening lawn.
It was a still night; a small crescent moon, misty as if it had been
dipped in milk, leaned over a group of slender silver-birches. The sky
was a pale blue shading into darkness.
Jim’s slow mind gripped his thought. Here he was in this strange scene
to learn out of education what would help him to live—to live, and to
beat down cages. He wanted, with a tightening of the heart, for all the
world to learn to live—for the weak to live more easily and the strong
more justly.
He did not want to stop at books; he wanted an honour that would
transcend codes and a truth that would be safe for the weak to trust to.
He did not know what powers were against him, but he knew what he held
in his heart. The cry of a nightingale broke upon the still night air,
high and shrill with a piercing sweetness.
Behind the carved magnolia buds he saw the flutter of a woman’s dress,
and then Mrs. Bligh’s face—it might have been, he thought, made out of
one of those firm, smooth flowers. She smiled at him with her finger on
her lips.
Again and again the shrill, cool sweetness of the bird’s song shook the
night. As they listened to it together, the intensity of his task
flashed upon Jim. The contrast between what this woman knew and what he
had still to learn drove the blood back from his heart. He felt, as he
had not felt before Mr. Bligh, curiously humbled and at her mercy.
She did not seem like a woman to him; she was an emanation of music and
moonlight. He never, then or afterward, saw her in any other way. She
had no age for him, and if she had sex it was as Eve, the mother of all
living, has it, with the deep sacredness of creation in her eyes.
The song ceased abruptly. Mrs. Bligh moved a little nearer to him.
‘You have been talking to my husband,’ she said gently. ‘I know you are
going to have a hard time. I wanted to tell you, if you will not think
me impertinent, that I feel quite sure you will do well, in spite of the
hardness. Sometimes I know——’ she paused a little as if she drew her
words out of some deep and difficult personal experience—‘sometimes I
know that to be believed in, helps a little.’
Jim looked at her. He had no words to give her the fullness of his
thanks. She took the unmasked adoration of his eyes without a change in
her mild serenity.
‘I wondered,’ she said, ‘if you would care to have an extra lesson with
me between six and seven every day? My husband thought perhaps you
might. A lesson in how to talk as we do. It’s not so very difficult——’
She gave a little apologetic laugh.
‘It’s just,’ she said, ‘a trick like any other, but it might make things
more comfortable for you while you are with us.’
But though Jim could express what he knew to Mr. Bligh in spite of being
tortured by how little it was, he could express nothing of what he felt
to her, though it enlarged his heart to feel it—nothing in words; his
eloquent, dumb eyes said more.
‘I don’ mind if I do,’ he muttered, and turned hastily away from her.
CHAPTER XIII
It was curiously unpleasant to Jim to sleep between cool linen sheets
with embroidered edges and to wake to a fresh panic on the subject of
Emily bitterly bringing him hot water at seven.
His night had been unrefreshed and full of dreams; it occurred to him at
about four o’clock in the morning that he had better give it all up and
creep out into the friendly morning, back to his barge before the
skipper had time to find another boy.
Was any goal worth such tortures of humiliation and uncertainty? Then a
spasm of rage shook him. Why should he be at the mercy of things that
happened—why couldn’t he, with all the strength that was in him, happen
to the things? What people think, matters only if you yield to them. To
run away from them was like giving in to being drowned.
He dressed slowly with a kind of cautious defiance and went down to
breakfast, but there was no breakfast, though it was already eight
o’clock. He broke into the vexed finishings of housemaids and hurried
out of a French window across the lawn.
The garden, at least, needed no preparation for the day. Nobody was
doing anything to it. A slight mist hung about the trees, and the lawn
was white as frost with early dew.
At half-past eight he heard the gate click, and looking up he saw Mrs.
Bligh coming into the garden from the road with a curious, rapt look in
her face, as if she had been reinforced from another world. She smiled
when she saw him; even before Jim knew where she had been he wondered at
the air she had, of fresh, spiritual intensity.
When he learned that she had been to church, he wondered still more what
she had found there.
Two little girls who had not appeared before came down to breakfast.
Their hair was very long and glossy—gold with a hint of red in it;
their skirts were very short and their legs very slim.
They had eyes of a serene blue which shone with all the weighty gravity
of a kitten’s. Dora had a charming tip-tilted nose and Mabel had a
charming straight one, and they both behaved formidably well.
They sat one on each side of their mother, and neither of them swung
their legs or lifted their voices; their small hands moved with deftness
and despatch; all their wants were unobtrusively supplied, and they had
the ease of children confident of their own behaviour. From time to time
they gravely studied the appearance of the new boy. They had been told
by nurse that in some strange way he was different from the other three.
He was a vulgar boy.
They suspected that the word vulgar meant something that went off with a
bang when you least expected it. Something that nobody nice ever was.
Denis, with the glaring want of judgment common to his sex had stated
that he liked ‘vulgar’ people. They were more fun. But then Denis liked
pigs being killed and neither of his sisters did.
They made up their minds not to like Jim before they saw him, and as
they equably ate their well-tapped boiled eggs, they decided with one
straight look of interchanging confidence that they would keep to this
decision.
Nobody, not even Jim, knew what he was going to do next with his knife.
They did not dream that they stood to Jim much as two angels off a
Christmas card miraculously turned in to life.
Eliza at their age had known a great deal more than Eve. Dora and Mabel
hardly had any individuality; they were like two small buds shaken by
the wind against a mother rose!
All three of her children were a part of Mrs. Bligh; they flowed toward
her and away from her like ripples borne on the smooth surface of a
stream. She controlled them without visible effort.
When her children were with her she was like a lamp lit from within; and
when they were withdrawn from her the light in her sank. It never wholly
left her, but it seemed withdrawn into a secret shrine.
None of her children had even seen her angry or in a hurry, or
preoccupied by her own concerns. She always spoke to them slowly, with
her whole attention fixed on them, and she never changed her mind or
broke her promises.
Nevertheless, if she became grave they trembled; her silent displeasure
haunted their whole consciousness—they could not rest until they had
obtained her forgiveness.
Mr. Bligh was merely an excitable outside element to his children—they
could shut him out as you shut out a shower of rain and wind.
He was not formidable, and often if you disobeyed him he forgot; and
when he said things were going to happen they didn’t. Their mother let
them come to her all day long, and at night they said their prayers to
her and she sat on their beds and sang to them, looking wonderfully like
a fairy queen.
They hoped she was not so old that she couldn’t live till they grew up.
She knew all about their fears at night, and crossed their foreheads
before she kissed them, and left them with a candle and with a wonderful
reinforcement of an invisible guardian angel to back it. Relentlessly
and tirelessly Mrs. Bligh gave her children all they needed; except the
power of doing without her.
They had hardly any initiative, and when Denis developed it he could see
by his mother’s eye that he was being naughty.
But to Jim’s dazzled mind there was no flaw in a system which presented
itself as all sympathy, happiness and affection. He had never seen
people making each other’s happiness before, as if happiness was a
pursuit. He supposed that you would have to be rather clean and well-off
to do it. His mother had never thought of such a thing; it was as much
as she could do to get them off to school in the morning.
Mr. Bligh was preoccupied at breakfast, and he barely threw Jim a word
of explanation before he bounded off to his study to start his socialist
lecture on the Holy Land.
Apparently there was no violent hurry about work. The library was
indicated to Jim by a wave of the hand, and it was there that he found
himself for the first time alone with the other three boys.
There was a perceptible pause as Jim came into the room. He hesitated
and looked about him, wondering where he could least conspicuously go.
Everything looked wonderfully handsome for a schoolroom, and as if you
had to be careful about ink.
None of the boys turned as he entered, but a perceptible stiffness
passed over them.
They did not set upon him as village dogs hurled themselves upon the
alien Cadger; they left him alone; but it was just as much a fight.
In haughty silence they took their seats at separate tables, and, as
those born out of due time, they set to work. Jim observed them each in
turn; then he addressed himself to Wivvle, who looked the least
inaccessible of the three, and asked him what he had better be at.
Wivvle, without turning his head, replied,—
‘Oh, can’t you find out for yourself?’
Wivvle was never able to resist being charming when there was no one
present to think the worse of him for it; but he couldn’t afford to be
charming now, under the condemnation of the other boys.
Their plan of ostracism had only come to them overnight, for they had
been open-minded on the subject of Jim as long as he wasn’t there.
Wivvle had been distinctly sympathetic, and Ainley had said the whole
thing, if well worked, might prove rather a lark; only Pritchard had
obstinately shaken his head from the first, and said, ‘Poor people ought
to be kept in their places’; but even he seemed to think you might be
nice to them if they stayed there. What had changed their attitude was
that Jim wasn’t ridiculous enough.
In spite of his accent, his grammar, and his incredible clumsiness, he
was not a joke. For one thing he was a great deal more grown up than
they were; if he hadn’t shaved, however badly, he would have had a
beard; and he was independent. Not with the well-bred independence that
knows its way about and can’t make social mistakes, but with that
rough-and-ready independence which can stand on its own feet in a
rough-and-ready world. Independence is never funny; it is not submissive
enough to be readily played with, and it is not at the mercy of other
people’s ideas.
They had recognised instantly, when they saw Jim, that it mattered less
what they thought of him than they had expected. With all their enormous
advantages they were not nearly so tough.
Instinctively it roused their antagonism to feel that they might not be
able to take the stuffing out of a barge-boy.
They were not in the least consciously cruel; they were all three a
little lazy, a little selfish, a little corrupt; but, on the whole, they
were quite normal boys of eighteen. They had the usual possibilities in
them of heroism and generosity, but they were unmade and spiritually
raw. What they were capable of was as uncertain as which way the cat
jumps; and the boy before them was already made.
Accidents could cripple or mutilate him, but they couldn’t deflect him
by a hair’s breadth from the iron mould into which destiny and his own
will had formed his character. For good or evil he would, in twenty
years’ time, be the same kind of person as the man who stood before them
now; and in twenty years’ time they would be what the path of least
resistance had made them.
Jim waited for a moment after receiving Wivvle’s rebuff. He looked at
each of them in turn. Wivvle flinched and fiddled with a fountain pen.
Pritchard, with unnatural concentration, turned over the leaves of a
Greek history. Ainley stuck a single eyeglass in his eye and
contemplated with an appearance of detachment a rose-spray tapping
against the window.
Pritchard disliked Jim as a class; Wivvle didn’t dislike him at all;
Ainley disliked him as an individual; and his position was therefore the
strongest. Jim’s eyes fell on him last with a kind of dumb, deliberate
meaning. This was the one who ought to have had more sense; but he
hadn’t.
It was odd that these admirably equipped boys should resent Jim. They
had all the things he hadn’t; they were well-bred, and as easy with life
as if it were an old shoe. Everything was open to them; most things were
obtainable.
They could afford to be ill and go away to the seaside afterward; they
lived like the lilies of the field, without resorting to any kind of
mechanical work to supply their glory, and yet Jim did not feel any
resentment against them. They were welcome to all their advantages. Of
course they knew a lot of things he didn’t, but he was going to learn,
and he wouldn’t take anything away from them by learning; he was only
going to see what was in his head.
He fixed his eyes on Ainley with that curious lack of diffidence which
they had already noticed.
‘Look a-here,’ he demanded brusquely, ‘what’s the matter wiv me anyway?’
It was the point at issue.
Wivvle jerked his pen so sharply that a drop of ink fell on his
immaculate shirt-cuff. Ainley’s eyeglass—he was only just learning how
to carry it—popped out of his eye like an over-ripe gooseberry.
Pritchard breathed heavily into his Grecian history.
Jim’s question was barbaric and unexpected; it struck at the root of the
matter, and no one likes being asked questions which strike at roots.
Ainley was the first to pull himself together. He reinserted his
eyeglass with care and spoke in a studied drawl.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you really want to know, you aren’t particularly
the kind of person with whom we are accustomed to associate.’
Wivvle gave a curious sigh of relief, as if his mind had found shelter
behind a screen of words.
‘Wot of it?’ asked Jim. ‘It ain’t my fault, is it? I’d just as lief know
you as not!’
Wivvle smiled, and then bit his lip and frowned.
‘That isn’t exactly my meaning,’ Ainley replied, preserving his air of
exaggerated courtesy. ‘It is very kind of you to say you have no
objection to making our acquaintance, but you see unfortunately the
objection lies on our side, and, I regret to say, I fear it is
insuperable. We don’t like having to associate with you.’
‘Oh, all right,’ said Jim casually; ‘there don’t seem much sense in it
as seemingly we’ve all got ter. But if that’s the way it is—I don’t
mind keeping myself to myself to oblige you. I did fink as ’ow Mr. Bligh
said we was all man to man like, but I reckon you none of yer ain’t men
yet—and happen he only meant himself and me.’
The outrageousness of this assertion dashed even Ainley, but it brought
Wivvle most astoundingly out upon the other side. He leaned forward
suddenly with his charming smile.
‘You’ve never been to a public school, have you?’ he asked Jim. ‘No—I
thought not. If you had been, you’d understand that a newcomer has to
learn to stand on his own feet. You mustn’t think we’re your natural
enemies—but on the other hand we aren’t particularly naturally your
friends. If I were you, I’d go slow and look about me.
‘I think you asked me about your work just now, and I’m afraid I
answered you a little shortly. We all work on our own lines here, but
Mr. Bligh said last night that you’d find books in the drawer on your
right. You’d better have a look at them, perhaps.’
Afterward Wivvle explained that he couldn’t do anything else. He was
awfully sorry to have upset their plan and gone back on Ainley, but Jim
had made him feel such a damned snob he couldn’t stand it.
Pritchard accepted this explanation; he had a great respect for Wivvle,
not only because his father was a baronet and his first cousin an earl,
but because everything about him—including his tennis rackets and his
ties—was so perfectly all right.
Of course a man in his position couldn’t afford for an instant to feel
like a snob. Even Ainley, though he was naturally more annoyed, bore
Wivvle no grudge. Curiously enough, it was Jim who most resented
Wivvle’s sudden change of front.
‘’E didn’t oughter ’ave done that,’ he said to himself. ‘’E oughter ’ave
stuck by the uvvers.’
But Jim was not aware that a man like Wivvle can die, or betray, or even
kill, rather than appear at a social disadvantage.
CHAPTER XIV
It was one of Jim’s greatest puzzles—accustomed as he was to outbursts
of tyranny, or the sharp expression of tortured nerves, forced from
human beings by the pressure of work and the absence of privacy—to see
the way in which people at Warren Manor kept their tempers.
He missed the skipper’s expletives; and he was conscious of his own
streak of bad temper, like something moving about wild and dissatisfied
inside him. He was like a hard-shelled crab in the society of soft ones.
To be rough-tongued at Warren Manor was considered bad manners, and when
Jim spoke his mind he was not holding his own as he had always supposed,
but he was rudely shaking the social ease which hung about them all like
sunshine.
Jim was not very sensitive himself—it was not easy to hurt him; but
when he was hurt, he was hurt deeply. These people, on the contrary,
seemed extremely sensitive. He often saw by their pained glances that he
had struck one of the hidden rocks of their submerged dislikes, though
they weren’t hurt very much; if they had been hurt very much their
dislikes would have remained submerged. As to their religion—and Jim at
once set himself to discover it—there seemed nothing which they were
more determined to hide. Only Mr. Bligh professed his with perpetual
outspokenness, and Jim decided after a month’s study that Mr. Bligh’s
religion was an imaginary affair. He was an ardent socialist, but he had
never altered any of his habits for his creed. Mr. Bligh had his meals,
his servants, his luxuries, precisely as if no passion for general
sharing had ever shaken his soul. Mrs. Bligh went to church every
morning at eight o’clock and three times on Sundays, but she never
mentioned anything about it. She kept her secret source of life as
private as if it had been a disgrace.
Of course all three of the boys belonged to the Church of England—or
would have said so if you had asked them. They went to church when they
had to. But that was not their real creed.
Ainley’s religion was success. Every nerve of his being responded to
that stimulus only. He was so ambitious that he never spoke of it. All
day long his mind was preoccupied with the great shipping interests of
his father, into which he hoped to pass. Huge schemes of business
adventure kept him awake at night. He studied with a conscientious
fervour, over which he spread a kind of indolent banter; but the banter
was his only indolence. Ainley’s God was power, and there is no harder
master.
Pritchard worshipped form. To be exactly like a certain small and select
herd of people, who never thought too much, felt too deeply, or made any
flagrant social mistakes, absorbed his entire vision. He had the type of
nature which exults in following a flock of sheep through a gap in a
hedge; he would have preferred a path with a lion in it to straying over
an open space.
Jim had seen the same type of mind in men of his own class, men who
followed their unions without even attempting to understand their
leaders’ reasons. Of all powerful human instincts probably that of the
herd is hardest to break. The centre of the herd instinct is panic
acting upon stupidity. Only those who are content to stand alone can
preserve the race courage and mercy for the race.
But Pritchard differed from the type of working men Jim knew, because he
was less independent. If you are near enough to reality to be a prey to
accident, you can not always resemble other people, because accidents
prevent uniformity. Pritchard was padded from reality.
It would have pierced him to the heart to wear the wrong kind of tie,
but nothing else was at all likely to pierce him.
Wivvle’s religion was the most frank; he wasn’t in the least afraid of
being pagan, and he would have granted immediately that, on the whole,
what he most believed in was doing what he liked.
Wivvle was a more bewildering character to Jim’s awakening mind than
either of the other two boys, and he was a great deal more attractive.
Neither Pritchard nor Ainley changed their attitude toward Jim.
Pritchard always disliked him as a class, and Ainley resented him as a
person. But Wivvle was intermittently friendly.
He couldn’t be Jim’s champion because it was too much bother, but he
couldn’t be a brute because being a brute was almost more of a bother
than being a champion.
Wivvle noticed Jim only when there was no one else to notice; but when
he was aware of him he gave him a flattering amount of his confidence.
He behaved as if Jim were his intimate friend, and spoke to him with a
slangy nonchalance which took no account of any difference between them,
unless indeed the differences were superiorities on the part of Jim.
Wivvle acknowledged Jim’s superiorities very handsomely, and profited by
them. Jim could work, and Wivvle wouldn’t. He really wanted to get into
the army, if it wasn’t too much of a grind, and by helping to make
awkward problems easy for him Jim became a slight convenience to Wivvle.
It is difficult to say what Wivvle became to Jim, because Jim had no
standard of comparison. He did not know what a friend of his own age was
like. Boys in the penitentiary had confederates, not friends, and those
Jim had met on the river he had usually fought, either with his fists or
his tongue or both. Wivvle smiled at him, chaffed him—and let him run
his errands.
If the opportunity had occurred Jim would have died for Wivvle, but he
didn’t altogether respect him.
Wivvle was not what Jim wanted to be like. He had no firmness in him,
and he took what he wanted and never paid for it. He was so much
accustomed to the untaxed gifts of the gods—his good looks and his
general fascination, his independence of means and the ease of his
social position—that it never occurred to him to take any trouble for
his friends.
He broke engagements whenever it suited him, and he took for granted a
continual series of services which he would never have dreamed of
reciprocating.
Nobody ever asked Wivvle to post their letters, buy their stamps, or
exercise their bull terriers; but every one took it as a matter of
course that these little services should be performed for Wivvle. He
could appear late for meals and be as untidy as a wind in a wood, but
housemaids only smiled, and housekeepers raised tolerant eyebrows.
Jim’s clear eyes, unobscured by his deepening affection, saw that
Wivvle’s carelessness was selfishness, and that half his charm was due
to his inability to face anything uncomfortable. To save the _amour
propre_ of his friends, he would risk their security. But Jim preserved
a belief in Wivvle’s curious honour.
Somewhere or other, he was certain, his friend _was_ a hero. You
couldn’t, Jim reflected, be a hero all round, but you could be one in a
flash, when the pinch came. Jim felt sure that some day he should see
the gleam of a sword drawn out of its scabbard, and Wivvle earning for
himself an imperishable glory.
Wivvle did not give Jim all his confidence, but he liked talking about
his difficulties to Jim; it seemed, in a way, to solve them, and he had
a great many difficulties. His people were extraordinarily stupid about
his allowance, and then there were Jews and mysterious men on the turf,
born solely to irritate and confuse Wivvle because he didn’t like
accounts, and naturally had to bet on horses. His worst bother was what
would happen if he didn’t pass for Sandhurst.
‘My people will mind,’ Wivvle would say, wrinkling his charming chestnut
eyebrows and looking for a moment like a butterfly at bay; but
butterflies seldom remained at bay. Wivvle’s casual wings let him
through in a moment into wider air. It was Jim who remembered
permanently that Wivvle’s people would mind.
It did not occur to Jim to tell Wivvle of his own difficulties, even if
there had ever been time for them in their haphazard moments of
confidence between the importances of games; but there never was any
time.
Jim’s difficulties were very much his own affair, and didn’t concern
other people.
He had to live through black and heavy hours when the work of the day
was over and the next day lay before him colourless and blind—heavy
with the unaccomplished. At these moments every little baffling disaster
of the day, his awkward speech his small social blunders, rose up and
tortured him.
He would not have felt them so unbearable but for the loneliness. On the
barge he had always had Cadger and the river. The skipper was not a
talker, but he smoked, spat and grunted in a companionable way—it was
not like sitting on the edge of a chair by your window and hearing other
people laughing in the garden.
Jim generally stayed on the edge of his chair, because if he went out
the laughter stopped.
Mr. and Mrs. Bligh sometimes made him come, and that was worse—what he
wanted was to be with the other boys, and for everybody to go on talking
just the same.
One evening, when Jim knew the Blighs were dining out, the longing for
companionship became too strong for him. The boys were just below him in
the dark; they were strolling about on the lawn, lighting cigarettes and
letting them go out again in the interest of their holiday experiences.
Jim had had no summer holidays; he had gripped his task unrelentingly.
But it struck him now that to hear about their experiences would be a
kind of a holiday.
After all, Wivvle was Jim’s friend; he wouldn’t let the other fellows
shut him out completely. Perhaps they would be nice to him—it was quite
a long time since he had dropped any of his _h’s_.
Jim flung aside his books and ran downstairs to join them.
Wivvle was telling the other two that he knew ‘a delicious little dream’
who danced at the Gaiety, ‘a most ripping little kid with her hair down
her back, but there wasn’t much she wasn’t on to.’ He offered to
introduce Ainley and Pritchard to this delectable vision but his
invitation stopped at Jim. You couldn’t very well ask a ‘delicious
little dream’ to meet a boy off a barge.
Jim was brought up short by the hedge of their evasive manners. He
wanted to ask them to go on talking about the ‘delicious little dream’
but he couldn’t find words for it.
Wivvle didn’t stop talking, but he switched the subject off on to an
obvious makeshift. The interest of all of them died down into pauses.
Jim felt a wave of rage pass over him.
He did not want to slip back into games and chaff; he wanted to talk, as
they had been talking before he came, about their real pursuits. He
wanted particularly to know what these other men thought about women. He
did not realise that it was precisely on this subject that none of the
three would ever communicate their thoughts to him. You could talk only
to your own sort about what concerned you most.
Jim felt his physical strength stand out in him like the exaggerated
muscles of one of Canova’s athletes. His body responded to the sharp
rebellion of his mind; a savage instinct rose in him to use his physical
power against them.
If they wouldn’t allow him ordinary companionship why shouldn’t he show
them who was after all the better man?
Jim had made no study of scientific fighting, and all the other three
were proficient in it, but he counted on his strength.
It was Ainley’s single eyeglass which most infuriated Jim; but he held
his fury back, and looked at Wivvle. If he could have a word or a glance
from his friend half his anger would drop, for half his anger was
jealousy.
But Wivvle withheld his conciliatory power. Jim was out of place, and
Wivvle never helped people to get into places when they were out of
them.
Jim took a few steps with the others in sullen silence. Then Ainley said
in his careless, impertinent drawl,—
‘I say, you two fellows, would you like a cigarette in my room? We can
talk in peace there.’
And Pritchard said quickly,—
‘I was just thinking it would be rather jolly.’
Wivvle did not say anything, but he turned his step toward the house
with the others.
The blood rushed to Jim’s head. He was as conscious of his anger as if
it were some animal behind bars trying to get out. He spoke thickly and
in jerks.
‘By God,’ he said, turning to face them. ‘I’ve had enough of this! I’ve
had enough of this!’
‘It’s curious,’ said Ainley in a light, bantering voice, ‘how fond
people of the lower classes are of repetition; especially as one fails
to see anything at all profound in their remarks.’
Pritchard giggled weakly.
Jim struck at Ainley automatically, as if his mind had abandoned
volition.
‘Hullo, you two chaps!’ Pritchard cried, aghast, and then seemed to melt
away into the darkness.
Wivvle said quietly,—
‘Let them fight it out—why not?’
Ainley returned Jim’s blow with interest; his eyeglass was off, and he
set his mind on the fight with cool intensity.
The man in front of him was simply a savage, and Ainley trusted
implicitly in his superior science.
Perhaps he trusted too much in his expertness; or perhaps that strange,
blind rage of Jim’s could have broken through any expert’s guards; but
from the first Ainley stood no chance, except of defence. He warded off
Jim’s first attempt to close with him, but Jim came on again like a bull
in a series of blind, formidable, frontal attacks, disregarding any
check.
Jim was conscious that Ainley saved himself repeatedly, and that his
light strokes got home, here and there; but his blows might have been
the taps of a child for all Jim noticed them.
He felt no sensation at all beyond his rage. He was lost in his anger,
as men are lost in love, or when fear has pierced them to the core. In
these wild, breathless minutes one of his terrible blows got home.
Ainley reeled backward, caught feebly at the air as if it were something
he could hold on to, and crumpled up in a heap on the lawn.
For a moment nothing stirred; then Pritchard screamed,—
‘By God—you brute—you’ve killed him!’
Pritchard had come back again with a contorted face like a doll’s, and
stood shakily in a patch of moonlight. Nobody took any notice of him.
Wivvle knelt down over Ainley’s body and felt for his heart.
Jim stood still; he heard Pritchard say, ‘Murderer,’ and saw him walk
rapidly out of the patch of moonlight toward the house.
It had suddenly occurred to Pritchard that this was the usual thing to
do.
The word ‘murderer’ came to Jim as if it had travelled from a long way
off, and rang on in his mind like the reverberation of a bell.
‘Murderer’—surely he had heard it before—the whole thing had happened
before—or was it still happening?—and was the rest of life blotted
out, and nothing left but a figure lying in front of him with the soul
knocked out of it by his hand?
The moon rose slowly behind the trees; the patch on the lawn widened
till the whole garden was flooded with pale clear light. Jim was not hot
any more; he felt curiously relieved physically, as if a weight had been
taken off him. But he wasn’t quite sure what he had done. He tried to
speak, but his throat was dry, and he found he could not swallow.
Ainley, that lover of power, looked a very frail and little thing lying
there quite still on the grass. Jim found himself feeling very sorry for
him, because Ainley had mattered, and now he didn’t matter any more.
Wivvle looked up at Jim reassuringly.
‘It’s all right, old man,’ he said; ‘I can feel his heart now. You only
knocked the wind clean out of him. But by Jove! You went at it like a
madman. You’d kill a fellow as like as not with that style of fighting.’
Jim began to shake with relief. He had not known he was anxious before,
but relief was terrible. He wanted to shout out loud and cry like a
child.
‘Gawd!’ he muttered, falling back in his old habits of speech. ‘I
thought I’d done ’im in! Like my father—I knocked the life out of
’im—as you might out of a cat! And I didn’t mean for to do it. It’s so
damned easy to ’it too ’ard!’
Wivvle glanced up again horrified.
‘My dear old chap, you’re out of your head!’ he said quickly. ‘Killed
your father?’
Jim looked gloomily down at him.
‘Yus,’ he said. ‘You can give me away if yer like. Parson said as ’ow I
wasn’t ter say nuffin about it. I served three years for it—but that
don’t seem ter make no difference. Like as not I’d have swung for this!’
Wivvle straightened himself up.
‘Hold your tongue about it anyway, now,’ he said under his breath. ‘I’ve
told you before—you don’t give people away. Ainley’s coming round. You
all right, old man?’
Ainley smiled feebly.
Mrs. Bligh spoke close to them; very quietly, as if someone had only
dropped a thimble.
‘I am so sorry,’ she said gently, ‘to hear that there has been an
accident. Is he badly hurt? No? Then help him in, will you? Drink this
brandy first, Mr. Ainley. I will stay out here and talk to you, Mr.
Barton. He must lie on the sofa till I come in, and then I will see if
it is necessary to send for the doctor.’
‘I had no idea you were in,’ Wivvle said remorsefully. ‘What an ass
Pritchard was to bother you!’
‘No one is going to be bothered,’ said Mrs. Bligh, putting her firm,
small hand under Ainley’s elbow.
Ainley rose painfully to his feet; he looked as if he might collapse
again at any moment; but he was a plucky fellow, and, refusing any help
but Wivvle’s, staggered back into the house.
Jim hardly dared to look at Mrs. Bligh. What would she say to him now
they were alone?
She hated violence, and he had done what she hated.
For a time she said nothing. She was dressed for her dinner party in a
filmy gray dress—everything about her was soft and gleamed.
She moved to a seat and motioned to Jim to sit down beside her.
‘I think you had better tell me how it happened,’ she said at last.
She showed neither anger nor disgust; but there was an arrest of
friendliness in her voice as if she had suspended feeling until after
she had judged.
Jim gave her the bare facts; he told her what he had said, and what
Ainley had said. He did not say what he had felt.
‘Then I hit him,’ he finished shamefacedly. ‘It seemed as if I had to
hit him.’
Mrs. Bligh’s silence robbed his action of all significance He saw now
that he hadn’t proved anything by hitting Ainley, except that he
couldn’t control his own temper.
‘You haven’t told me why you did it?’ she said after a pause. ‘I think
there is something more, something in your mind—isn’t there?—which
made you feel upset Perhaps you were lonely?’
Jim hesitated. Should he tell her about his hours of darkness; would she
understand the cramping temptations of his lonely youth? He could not
see her eyes, and her voice still withheld its personal kindliness.
But some barrier had broken down in Jim. He knew he could tell her
everything now. It was that moment in a man’s life when he has for one
woman the stored-up completed confidence of all his years. He moved a
little so that the pale light rested on his tortured face.
‘It’s a pull,’ he said at last slowly, ‘being alone, and with people
different like. Seems as if they didn’t know what was inside you—nor
you what was inside them.
‘I want to keep clear of things—old things that catch a hold on me
sometimes; but I don’t know how—I’m afraid I’ll get caught out one of
these days. To-night I thought if I could talk like the other fellows,
I’d forget—it would ease me up inside like; and when I saw they were
all against me I got sort of wild. You see, I want to keep
straight—it’s—it’s one of the things I’d like——’
He looked at her wistfully—would she understand what he meant? That he
was on his knees to her, in his heart—and that all the reverence he had
never had, came to him for her sake, and gave him strength to resist
temptation. Only not even this was enough—not quite enough against the
awful driving force of desire. But if she understood, perhaps it would
be enough.
To his surprise she made a quick movement to stop him, as if her silvery
dress were too near something that might soil it. She was afraid of his
sins. Mrs. Bligh had that habit of self-preservation which is fatal to
all real confidence. She knew that she could not go on liking people if
they were not quite nice.
‘No! No!’ she said hurriedly. ‘You need not tell me! I understand! It is
better not to speak of one’s temptations. They are very terrible. I wish
I could help you—but there is strength, strength enough and to spare,
only we have not got it in ourselves. God can perform miracles if we
give Him the chance.’
Mrs. Bligh was eager to put Jim’s troubles on to God; it would save her
from any personal contact with them.
Jim listened, but he felt discouraged. He had already tried God.
‘I am not a clever woman,’ Mrs. Bligh went on, ‘and I have no arguments
to give you—I know you are fond of arguments, Jim; perhaps too fond.
Faith is very simple.
‘I will tell you a little about my own if it will help you?’
Jim nodded; he was still surprised that she had checked his confidence,
but he was not at all hurt. He was convinced that she was too beautiful
not to do right.
‘I find all my strength in prayer,’ Mrs. Bligh murmured. ‘I pray always
before I speak. I feel the Presence, the Divine Presence, on the altar
of my church. I take from it every day my courage and my will to live,
and every day it is new, because what is Eternal is always new.’
‘But you’re happy,’ Jim faltered, ‘and you’re good. I think God made you
good. You can’t have any temptations.’
Mrs. Bligh did not answer. She liked Jim to think her perfect.
The moonlight shone hard on the lawn and whitened all the grass. There
was a curious sense of suspension in the air, as if some secret stood
close behind the pallid light in the shelter of the dark.
‘Now, I wanted to kill Ainley just now,’ Jim continued. ‘I was hot like
to get to the end of him. It was luck I didn’t.’
Mrs. Bligh gave a curious little sigh as if she too understood the
pressure of hate.
‘You are so strong,’ she said, when Jim paused, ‘and strength can be so
terrible if it is used against God, and so beautiful if it is used for
Him. Put away all that idea of anger and killing—and even loneliness,
because we are never unbefriended—use your strength for life.’
‘I’d like to do that,’ said Jim humbly; ‘that’s what I’m getting
educated for—but I don’t know how. I got a cruel temper.’
‘The church will teach you all you need to know,’ Mrs. Bligh said
quickly; ‘let the vicar prepare you for confirmation. Confirmation means
strengthening. Remember the church is very old and wise. She knows what
is good for us. What does it matter if our finite minds rebel sometimes
against her laws? It is your heart that guides your actions, not your
mind—and laws are for the heart.’
Jim was in the mood for an immediate sacrifice. He would gladly have cut
off his hand and entered the kingdom of Heaven maimed, but he was not
prepared for this wholesale abdication of the intellect.
‘But you got to see things clear,’ he objected.
‘Not always,’ said Mrs. Bligh decisively, rising to her feet to end the
interview.
It was Jim’s initiation into the sacramental system. He bowed his head
and agreed to give up seeing things clear.
CHAPTER XV
It was a most awkward business. Ainley had a hemorrhage in the night,
and for a week or two it seemed more than likely that Jim’s blow had set
up the old mischief in his lungs.
The house divided itself equally for and against Jim. The quarrel had
been most carefully hushed up, but, of course, everybody knew all about
it.
Emily was certain that she was the direct cause. She had heard her name
mentioned in the laurel bushes, besides, she had reason to know that she
might be the cause of many quarrels.
The cook—all the servants were against Jim—thought it merely a
cold-blooded design to murder the entire household, and that her turn
would come next.
Nurse said it was all ‘them low papers of Mr. Bligh’s, enough to turn a
cat’s stomach, lying about in the hall, all against the aristocracy and
the clergy and what not.’
Pritchard refused to speak to Jim, even when directly addressed; he
walked about on tiptoe scowling, and expected, without quite wishing,
Ainley to die.
The rest of the household went out of its way to be nice to Jim. Ainley
sent a message by Wivvle to say that he would have done just the same in
Jim’s place, and that there was nothing for anybody to be in a wax
about.
It was a sporting message, but it did not make Jim feel any more
comfortable; even Wivvle’s, ‘My dear chap, _of course_ you had to fight
him,’ lacked the ring of finality.
Jim did not feel as if he had any such comfortable compulsion behind
him. There was no sense in half killing a man because he didn’t like
you; and that was after all what he had done. He had acted in a passion,
and the results of passion are irrelevant. They weighed on Jim’s mind
with the intolerable weight of outraged common sense. When Wivvle tried
to comfort him by saying that, of course, he had to defend his honour,
Jim said he didn’t know what his honour was, and Wivvle whistled and
walked out of the room.
Mr. Bligh was appalled; he felt like the possessor of a very nice plain
bottle out of which by accident he had evoked a destructive genie. His
sympathies would have been entirely with Jim if Ainley hadn’t been badly
hurt, and entirely with Ainley if Jim hadn’t been the one to hurt him.
Jim had not only struck a person, he had struck a theory; and it is a
very grave thing to knock down the favourite theory of any fanatic.
Mr. Bligh, in the mood of an unrelenting if benevolent judge, sent for
him to his study, but when he was confronted by Jim’s solid and silent
figure he felt like a small trapped animal, and moved uneasily about the
room fingering the corners of his book-shelves.
‘I don’t see how, it all came about,’ he murmured fretfully. ‘I must get
to the bottom of it, Barton; I really must. We are speaking man to man,
you know, and all that, but there are certain principles in a household
like this which mustn’t be set at defiance.
‘Violence, now! I don’t believe in violence. Don’t you remember my
mentioning that the first time I saw you? I’ve always said the French
Revolution went a little too far—poor Marie Antoinette, now. Carlyle
spoke very nicely of her—bluntly, of course, he didn’t like extravagant
women—but she was a woman, even if she was a queen.
‘I’m all against monarchy, especially in Europe, when it can’t keep in
its place. But the guillotine was too final; it was, really.
‘Now, tearing down the Hyde Park railing; it looks childish, but I see a
certain persuasiveness in it, and you can put up railings again. But a
man’s life, you know, Barton; that can’t be put together again! It’s
destructiveness without elements of reconstruction; and Ainley is a
delicate fellow, you know—he’s had lung trouble——’
‘I didn’t know it,’ said Jim sullenly. ‘They told me afterwards—they
might have told me before—but they never told me anything—not that
lot. They never spoke to me if they could help it. How was I to know
he’d been ill—he looks twice the man that Pritchard is?’
‘Dear me! Dear me!’ said Mr. Bligh, distractedly running his hand
through his red hair till it rose up like an inverted halo. ‘I never
dreamed of all this moral isolation—most unhealthy and subversive in my
own house, too—I thought we all seemed so happy and comfortable
together, quite a little family party; and we live quite simply, you
know—we’ve never had a man-servant, only the gardener, and he sleeps in
his own cottage in the village.
‘It should have been brought to my notice sooner, you know. I could have
stimulated companionship. Talked about mountain-climbing, for instance,
after dinner—a little friendly repartee, once started!
‘You see, everything going on at such a pace behind my back is so
bewildering, and this house has been noted for never having had an
acrimonious dispute—“soft words and hard arguments”—somebody or other
said that—Sydney Webb, perhaps—except that now, I come to think of it,
he is more weighty than epigrammatic—perhaps it was Rosetti—no, no,
his favourite phrase was “fundamental brainwork,”—remember that Jim. It
seems to have been lacking somewhere, doesn’t it? And then you know,
Barton, the essence of being a gentleman is consideration for others,
isn’t it?’
‘I shouldn’t have thought so from being here,’ said Jim grimly. ‘I
should have thought if it had an essence, it was making people different
from yourself feel as uncomfortable as possible.’
‘Quite the contrary! Quite the contrary!’ said Mr. Bligh, coming up
short against a medical dictionary which he had got out of the shelf
with some difficulty and found even harder to replace. ‘And yet, of
course, in a sense I see what you mean. We must allow for youth, you
know, Barton—the arrogance of youth—mustn’t we?
‘I daresay Ainley and Pritchard hadn’t quite got to the root of the
matter. Wivvle, now, Wivvle appreciated the position perfectly—but the
other two are more naturally reactionary. They would have come round in
time, though, I think, by a process of reasoning.
‘But violence, you see, Barton, doesn’t conciliate—it doesn’t really.
Take the militant suffragettes, burning down golf-clubs; it can’t
advance their cause, you know. I’m all for votes for women, of course,
all labour men are; I see the childishness and selfishness of the
arguments against them; but golf-clubs, you know, all the sacred feeling
there is about a golf-club—well—it’s embittering—I play golf myself,
but they don’t discriminate.
‘I daresay Pritchard feels a little embittered with you, and it’s that
which gives him such a gloomy expression; or else he eats too much meat.
I’ve put vegetarianism before him several times, but he doesn’t seem to
take to it. But Ainley now; I understand he’s behaved splendidly about
it all, poor chap—doesn’t blame you in any way.’
‘I don’t care whether he does or not,’ said Jim harshly. ‘It isn’t what
anybody thinks that I care about. It wasn’t sense what I did, and I’ve
laid him out for nothing. It’s that that goes against the grain with
me.’
‘Ah! You’ve grasped that point,’ Mr. Bligh exclaimed with relief. ‘I
thought I could persuade you to it. Force, now, it reacts on itself. In
the end force destroys force. It may destroy a person capable of reason,
but it can’t destroy reason, and it shouldn’t be used as any kind of
substitute for the intellect; it shouldn’t, indeed.
‘Do I take it I can tell Ainley you apologise? Of course, it’s only a
matter of form, but I understand you sent no answer to his message.’
‘What answer was I to send?’ asked Jim doubtfully. ‘No! I can’t say I do
apologise. I’m sorry—you can tell him that if you like—that I’ve hurt
him more than if he was the same as us, but he deserved to be hit all
right. It isn’t him I’m sorry for, about that, it’s myself. I ought to
have had more sense.’
‘Of course I’m glad I’ve convinced you of that,’ Mr. Bligh hastened to
assure Jim, who had reached his own conclusion quite without any such
assistance. ‘But there mustn’t be any grudges in the house. My wife is
very anxious there shouldn’t be any grudges.
‘She tells me something about your wishing to be confirmed, too. Doesn’t
that strike you as rather reactionary and extreme? Of course I quite
understand you feel remorse. Your mind misgives you and looks about for
a prop. All religions are a system of props. But remorse shouldn’t go
too far. Better look the other way and start afresh.’
‘It’s not remorse I’m after,’ Jim explained with unrelenting firmness,
‘nor yet looking the other way; but if I can’t get on without religion I
suppose I’ve got to have it, and I may as well try the church kind as
any other.’
‘There’s something in what you say, of course,’ said Mr. Bligh, edging
rapidly toward the door. Religion is a universal instinct; I’ve never
denied that; it’s what’s kept the church going so long, you
know—utilised by an opportunist priesthood, but it hasn’t moved, you
know, not moved to speak of since the middle ages. Still, perhaps it may
help you. After all, individuals evolve as slowly as nations, and this
outbreak of yours, you know, now I come to think of it, though quite
opposed to the feudal spirit, may have something late renaissance about
it—mayn’t it?
‘At any rate, my dear boy, if you feel you need the church, take it. I
shan’t interfere with your opinions; but take it gently—don’t let it
carry you too far. I’ll tell Ainley you’re sorry. No! No! You needn’t
explain again—I understand perfectly what you feel—and there’s Huxley
now! On the shelf to the right, I think—or is it Robert Owen, or Karl
Marx! No! Huxley—I should strongly recommend you to dip into Huxley;
there’s something so bracing and antimedieval about him.
‘We’ve got to the bottom of it all now, haven’t we—and no grudges? I
think I’ll just go and speak to Pritchard a moment about his gloom—it
may have been those three sausages he ate for breakfast, followed up by
ham. But, on the other hand, perhaps it’s something I ought to probe. Of
course I’m very much against anything at all like the inquisition, you
know—but the policy of “_laissez faire_”—I mustn’t drop too far into
that, must I?’
Mr. Bligh left Jim with unmistakable relief. Jim never seemed to swallow
what was being said to him easily, and his answers were often
unexpected; but Pritchard was never unexpected; his answers were made in
words of one syllable, and everything you said slipped off him like
water off a duck’s back.
CHAPTER XVI
Jim didn’t take to Huxley. He went instead to the little church across
the fields, half a mile away. It was a still, dim day of misty sunshine.
The heaviness of the autumn air had something peaceful and grave in it,
as if by its own weight it could hold back the storms of life.
The leaves hung brittle and quiet on the trees. Death rested like a
dream upon the empty harvest fields.
A wild, glad feeling rose in Jim’s heart which he could not understand
nor tame. He had never been so conscious of his youth before; it
thrilled up in him with all the ecstasy and force of unfettered
instinct.
His mind was at war with his senses. He kept telling himself that he had
sinned, that the result of his sin was suffering, and that another human
being was lying threatened and enfeebled by his act; yet he knew that
the air tasted like apples and that an unmistakable gladness lurked
behind his fostered anxiety.
There were no ends in sight—he could do anything—feel anything—meet
any one—the future was as hidden and as rare as the far misty hills.
Youth is an awkward and baffling period—but it has moments of
compensation when it transcends experience, and Jim had one of these
moments now. He felt only his strength and saw none of the obstacles
against which strength is broken.
The church was always open. Jim pushed back the wired door and felt the
welcoming hush of the ancient sanctuary.
It had been badly restored, and love had filled it with tawdry and
piteous things, but beauty lived in the solid old arches and rested on
the worn and crooked stones. The church had stood for centuries and held
the spirit of many prayers.
People had gone there in pain and with undreamed-of secrets; they had
gone there filled with new joy and the innocence of thanksgiving; it
seemed to Jim as if the spirit of humanity lingered there still—a
little baffled and a little estranged by the placid obstinacy of
invisible things.
The shadows of the dwindling day darkened over the altar. There were
seven cheap lamps stretched across the church, one of which was always
kept burning.
Mrs. Bligh had put white chrysanthemums and late lilies in the altar
vases. She had a gift for arranging flowers; it seemed to Jim as if she
had made a prayer out of each lifted blossom.
She was not there, but the church was full of her presence. Jim saw in
his mind’s eye her small, erect figure with its lifted head and air of
listening stillness.
He, too, listened, and in the silence he found prayer.
The sense of the Invisible pressed down upon him. A Presence on the
cared-for altar, evoked and ministered to, responded to Jim’s needs. He
felt as if he had never prayed before; he let his heart rush to his lips
in burning words. All that he had never said to any one, and could never
say, took him by storm and made its way to God.
His hurricane angers; the weight on him of his senses; the perpetual
torment of the differences between himself and others; his large desires
and petty failings; his pity and his love for mankind; poured out of his
heart without let or hindrance.
Time ceased; and the slow shadows crept from the altar to the door.
Jim was in a holy place, where even a man’s sins are safe, if he knows
that they are sins. He felt a stubborn strength in his heart rise up to
meet them.
He did not hate Ainley any more; he hated still, but it was his own
violence that he hated. He wanted to force his wild, spilled strength
under a safe control.
Jim remembered how Arthur had once said to him,—
‘The place I am sending you to is a very stiff proposition. It’ll be a
fight from start to finish, but there isn’t time now to prepare you
first. You’ll have to fight your way through.’
Jim had glanced with justifiable pride at his iron fists, and reassured
himself with the memory of his river conquests.
But Arthur had said quickly,—
‘The fight I mean will be not to use them!’
Jim hadn’t learned it yet. The humility of all strong natures shook him.
He did not remember all his laborious weeks of self-control; he saw only
the awfulness of his one failure.
A speck of dust in the niche of the stone column in front of him caught
his eye. He thought his life had been like that—as purposeless and as
fragmentary.
The unexpungeable years of his prison life weighed on him; and when he
escaped from these he could not taste the joy of liberty because of
Eliza.
However he tried to climb out of his past, he had Eliza fixed on his
back as firmly as any Old Man of the Sea. He might keep out of prison
himself; but part of him would go back to prison if Eliza went.
Crime was on his hands and in his sister’s heart. He was stamped and
sealed against the law. He never could feel free as Wivvle and the other
boys were free.
Shame lowered his heavy head. Not even Mrs. Bligh could bear to face his
sins. They came upon him remorselessly, ugly, and heavy out of the misty
past, and they were in him now, for nothing breaks the continuity of
sin. They were in him, but something else was in him as well—something
or some one who was on his side. He had been checked, a hand had
interfered between him and murder; a voice, even now in the silence
about him, was working upon his anxious heart. God, who hated sin, loved
sinners; had made them; put up with them, and saved them.
Religion wasn’t only what you thought about God—it was what God thought
about you.
You had a lot of it inside, but it came from outside as well—it was in
the laughter of the sunshine as well as running in Jim’s blood. It was
in the winds and the woods; little children had it, and the mothers of
little children—all lovers knew it, and the hour of death was hushed by
its presence.
You did not have to do everything yourself, but you had to do a great
deal.
If you were going to be forgiven you had to forgive; if you were going
to win you had to fight; you even had to fight fighting. You had to love
loving. You were forced, if you wanted to be saved, to try to save.
It wasn’t enough for God to have your soul. He couldn’t even begin to
have it unless it was out after somebody else’s. If you didn’t want to
be like Eliza you must help Eliza. So many things came back to Eliza. If
Jim never saw her again—and he didn’t see how he was going to—she was
still a perpetual challenge to his faith.
Jim was so humble that he felt himself dust; but he was so alive that he
knew God was in him.
Dust and God—it was what it all came down to. He could be what he liked
most. He knew what instincts were and the drag of them on bewildered
senses, and he had seen where instincts lead. He knew what beauty was,
but he didn’t know where it might lead him; he knew only that he wanted
to follow wherever it led; wanted it with a thirst sharper than the
thirst of all his eager passions.
He bowed his young, fierce head still lower. He had no words, but in his
dumb desire to escape sin and use himself for God, he might have voiced
the infrequent cry of Job,—
‘Though he slay me, yet will I put my trust in God.’
It is the extremist challenge of the Christian, and it is never left
unanswered.
The sun sank and a mist came up across the fields; it hung about the
little church until the seven lamps and the one red light became
beautiful and consolatory as the stars.
Jim still knelt, absorbed and unconscious, with a fixed heart. He had
found a ladder between his soul and God.
CHAPTER XVII
In the course of the weeks that followed, Ainley took a swift turn for
the better, but not before Jim had prepared and made his first
confession. It had taken him some time to grasp why he should make his
confession to God before a priest, and it rather took Mrs. Bligh’s
breath away when he explained what finally decided him to agree to it.
‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ he said, ‘and I see it’s the same as
playing cards for money, or what they call for love—if you don’t play
for money you get careless like, and I daresay it’s the same confessing.
Of course God listens to you, but He doesn’t bring you up short like
another man.’
Jim made his preparation with an unswerving thoroughness; he spent hours
over self-examination; the pain of all his sins drew slow, hot tears
from his eyes—the mercy and the love of God hurt him like a physical
torment. When he read ‘Our God is a consuming fire’ he knew what it
meant.
He lay awake all the night before he made his confession. He wanted to
be sure he had left nothing unthought of; no corner in his stained heart
unready for forgiveness.
Mrs. Bligh saw him for a moment in the garden before he went to the
church. Her eyes lingered on him, full of a quickened sympathy. She had
all the cold but earnest tenderness of the missionary spirit for its
first convert. Jim felt as if the relationship between them moved
suddenly nearer.
Mrs. Bligh did not speak to him; she lifted a late white rose toward
him, but she did not touch his hand. The rose was frail and had no
scent, and as she gave it to him he felt as if she had given him a
symbol of her own purity.
The vicar was waiting for him in the vestry. The vicar felt a little
uncomfortable. Mrs. Bligh had warned him that Jim was sure to be
awkward, and from the first moment Jim was awkward. He looked at the
vicar; a steady, measuring look, as if he expected something from him;
then plunged clumsily forward where he was told to kneel before the
crucifix, and nearly upset the small desk on which it stood.
The vicar gave him the few introductory words and started him gently, as
he had started many stammering and flurried people—for none of the
penitents achieved the straightforward impersonality of the Catholic,
which the vicar had always so greatly desired.
But once he had begun, Jim was unexpectedly straightforward. He
transferred his awkwardness to the vicar.
It was a surprising confession to listen to. Jim gave a perfectly
truthful account of the average young man’s heart; and average young
men’s hearts are seldom communicated truthfully to their vicars.
Jim didn’t always know what was wicked and what was not, but he wanted
to make sure, and he never gave himself the benefit of any doubt.
Of course most young men didn’t murder their fathers, but that was an
accident. Jim made no bones about it; nor that he had wished to murder
Ainley, and very nearly succeeded.
All his sins, potential and actual, had got to come out; the priest’s
eyes, as far as Jim was concerned, weren’t any worse than God’s.
Unfortunately they were a great deal worse. God has made sinners and has
presumably to put up with them. The Rev. Anthony Brown had done nothing
of the kind, and he had never had, in any serious sense, to put up with
sinners, when made.
He was torn between the knowledge that what he was being told was under
the seal of confession, so that he couldn’t warn anybody, and the fear
that a person so tempted as Jim might become dangerous if he went about
in an unwarned world.
He was troubled, too, as to whether he ought to give so practised a
sinner absolution. Jim had no doubt about the matter.
‘I’m sorry all right,’ he pointed out to the vicar, who expressed his
doubt upon the subject. ‘What more do you want? I’ve come here for it,
haven’t I?’
To Jim’s mind the whole thing was perfectly simple. If you were sorry
and confessed, you were forgiven. The Bible and the prayer-book both
plainly said so, and would have been silly if they hadn’t.
He didn’t see why the vicar should shilly-shally; but the vicar had
shilly-shallied all his life and didn’t see why he shouldn’t. Still, in
the end he gave in, and absolved Jim.
He was rather upset about it afterward. At the time he was frankly
afraid of what Jim might do if he didn’t. But he never admitted to
himself that he had been afraid; he told himself that he was struck with
the force of Jim’s penitence.
Jim received his absolution, but he didn’t get very much advice.
The vicar told him to flee from his sins, and suggested his learning
several penitential psalms off by heart—but fleeing from his sins was
precisely what Jim had done in coming to the vestry; and if the
penitential psalms weren’t more efficacious than the vicar, Jim felt
that he must have come to the wrong place. The vicar hesitated, and then
said that he was afraid Jim’s confirmation must be postponed.
‘I must be sure,’ he added warily, ‘of your consistent penitence.’
Jim thought that was quite natural. He wanted to be sure of it himself;
but he never had been as inconsistent as most people liked.
He came to the conclusion that he wouldn’t go to confession to a priest
again, but that he would ask Wivvle to teach him boxing.
He found it helped him to keep his temper nearly as well as his prayers.
Mrs. Bligh gave him extra confirmation lessons on Sundays, but though he
loved the sound of her voice, he sometimes found it difficult to believe
all that she told him.
The superiority of even a sacramental system stuck in his throat.
‘The way I look at it,’ he explained to her, ‘is that if we were all
made by God everything is His, and every religion—that people mean—is
His too. I daresay you like sacraments better, and find Him in them
easier than anywhere else, but He must be wherever faith has called
Him.’
This was a Protestant theory, and Mrs. Bligh said so; but even that
didn’t put Jim off it.
‘I must,’ he said, ‘take truth where I find it. I can’t believe what I’m
told unless I see the sense of it, can I?’
Mrs. Bligh explained patiently that this was exactly what he must do; he
was too ignorant to find it for himself.
‘Truth,’ she said, ‘is not what you and I think—or think we think. It
is infinite and divine; only those who study the divine and have the
special sacramental grace given them for that purpose, can judge what is
true or not.’
Jim looked at her curiously. Suddenly his heavy mouth took its ironic
twist.
‘They might feed you up with a lot of lies, that way, mightn’t they?’ he
questioned. ‘And, anyway, parts of truth aren’t divine. Some of it’s
right down nasty—what are you going to do about that?’
Mrs. Bligh did not propose to do anything about it; she never had; but
she smoothed the question over with her usual skill.
On the whole Jim’s conversion went off very well. Jim accepted a great
deal that he was told and agreed that, if he didn’t see it all now, he
might in time. The proof of it was the life of the woman who taught him.
He believed what made her so beautiful; he did not know that it was her
beauty which made him believe it.
The confirmation service was a disappointment to Jim. He had used up his
emotional force beforehand; the bishop was old, a trifle overworked, and
a good deal bored.
He had given his confirmation address a great many times before; and he
liked large congregations and rows of listening candidates. In the small
church before him only twenty had been enlisted from five reluctant
villages; and, though of course the bishop wouldn’t have said so, he
privately wondered if it was worth the petrol he had used in motoring
there. He looked grave and felt cross. Unfortunately he wasn’t really
very fond of young people, though he said that he was.
Jim listened to him for a few moments with a concentration as powerful
as collected electricity—then he turned his attention completely off
him.
Mrs. Bligh had told him that it was the office which mattered; but he
couldn’t help wondering if even the office mattered very much.
He felt happier about his first communion. It was Christmas morning, and
Mrs. Bligh went out alone with him into a shimmering darkness of
new-fallen snow. The trees bent low with wreaths of fantastic
loveliness; as far as the eye could see, a mantle of soft and endless
purity was pressed down over the world. A late star lingered in the gray
sky.
The church was full of light and holly; the music of the Christmas hymns
rang out victorious and certain. It sounded as if there really had been
some one who saved the world.
Jim remembered, with a shock of joy, that for all these months of
preparation and prayer his physical thirsts had never troubled him. They
had been transferred into some other portion of his being; they were
still there, but it was for his soul he thirsted, and for all the souls
of men.
As he knelt with his head buried in his hands, the visible world melted
away from him—he was conscious of an immense gift about to descend upon
him, an unseen presence, white as the outer world, shaking away all that
was earthly and could be shaken, and leaving in him only invisible
forces built for eternity.
There was a faint movement beside him; he knew that the great moment had
come. Mrs. Bligh rose to her feet, and he followed her.
His shoes creaked; he knew who the people were who stood in the aisle.
The waiting seemed interminable, and filled with uncomfortable clutching
thoughts. He wished he needn’t have got up from his knees and the dark.
Then he found he was kneeling beside her again; there was the altar in
front of them, white and red with flowers.
He made an enormous effort to blot out the little intrusive, conscious
world; the hurried, whispered bleat of the vicar’s voice; the sense of
the actual silver cup lifted and given into his hands.
He would not think of anything at all, but let the presence of God reach
him as it would.
He was sorry for his sins and he wanted God: that would be enough.
He thought the presence had reached him; but he was never sure.
It was just as difficult getting back into his seat afterward; in fact,
it was more difficult because he forgot about the footstool.
When they came out into the air again, the snow had already begun to
melt, and most of it had run to puddles.
CHAPTER XVIII
Warren Manor was not a house in which accidents often happened.
When the village children had measles all the little Blighs escaped it;
they did not fall out of trees; nor get into moral and physical
difficulties over summer fruit. Their sins were slight and infrequent,
and as far as possible confined to the involuntary lapses of human
nature.
The servants, too, lived a surface life of perfect smoothness and
propriety. Their manners were quiet and their aprons whiter than snow.
Mrs. Bligh gave them good wages and excellent food, and knew all about
their families. She was faultlessly kind and considerate to them; and
none of them had ever laughed, cried, or sneezed in her presence.
She didn’t know anything about their lovers; no young men were allowed
to visit them, and Mrs. Bligh never mentioned the subject—after this
point had once been made plain—any more than she would have mentioned
the tails of monkeys.
There was a certain amount of trouble in the household caused by Mr.
Bligh’s ardent temperament; but Mrs. Bligh managed to keep most of it to
herself, and as Mr. Bligh had a tender heart, and always told her
everything, she succeeded in steering him through the results of his
blunders without disaster.
She had married him for love, and called him in her youth the Don
Quixote of her dreams; but she was very careful to remove all the
windmills in his vicinity.
After ten years of happy married life Mr. Bligh’s ideals had become
reduced to picturesque theories. Perhaps his temperament would have
given his wife less trouble if she had allowed him a larger margin for
his enthusiasms, but, on the whole, she was more afraid of his
enthusiasms than of his temperament. Enthusiasms often reduced incomes;
whereas temperaments, when kept in play, will not reduce anything.
The boys were a responsibility, but they had never been a bother. They
were well-mannered and well-bred; and no being on earth can conceal more
than a well-mannered, well-bred English public schoolboy.
Sometimes you find out what he doesn’t know, but you can not find out
what he does. Nor did Mrs. Bligh wish to find out. She agreed with her
husband that the boys should be put on their honour and left alone. She
gave them all the moral influence she could spare from her family; as
she was not an emotional woman, this did them practically no harm. But
no policy of men nor of angels can keep human nature permanently secure,
and when an accident at length produced itself at Warren Manor, it
crashed through the polished surface of the house like an explosive
shell.
The cook was the first witness of the accident; her manner betrayed
extreme uneasiness over the morning’s orders, and she suggested making
beef-olives out of the remains of the mutton. Finally, she confessed
that she was ‘that upset’ she hardly knew where she was. Mrs. Bligh’s
eyes recalled her quickly to her exact position on the pale blue carpet
of the morning-room.
‘I think you had better tell me what is the matter?’ Mrs. Bligh
suggested coldly; for she did not like things that mattered, early in
the morning.
The cook took a hurried breath, and said she supposed it would all have
to come out sooner or later, but it gave her a turn to think of it.
She was a kind-hearted woman, and she urged her mistress to remember
that, of course, sometimes these things were to be looked upon as
accidents. Mrs. Bligh asked her what things? The cook said girls and
boys were that awkward when you came to think of it—and her mother had
once said that, after all, it was the marring of some and the making of
others. Emily had always seemed all right, and the cook had never
noticed anything to speak of—till this morning—when, as she was frying
the bacon and Emily came in with the tray, it had struck her all of a
heap.
Mrs. Bligh asked what had struck her; but it was a rhetorical question;
she knew by now what had struck the cook.
The cook turned the colour of boiled beetroot, and said perhaps the
mistress had better see Emily for herself.
‘I asked her right out who it was,’ the cook explained getting more and
more flustered under Mrs. Bligh’s cool and steady eyes. ‘And she did say
that young Barton—’is name come to the tip of ’er tongue, as it
were—though she never had a civil word for, or about him, before. I
will say that for her——’
‘Thank you, cook,’ said Mrs. Bligh incisively. ‘You need not tell me
anything more. Please send Emily to me.’
The cook hurried down the passage trembling and muttering. She told
Emily, to comfort her, that if she were in her place, she would a sight
rather meet an alligator than the mistress.
But this alternative did not present itself to Emily.
She went into the morning-room as a criminal goes to execution; and she
received what she went for.
Emily was, for the first time in her life, disturbed and inattentive.
Her face was distorted with tears, and her apron crumpled. She twisted
her hands in and out of its folds as if it could relieve the situation,
which she could not twist or wind herself out of.
Mrs. Bligh looked at her once and then looked away again. It was almost
more terrible when she looked away. It was so final.
There are some people who rush to help sinners because they see they are
in trouble; in their impulsive ardour they get into the trouble
themselves, but sometimes they help the sinner out of it. Perhaps they
are aware of a fellow-feeling. Mrs. Bligh was not one of this officious
and clumsy fellowship. She never touched pitch; so that she ran no risk
of getting defiled.
She sat there, a contented, married woman with three children, awful in
her purity; no iceberg could have looked colder, or more remote from the
experiences of the girl before her.
‘This is all _very, very_ distressing,’ Mrs. Bligh began after a pause.
It was very distressing for Emily, but not quite so distressing for Mrs.
Bligh. Besides, her uppermost feeling was disgust, not distress; and
Emily could feel that Mrs. Bligh’s real feeling was disgust.
She sobbed and threw her apron over her head.
‘Such a thing has never happened in my house before,’ Mrs. Bligh
continued, with the unconscious egotism of personal immunity, ‘and it
is, of course, a very great disgrace and sin on your part, Emily.
Indeed, I simply can not understand how it could have occurred.’
Emily choked with sobs. She might have told Mrs. Bligh that things occur
very easily when they are not understood, and she could have added that
even Mr. Bligh had kissed her once behind the scullery door.
But she didn’t dare; and besides, in that case nothing further had
happened. Mr. Bligh had only given her five shillings the next day and
looked rather silly.
‘I can not help blaming you,’ said Mrs. Bligh, ‘most women of your age
should have learned how to keep their self-respect and the respect of
others.’
Emily sobbed harder; then she saw a loophole for justification and took
it.
‘It’s very hard on me,’ she wailed, ‘having had any one like a young
gentleman—that wasn’t one—in the house, and going to early services
and all.’
It was a shrewd thrust; Emily, looking round the corner of her apron,
saw that it had taken effect. Mrs. Bligh winced as if she had trodden on
a slug.
‘If it is any comfort to you to know it,’ she observed after a moment’s
pause, ‘you will not be the only one to suffer. Of course you will leave
the house immediately, but so will the—the partner of your sin.’
It was a great comfort to Emily. Victorious spite is extremely pleasant,
and the memory of it lasts after other memories have faded. As a
momentary sensation it practically equals that joy in heaven over the
one sinner that repenteth.
Emily had her moment’s victory; but it should be forgiven her, for she
had a very bad time afterward.
‘Of course,’ Mrs. Bligh said, with frosty charity, ‘I shall not turn you
adrift. Will your parents consent to receive you?’
Emily couldn’t, and perhaps wouldn’t, go home to her parents. She
thought hurriedly for a moment, while she sobbed convulsively, and then
declared that they would turn her out of doors on the spot. She had
always been one to hold her head so high, and she had younger sisters.
The thought of going home drove her to the door of hysteria, but not
through it. Mrs. Bligh’s manner restrained her. Nobody had ever had
hysterics in her presence, and nobody ever would.
‘I think,’ Mrs. Bligh said decisively, ‘that, in that case, you had
better go to the Sisters of St. Mary’s Penitentiary. I will arrange for
cook to take you there this afternoon. You can remain there until the
birth of your child, and for a month afterward. If you do well, they
will try to find you a situation and take care of your child for you
if——’ Mrs. Bligh paused for a moment—‘it should be so unfortunate as
to live,’ she finished tranquilly.
Mrs. Bligh thought of her own two babies who had died, and it did not
make her tender toward the other woman’s child.
‘I think that is all,’ she added, rising to close the interview.
She looked at Emily again now, and said with formidable gentleness,—
‘I shall pray for you, Emily.’
Emily waited for a moment; perhaps she was expecting something more. She
knew that Mrs. Bligh was a very good woman, and she respected her, all
the more for being despised by her, but she thought that perhaps when
Mrs. Bligh had got over despising her she would help her.
However, it wasn’t any use Emily’s waiting. Mrs. Bligh thought that her
prayers would be quite enough, and she never got over despising Emily.
CHAPTER XIX
Emily met Wivvle as she crept sobbing across the hall. He would have
passed her with his head held stiffly away, but she clutched his arm
like a frightened animal. He stopped rigidly; every nerve in his being
resented this contact with Emily. All that ought to have kept him from
her in the first instance drove him from her now, when it was too late
to save her, and only not too late to save himself.
‘Let me go,’ he said in a low, fierce whisper. ‘Don’t you realise this
place is public?’
But Emily was beyond the consideration of outward things. She lifted her
sodden, tear-stained face to his as if the pain in it would touch him
when she could no longer attract him. This is perhaps the greatest
mistake that any woman can make.
‘I must speak to you,’ she whispered. ‘It’s all out. I’ve been with
her—oh, I didn’t know it was going to be like this!’
Wivvle had not known it either. The panic of the unimaginative,
overtaken by reality, seized them both; but Wivvle was the more
afraid—he was only afraid for himself.
‘It’s all right about you,’ she whispered eagerly; ‘I’ve laid it on to
that barge-boy—Jim Barton—it won’t matter about him.’
‘Good God! Why did you do that?’ Wivvle asked angrily. ‘Things are bad
enough already without your tangling me up in a tissue of lies!’
Emily gazed at him incredulously.
‘But,’ she said, ‘I thought it was what you wanted. You said last night
if it had only been him, with no family—— Of course I should never
have looked at him! I fair hate the sound of his voice! But I said it to
save you!’
‘Oh, hell!’ said Wivvle with uneasy exasperation—as if Emily could
possibly save him—as if she could do anything now, but bore him! ‘Never
mind—let go of my arm—here’s old Bligh coming along.’
Emily dropped his arm and scuttled behind the green baize door which led
to the servants’ quarters. She felt a strange sense of relief when she
was on the other side of the door. A week or two earlier she had felt as
if she didn’t belong there; she wanted to belong there now.
Mr. Bligh had not seen his wife, but he was aware that there was
uneasiness in the household. It set his nerves on edge and he spoke a
trifle sharply to Wivvle.
‘You ought to be at your work,’ he said. ‘What do you want with Emily at
this hour of the morning?’
Wivvle, who from the moment of Mr. Bligh’s approach had become
imperturbable and quiet as velvet, replied that he merely wanted to ask
her about his washing.
Mr. Bligh’s annoyance cleared instantly. He patted Wivvle on the
shoulder, and murmuring, ‘Perfect confidence of
course—breeding—reliable——’ turned off into his study.
Wivvle heard his words and flushed with genuine compunction. For a
moment he nearly did what he expected of himself. He nearly followed Mr.
Bligh into his study and told him the whole truth. He did not know that
if he did not do it then he would never do it; or that his conscience
would be unable twice to give him the same sharp lead. He was so little
used to sharpness; he felt sure he would find an easier opportunity of
speaking to Mr. Bligh a little later on.
When he had seen Pritchard and Ainley, for instance. It wouldn’t be
quite fair, after he had taken them both so completely into his
confidence, to act without asking their advice.
He was so sure of his own sense of fair play that he could easily
transfer it from what was essential to what was optional, and yet feel
convinced that when the moment of pressure came the _beau geste_ would
be given him.
He did not realise that, when a man has acted ignobly, a _beau geste_,
even if it occurs to him, does not remove the consequences of his act.
To his relief he found his confidants alone.
‘Look here, you fellows,’ he said impressively, ‘a most appalling thing
has happened. It’s out about Emily, and she’s told Mrs. Bligh it’s
Barton.’
Pritchard gave a long, low whistle. It was the whistle of a defeated
intellect. But Ainley was made of sterner stuff. He fixed his monocle
into his eye and laid his finger on the way of escape.
‘But why not?’ he asked composedly. ‘Why shouldn’t it be Jim Barton? It
won’t hurt him to speak of—he’s nearly finished his time here—he has
no people—and nobody knows him. Nothing could be more natural. Quite a
stroke on Emily’s part. And it lets you out, beautifully.’
‘Only you overlook one thing,’ said Wivvle, and try as he might he could
not keep the note of interrogation out of his voice. ‘Of course I can’t
do it—it would be a cad’s game.’
‘Not a bit of it,’ broke in Pritchard hurriedly. ‘I’m sure Ainley’s
right. It isn’t as if it had been one of us. You’ve been most
frightfully decent to the chap. If he has an atom of good feeling in him
he’ll be glad to help you. It isn’t mean if you _ask_ him—I grant you
it would be if you did it without asking.’
‘You can pay him for it, as far as that goes,’ urged Ainley. ‘He’s as
poor as a dog.’
‘Oh, that——’ said Wivvle handsomely.
He was beginning to feel handsome again; after all he might be able to
get out of it without feeling a cad.
He wouldn’t have accepted Ainley’s advice alone—Ainley had rather too
sharp a business code for Wivvle to follow—but Pritchard was all right.
Pritchard did not believe in a man’s acting to his own advantage except
when the temptation was overwhelming.
There was only one joint in Pritchard’s armour which Wivvle overlooked.
He would be unable to feel anything right which did not save Wivvle at
the expense of Barton.
‘Of course I would see that he didn’t suffer in any way,’ Wivvle said,
still looking defensively at his two advisers. ‘I might start him in
something later on. If I see he really doesn’t mind, you know. Only it
does seem rather a low-down thing to suggest.’
Ainley said,—
‘What about Emily? As she’s done it already you’d be rather putting her
in a hole if you deny it, won’t you? Quite a sport that girl, I must
say.’
‘That’s true,’ said Wivvle with relief.
Of course he wouldn’t put Emily into a hole—at least, not into a little
hole.
The man-of-the-world tone used by Ainley was a curious relief to Wivvle.
The sick distaste he felt for Emily—and even a little for himself—left
him. After all, such things happen every day. He had behaved generously
to Emily, and she would be perfectly all right, of course. She was a
handsome, superior girl—when she had not been crying—perhaps Jim would
like to marry her. It was rather a big concession for Wivvle to make;
but he felt that it was a moment for big concessions.
The whole question might resolve itself into a good thing for Jim.
Wivvle decided he would get his father to make Jim an under-bailiff in
Scotland. He could always go to Norway instead for salmon fishing. It
had hurt him too abominably to see himself as a gainer by Jim’s
generosity, but after all he needn’t look at it like that. Jim could be
the gainer, and Wivvle could still be generous.
‘Of course the whole thing depends on how he takes it,’ he observed in a
relieved voice. ‘I daresay I could make it rather a chance for him in
some way, if he’s for it. But I shan’t urge him in any way. I wonder if
his religion won’t rather stick in his throat?’
‘Not a bit of it,’ said Ainley; ‘that’s where you score. What about
bearing one another’s burdens! If he jibs at all, sling that at him.’
Wivvle winced. His idea was that Jim wasn’t exactly to bear a burden; he
was merely to receive a reward for removing an inconvenience. Emily by
now was nothing but inconvenience. The burden once off Wivvle’s
shoulders had grown miraculously small.
‘Well,’ he said nonchalantly, ‘I suppose I shall have to take the advice
you fellows have given me. You’ve been awfully decent about it—and I’ll
go and have it out now with old Barton. But I must say women are no end
of a nuisance.’
The other two looked at him admiringly, and his spirits rose under their
homage. They obviously thought the better of him for his complications.
Besides, they weren’t simply sick of Emily.
Jim laid his book aside the moment Wivvle came into the room.
He had noticed the traces of tears on Emily’s face the day before, and
his eyes, more accustomed to the changes of life, had guessed the reason
of her tears.
Wivvle had never spoken to him about Emily, but Jim saw now that he
meant to speak about her.
Wivvle moved a little uncertainly about the room. He had it on his
tongue’s tip, as he came upstairs, to begin the conversation by
saying,—
‘I’ve had rather a good idea about you, Barton, if you feel like falling
in with it.’
But as he met Jim’s eyes, friendly but searching, with that curious
directness of gaze which had first attracted him, he found himself
hurriedly saying instead,—
‘Look here, I’ve got into the deuce of a mess!’
Jim pointed to a chair opposite the table and drew out his pipe.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s hear what it is. I’ve been in the deuce of a
mess myself before now, and got out again.’
Wivvle sat down a trifle awkwardly for him and played with a cigarette
without lighting it.
‘Women are a dashed nuisance,’ he began fretfully. ‘I really ought to
have kept clear of them till I’d passed for Sandhurst. But what’s a man
to do when they won’t let you alone?’
The eyes opposite him hardened. Jim had not much sympathy for that plea
which has been the inspiration of all uncomfortable men since the garden
of Eden.
He made a quick descent from the agreeable abstract to the disagreeable
concrete.
‘Do you mean you’ve got Emily into trouble?’ he asked.
The question offended Wivvle deeply. He hesitated, and found himself on
the verge of a direct denial. It was only the remembrance that he had
got to play straight now to save himself in the end which prevented him
from a fresh evasion.
He put aside the tactlessness of Jim, and told his story as plainly as
he could.
He went on with more confidence when he had once started because he saw
that he wasn’t shocking Jim.
Jim thought the whole matter quite an everyday affair evidently, and he
was curiously free from reproach.
‘I thought somebody had turned the girl’s head the moment I saw her,’
was his only comment; but if he was not prepared to condemn Wivvle he
didn’t seem prepared to admire him either.
Apparently Jim did not think the turning of Emily’s head a very clever
thing to have done. Wivvle had to point out that, though he felt a cad
for doing it, after all he was barely nineteen and Emily twenty-four.
Jim agreed that she ought to have known better.
‘Still, she’ll have to pay for it,’ he added reflectively, and he didn’t
seem inclined to add anything else.
Wivvle resented this aspect of the subject and explained defensively
that he had been to a lawyer; and, while owing to the lawyer’s advice he
had denied his paternity, he had made a very handsome arrangement for
Emily—twenty pounds down and five shillings a week until the child was
sixteen. The lawyer said it was a most generous arrangement, and that
she was a lucky girl. But Jim still did not seem to be dazzled by
Emily’s good fortune. He merely remarked,—
‘It’ll take all of that to get her under way again. But I daresay when
it’s all over she’ll be able to earn enough to keep herself and the
child going.’
‘You see, I haven’t a very large allowance,’ Wivvle said a little
reproachfully.
‘She hasn’t got anything at all, and she’s lost her job,’ Jim reminded
him. ‘But you’ll have thought of that, of course.’
As a matter of fact, Wivvle hadn’t thought of it.
The whole thing was quite unexpectedly awkward, and twenty pounds down
and five shillings a week sounded princely for any one in Emily’s
position. He became suddenly dignified and vague.
‘Ah, I shall look after her, of course,’ he said, getting up and gazing
out of the window.
He had every intention of never seeing Emily again. In fact it was part
of the agreement that he had drawn up with the lawyer. The money was
contingent on there being no molestation on Emily’s part. Emily had
cried when she was told what ‘no molestation’ meant, but she had signed
the agreement.
‘It’ll be funny,’ said Jim unexpectedly, ‘having a child. I should like
it if it was me. I’ve always had a hankering for a kid of my own.’
Wivvle winced. He was shocked at Jim’s point of view.
Sins are seldom shocking to the conventional mind, but a plain statement
of their results can be extremely shocking.
Wivvle had felt that, once he had paid the twenty pounds, it would cease
to be his child. Evidently Jim lacked all sense of good breeding, and it
was peculiarly difficult to go on with so delicate a matter any further.
For a moment Wivvle almost wondered whether it wouldn’t be better—he
meant easier—to drop the whole thing.
But after all he couldn’t drop it. The only way to drop the subject was
to go on until he had got rid of it.
There was a bewildering absence of any agreeable alternative to this
particular situation.
Wivvle came back to the table and faced Jim’s steady quiet eyes with
their baffling candour.
‘Look here, old chap,’ he said desperately, ‘you don’t know what I’m up
against! This business fairly knocks me out. The Blighs will turn me
adrift to-morrow—oh, he wouldn’t—but she will—she’s as hard as iron
and ice. Oh, the dearest little woman in the world as long as you mind
your P’s and Q’s, I grant you; but, by Jove, she’s flint as far as
things of this kind are concerned. She’s the kind of woman to marry
really, once you’ve had your fling.
‘But it’ll do me out of my chance for the army, and that’d be bad
enough. Being a soldier is the only thing I ever wanted. I can’t see
myself doing anything else.
‘But that’s not the worst. What I mind most is my people.
‘This’ll break my mother’s heart. I’ve got to let her know because my
father always tells her everything—and she believes in me—she hasn’t
any sense about it—she believes I’ll come up to any scratch—and I hope
I would, of course, about most of ’em—but she’s particularly keen about
women—I don’t know why. But I know she thinks I’m as safe as houses.’
Jim wondered, if this were so, why it had failed to be remembered at the
only time when it could have been of any practical use. But he felt very
sorry for Wivvle. He knew from his own experience that there are things
which need all the grit a man has got to resist.
Now would be the moment his friendship had waited for and believed
in—he would see the flash of the sword of Wivvle’s honour. He still
believed Wivvle had got honour.
‘That’s bad,’ he said kindly. ‘I don’t know what it would be like, but I
can guess. You see, my mother’s dead.’
‘Yes,’ said Wivvle eagerly, ‘that’s just what I thought—if you were in
my place, if you _could_ be—you’d have nobody to mind. You leave here
in a month or so, anyhow, don’t you? And nobody really knows you. It
wouldn’t queer your pitch, I mean? You aren’t going to live here, and
anyhow it’ll all be hushed up—trust the Blighs for that. Nobody’ll know
anything outside the house. Mrs. Bligh’ll square the lot of them
somehow.
‘What I thought was, if you didn’t mind just taking my place. You see,
Emily lost her head this morning when she was accused of being in
trouble. She named you to shield me. Of course, it was an awful thing
for her to do. I told her at once I should deny it.’
Wivvle waited for a moment for the tribute of Jim’s thanks, but he got
no thanks. Jim took his pipe out of his mouth and said,—
‘She must have thought a lot of you to do that.’
Wivvle dismissed Emily’s affection with a wave of his hand. It seemed to
him irrelevant now that he no longer wanted it.
‘My idea was to go at once to old Bligh and deny it,’ he said firmly;
then his eyes wavered.
Jim’s, fixed steadily on him, probed to the root instinct of his
selfishness. Wivvle had not given his idea much of a chance.
‘Of course, I will in any case,’ Wivvle finished lamely, ‘if you decide
you’d rather not help me out?’
He didn’t offer Jim the under-bailiff ship. It was another of those
moments when it seemed better to wait for an easier opportunity.
Jim did not speak for quite a long time. He was so angry that he looked
down at the tablecloth to hide his emotion.
Wivvle did not dream of the fury that possessed Jim, because Wivvle did
not realise what he was asking. The whole predicament had become for him
a vague discomfort easily shifted. He did not see it as a monstrous debt
which he was asking Jim to pay.
Jim thought about Eliza and what he would have felt if Eliza had been
Emily and had to support a child without a name. He thought of himself,
too, and what would be thought of him for getting a respectable girl
into trouble and leaving her to it. He thought of his new-found
religion, and the comments on it that would instantly follow his
exposure.
Anger clutched him by the throat and shook him. From the bottom of his
soul he felt wronged, and he felt that Emily was wronged. He did well to
be angry. But still he did not speak. Something in Wivvle’s sudden
silence held him back. Wivvle had been so busy talking when he came
in—so fluent and so glibly self-preservative—that Jim had been
unconscious of the fear behind his words, and his essential ignorance.
Wivvle’s thoughts about himself had hidden his actions from Jim. He
simply wasn’t a hero after all. He looked like a hero—even now—with
his clear eyes and troubled brows; his curls thrown back and his fine
head erect. He looked every inch a hero. Unfortunately inches don’t make
heroes; perhaps it is not very just to expect them to.
Jim began to ask himself if it was fair to ask too much from Wivvle? The
sense of Wivvle’s weakness did not feed Jim’s anger. It softened it.
Wivvle was not one of those honest sinners who get into the rough and
tumble of their sins and fight for what they want; he let his
inclination force him into a situation which his spirit could neither
accept nor escape.
Jim looked up at him at last with tolerant, kind eyes. He had lost a
great illusion, but his heart ached for his friend.
Wivvle was sitting crouched forward against the table—he was sick with
a sudden fear that he wasn’t after all going to escape, and that this
slight inconvenience for Jim was once more to be turned into an
incredible menace for himself.
‘I don’t think I can lie about it for you,’ said Jim quietly, ‘but I can
stand to it. If I’m not asked I won’t deny it; I mean, if they believe
it I’ll let them believe it. I won’t give you away, and I’ll take the
punishment all right if they dismiss me.’
Wivvle gasped his relief; then he pulled himself together, and said with
an effort to revive his collapsed dignity,—
‘Of course I shouldn’t expect you to lie for me.’
It _was_ what he had expected, but what Jim suggested would do nearly as
well; no one would believe in Jim.
‘Mrs. Bligh knows it already,’ he explained. ‘She won’t ask you any
questions. She simply won’t speak to you again; and as for old Bligh,
you can easily bluff old Bligh. If you’ll really hold your tongue, it’s
a damned decent thing for you to do for me, Barton. I’ll never forget
it. Perhaps some day it’ll be my turn to do something for you, and I
rely on you to let me know if I ever can.’
Wivvle thought there was something curious about Jim’s face. He looked
suddenly as if he had been kicked blind, but he made no protest; he only
forgot to carry the thing off properly. It would have helped Wivvle to
get out of the room comfortably if Jim had agreed to his offer—or made
light of his own share in the transaction; but he let Wivvle go out of
the room without making light of anything.
After Wivvle had gone he put his hand up to his eyes, as if the sunshine
dazzled him.
He could not quite believe it.
His eyes wandered till they rested on a little silver crucifix Mrs.
Bligh had given him on Christmas day. She had said that she hoped it was
not superstitious to believe that it could keep a man from harm. Jim
stumbled forward and knelt before it; but he could not pray. Wivvle had
said that she believed he had done this thing—believed it without the
need for any further witness—and she would never speak to him again.
It was all a mistake—she could not believe it—he would see her and
look in her clear, gray eyes; and she, who knew what he had fought for,
prayed for, and gained out of all she had given him, would restore
something in him that seemed to be going to break. He tried to think
what there would be left of God if, after all, she didn’t believe in
him.
CHAPTER XX
Jim found Mrs. Bligh in her boudoir. She had just come in from the
garden with a great bunch of Christmas roses in her arms.
A faint flush of colour shone in her cheeks from the whipping wind. She
was dressed in white serge, and she had an ermine collar across her
shoulders, and a tiny little ermine cap set deep on her fair hair.
Jim watched her hands move deftly over the Christmas roses on their
tray. It seemed to him as if her delicate white fingers were made of the
same frail, impalpable substance.
The two little girls hovered round her like butterflies, carrying two
small blue vases which, they urged, they must fill for the nursery.
Mrs. Bligh stood there with her hands on the flowers and her head flung
back; her eyes were full of tenderness and laughter. She was teasing
them with the consenting, playful, teasing of happy love; then she
looked up suddenly and saw Jim.
She stiffened instantly and stood quite still; Jim saw the laughter and
the tenderness pass out of her face until she looked as if she were made
of frost. Her eyes met his with a deadly calmness of recognition; then
returned watchfully, to her children. She made a cruel little gesture as
if she stood between them and danger.
They stopped their dancing and became as still as she; they, too, felt
the sudden icy wind which had frozen the kindness out of her.
‘Go into the nursery,’ she said, in a toneless, gentle voice. ‘I will
bring you some of the flowers soon.’
They obeyed without a protest. As they passed Jim they turned away their
smooth fair heads punishingly, to accentuate his disgrace.
Mrs. Bligh began to arrange the flowers methodically in a wide, crystal
bowl. Sometimes they fell forward loosely over her fingers, and she
replaced them with a firm, quick touch without impatience.
‘I do not know why you have come here,’ she said. ‘It would have been
better for you not to come. I have nothing at all to say to you.’
Jim fixed his eyes on her with a dumb insistence of longing. Surely she
would lift hers to his with her tender intuition and restore his heart?
She could not shut him out of the world of laughing tenderness she had
for her children and all weak things. Even if he had sinned as Wivvle
had sinned, would there not be for him still her pity and the mercy of
her unstinted maternity; or was her motherhood only for her own—the
narrow, sterile passion of an unpassionate heart?
It seemed as if it was. She would not look at Jim, nor draw from his
dumb, expressive face any of the answers his heart held for her. She
would never willingly hear anything that he had to say to her again.
Jim had given up the question of his guilt the moment he first met her
eyes. He saw that she had judged him without hesitation or reprieve; but
it was harder to give up his confidence in her mercy. Because to give up
that was to believe her to be less than he had thought her, and it was
far easier for Jim to accept condemnation than to give it. The
incredulity in his eyes settled into protest.
‘Look here,’ he said roughly, ‘what kind of a game is it to play to call
yourself a Christian and have no forgiveness?’
Her hands moved on unfalteringly among the loose, frail buds.
‘I forgive you as a sinner,’ she said coldly, ‘but I do not forgive your
sin; nor do I wish to speak to you again. You have made it impossible.
There are sins which cause gulfs between human beings; gulfs which are
impassible—and yours is one of them.’
‘You oughtn’t to say that,’ Jim urged desperately. ‘If forgiveness means
anything, it means wiping out any sin. I thought mothers were as
merciful as God.’
‘I do not know what you have done to expect mercy,’ Mrs. Bligh observed,
with an added edge to her voice.
She thought that the reference to her maternity was impertinent.
‘There is a plain way of repentance marked out for you—but you have not
attempted to take it—and no religion bestows forgiveness without the
fruits of repentance.’
‘Do you mean Emily ought to be married?’ Jim asked. ‘But she doesn’t
want to marry me, nor I her. Wouldn’t it be as bad to marry—feeling
like that—as anything that has happened?’
‘I don’t wish to discuss this subject with you,’ said Mrs. Bligh,
lifting her cool, untroubled eyes to his face. ‘I believe my husband is
waiting to see you in his study.’
‘But you’re my friend,’ Jim pleaded. ‘Surely you aren’t going to let me
go out anyhow, believing this of me?’
‘I am not your friend,’ she answered steadily. ‘I was most willing to be
of use to you as a human being, and as my husband’s charge. I saw that
you needed help and assistance, and I tried to show you where you might
find them. I had no personal feeling in the matter, and I have none
now.’
Jim stared at her. Was she speaking the truth? Hadn’t she cared for all
his homage and his eagerness—hadn’t she let him be her child’s
companion, and her own?
Were all the summer hours they had spent together building up his new
world of words and ideas, and all the silent hours of their prayers,
nothing to her at all?
She had seen his worship in his eyes, and she had accepted it. She had
not recognised any class distinction as a separation between them while
he pleased her, but she was making him feel it now that he displeased
her. She was making him feel everything that it was in her power to make
him feel, because what he had wounded in her was her sense of power. She
had believed she could do what she liked with Jim, and her supremacy had
been threatened by a housemaid.
He had offended Mrs. Bligh’s pride and her taste at one blow. She might
have forgiven him these two things if she had felt that he was wholly
subservient to her. The depth of her interest in him before marked the
depth of her distaste for him now; all his defects became insults. Jim
did not know what had happened, but he had a sense that she was not
speaking the truth. Her feelings were a closed door to him, and he
struck against it with his bared heart, insistently and in vain.
‘Can’t you understand,’ he pleaded, ‘that a man may fail, and yet need
help? That it’s not till he really stumbles that he does need it? You’re
a married woman—you ought to know what men and women are like?
‘And if you can’t forgive me, you might have forgiven Emily. Oh, not
what you call forgive—but you might have let her feel you cared, and
were the same as she is. She’s harder hit than a man, and she’s got the
world against her—but you needn’t have been against her. You might have
made her feel there was something stronger than the world!’
Mrs. Bligh set her lips into a thin, hard line. She had no need of any
further witness; this boy before her had spoken blasphemy. He had said
she was the same as Emily.
‘I have just told you that I will not discuss this matter with you,’ she
said. ‘You have presumed too far, first on my kindness, and now on my
patience. As to what you say about the poor girl you have wronged, it is
absurd, and you are the last person to say it. Whatever she has to
suffer, you—and you alone—have inflicted it. I must ask you for the
second time to leave me.’
‘Oh, I’ll go now,’ said Jim recklessly. ‘Nothing can matter any more
now. I believed in what you taught me because I thought it made people
better; I see now that it makes them worse.
‘It keeps them out of facing things. Why, my old skipper, without a
clean word in his head, would have seen straighter into this thing than
you!’
His words came back into his own heart, but they held no meaning for
Mrs. Bligh.
As he had not gone at her bidding, she withdrew her attention from him
as completely as if he were no longer there.
She was as remote and as fixed as the imperishable snows; and at last
Jim dragged his reluctant heart away from her as if it were a beleagured
traveller, dying of the cold.
Mrs. Bligh did not raise her eyes when he had gone, but she felt a vague
sense of relief. Something had troubled her. She had been judged, and
she was not used to being judged.
She told herself that this experiment, like all her husband’s
experiments, had failed; and she gave a little, brave, self-pitying
sigh, as she thought how often she had had to bear the disagreeable
results of her husband’s failures.
CHAPTER XXI
It was almost a relief to Jim to find himself facing his second ordeal.
The fire was burning brightly in Mr. Bligh’s study; there was a sense of
comfort and immunity in the thick-carpeted book-lined room; the very
smell of tobacco and leather had something vaguely coarse and kind about
it.
Mr. Bligh’s hair was more on end than ever; his collar was pulled
crooked, and he was attempting to smoke his pipe upside down, appalled
by the clash of his sympathies and his obligations. Mrs. Bligh had
explained to him carefully that they were quite different things, but
Mr. Bligh always found it difficult to keep his obligations and his
sympathies separate.
He was sorriest for Emily; all his chivalry was roused for her; in a
sense she was more in his charge than Jim—he had not thought of this
behind the scullery door, but he had thought of it when he helped Emily
into the high dog-cart which was to take her to the penitentiary, and
implored the cook—quite unnecessarily—to be kind to her.
Emily was young and very pretty, and in a trouble which Mr. Bligh was
shocked to think she had received in his house; and here was Jim, not
only one of his boys, but a real, genuine son of the soil, the happy
result of a social experiment upon which Mr. Bligh had set his
heart—acting with dreadful precocity and callousness; and yet somehow
Mr. Bligh was sorry for Jim as well. He was sorry for Jim as if
something had fallen on him out of the sky—something that had nothing
to do with Emily. Mr. Bligh knew that things did fall out of the
sky—unconnected, disastrous things, which seemed to wind up with
Emilies, and which one did not seem able always to foresee or to
prevent.
‘You know this is quite dreadful,’ he said with a nervous anxiety to
take his bull by the horns; ‘any way you look at it. From a perfectly
fair-minded, modern point of view its inadmissible—the laws of the
state, you know—I quite grant that they are incomplete and they haven’t
gone into the subject yet thoroughly enough, but there _is_ marriage,
you know—in a sense provided, and everything arranged for it, a
trifling fee—though I think it ought to be waived myself—and no one
can get any harm by it . . . especially not if it’s made more elastic
afterwards.
‘And a girl—unprotected—somehow or other, girls always _are_
unprotected—in a friend’s house! I don’t say the position is menial—I
hope no servant of mine has ever felt menial for a moment. I lend them
all Sir Walter Scott’s novels, and a gramophone when we go out on Sunday
afternoons. But still it’s a position which, when you come to think of
it, really oughtn’t to be taken advantage of—you know what I mean,
don’t you?’
Jim sat down in the leather arm-chair opposite Mr. Bligh and looked at
him with indulgent eyes.
He did not blame Mr. Bligh for not believing him innocent. He saw that
Mr. Bligh was feeling most upset and didn’t know how to express himself,
and Jim thought that perhaps it was a better thing to feel upset and not
know how to express yourself, than to express yourself with perfect
clearness and not to know how to feel upset.
‘Well,’ he agreed, ‘things seem to have come to pieces somehow, sir’—a
flicker of ironic laughter shone in his eyes—‘but I couldn’t quite say
how.’
‘No! No! Of course not! I don’t ask it!’ Mr. Bligh intervened hurriedly.
‘One can’t, you know, always say how. And a fine-looking strap—— I
mean, if one looked at it from the poor girl’s point of view now.
‘I was most distressed when I saw her drive off to that Sisterhood this
morning. Of course, she couldn’t be in better hands, I admit that; but
somehow it all seemed rather cheerless, you know—laundry work, they
say—soap suds and perpetual chapel—and I couldn’t help wondering if
marriage now wouldn’t have been better all round? Though I know you’re
very young.’
Jim shook his head and repeated his formula with some amusement.
‘She doesn’t want it,’ he said firmly, ‘and I don’t want it.’
‘Well, now, really,’ said Mr. Bligh with a puzzled air. ‘That seems very
curious, doesn’t it—and rather awkward when you come to think of it? Of
course I know that, financially, you’re not justified. Still, if a loan
of twenty pounds——’
Mr. Bligh gave a cowed and guilty glance at the door. Married men with
families should not offer twenty pounds to misbehaving pupils. He knew
this, but the twenty pounds had sprung from his lips as lightly and
irresistibly as Venus from the seas. Jim, watching him with critical
eyes, felt a perverse desire to accept the money; to see if Mr. Bligh’s
generosity would have grit enough in it to pass into action. He had a
vindictive moment when it seemed to him that he should like to pay them
both out to the extent of twenty pounds. Then Mr. Bligh’s nervous eyes
recalled Jim to his deeper feeling of indulgence.
It is a cruel thing to tie a weak man down to his generosities.
‘It isn’t money,’ Jim explained, ‘thank you, sir, all the same. I’m
afraid the whole thing’s not what you call downright serious.’
Mr. Bligh shook his head regretfully, and tried unsuccessfully to look
extremely stern.
‘But the consequences,’ he said, ‘the consequences are very serious, you
know, Jim, for her—and in a sense for you.’
‘She’s been squared as far as I can square her,’ said Jim. ‘What about
me?’
‘Your career, you know,’ said Mr. Bligh limply. ‘You’ve done so
extraordinarily well. I wrote to Arthur the other day—I said you had
proved my theory—grit and brain. You had achieved a miracle. And on the
top of it I have planted the culture—quite enough, you know, for
Cambridge—our time was drawing to an end.’
Mr. Bligh coughed and plunged his head despairingly into his hands.
‘But it must come, you see,’ he pleaded, ‘to an end quicker! Example,
you know—and poor Emily—one has to think of the others. They’ve all
been sportsmen about it. They had to be told something. I spoke to them,
man to man, you know. Wivvle was upset—he took it to heart—a
high-minded, sensitive lad—but they were all nice about you, Jim—that
part of the plan _has_ succeeded.
‘But you see you couldn’t stay on here, could you? Even if I admitted
the most advanced views on the sex subject—and I don’t know that I’m
quite prepared to admit them. I’m enlightened, but I’m not extreme; not
on sex questions, you know. There is so much to be said on both sides,
and it doesn’t do much good saying it, _does_ it? But I think one must
draw a line somewhere in the house, I do really.
‘And there’s my wife’s religion, you know. I told you I always
considered that?
‘By-the-by, Jim, what’s happened to your religion? I’ve always doubted
the power of medieval superstitions to stand against nature—women, of
course, are different. They’re more medieval, when you come to think of
it, and perhaps less natural. But you don’t seem to have found it much
of a help?’
‘I don’t know quite what I’ve found it yet,’ said Jim dryly. ‘I’ve got
to find out, I suppose; but religion doesn’t come to an end with the
first lost sheep, does it?’
‘No, no; of course, not in a sense,’ Mr. Bligh agreed. ‘Still, there are
the ninety-and-nine just persons, you know, and they rather weigh down
the scale inside the church. The vicar, for instance; he takes a very
gloomy view of anything at all marked. I think probably you’d _better_
leave us to-morrow.’
Mr. Bligh’s eyes fixed themselves desperately upon Jim’s. His whole
heart was against this dismissal, but there were stronger forces at play
than Mr. Bligh’s heart.
‘I’ll go to-day,’ said Jim kindly. ‘I’ll walk over to Mr. Atkinson’s
this afternoon.’
‘Walk—my dear boy——’ exclaimed Mr. Bligh; ‘it’s twenty miles, and I
believe it’s going to snow.’
‘Yes,’ said Jim; ‘but I think I’d like to walk twenty miles.’
‘But doesn’t that seem a little extreme?’ Mr. Bligh urged. ‘You’ve not
had lunch yet.’
‘I don’t want lunch,’ said Jim, ‘and if I’m to get in before night I’d
better be going.’
He paused for a moment, then he lifted his eyes to Mr. Bligh’s and said
a little grimly,—
‘I’ve seen Mrs. Bligh.’
Mr. Bligh blinked rapidly.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said sympathetically; ‘of course—I suppose you had to. A
perfectly good woman, you know—immaculate, I always call her. Nothing
ever happens to good women quite, does it? I mean they can’t be expected
to feel for a man when he’s down, can they? It’s quite natural. You see,
they think he oughtn’t to be down.
‘I’m all for the feminist movement, you know—economic independence and
a kind of _rapprochement_ between the sexes. But not with the older type
of woman; it can’t be done. They stand on a pedestal, you know, and
would rather stay there. It’s the beauty of holiness, and after all you
can’t have it both ways, can you? If you like the beauty of holiness
it’s safer up there, out of the way, where it can’t get trodden on,
isn’t it?’
‘I’d like to see holiness without a pedestal,’ said Jim obstinately. ‘It
ought to be able to look after itself and us too.’
‘Well, but in a sense it does,’ Mr. Bligh protested, a little wistfully.
‘If you live up to it, you know—it is most inspiring. I assure you it
can be done.’
Mr. Bligh glanced down for a moment and sighed. He looked a little
strained and sad for one who is living successfully upon inspiration.
‘I admit it takes some doing,’ he added after a pause. ‘But life would
be nothing without its ideals, would it? Now, my dear fellow—I needn’t
say that, however we look at this very trying incident of your life—we
won’t use harsher words—I hope you’ll still consider me your friend?’
‘Yes,’ said Jim, ‘I will.’
He shook hands with Mr. Bligh and went upstairs to pack. He made no
other farewells. Something happened when he reached the hall which put
them out of his head.
Denis rushed in; he was full of the joy of making a snow man. His cheeks
and eyes were on fire; his whole buoyant figure tense with excitement;
but, as his eyes rested on Jim, a curious change took place in him. All
his joy faded. He did not spring forward as usual to claim Jim’s
absorption into his adventure. His small, erect figure held itself back;
his eyes miserably wavered; an anguish of reproach and pain swept across
his face.
Without a word he turned and stumbled away from the sight of his friend.
All his ardour was struck down into the chill of memory. His mother had
told him that this beloved friend had done a cruel and an evil thing.
She had made the thought of Jim hideous in her child’s eyes, and, as he
turned obediently from the presence of the evil-doer, he heard her
warning to him audibly justified, for Jim stood still in the hall and
cursed bitterly.
CHAPTER XXII
It did not feel cold to Jim.
He was conscious that there was a violent and spiteful wind blowing,
cutting off the tops of the trees and ravaging the life of the hedges;
but he was glad of something to struggle against. What would have been
hard to bear was a day in which beauty taunted his heart.
He could share the life of the stripped and fading leaves flying before
the wind like tormented people in a panic, but he could not have borne
their gay security.
The whipped, low fields were as empty as his desolate heart.
There was no visible sky; only a dull, gray void filled with the
unfriendly clamour of the air. Nothing had any purpose; the wind beat
down on the earth with the unreasoning hysterical repetition of a scold.
This was where Jim belonged, out of doors, in a cold world, struggling;
it had all been a mistake to put him into a beautiful, soft house, with
dressed-up people who didn’t understand facts.
Education? What had he got out of it? He had learned how to have his
feelings hurt without being cold or hungry or knocked about. These
things were bad, but he was used to them. Having his feelings hurt was
worse. It would have been much better not to have learned feelings.
He turned his head away from the field path which led to the
square-towered church—the memory of his hours there was like the sting
of a whip-lash across his cheek.
What was the use of going to a church that pushed you out into the cold
when you most needed help? It was bad enough not having given him the
benefit of a doubt, but even if they had had no faith in him, couldn’t
they have held on to him?
Jim’s mind rushed ceaselessly round its core of grief, returning with
the persistence of a robbed bird to its empty nest.
Their main idea was to get rid of him—to get rid of Emily—to get rid
of trouble. They had begged the question of life. Pain beat upon Jim’s
heart with the hammer-like ferocity of a toothache. The weight of it was
on him, and the loneliness.
It is a mistake to believe that sensitiveness to pain is a sign of
weakness. Weak natures respond more readily to pain, but never so
deeply; it is only the strong who feel the full weight of a storm.
Jim had not forgotten Arthur, but all his incentives had for the moment
weakened. He could not think easily of anything but Mrs. Bligh.
It is a cold business to part with an illusion, especially if you are
not supple to illusion, and it has grown into your very soul with roots
deeper than fact.
Jim set his mind doggedly upon the elusive figure of Mrs. Bligh. The
veil of the temple was rent in twain; and what was destroyed in her took
part of himself with it.
His first youth went with her supremacy; and all his dreams.
He saw that the virtues which he so loved in her—her common sense, her
dignity and self-control—were, after all, only miniature virtues. She
had evaded the two overwhelming qualities which sometimes seem more like
sins than graces—love and compassion.
It was hard for Mrs. Bligh not to see that she was right, and the church
had made it harder. By keeping all its rules she believed that she was
obeying the law of God. She judged herself, and without leniency, by the
church’s standard.
She also judged others; she had just enough mercy to forgive the kind of
faults she could have committed herself, but unfortunately they were not
very many.
All the big questions of the sin-racked world had escaped her. She had
had ceremonies instead of humanity.
Priesthood and sacraments, what were they in this broken world so full
of tyrannies and sins? They did not take the place of oil and wine, or
pay for ruined travellers at an inn.
Hadn’t the church taken the presence of God out of the human heart and
poked it into a mouse-trap?
What was left for a boy of nineteen whose mind could grasp these
problems, and who had learned better than to get drunk?
It occurred to Jim that he would rather not go back to Arthur—even
Arthur was educated and a gentleman. The river was still there, and the
skipper would be sure to welcome him. Jim had five shillings in his
pocket; and he didn’t want any more education; it was too expensive.
Drink, breed, and rot! Life was much simpler if you looked at it like
that and didn’t have any fine feelings. You got something out of it
then. You got what there was. But you didn’t get all there was.
It was much simpler; but was it any more honest than Mrs. Bligh sending
Emily to a Sisterhood?
Mrs. Bligh hadn’t been able to shuffle out of the baby, and Jim couldn’t
shuffle out of his own soul. He knew there was something in him, now,
that being on a barge wouldn’t satisfy.
He would have to go on and make the best of it; even if making the best
of it pulled him every which way. He set his teeth and pushed steadily
on into the storm.
Jim was beginning to be tired now; the wind dropped and snow fell, at
first desultory in occasional soft flakes, and then closing in with cold
persistent fingers, blotting out the world.
Now and then Jim caught a glimpse of a group of farm buildings; once he
passed through a village in which nothing moved.
The gray winter dusk was like the withdrawing of human consciousness
when the blood runs thin, with faint, uneven pulses, and the sight of
the eyes grow blurred and dim. Only the white, hard road was plain,
winding interminably toward London.
He plunged suddenly over the brow of a hill into a beech forest; the
giant trees stood like the pillars of a cathedral, with their interlaced
branches forming a roof over his head.
There was no sound anywhere.
He stood quite still under the silent trees, as if there was no point in
going on any more.
Life was not satisfactory; it did not substantiate its promises. It
muddled things—a reformatory with the world a garden beyond iron
doors—and when you got into the garden, you found that the iron was
still there.
Jim could not see any point in the judgments of God. He could not see,
in anything that happened to him, anything very much like God.
He could have loved Christ; but Christ was crucified so very long ago.
It would be much better to stop thinking and curl up under the trees.
Even if there was a God, He couldn’t expect a boy to go on swimming for
ever in a fog. Jim’s body was ceasing to obey him. He seemed to be
carrying all the weight of it in his thoughts. It was like being drowned
again; only the safety seemed farther off.
But there was still something warm and savage in his heart that refused
this last surrender. He possessed a quality tougher than life if he
could only get hold of it.
He said Arthur’s name over and over to himself to goad his body forward.
When he tried to walk he reeled, but the unsteadiness of his limbs did
not last long.
He became curiously conscious that he was no longer alone. Once or twice
he looked behind him to see if some one was not by his side. There was
no sound of footsteps, but there was a sense of companionship.
He moved safely out of the trees before the darkness caught him. The
feeling of cold and loneliness decreased in the open road; it was as if
Arthur’s spirit had not waited for Jim’s return to join him.
There are some human intimacies in which the soul knows that it need
take no thought for the morrow, and can be at rest without explanations.
Such friendships are rare; they can exist without sentiment and with
none of the rufflings of passion. They thrive on criticism, and disaster
does not confuse them.
The breath of their life is equal liberty.
Jim did not give a thought as to how he should tell Arthur what had
happened, but the knowledge that he should see him at his journey’s end
was like warming his frozen hands at a fire. All through the last heavy,
plodding miles, wet through, with only the mechanical unfreshened
strength of his second wind, his spirit felt accompanied.
At last he reached the little smoky town above the river, where Arthur
lived. Lights came again, broken and flickering, and voices.
As Jim caught at the door of Arthur’s home all his strength went out of
him suddenly like water. He had a strange, bewildered feeling that
eternity slipped between his knock at the door and any answer.
Then Arthur’s housekeeper stood there looking at Jim curiously, her face
distorted with tears and excitement. For a moment she looked at him
without recognition; then she cried out suddenly,—
‘Why, it’s young Mr. James! Haven’t you heard?’
Jim’s eyes fixed themselves on her beseechingly; he knew that when
people say, ‘Haven’t you heard?’ they always mean something terrible.
‘Come in! Come in!’ she said distractedly. ‘’Is last words were,—
‘“Bring him in at once, Alice, and keep something hot on the fire till
he comes.”
‘The doctor said as ’ow it was ’eart failure, along of ’is walkin’ miles
in a wind on an empty stummick to christen a baby over at Crayford way
that was took with fits.
‘’E just come in and opened the telegram to say as ’ow you was a-walkin’
over from the gentleman you was staying with—and I was a-standing at
the door, as I am now, only it was ’is study door, and I’d boiled an egg
for ’is tea, and ’e says, “Bring ’im in at once, Alice, and keep
something hot till he comes,” and then ’e looks up past my ’ead, as if
’e ’eard some one a-calling of ’im, and just fell over as you might
knock a vawse off the table with the back of your ’and!
‘But for the Lord’s sake come in and sit down, Mr. James, or we shall
’ave another corpse in the ’ouse before the morning.’
Jim groped his way in mechanically. His eyes were dazzled with light,
and his mind refused to take the first sense of what had happened.
He could not have lost everything he had. Death was preposterous and
incredible. It was like putting your foot down where there was nothing.
‘I’ve got to tell him what’s happened,’ he muttered, drawing down his
sullen eyebrows.
‘Poor boy! ’Is ’ead’s completely turned,’ said Alice, hurrying away to
get some food. ‘An’ no wonder—walkin’ twenty miles through a snowstorm,
and this at the end of it! Providence do seem fond of a queer turn
sometimes, and no mistake!’
‘I’ve got to tell him what happened,’ Jim repeated firmly to himself,
and then darkness crept over him, a darkness more complete than any
physical loss—the darkness of a world in which there is no one to whom
you can tell what has happened.
CHAPTER XXIII
A human spirit cast ashore after a storm of grief takes a long time to
recover full consciousness. It lies in a ‘no-man’s-land’ out of reach of
the waves, but incapable of movement.
For six months after Arthur’s death Jim’s world was submerged in
disaster. Flickering thoughts came to him of going to the bad. Evil had
no particular attraction for him, but there seemed nowhere else to go.
The results of wrong-doing seemed as formidable as the results of doing
right, and they required less effort.
It was not grief alone that had unseated his will, but the crueller
sense of having lost an object of worship. Jim had made an idol of Mrs.
Bligh and worshipped her. God is a jealous God, who, for the sake of the
worshipper, destroys idols; and when an idol falls, all that it stands
for falls with it. The sense of the invisible had receded from Jim; he
craved for the hardness of the material world.
He hated beauty now; he wanted brutal things that he could fight. He did
not want to be guided by Arthur’s memory; if Arthur had left him a
single condition with his inheritance, Jim would have refused it.
But Arthur had left no conditions; he had simply left all he had in
Jim’s strong, young hands, as if it was certain Jim would know what to
do with it. His trust was like a hand laid on Jim’s shoulder. Jim
couldn’t shake it off, because he loved it.
After a few disconsolate, desultory weeks, he went to Cambridge, because
Arthur had always said he wanted Jim to go to Cambridge.
There was none of the sharpness of life to be found within its old gray
walls, but it was restful there.
The unharassing, ancient customs, the kind, wise, old scholars, with
their accessible knowledge, soothed and stimulated Jim.
They were as impersonal as stones, but intellectually they kindled
fires.
Scholars are an unobtrusive, kindly race. They will not come out of
their shells unless attacked by intelligence; but they never fail to
respond to intelligence when it attacks them.
Jim’s questions roused his professor’s interest, and he gave him the
best he had—an effortless patience with detail, an inescapable
obedience to fact and rather more reliance on reason than Jim had yet
discovered in human beings. The professor cared about truth, and this
lonely, surly, brooding boy cared also for truth. Jim did not want
friendship. He was afraid of being helped or hurt, or moved any more.
There was a weight upon his heart as heavy as time. He shrank from the
laughter and youthfulness of his fellows, and refused to respond to the
tentative advances which were made to him.
He settled down to work in a room which looked out upon a narrow street,
enclosed by two high old walls. At the end of the street was the river.
Jim could not see it from his windows, but he knew that, in a moment, he
could be standing on a gray bridge and looking into vistas of hanging
trees and over flat green fields, with here and there a solid stone
building which had placidly held the youth and history of England for
centuries.
It was easier for Jim to feel part of the place than part of the life
within it. He felt akin to all the ancient landmarks. He was content, as
they were, to brood unobtrusively over the stream of laughing youth
which passed between those walls without check or trace. They were not
personally involved in short adventures; they, like Jim, were out upon a
quest for finality.
Jim took a purely practical view of education; he wanted to find out if
one or two things were true, and then change his life to meet them.
Christianity, for instance—did it shrink away from fact with the light
scorn of a good woman from a sin she did not understand? Or was it a
consoling dream fit for delicate and irresponsible beings who couldn’t
stand life without the padding of dreams? He asked several of the
Cambridge scholars for evidences of Christianity, and they gave him all
they had, both for and against. Even the theological professor, who was
one of the greatest scholars of his age, and wanted Christianity to be
true, handled its difficulties with an unfettered reverence for fact. He
never asked Jim to accept anything on authority. But it was different
when Jim wanted to apply religion to modern life. All the delicate,
deliberate researches of Cambridge seemed to fail at this further demand
upon them. Nobody wanted to deal with a fact once they had proved it.
The sense of the long, slow, chain of history blinded their eyes to the
urgency of life. They could lay their fingers admirably upon the causes
of modern evils, but they took them away again afterwards.
Jim could not take his fingers away. He had the instinct of the
reformer. He wanted to cry aloud like Peter, ‘Lord, not my feet only,
but my hands and my head.’
He could not wait to find out any more before he acted upon it. The
professor advised him, a little vaguely, to find out what social work
the church was doing in Cambridge, but the church did not help Jim very
much; its social efforts were dignified and ineffectual. Trying to find
life in it was like putting your ear to a shell and listening to the
far-off murmur of the sea. It is not the real voice of the sea which
carried the delusive sound, but only the reverberation from within the
drum of the ear.
There were good men to be found m the church, and very good women, but
there was no ardour to turn the world upside down, and without ardour
nothing turns upside down, not even a thimble.
Jim felt he couldn’t bear to go on behaving as if the origins of
Christianity and the upkeep of church services ought to take up all your
time, when the world was breaking itself to pieces for lack of the
practice of Christian principles. He found himself more in tune with a
set of young and violent sceptics, who cared passionately to change
life, but didn’t believe in Christianity.
They wanted to free the world, and would have died to do it. They did
run certain risks and gave up the minor conveniences of life.
Jim was secretly amused at the value they attached to giving up comforts
he had never had, but he admired their spirit. It was their choice of
weapons for carrying on their warfare which struck him as
unsatisfactory.
He thought their creed brittle and unthrifty. Jim knew life at first
hand, and he had been brought up surrounded by evil.
He did not believe that even justice could cure vice. Nothing ever
really sets human nature free but self-control. Easier conditions were
the simpler half of the problem, but even if that were solved, what you
were to do with the human heart still remained.
The men who thought they could legislate evil off the map didn’t really
know what evil was; they only knew the defects of incomplete goodness.
In the hour of disaster their childish improvements would slip into
nothingness, like sand swallowed up by the sea. They wouldn’t look at
Christianity because they thought it was old, and all the good sucked
out of it by tyrants; but Jim wanted them to look at it, because he
believed that nobody had sucked the good out of it, and that these
particular violent young men, full of free love and blasphemy, were the
stuff out of which Christians can be made. Jim had been dumb for two
years, but one evening he found himself addressing the debating society
in a queer flurry of opportunity and inspiration. Nobody knew who he was
before this occasion, but after his first speech he became a name in
Cambridge. Jim had a knowledge which was a new angle of vision to those
who had always seen life through books, and a burning conviction which
amazed spirits whose enthusiasms were light as thistledown.
At first Jim was conscious of perpetual pitfalls, clumsiness, and
inexperience, and an odd innocence of other people’s views forced him
into dire mistakes, but he developed a curious grip upon his audience
which kept them spellbound till he stopped speaking. He was never
fettered to his own ideas—he wanted to convince himself, and no one who
heard him ever went away with any sense of unfairness or glibness. When
Jim came up to a difficulty, he tackled it like a football, as an object
to batter through a goal after a hard struggle, taking his field with
him. He never gave any sense of a man who knew things on authority, or
who stood above the crowd. Jim’s professor took a mild interest in his
efforts, though he warned him that few scholars ever shone in debate.
‘They tell me you are on the side of violence,’ he observed one day.
‘That is a pity. Temper is always a confession of fear. Uncertainty of
faith is the explanation of all the persecutions.
‘It would be as well for you to remember that your opponent is never
dangerous, only facts are dangerous. If your facts are safe it is an act
of cowardice to lose your temper, and if your facts are not safe the
sooner you find out and change them the better.’
‘But if my opponent twists my facts?’ Jim objected.
‘Learn to put your facts,’ said the Professor, with a gleam in his mild
eyes, ‘so that they can’t be twisted. You must try to be as agile as if
you were unfair, but you must never be unfair.’
Into this safe world of intellectual research and experiment life broke
like a careless blunder and reset Jim’s mind.
It was on one of the last days of term when Jim’s landlady told him that
there was a lady to see him, a lady who wouldn’t give her name.
A wild hope caught at Jim’s heart. He thought he had put relentlessly
behind him the image of Mrs. Bligh, but there is no finality to visions,
and what he saw now was a vision of Mrs. Bligh, repentant, kindly, ready
once more to set his life to music. The very thought of her unloosed his
spirit as if he had been tied to a stake.
He ran into his dusty, book-filled, little room, with his heart on a
wave of ecstasy, but the figure which rose to meet him was not Mrs.
Bligh.
Eliza looked precisely as she had done when she left him last in
Trafalgar Square. She took the protective colour of her surroundings
upon her so that she never seemed out of place. But though her
appearance was unaltered, her behaviour was more cordial.
She turned her rather hard pink cheek for a fraternal kiss.
‘Well,’ she said with sisterly ease, ‘this does seem a piece of all
right, doesn’t it? I’ve just heard of your legacy and I was wondering
what you’d do with it. I’m glad you’ve taken my advice. There’s nothing
like education when you can afford it, and what I say is, you can always
have one kind or another if you put your mind to it. My word! What a
queer place Cambridge is, isn’t it? How much did old Mr. Atkinson leave
you?’
Eliza asked this question without reproachfulness, but there was a shade
in her manner which implied that she had more than a right to know.
After all, if she hadn’t so conveniently left the field to Jim, their
parts might have been reversed. He owed her something for her
considerate flight.
Jim hesitated a moment before he said, ‘Three hundred a year.’ He said
it a little dryly, for he saw it was all Eliza had come for. Then he
asked her why she had never made him a sign for all these years? Eliza
waived the question. She didn’t say that, when she’d seen him last, he
hadn’t been worth it. She only looked around her at the simplicity of
horsehair sofas and antimacassars which still surrounded Jim’s
undiscerning path. Her eyes wandered over the pale blue vases on the
mantelpiece, flanked by brown, undogmatic china animals before she said,
‘That’s all right for a single man, for a beginning. If you’ll use sense
you’ll soon be in the way of earning more. I do better than this without
an education.’
Jim hung his head. The memory of what Eliza did was always with him. He
dreamed about it by night, and by day it entered into him and crushed
him, so that he hesitated on the brink of his enthusiasms. Eliza’s
profession was the sharpest of his spiritual handicaps.
He was always asking himself if he hadn’t, by his own violence,
contributed to it.
If he hadn’t broken up their home would Eliza have ever gone beyond her
dreams of feather boas, into her admirable extractions?
He looked up from under his heavy brows and measured himself against
Eliza.
Her eyes, shining and impenetrable, were set flatly in her head; they
never changed their impersonal but friendly watchfulness. She knew that
he wanted to change her life, but as long as the struggle between them
was not physical, she knew, as she had known long ago in her swiftly
developing girlhood, that she had nothing to fear.
Jim had only brute strength, which he was too soft to use; he was, as
far as Eliza was concerned, negligible as a danger.
She smiled at the gravity of his challenging eyes.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked lightly ‘Are you too grand for me now?’
He put off the struggle with a sense of shame in his cowardice.
‘I don’t suppose I’m grand enough,’ he said. ‘What would you like to do?
Take a look round Cambridge, now you’re here—go on the river——?’
‘The river’ll do nicely,’ said Eliza with decision. ‘I saw quite enough
of the place coming up from the station. Poky, that’s what these old
buildings are. I don’t say one couldn’t do something with all the
flighty boys running about loose—but it’s not in my line, of course.
Besides, I shouldn’t dream of interfering with you. I quite see we must
stand or fall together.’
Jim held the door open for her. ‘I’m glad to hear you say that,’ he
observed a little grimly. ‘It’s what I’ve been thinking of myself, but
we’ll wait to talk over what we mean by it till we get to a more private
place.’
Eliza nodded in a friendly way. She tripped between the historic walks
with unseeing eyes. She, too, had a point to make. Occasionally she shot
a glance at the man beside her. He still wasn’t as smart as he might
have been. His clothes were badly cut, he walked like a man who has done
manual work. But he had improved greatly. He wasn’t so different from
the other bareheaded youths who passed them, not without glances of
admiration for Jim’s companion, which Eliza returned with her discreet,
furtive eyes narrowed a little, but full of wavering light.
Eliza was young, and she enjoyed her youth. She calculated what it
brought her in, with the least possible expenditure of power.
She was a woman, and that too was an asset. But she did nothing to
obtrude her sex upon her companion. She knew better than that with Jim.
She merely hoodwinked him with ease until they reached the river.
The willows, gold and thin, leaned low on the banks. They had nothing
behind them but the sky—deep into the water their reflections flung
back at them an answering life.
The flat, low lands which had crouched and clenched themselves away
under the breath of the long winter winds lay relaxed and green now,
with buttercups in a flood of golden bronze spread above them.
Far away across the plain the cliff of Ely rose with its cathedral like
a gray tethered cloud, launched into the sky. It was an autumn day with
no movement in it but the infrequent fall of leaves and the swift, short
flights of robins, shaking out their sweet and fitful songs.
Jim found a boat and pulled out silently on to the stream.
Eliza leaned back against the cushions with a curious movement of
relaxation.
‘Eliza,’ Jim said at last, ‘I’m glad you’ve come here. I’m glad you said
you wanted us to act together. It’s been on my mind like all these
years. I have an idea. I daresay it sounds nonsense to you, but I can’t
work it out without you. I want to stand for people like we
were—without a chance. You know how it was. Girls like you with no
education, and fathers like ours. Well, it was bound to tell on us—it
did me, in one way, and you another. But we can get out again. I won’t
say much about religion; it hasn’t come your way, perhaps, but it’s what
made me feel there was a way out. There’s people, too, who think they
haven’t got any religion, and have enough to try to help others. That’s
what I’m after. Education shows one how to do things, and how to make
other men do them. I’ll get all I can.
‘When I’m finished will you give up your way of life and help me?’
‘I don’t believe I’ve ever been in a row-boat before,’ Eliza remarked
reflectively, ‘except once on the Serpentine of a summer evening. There
were some people about then. It’s a bit too quiet for my taste on this
river.’
‘You and I,’ Jim persisted, ‘ought to be pals. I haven’t had a pal—not
for a long time. Have you?’
Eliza answered this question. ‘I don’t know that I have,’ she said,
‘except as you might say, professionally, and these I trust just as far
as I can see them.’
‘Do you trust me?’ Jim asked urgently.
‘I don’t suppose I should be sitting here if I didn’t,’ said Eliza
cautiously. ‘I know you’ll not give me away.’
‘No, I suppose I shan’t do that,’ Jim agreed reluctantly. ‘But I don’t
like your way of life, Eliza, I don’t like it at all. You’re clever
enough to get on and yet play square—why don’t you do it?’
‘That’s where you’re mistaken,’ said Eliza equably. ‘I hadn’t any
capital except my wits. Work wouldn’t have kept me in gloves. It
doesn’t. What about you—and you’re a man? You were working when I saw
you last, weren’t you? Well, your hands weren’t even clean.’
Jim flinched before Eliza’s recollection. He didn’t want to make a
personal protest—personal protests weaken argument, but he wished to
explain to her why his hands hadn’t been clean.
‘Still,’ he said at last, ‘I’d rather work on anyhow and keep straight.
It pays in the long run.’
Eliza shook her head. ‘There’s straight people in the work-house now,’
she observed. ‘I don’t say there aren’t crooked ones too, but anyhow
they’ve had their good times.’
‘I don’t believe you have such a good time,’ said Jim firmly. ‘You look
like a chased cat. Anyhow, don’t you believe in right and wrong, Eliza?’
‘I don’t know what you mean by believe in it,’ said Eliza defensively.
‘I know I’ll go to prison if I’m caught out, if that’s what you mean.
‘It’s quite true it’s an exhausting life; now and again I do get tired,
but you’d have to make it worth my while to drop it.’
Jim was silent; something in his flesh and blood was as wounded by Eliza
as if he had been personally attacked. Virtue had gone out of him, but
it was not transferred. Eliza had started some spiritual leak in his
soul, which left him weakened and bereft of words.
‘What would be worth your while?’ he said at last without looking up at
her.
‘Five hundred a year,’ said Eliza promptly, ‘with what I’ve managed to
save, would be worth my while, not less.’
‘I haven’t got it,’ said Jim desperately, ‘and if I had I wouldn’t give
it to you. What’s the use of bribing you to keep straight?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know if you don’t,’ said Eliza serenely.
‘I’d like to get out of being ashamed, that’s all,’ Jim muttered, ‘and I
don’t want to see you nabbed, and one of these days you will be
nabbed—you know that as well as I do. But it isn’t prison that matters
most; it’s the thing, the dirty thing, that puts you there.’
Jim spat into the river.
He could not express his loathing of dishonesty; it rose up and
overwhelmed him, like the knowledge of some horrible physical disease.
‘I don’t say I don’t like being honest myself,’ said Eliza calmly, after
a short pause. ‘All I say is, I can’t afford it. You can’t either, it
seems. Well, then, it’s no use making a fuss about what you can’t help,
is it? I’ve had a nice quiet afternoon anyway, and now I’d like my tea.
Do you think it would go too much against your principles to lend me a
tenner? I’ve got to get to Glasgow to-morrow, and my pal’s left me
uncommonly short.’
‘I thought you said,’ Jim grumbled, ‘that you’d got capital put away?’
‘So I have,’ said Eliza, ‘but not in the way you mean. It’s stones, and
they have to go on to the market carefully. Just now wouldn’t suit me to
sell at all.’
Jim continued to grumble, but before they had got back he produced the
ten-pound note. Eliza fingered it thoughtfully. It had just been worth
her while to come down to Cambridge.
Jim gave her a very handsome tea in a tea-shop full of innocent,
admiring young men.
Jim’s mouth had a good-natured twist, and his eyes met Eliza’s in a
friendly twinkle when he heard one of these deluded boys referring to
her in an undertone as an angel. Eliza looked reflective; she came to
the conclusion that she had better, some day, come back to Cambridge by
herself.
Jim saw her to the station, and on to the train with a curious sinking
at his heart.
He had asked for real life, and now even before his work upon books was
over, real life had broken through and granted his request. It was a
hard and heavy substance, and Jim was conscious that he hadn’t done very
much with it. In some curious but perfectly final way it was he himself
who yielded to this experience. He found, as he walked back to his
lodgings, that he had decided not to stay up and try for a fellowship.
He had singularly failed in his effort to convert Eliza, but he could
not accept a life which had nothing to do with Eliza’s.
CHAPTER XXIV
Jim came back to London one dull November day, ready for his life-work.
There was no light, and the taste of fog was in the air.
The massive unconcern of London struck him like a blow.
Nobody wanted him or his knowledge; nobody wanted change; those who
needed it most clung with the steadiness of limpets to the invisible
rocks of their unsavoury habits.
Jim’s instinct took him to the river, down by the gray, unlighted miles
of docks.
A region of narrow streets, and squalid, small houses swallowed him up,
and only his landlady took a feeble interest in him, founded on rent.
When he went to see labour leaders and put his ideas before them he was
looked upon suspiciously as if he wanted to get something out of them.
They looked at his hands and shut him out of their counsels. Labour was
sullen and hostile in those days, before the shilly-shallying of
intellectual freaks; they had been taken in so often by the devil
appearing as an angel of light; and in the end they had found they
always had to pay for the light.
Jim found himself as disconnected as a stray cat. His speech betrayed
him; only a jaded but enthusiastic parson, buried in an enormous parish
of poverty and spiritual apathy, gave him a sympathetic but scarcely
encouraging word.
‘You may be able to do something,’ he said wistfully to Jim. ‘My
profession is like the mark of the beast. They look at my clerical
collar and sheer off. No wonder St. Paul was a tentmaker first and a
preacher afterwards. I visit and do what I can for the young. Religion
bores the men, and the women are too overworked to come to church.
‘You see how they live. It’s the life of nomads, without the
climate—all these miles of dock and no centre for them to tell them
where work is to be found—they wander and migrate like the birds—only
without a plan.
‘I can’t alter anything. I’m a hobbled horse. People like you, perhaps,
may do something, but I doubt it. Power is in the hands of money. St.
John the Baptist couldn’t drag prominent people into the desert to
listen to him now. They wouldn’t even bother about cutting off his
head.’
Jim listened, and went away convinced that the church couldn’t help him,
or herself. There was no backing in her for revolution, and no life
possible without revolt.
It was five years since Jim had worked with his hands.
He went down to the docks to look for work. It was a slack time, and he
had to wait for two weeks before he got taken on.
Jim hated taking the job when it came, for he was safe, and the men
fighting and scrambling in the queue behind him were not safe.
But it was no use waiting for some one who could afford to miss a
chance.
They all stood without a margin, with their eyes fixed on luck.
When luck failed them they sank like stones, and bitter waters closed
over their heads.
Jim felt drowned with each man who went under, but he wouldn’t drown
dumb. He spoke, and the men listened to him at last, for he was one of
themselves now. He was acquainted with their infirmities. He poured out
his scorn on the England who held her children so cheap that she could
not give them work. He joined the Docker’s Union, and fed their meetings
with his reasoned, inflammatory anger.
His brain was on fire, and the heavy, mechanical day’s work left him
free to think.
He left no secrecy about his past. He told the dockers who he was and
what he had done. It was not such an unusual story told to such an
audience, but what Jim had made of it afterwards was unusual. He poured
out to them his motives for the future. He wanted to get better wages,
shorter hours, more centralization, more control of these mysterious
docks; they loaded and unloaded for capricious and invisible powers.
He had all their sympathy for his passion and his resentment against the
conditions of labour, but he wanted more than better conditions. He
wanted, with the same passion, with the same vitriolic, practical
invective, a scheme of things by which the free hours and added incomes
would not be thrown away. Jim wanted to lift character. The men were
puzzled by this attitude. They could understand an agitator or a parson,
or even one or two noted men on the dockers’ side, who were priests and
called themselves fathers and had combined the two attributes, but these
infrequent visitors had vanished. They had stood for a while with a
mysterious church behind them, into which they had finally withdrawn, a
dream, which was as foreign to the life of a docker as a bird-cage in
the life of a wild bird.
But Jim had no church behind him, and he was one of themselves.
He spoke out-doors and in public houses, and finally, as the weather
grew worse and his audiences larger, he hired a room and gave night
classes and Sunday lectures in it. The Sunday lectures were a curious
blend of revolt against material pressure and discipline for the
climbing soul. Indiscreet and challenging, they were flung, formless and
alive, on to the raw attention of the men.
They did not flatter the dockers, but they interested them. They took a
light straight into each man’s soul and held it there.
The little room grew crowded out and gave place to an empty factory.
Jim was one of the most important speakers for the union by then, and he
hoped to see it run on French syndicalist lines. He did not believe in
any compromise with capital. Compromises were only safe with equal
partners. The powers of the employers were still too great. They had
behind them riches, education, newspapers, the church, the state, and
the army, with a front as solid as a cathedral. The men had only their
numbers and their necessities. Unity could give them power, and it was
for unity that Jim struggled. Unity and the overthrow of personal
selfishness.
He had to give up his dock labour to devote himself to his union and his
weekly talks.
He handed the empty factory over to a committee, the men ran it and paid
for it. Jim only spoke in it.
He was responsible for nothing but his own ideas.
It was as if the birds of the air carried them about, and brought him in
a harvest. Men who remembered his name from the university debating
society, offered to take over night classes and run boys’ clubs and
holiday funds for him. A Mr. and Mrs. Hodgkins, two devout and
free-thinking young people, came down to Poplar to live near him as
independent workers under his guidance.
Jim saw them, trembled before the fixed eyes and unmodulated opinions of
Mrs. Hodgkins, and loved the thin, feverish face of her young husband.
They talked to him in turn, steadily and for hours; he saw they looked
on the millennium in the light of a model tenement house, where all the
inhabitants would clothe themselves in blue serge bloomers, irrespective
of sex, and eat cheese. But he saw, too, that they loved human beings.
Before they had finished talking, Jim had handed over to them the
organisation of his surprising church.
He had not meant it to be a church, but Mr. and Mrs. Hodgkins persuaded
him that it was. They told him they were prepared to be called the Rev.
and Mrs. Hodgkins, and to be Jim’s assistant ministers.
‘Well,’ Jim replied, when Mr. Hodgkins ceased to expound his innocent,
thin daydreams, and Mrs. Hodgkins relieved him for a moment from her
more fixed and sanitary plans, ‘Be what you like, only remember I’m Jim
Barton, and I am never going to be anything else. I don’t mind what you
do to the factory as long as the committee run the accounts. It’s the
people’s church (if it is a church) not mine. They elect the committee
and have a general meeting every six months.
‘They can turn me out at any moment, and they must be able to do the
same with you. Meanwhile, I speak every Sunday night at seven. I say
what I like, and you can do the same. But you must remember they are
equally at liberty to object to it. If you take my advice, you won’t say
anything about women wearing bloomers and men not eating meat. Because
these kind of things aren’t going to happen yet in Poplar.’
The Rev. Mr. and Mrs. Hodgkins agreed to go slowly and build up public
opinion. They stopped the factory being called a factory, and named it
Calvary Church.
The committee was a little restive at first, but Mrs. Hodgkins
magnetised them. She wore a cassock and a mortar-board and bought a
brass eagle.
She told the committee that they had everything in their hands, and then
proceeded to put into their heads what their hands should perform. The
committee soon began to like the ideas with which she provided them.
They chose an altar and a pulpit; they replaced a harmonium by an organ,
and told Jim he must stop using a chair and sitting in the middle of
them.
They got proper chairs in tidy rows instead of backless benches, and in
the end they had red hassocks.
Everything became more like everything else and much more comfortable.
They hired a real organist who liked anthems instead of a shoemaker who
could only play, ‘Dare to be a Daniel.’
The most important members of the congregation with adequate lung power
went into the choir and wore surplices and cassocks.
Jim took no apparent notice of any of these changes. He agreed to the
cassocks, which he found very uncomfortable, but not even Mrs. Hodgkins
could prevail upon him to wear a stole.
‘You are a priest in the eyes of God,’ Mrs. Hodgkins reminded him
firmly, ‘for ever—after the order of Melchisidek.’
‘Still, he didn’t wear a stole,’ Jim objected, ‘and I don’t need to
remind God what I am. It’s no use setting up church people’s backs for a
little thing like a stole. You wait a bit, we shall have heavier jobs
than stoles to fight about before we’re through.’
Mrs. Hodgkins shook her head gloomily. She was one of Jim’s most devoted
disciples, but at the bottom of her heart she wished he was different;
he had no eye for the external. It seemed to Mrs. Hodgkins that if her
husband had had a stronger throat and continued to do exactly as she
told him, he would have made a better preacher than Jim.
London slowly awoke to the existence of Calvary.
It seemed there was a remarkable man who preached in Poplar and who
wasn’t a proper clergyman at all.
There were packed services three times a day, on the lines of a refined
and up-to-date Church of England.
The Service of Benediction had been lifted from the Church of Rome by
Mrs. Hodgkins with a lightness of hand worthy of Eliza. There was a
great deal of popular music, and the social side of the work had the
effect of a mosquito upon the Local Government Board. It sang songs of
triumph, stung, and wouldn’t keep still enough to be killed.
The committee ran the financial side of the church, and the people ran
the committee, but Mrs. Hodgkins ran everything else, including Jim.
Jim knew that she ran him. He realised that he hadn’t meant to have a
church, and that now he had one, and that he hadn’t meant to be any kind
of a clergyman, and now he was some kind of a one.
But he was the vice-president of the Dockers’ Union, too, and he still
said what he liked.
This was a great achievement, but Jim was not universally popular. If he
had not been a great orator nobody would have listened to him.
His mistake was that he saw there wasn’t any side which was wholly in
the right. He wouldn’t flatter the people he loved at the expense of the
people they hated. He had to speak the truth, and it cost him many
disciples.
When he fought against poor wages, long hours and interference with
personal liberty, he could count on his influence over those he fought
for; but when he turned on them the same shafts of indignation and
ridicule, to eradicate evils at least as deep in their lives and his
own, he met with no support.
No one in Poplar wanted to see that Christianity is just as much against
hostility, unfairness and tyranny in poor people as it is against these
characteristics in the rich, and that what it really requires is an
abolition of personal selfishness.
The people of Calvary Church wanted to be told that they were the elect.
They knew they were being respectable against heavy odds, and they
thought this ought to be enough.
They resented being told that respectability wasn’t Christianity, and
they didn’t want the ‘Down and Outers’ in the church at all.
‘If they go, I go,’ Jim said grimly. ‘If you’ve got an ex-convict for a
minister you ought to be able to put up with a few criminals in the
congregation.’
But after all, Jim couldn’t be everywhere at once, and ‘Down and
Outers,’ those rare, shy birds, fugitively won from the placid nursery
of their sins, fled back to them at the first sign of the righteous cold
shoulders of their brothers. They came to Jim by night, for bread and
love; but they didn’t want anything else.
There were men he had struggled to save and gone down with when they
sank; there were women he had protected and rescued from an old and
ready bondage.
They came to Jim because they knew his compassion was without judgment.
They felt that all he wanted was to share their bad times, and give them
his strength for their unequal fights. Even when they couldn’t fight,
something in him helped them.
His door was always open, day and night. It caused a great deal of
scandal. Mrs. Hodgkins told Jim he ought to consider the weaker brother.
Jim looked at her reflectively. ‘Not before the weakest,’ he said
quietly. Mrs. Hodgkins said no more, but she started a night shelter for
women.
Jim did what he could to get them to go to it, but most of them were
afraid of shelters.
When they could be persuaded to go, Mrs. Hodgkins managed them much
better than Jim.
Jim didn’t understand women. He wanted them to be free and safe; but
free first.
Mrs. Hodgkins gave them good hot tea and told them how wicked they were;
and that was what they had expected.
There was a good deal of talk about getting Jim out of Poplar. The
clergyman of the parish, who had been happily asleep for thirty years,
woke up suddenly and strongly objected to the presence of a building
called ‘Calvary,’ which was full, three hundred yards away from a church
called St. Botolph’s, which was empty.
Bishops objected. Some tactless person from the west end hearing that
Jim’s landlord was about to turn him out of Calvary, paid a fancy price
for the site and handed it over to the committee.
There was nothing further for the authorities to do then, except to say
how disgraceful it was, and wait for Jim to do something illegal.
When fashionable people read the small paragraphs in the paper about how
disgraceful Jim was, they flocked to hear him.
Jim’s mordant wit became extremely popular in the west end, and his
passion was as stirring as a play. People even wanted to meet him,
especially when they found he had no wife, and wouldn’t accept their
invitations.
But Jim did not keep this section of his admirers very long.
The first great dock strike branded him. This wasn’t only an amusing man
who made Christianity thrilling. He was one of those dreadful people who
come to bring not peace but a sword. He not only attacked people’s
souls, but their interests.
It ceased to be bishops who thundered against Jim now; it was the whole
class from which bishops spring.
Jim had prepared for the strike for years. He had devoted his whole
energy into increasing the Union and its supplies, and had studied with
secrecy and passion the points in the armour of the shipowners. When he
struck, he struck hard and formidably.
It was a terrible and embittering time. Inconvenient for the shipowners
and merchants, and devastating for the dockers themselves.
Famine, illness, and awful lassitude seized the miles of small gray
houses, seized and shook the heart out of them for nine long weeks.
Then the strike was broken. The powers against them, outraged and
well-handled, were too strong.
There was no general co-operation of labour to come to their help.
Their comrades in other trades watched their struggle with sullen eyes,
in which sympathy was powerless to overcome the timidity of centuries.
They watched a great fire kindle, flicker, and die out.
The strike was broken, but not the spirit which made it. The dockers had
not been able to get what they wanted, but they had shaken power.
Jim laughed when he read Mr. Egerton’s invitation to dinner. It was a
grim laugh, for he had not had a dinner for some time—all his resources
were stretched to the uttermost, and he never took more than would just
keep him going.
‘They’re frightened,’ he said to himself. ‘Good—well, so are we, but we
shan’t show it, and they have—this card is as good as a white feather.
I can hear them saying, “We must get hold of the man, he’s dangerous.”
Well, I’ve got to be dangerous, but if I meet them I shall know better,
perhaps, just how dangerous I have got to be.’
Jim spoke with the pleasant zeal of one who is prepared to meet his
enemies on their own ground, and without any presentiment that he might
be called upon to face a far more difficult problem—the presence of a
friend in the house of his enemies.
CHAPTER XXV
Viola Egerton was as interested in life as a well-cared for kitten. She
did not want to get to the end of her ball of wool; but she loved
tangling it up.
She wanted to destroy a little, tease a little, explore a great deal,
and play imaginary games in an imaginary jungle, without being too much
interfered with by reality. She chased her own tail with ardour, and she
thought, when she had succeeded in catching it, she would have done
something very handsome.
She did not wish to be too different from other people. Viola was afraid
of the spark of imagination which pushed her beyond the hedges of her
upbringing, and she was even more afraid of the tides of young
generosity which threatened to make her ridiculous by their intensity.
She didn’t want to make people think she was tiresome and clever any
more than that she was innocent and dull. Above everything she wanted to
be considered modern; to be like some of the girls she knew—audacious,
a little hard, without continuity, and knowing rapidly and thoroughly
what they wanted.
These young people went their own way and were not easily upset.
Viola Egerton knew that she did not possess these qualities. She wavered
even over what she wanted, her judgment slid away from application, and
more often than not she went other people’s way, because she liked
pleasing them better than she liked pleasing herself.
Above all, she liked to please her mother. Mrs. Egerton was as charming
when she was pleased as a warm day in spring, and she was as inclement
as the edge of an east wind when people were careless, or wilful enough
to displease her.
She had been an indulgent mother, but there had always been something
behind her indulgence which could not be trifled with. She let her two
children do what they liked after she had chosen it.
Harry never found this out. When his mother had moulded him into the
precise form she thought a young man of his station should present, she
let him go on at his own momentum, and Harry went on, serenely,
selfishly, and above all safely, under the impression that he was
exercising his own free will.
But Viola had qualms. She had recognised even as a child that when her
heart was set upon an inconvenient mongrel puppy, her mother had
instantly presented her with a magnificent wax doll; and it had not been
precisely the same thing to her.
But she only once openly defied her mother. She wanted to read _Ann
Veronica_, every one was saying that it was a dreadful book and ought
never to be read by young girls. Almost every girl in Viola’s set read
it, and most of them thought they were potential Ann Veronicas, though
perhaps more intelligent. Mrs. Egerton said when she saw it in Viola’s
hands, ‘Oh, that tiresome book. I shouldn’t bother about it——’ and
_Ann Veronica_ mysteriously disappeared, a sapphire blue leather bound
volume of _An English Woman’s Love Letters_ taking its place. Viola went
out, bought another copy of _Ann Veronica_, read it with flaming cheeks
and an uneven heart, and took it to her mother. ‘I wanted to read it
after all,’ she said defiantly, ‘and I went and bought it.’
Mrs. Egerton said, ‘Did you, darling? What a pity. There is a copy
somewhere in the house. I’m afraid it must have bored you dreadfully.’
The worst of it was that Viola couldn’t feel like Ann Veronica. Nobody
defied her to go to balls; on the contrary, they brought round padded
motors and took her.
Neither of her parents were ever rude to her, or ordered her about, and
it is much more difficult to rebel against velvet than against violence.
As soon as Viola’s education was finished, her mother said to her,
‘Dearest, you’re the greatest friend I have in the world. It would break
my heart if, because we’re two grown up women in one house. We didn’t
get on.
‘I purpose to share all my pleasures with you and all my confidence—and
whatever you choose to tell me in return shall be kept secret. We will
talk over all you want to do, so that I shan’t make any mistakes.’
They did talk it over, and most of Viola’s inspirations evaporated; but
on the whole what replaced them was more inspiring still. Mrs. Egerton
was as good as her word; she gave her daughter her confidence; that is
to say, she told her what she thought it would be good for her to know,
and she made it extremely amusing.
Other girls in Viola’s set went out more alone and were tasting the
delights of new-won social freedom. Viola was anxious to reproduce their
liberty in her own life, but when it came to the point, Mrs. Egerton
raised her charming eyebrows, and said with laughing, experienced
eyes,—
‘But you don’t want to get kissed by young men in cabs, do you,
darling?’
And Viola wasn’t quite modern enough to say that she did. She could only
stammer and grow red, and look silly, and decide that no liberty was
worth having at the price of having to meet her mother’s amused wise
eyes, while she was using it.
Viola had with acuteness, the sensitiveness of the untried. No young
girl can explain easily that she wants to learn what older women know.
She wishes to appear to know already. She wishes not to know exactly,
but to be possessed of the adroitness which comes with knowledge; above
all she wishes to escape being watched while she is finding out.
Viola, more sensitive than most, made a swift retreat into her
ignorance.
She was allowed plenty of friends of her own age, but her mother was
always her most intimate companion, she was like an enchanting elder
sister. She laughed at Viola very little, and never before any one else,
and she gave her a sense of enormous social ease.
Her wisdom and experience were like skilful tools, ready to slip into
her daughter’s nervous hands at every crisis.
Mrs. Egerton never used anything she possessed against Viola; her wit,
her knowledge of the world, even her still splendid beauty—were not
rivals to her daughter’s gifts—they were always reinforcements.
She had been a noted beauty in her day, and no one would have known that
it was over, if she had not so placidly asserted it. Only Mrs. Egerton
herself knew that her placidity and her renunciation were but the cloak
of an ambition—as bitter as salt, and as hot as flame.
She had failed to do what she wanted with her own life, but she had
determined to do it with her daughter’s.
Harry was perfectly useless. He would never give his mother any trouble;
he was her husband over again, a decent, reliable, pleasant fellow,
without a leader’s eyes or hands.
He would not lose money, and when he died (which would probably be not
before eighty) he would never be heard of again.
Mrs. Egerton had wanted power and a great name. She had believed at
eighteen that Tom Egerton, who was very handsome and had just won a
fortune out of a peculiarly brilliant stroke of business, was capable of
presenting her with what she wanted.
He couldn’t become an ambassador because he was not a linguist, but he
might, if carefully run, become anything else. He talked a great deal
and men listened to him; he almost always said what the men of his own
class were thinking—and he never said what they weren’t. Unfortunately,
Tom’s shipping deal had really been the work of a common young
under-manager, whom the firm had to get rid of, because he wanted to be
made a director and had no capital beyond his brains.
Tom never did anything brilliant afterwards, but he went on making a
good deal of money regularly and thinking that it was, on the whole, due
to him that the money was made.
He did not realise that money follows money as duck follows duck, and
his increasing fortune looked very like brains—coming in, in large
quantities, fairly easily, and not going out again, because he always
had the sense not to do anything silly with it.
Tom couldn’t see what more his wife wanted. He was very much in love
with her, and for the first five years of their married life he met her
efforts to rouse him into political leadership, by kindred efforts of
his own. He puffed himself out like the frog who wanted to be thought a
bullock, but he had just enough commonsense to stop in time to prevent
any serious explosion. If a command of platitude, and a modest sense of
self-importance were enough to have made Tom a Cabinet Minister, there
is no doubt he would have become one. He believed in himself and he
believed in all the causes which support such a self, but he wasn’t as a
speaker, infectious.
He tried twice for a seat, failed with a too obvious majority against
him, and retired from public life with the knowledge that his wife
thought him a fool.
He was not the type of man who can go on being in love with a woman who
thinks him a fool; but he always admired her, and he never did anything
at all desperate.
He liked his home, his children and his business; he managed his cellars
excellently and was a delightful host.
What he did with his private life was his own affair; he could afford
discretion.
Mrs. Egerton never failed to be perfectly polite to her husband, and
perfectly indifferent to him. She spent a great deal of money, but it
was thoroughly well spent; and her conduct was irreproachable.
She often used to say with her wistful, two-edged smile, ‘I am the Early
Victorian wife and mother, you know. I have no life outside my poor
little home.’
They had a house in Grosvenor Square and one in the country.
No trainer ever studied a prospective favourite for the Derby with more
watchful precautionary care than Mrs. Egerton gave to her only daughter.
She played for Viola’s sensitive, imaginative heart as great men play
for kingdoms; and the child loved her, responded to her, and grew very
much what her mother had hoped; but Mrs. Egerton was not wholly sure of
her.
What in herself was a pleasant, romantic sentiment which often led her
to be very sorry for people when she could do nothing to help them, had
the dangerous element of intensity in Viola. Mrs. Egerton was a
well-bred woman and she never told unnecessary lies, but she did not
carry conclusions when they were too heavy to be comfortable, she put
them down; and there were moments when she thought Viola did not know
when to let unpleasant conclusions drop. She was an inconveniently
truthful child, and she was never silly in the right place.
Even Viola’s humour was more intelligent for her age than was at all
advisable.
It might bring quite suitable young men up too short.
But these were faults of youth, and she was too lovely not to be easily
forgiven.
Viola had not inherited her mother’s splendid regularity of features,
but she had got her clear olive skin, the beauty of the lines of her
small head superbly carried, the delicate curve of her chin, and
eyebrows which had the fine, firm lightness of a butterfly’s wings. The
eyes beneath them were not as brilliant as Mrs. Egerton’s; they were a
shade darker and their expression was tentative and candid. Viola hadn’t
anything to hide, and she had a great deal to learn. Men thought them
charming eyes.
She was much smaller than her mother; nature had finished her off with
the same attention to detail; her hands were like white pointed flowers,
her feet and ankles had never needed the implacable care with which her
mother had treated them.
Mrs. Egerton left nothing in her daughter’s appearance to chance or
nature. She despised people who leave well alone, when with a little
attention to detail they could make it better.
No girl in London was as well turned out as Viola Egerton. She was as
actually strong, and as fragile looking, as a briar rose. She could have
stood any exposure, but she looked as if she had never been exposed. She
did not have freckles, colds or nerves.
Viola herself was perfectly unconscious of the processes applied to her.
She accepted cold cream for her skin, drank barley water when she would
have preferred tea, and enjoyed regular and delightful exercise without
thinking about these practices. She supposed she was clean and tidy like
everybody else.
Viola never discovered that she was as much a work of art as one of
Leonardo’s faintly smiling women; nor that secretly in her mother’s mind
there was the same high price attached to her.
It was true that a casual glance from a pair of masculine eyes—and all
Mrs. Egerton’s care might be thrown away. The point of Viola’s life must
be marriage, and after she had made her beautiful, Mrs. Egerton knew
that she still had the harder task in front of her, of making her beauty
safe.
Fortunately she had already avoided the worst pitfalls. Viola showed no
genius. She had not even any very strong tastes.
She had had the best teachers in Europe, and she sang in a perfectly
trained, sweet, small voice, and danced nearly as well as she had been
taught. She took to perfection in dress as naturally as a bee to
lavender. She hadn’t much time for reading, and read what was in the
house.
All the slighter dangers of the roused intellect had been successfully
escaped, but there was always the more acute danger of personal friends.
Mrs. Egerton had her house full of the right kind of men, and Viola had
talked to them from childhood without apparent supervision. The Egertons
received as many other women as Mrs. Egerton considered necessary. She
did not like other women, but when they had to be there they were there;
and she was perfectly charming to Viola’s girl friends.
With infinite skill and precaution she managed to prevent any deep
intimacy between Viola and these young persons.
When Viola showed too marked an inclination for ‘dear Maud’ she found
herself more and more thrown with ‘dear Edith,’ and if ‘dear Edith’
threatened to be at all tiresome, she faded without any apparent reason
into ‘dear Mabel.’
The Suffrage question was for a time a direct menace, but Mrs. Egerton
handled it from the first with supreme skill. She behaved as if the
women who wanted a vote suffered from the same serious disability to
attract which is supposed to haunt the unmarried. Attractive women did
not need to clamour for either a vote or a husband. What they wanted
happened without any legal stir. She refused to take the subject
seriously. ‘I know, dear,’ she said to Viola. ‘Suffragettes are the most
dreadful nuisance, and anti-Suffragettes are worse. I think we won’t let
people bore us over them.’ And she made a rule that no discussion on the
question should ever be allowed in her house.
Viola felt indefinably relieved by the shelving of this painful subject.
She wanted to think the vote didn’t matter, because she knew that if it
did she, too, ought to go white-faced and trembling to noisy meetings,
and walk with tired feet over the London streets. She even wondered
whether the whole question wasn’t so extreme as to make law-breaking
less an enormity than some of the laws hastily devised against it. At a
word of positive opposition she would have hoisted her colours and known
what they were.
But Mrs. Egerton said she thought that women would probably get the vote
in the end, if enough of them wanted it sufficiently, and could have got
it long ago if half a dozen really charming women hadn’t been able to
get a great deal more without bothering. But what these poor dears who
were making such a fuss didn’t realise was that a vote in itself was
really worth nothing at all, except perhaps to quite poor people. It
took the edge off sacrifice to think that if you gave everything you
had, and did everything you didn’t want to do, you would get nothing at
all for it.
The Egertons went to Egypt for the worst winter, and in the summer Viola
was nineteen and received her first proposal. It was a most satisfactory
offer: ten thousand a year and a baronetcy of a quite respectable date.
Mrs. Egerton was not a vulgar woman, but she felt the same secret thrill
of triumph with which a careful cat greets its kitten’s first mouse.
She took Viola’s refusal perfectly calmly. It was a very fine mouse, but
she had not meant it to be final.
Sir Edgar Milton was an excellent match; but he wasn’t anything else. He
had an engaging manner and the brains of a healthy schoolboy of fifteen.
He wanted Viola as if she was cake, and cried when she refused him.
Viola cried as well; she cried a great deal too much; it even gave her
mother a momentary pang of uneasiness as to whether a kitten of so
remorseful a type would make a satisfactory mouser?
Viola’s next refusal was a man of the world. Bertram Montague had had a
career with women, and a more inspiring and less erratic career in the
House. He was the kind of man who may still, if it is made reasonably
easy, do something remarkable.
Viola was flattered by his attentions and a little afraid of him. He was
very clever with her, and she nearly accepted him because he made it
seem as if there was no alternative. But something in his eyes at the
last moment made her feel like a creature close to a trap. She ran away
from him literally, and was very much ashamed of herself afterwards.
She didn’t cry after that refusal, but she felt very much relieved.
Mrs. Egerton thought two refusals were enough. She had a long, quiet
talk with Viola, and she made her feel, without hurting her feelings,
that to go on refusing nice, kind men, who would make perfectly good
husbands, wouldn’t be considerate or even very well-bred.
‘Of course there’s no reason in the world why you should marry, my pet,’
she said tranquilly. ‘I never can see why to be an old maid should
always seem a little ridiculous and left out, particularly as such very
plain women marry, and sometimes such extremely pretty ones don’t; but
if you’ve really made up your mind to avoid marriage, it would be
kinder, wouldn’t it, to a little more avoid men?’
Mrs. Egerton didn’t point out how, in a house that was practically
always full of them, they were to be avoided. She only smiled
caressingly and said, ‘There is nothing in the world your father and I
want less than to get rid of you, dearest.’
Viola knew that she had an ideal home, but she wanted sometime or other
to get out of it, and of course she didn’t want to be unkind.
So when the third applicant came she accepted him. He was young,
handsome, intelligent, and extravagantly in love with her. Viola really
rather wanted to accept him. She thought it would be nice to go off
alone together. It was always exciting when he came, and dull when he
went.
She could do whatever she liked with him.
It was like owning a very intelligent dog who picks up tricks in a flash
and never snaps at his biscuit till you say the word.
It was true that Viola was not sure that she wanted to marry him, but
then she wasn’t sure that she wanted to marry any one, she was only sure
that she didn’t want not to be married at all.
This man was the kind of husband she had always meant to have. He was
cleverer than she was; he knew all about politics and had real books she
had never heard of. He held his own easily in the society of much older
men.
He had a pleasant wit and the air of never being left behind. He, too,
would give Viola that reassuring sense of social security which her
mother gave her.
Perhaps he would give her more, and reassure her sometimes wondering
sense of moral questions, a little overlooked in the pressure of daily
life.
But though he was the kind of man Viola wanted, he wasn’t the man
himself. Nothing in her heart but pity responded to his pleading,
burning eyes. Unfortunately she had a great deal of pity, and she did
not know that pity can be cruel when it is given instead of love.
Mrs. Egerton comforted her by assuring Viola that love came gradually
with nice women, and that the nicer they were the more gradually it
came.
Her father said with even more than his usual confidence in his own
judgment, ‘What I like about him, my darling, is he’s all right. You’ve
chosen a white man.’ His future son-in-law was the son of his
co-director.
Harry kissed her and said she was a lucky girl, and he hoped she’d
invite him to Scotland and make her husband buy a yacht. A marriage
founded on these simple principles couldn’t, in Harry’s eyes, go very
far wrong.
Viola put her hand on his shoulder and said thoughtfully, ‘Harry, I wish
I knew more about men,’ and Harry chuckled and said, ‘You will, old
girl, you will,’ but of course what Viola had meant was _first_.
No one had tried to influence her about her engagement. She wasn’t being
deceived or hoodwinked, no essential fact was kept from her.
She knew all about love; the only thing she had not had much opportunity
of learning anything about was life.
CHAPTER XXVI
Viola stood in the doorway looking at Jim thoughtfully. She was
wondering how she was going to talk for half an hour to a man who came
to dinner in a blue serge suit.
Mr. Egerton had warned her that Jim Barton would be early, and that he
wanted her to be particularly nice to him.
‘The fellow can do me a great deal of harm,’ he had explained, ‘That’s
why I’ve asked him to dinner.
‘He isn’t any class at all and your mother’s horrified. She never
understands business. He’s a tremendous speaker and does what he likes
with my men; if I could get him to go easy with them for a bit we might
avoid a strike—it’ll be extremely inconvenient if they strike before
Christmas. And very often a woman’s tact, you know——’
Mr. Egerton trailed away on this tribute to woman, leaving Viola to fill
out exactly what he meant by it.
Viola never pressed any of her father’s points. She had an uneasy
feeling that he wouldn’t like the pressure, and that if she pressed hard
enough she might not like the points.
Her father adored her, and she couldn’t bear to imagine herself ashamed
of him. Mr. Egerton was a man full of conscious superiority and the
habits of command, but he was too much of a gentleman not to cover these
qualities by an exaggerated air of deference as long as he wasn’t being
directly opposed. It would have been absurd to connect him with anything
at all shabby.
And yet Viola often felt that all he had was unsubstantial, and that
behind his safeties of possession and control ran a very small stream of
spirit.
She felt instinctively that it wasn’t quite fair to her, or even to a
common man, to make her coax him into being accommodating. But she was
going to do it. It would have been a more direct violence to Viola’s
sense of taste not to fall in with her father’s plans. He counted on her
to help him. So she kissed him with an irritated tenderness, and refused
to look her scruples in the face.
She guessed that what her father had meant by tact was that she should
look particularly nice, so that she took a placid, unhurried hour to
dress for the evening.
She wore a dress she had designed for herself; the bodice was a strip of
filmy old lace, as light as foam, and the skirt came out all round her
in the shape of a butterfly’s wings, pale yellow and dark orange.
She wore her lover’s emeralds, but with a sudden impulse she took them
off and put nothing in their place.
‘You’re Mr. Barton, I think,’ she said gently. ‘Won’t you sit down.’
The young man stood there staring at her with immense and curious blue
eyes. He seemed unconscious of the need for him to do anything else, but
at the sound of her voice he shook hands a little uncertainly and sat
down on an uncomfortable chair; he made it look more uncomfortable by
crossing his hands over his knees and leaning forward. It was a charming
room, and Jim had been admiring it greatly before Viola came in; but he
no longer saw it—the green brocade curtains, light as spring leaves
against the background of old oak, faded away from him—he ceased to
notice the shining splendour of the solid silver candle-sticks in their
old cut glass brackets, or the Venetian leather screen with its dim and
broken browns and golds.
Instead he saw, as his eyes met Viola’s, a Kingfisher darting its
jewelled flight across a sunny stream. Something as solid and as light
pierced suddenly into his heart and would not fly away.
‘I’m afraid I’m altogether too early,’ he said humbly after a pause. ‘I
came on after a meeting. My home is in Poplar; it was too far to go
back.’
‘Poplar,’ Viola repeated thoughtfully. She hadn’t any idea where Poplar
was—it might have been some little place in the north of Russia for all
she knew to the contrary. ‘Of course, much too far,’ she agreed with a
smile. ‘But I’m very glad you came early—I wanted to talk to you, and
I’m always shy when everybody is there and expecting me to behave
properly. My father tells me you’re like him—awfully interested in
working men. I want you to tell me all about them.’
Jim’s eyes grew veiled, his heavy chin, a trifle underhung, swung
forward, as he bent to answer her.
‘I’m one of the working men myself,’ he said; ‘I’m not a bit like your
father, and you ought to use a stronger word than interested. I’m
involved in all their interests.’
She flushed under the weight of his contradiction. It gave her the
braced, tingling feeling of a sudden plunge into cold water. It might,
when you got used to it, be nice, but it took your breath away.
She had never talked to a man who treated her less as if she were a
woman. Jim seemed to force her relentlessly away from her advantages of
beauty and of sex. But it was not because her beauty failed to move him.
The last ten years of his life had been a perpetual struggle between Jim
and the force of his passions; he was a man ridden by impulses and
attractions, and he had taught himself to let the strongest of them be
nothing but an incentive to put him on his guard.
‘I don’t know what you want to know about us,’ he said with a sudden,
keen, disarming smile, ‘but there’s no harm in your asking.’
Viola thought it a pity that a man with so nice a smile should speak as
if he belonged to a class which she had been brought up to think was
little better than criminal. She tried to cut him adrift from it.
‘But you’re educated,’ she protested. ‘You can’t really have anything in
common with people who don’t think and read?’
‘Oh, I’m on the other side of that barrier,’ said Jim with his curious,
twisted smile. ‘I daresay if I’d got culture I might have lost my soul,
but I stopped at education, and that only made me rather convinced to
stick to my class. All the thought and reading in the world, Miss
Egerton, aren’t confined to the few clever people who have time to do
them in. The rest of us pick up a thing or two!
‘If you were to go to a working men’s meeting you would discover that
I’m rather below the average.’
‘I don’t think I should discover that,’ said Viola. ‘But I thought
working men never read anything but newspapers and spent their evenings
in public houses?’
Jim groaned. ‘There,’ he said. ‘You would think _that_, and you think
we’re ignorant! Why the working man who says the archbishop is walking
about in boots paid for out of his pocket, doesn’t know _less_ what he’s
talking about! Of course we’ve none of us had much chance of education.
Do you know the State closes its normal benefits in that direction at
thirteen? But something can be done if you’ve a mind for it—and a good
many of us have nowadays. Only it’s hard not to get beaten out of the
race by too heavy a load to start with. And you’re right—drink’s a
curse! If public houses could only be made _more_ public, with food and
fun in them—but then the poor brewers would have to suffer, wouldn’t
they? And we all know about the widows and orphans who seem invariably
to put their savings into beer. But it’s just as much a mistake, even
while we’re keeping all the widows and orphans’ heads out of water, by
the drink monopoly, to suppose all working men drink as to suppose all
pretty girls flirt—they don’t, do they?’
Viola stiffened. This young man was not her equal, and he was behaving
as if he was, while quite rightly asserting that he wasn’t.
She put him in his place, but she did it gently. His eyes went on
laughing, even after this uncomfortable operation had been successfully
performed.
‘It seems such a pity,’ she said, ignoring what she thought he should
not have said, ‘that working men won’t understand what is good for
them.’ She was going on, but Jim interrupted her.
‘I suppose they’re like the rest of us,’ he said. ‘They prefer what’s
attractive. It’s not in me to blame them, Miss Egerton.’
Viola frowned a little.
‘My father is always arranging lectures,’ she went on steadily, ‘and
excellent classes for his men who want to come—but so few of them ever
do.’
‘Do you like lectures?’ Jim asked with apparent submission. ‘I always
think they’re rather like being told how to behave.’
The colour rose suddenly under Viola’s clear, pale skin. He was
literally the only man who had ever made her blush. But she decided it
was because he was the only man who had ever been rude to her.
‘Sometimes,’ she said coldly, ‘even that is necessary.’
‘Still,’ said Jim with unshakable good humour, ‘people won’t pay a penny
a night for it—or a shilling the course, I forget which. Wonderfully
little if you get what you like, but an awful lot if you don’t.’
Viola reminded herself that her mission was to conciliate, so she
dropped the subject of lectures.
‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if you know, Mr. Barton, how much my father cares
about his dockers? I think he would do anything for their good—and it
seems such a mistake for you not to work together, doesn’t it? I always
think we lose so much force by our lack of unity.’
‘If good was jam,’ Jim answered, ‘and your father could keep it in a
cupboard and spoon it out regularly to the men, I believe he’d give them
quite a lot.
‘He’s a benevolent despot, as I expect you are really, and you won’t
mind my saying that from my point of view they’re the worst sort,
because it’s so hard to make up one’s mind to do them in!’
‘I don’t see why you should suppose that necessary,’ objected Viola, ‘if
you admit we’re benevolent.’
‘Oh, but good’s not jam,’ said Jim. ‘It’s something men ought to get for
themselves if their conditions enable them to do it, and if not, they’ve
got to alter the conditions, and while the conditions are being altered
benevolent despots will have to rip. Unfortunately the process of
ripping is extremely painful; and, naturally enough, the benevolent
despots think it awfully wrong. What they can’t understand is that the
sacredness of a good position is only felt by the people who have it.
‘Look at your father, for instance. It’s very difficult for him, because
he’s made the conditions, to see that they need altering. They fit him
all right, and while he’s kindly supplying his jam there we are trying
to pull the ground from under his feet! I’m afraid it isn’t likely that
we can act together, Miss Egerton.’
Viola tried to steady her mind to answer him, but her wits felt like
scattered birds, and all the while something in her answered him—his
eyes had the sparkle of a frosty morning, and the force behind them
invaded her like the drive of the sea.
She shifted her ground with a sense of a precarious foot-hold.
‘Think of what my father gives,’ she said eagerly. ‘His contribution is
not to be compared to the men’s—he gives his capital and his brains;
and he takes all the risks. A big shipping business with its cut-throat
competition, and its constant accidents, is an immense responsibility.
He knows better than the men under what conditions it can be profitably
run, and it is not fair to speak as if his perfectly reasonable returns
make the conditions of his men’s work harder. He has to study the trade
as a whole, and you forget, while they get their wages paid exactly the
same, he has the losses as well as the gains for his share of the
business.’
The laughter died out of Jim’s eyes. She saw for the first time the
hard, fighting look which made him a formidable and not too merciful
antagonist.
He did not answer her at once. Indeed for a moment he had forgotten her.
His eyes saw instead the row upon row of small gray houses, interminable
and monotonous, about the distant docks. The sunk, drab life of the men
he lived amongst, the pallor and ugliness of their youth, which had been
built for strength and beauty, shook his heart. The thought of the
neglected, tired children crying in the gutters and the dust, made
bitter lines come into his hard young face.
‘Oh, you don’t see,’ he said in a different tone. ‘You can’t see. You’re
not looking straight.
‘You talk of what men like your father put into their businesses—but
you don’t reckon what they take out of them!
‘All we want, we others, is to be in a position to put in as much. We’d
stand our chance of the losses; you don’t live on the edge of nothing
and fear losses. What we want is to have leisure enough, quiet enough,
comfort enough, to make our brains _tell_. You see, it’s waste for a man
to have his brain pinched out of him, by dirt and bad air, and the food
which comes from such conditions. You say, look what your father
gives—but have you thought what we do? We give toil. We don’t live far
off from the Godforsaken mud flats where the docks have to be, in a
house like this, to have our times off in comfort. We don’t start work
at ten after a breakfast as big as all our meals put together, and a
thousand times more nourishing, and we don’t go to a luxurious office in
a motor car, and sit for a few hours giving orders, with clean hands,
from a leather arm-chair.
‘A man’s toil is himself, and when we’ve used ourselves up for the day,
where’s the margin to be amiable and brilliant—or even to be
intelligent and decent, when we come home in the evening, though the
majority of work-people _are_ intelligent and decent?
‘I tell you what we want is margin, and we’ve got to have it!’
Jim did not raise his voice as he finished, but it had a peculiar
compelling quality, as if he added to the words he used the whole force
of his personality. He confronted you out of his arguments, as the angel
confronted the baffled Adam and Eve, with his righteous flaming sword.
Viola’s face grew set, and her charming arched brows ceased to look like
an inquiring flower. It was horrid of this man to talk as if tiresome
and painful things had anything to do with them, when they had invited
him to dinner. It was especially unfair to say that Viola didn’t see
straight, when she went on seeing straight even after it had made her
uncomfortable. She didn’t know any girls of her own age who danced
properly and were half as sorry for the poor.
She looked over Jim’s head and asked if he had noticed when he came in
if it was still raining?
And then he laughed at her. He deliberately laughed at her, as if she
was a naughty but engaging child.
‘Come,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t bear me malice for giving you my point of
view. You had me here to convert me to yours, didn’t you? Well—I’ll
have to show you first what to convert me from!’
Viola trembled with annoyance. How dared he speak as if he had been
lured into a trap? She, who was the cheese in the trap, rebelled more
against Jim’s audacity in discovering it than she had against the idea
of the deception.
Viola wanted some one to step in front of her and take her place, to
fight down the rising sense of excitement and alarm this strange man
gave her, and to make him look as cheap as she knew he wasn’t, and as,
for a moment, he had made her feel that she was. And as she looked
around her with desperate eyes for an intervention, the door opened and
they fell upon her chosen champion.
Reginald Ainley stood there fingering his effective monocle.
Viola gave a little sigh of relief. He was immaculately dressed, as
smooth as a peach, and as slender as a walking stick.
She thought for a moment that he had all the virtues and would be the
answer to the strange breathlessness at her heart.
Her eyes ran hurriedly from one man to the other, unconsciously
measuring them.
Jim was an inch shorter than Ainley, he was more heavily built, there
was a mixture of strength in his clumsiness and of clumsiness in his
strength. His rough-hewn, unfinished face had no attraction beyond the
beauty of his blue, steady eyes, and of those even he was unconscious,
for no one had ever pulled him together by appealing to his vanity.
There was no clumsiness at all in Ainley. He was straight-backed and as
supple as a racer. He looked like a classical Rodin, and Jim like one of
the sculptor’s later rough-hewn works, when he wished to arrive at the
confusion and grandeur of the soul and left the fine small finish of the
animal to look after itself.
‘I’ve had the pleasure,’ said Ainley after a quick, appreciative glance
at Viola, ‘of hearing you speak, Mr. Barton, mingled with the gall of
disagreeing with all you had to say—but I’m delighted to meet you for
the first time in private life.’
‘You’ve forgotten,’ said Jim. ‘We’ve met before, Mr. Ainley. I’m that
boy off a barge who was so out of place at Warren Manor.’
Ainley’s eyes narrowed; he was more disconcerted than he cared to show.
‘Now, that’s very odd,’ he said pleasantly; ‘two fellows from old
Bligh’s knocking against each other after all these years—ten, isn’t
it? I will say this for you, Barton: you’re uncommonly changed.’
‘No,’ said Jim. ‘I’ve had three hundred a year left me, and been to a
University, but I’m not changed—nor, from the look of you are you.’
The hostility behind Ainley’s smile deepened, and yet it was Jim who
looked the least at ease of the two men.
Ainley turned to Viola and told her an amusing anecdote of the Blighs.
It was a friendly anecdote and pleasantly included Jim.
Viola did not listen very carefully; she thought it was a pity Mr.
Barton hadn’t any manners. She wondered if Reggie could have convinced
him that he was wrong. She wondered, if Reggie had tried, whether she
herself would have been convinced that Mr. Barton was wrong?
He had been horrid, but to be horrid is not necessarily (though Viola
would have liked to think it was) to be wrong.
CHAPTER XXVII
The dinner went off quite as well as any one could have expected. It was
rather like playing at bran pie. You put your hand into a disintegrating
substance and drew out something you had not expected to find. It might
be a thimble or a gollywog, but it was seldom appropriate, and it never
seemed to lead at all naturally to anything else.
Jim didn’t know any of the people they did, and he talked without ease,
solidly, as if talking were an excavating process.
He used his knives and forks correctly, but he didn’t know how to use
his ideas; they lacked the smooth shallowness of custom. It was as if he
only spoke to find something—or—when he meant what he said. Mr.
Egerton and Reggie were wonderfully deft and adaptable, but Viola
thought it a curiously long and slightly precarious evening. They were
always so very near something that might break.
When Viola was alone at last, and Cèleste had arranged the reading-lamp
carefully by her bed, and noiselessly closed the door, she did not begin
to read. She lay with her very small head on a very large expanse of
spotless linen pillow, thinking over the evening.
She took up a book beautifully bound for her by Ainley, whose taste in
books always went as far as their covers, then she put it down again.
‘I should like,’ she said to herself, ‘to hear him preach. I think he
wasn’t free to speak to-night. He was like some one who expects to get
caught. He ate perfectly properly. I think Reggie must have exaggerated
what he was like at the Blighs.’ I ought to go and call on Mrs. Bligh
some day. He has a funny Cockney voice. I don’t see why he doesn’t take
elocution lessons. I wish father hadn’t been so nice to him. Reggie
doesn’t like him. He was much nicer than father really—it didn’t show,
his being nice, but he doesn’t like him. I don’t myself, really, only he
isn’t like any one else.
‘I’m rather glad mother didn’t meet him——’ Viola flushed suddenly
under the disloyalty of her thoughts. Mrs. Egerton had sent a polite
message to her husband just before dinner—she hoped they would all
excuse her, but she had too bad a headache to leave her room. Viola knew
that Mrs. Egerton hadn’t got a headache; she was merely annoying her
husband. She knew, though she blamed herself for knowing it, that if
Mrs. Egerton had come down she would have been politely devastating to
Jim Barton; and that was why she hadn’t come down. Mrs. Egerton wished
to annoy her husband but she didn’t wish to spoil any of his business
arrangements. Mr. Egerton did not know this. He was merely very much
annoyed; and Harry and Reggie only wondered what was up.
Being a girl and being so dreadfully loved by a person so competent as
Mrs. Egerton was sometimes rather terrifying. It made you know what
people meant when you didn’t like their meanings.
It made your thoughts flicker in and out like frightened mice in the
house of an ever menacing cat. One good thing was, Viola hadn’t had to
have her evening talk with her mother, while her mind was still raw from
its contact with Jim. She could insert a little padding first, and she
was inserting the padding now.
Her mind ran unceasingly over the evening’s events. Her father had been
extraordinarily cordial; he had ordered champagne, and Mr. Barton drank
nothing but water. It was somehow or other a great pity Mr. Barton drank
nothing but water.
Mr. Egerton said, ‘Tee-totaller?’ and Mr. Barton had replied, ‘Yes—but
against my principles! I believe in doing all natural and delightful
things, but I’ve given up alcohol as a protest against its abuse.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Mr. Egerton had said, ‘it is the crime of the class you work
amongst.’
‘It’s the only crime they can all get hold of equally easily,’ Jim had
answered. ‘They can’t afford the more expensive crimes.’
Her father had dropped the subject, and, still with the air of overdone
consideration, had started up the topic of religion, but Mr. Barton
wouldn’t be drawn into it. He simply listened. He probably hadn’t agreed
at all, or else he had an idea that her father wasn’t sincere—that
would have been horrible; there was no reason why one shouldn’t talk
pleasantly and tactfully about religion without believing in it.
Then Harry came in late—she must speak to him about it—her father was
obviously very angry—that is to say, he’d said, ‘Late as usual, Harry,’
and raised an eyebrow. Reggie had been more sensible. He had got off
religion and taken up swimming and rowing—Mr. Barton had been in a
trial eight at Cambridge, but he hadn’t had enough time to get his blue.
Then they talked about Germany. Mr. Barton hadn’t been to Germany—but
he admired the Germans; that was a pity. Reggie and the _Morning Post_
disliked Germans very much, and felt sure they would have to be fought
and beaten. Mr. Barton said we ought to make friends with them, that
they were, on the whole—if they weren’t too conceited and militant—the
best people on the Continent. Reggie agreed they were too conceited, but
he didn’t agree they were good, and he thought we ought to be a great
deal more militant. Poor Mr. Barton was a pacifist—that had to come
out. It did suddenly, as if some one had upset a glass of wine by
mistake. Harry brought it out. He said, ‘But that sounds as if you
didn’t believe in war,’ and Mr. Barton had said very quickly, with quite
the most fighting eyes in the world, ‘I don’t.’
‘Never?’ the astonished Harry had blurted out. ‘Not if a man went for
you?’
‘Least of all then,’ Jim Barton had said. ‘Perhaps if he went for
somebody else—but there are usually better methods——’
‘I’m hanged if I know what they are!’ Harry had exclaimed. Then Reggie
had intervened, and very nicely, without being a bit prejudiced,
laughing all the time, he had shown how little good arbitration and the
Hague Conference were or ever would be. He had explained everything so
well that her father said it couldn’t be better put. Viola herself
believed Mr. Barton would be convinced now.
But he wasn’t convinced. He said, ‘So you think the brains of men will
always be chained to gunpowder? I don’t.’ But he hadn’t gone on with it.
Reggie had asked him if he’d read _The Riddle of the Sands_. But Mr.
Barton hadn’t read it. He said he’d read books in German that were the
same kind of thing. He added, ‘I don’t like inflammatory stuff.’
Viola told him about the Navy League herself—she belonged to it—and
she had explained how very necessary it was for England to be prepared,
then nothing would happen. But Jim had laughed at her and said, ‘When
you dress to go out, don’t you go out? I think I should if I had a ball
dress on!’
Reggie had explained that if you happen to be the richest country in the
world it is wiser not to be unarmed in the society of thieves.
‘Yes, if you must look on other countries as thieves, and if you will be
burdened with riches,’ Jim had replied. Unfortunately he was not even an
Imperialist.
It was really very puzzling for any one not to be an Imperialist.
Not exactly wicked, of course, but rather like having a principle
against eating your own breakfast. It was worse to be a teetotaller and
pacifist, because in a kind of way temperance and peace were virtues,
and it is such bad form to have virtues that other people don’t care
much about. Besides teetotallers and pacifists were usually awful
creatures and yet Mr. Barton didn’t look very awful when he smiled.
Of course she wouldn’t see him again unless she went to hear him preach
at Poplar. There must be a map of London in the house; she had
discovered that Poplar was in London.
The men had been ages over their wine—Viola had known they would be.
Harry was going out to a dance. He had rushed in and asked who that
awful bounder was, kissed her and advised her to come with him; when she
told him she couldn’t he had rushed out. But the others were downstairs
for ages, persuading Mr. Barton not to encourage the horrid strike. She
wondered how they were doing it. Then they came upstairs and she saw
they hadn’t persuaded him.
Her father was naturally very much annoyed, and had asked her to sing
something. Reggie was full of jokes, but somehow or other Viola had felt
that under the jokes Reggie was even more annoyed than her father.
She sang ‘The Rosary,’ because every one was singing it.
Her little beautiful voice had slipped its golden sound over all their
troubled spirits, and charmed them into peace. When she had finished
singing she saw that there were tears in Mr. Barton’s eyes. He did not
speak at all.
She had gone on singing, but she had felt a curious trembling in her
limbs which she had never felt before while she sang, as if all the
chords of her being vibrated and were stirred cruelly by the beauty of
sound. She couldn’t go on very long; though none of them had wanted her
to stop.
Mr. Barton went away at once, and her father had letters to write.
Reggie had kissed her. Of course he had a perfect right to kiss her.
It was funny that poets thought love so exquisite, when it really seemed
rather tiresome—like being trodden on by mistake. Well, of course,
Reggie was a dear and she would get used to it. Sometimes even now she
liked it, and she always liked Reggie. They were to go and look at some
furniture to-morrow. Reggie had said it was just what they wanted, but
Viola wondered, because she knew so very well exactly what she liked
furniture to be, if it would be what she wanted?
Reggie spoke as if their tastes would naturally be exactly the same.
They liked the same dances, the same songs, the same books, the same
houses—not always the same people; probably they would like the same
furniture. Only it rather mattered, because you had to live with
furniture—and people, too, of course mattered. You had to live with
people. Being married meant the same people, and even more the same
person—always the same person.
Some people were not easy to know. You never had enough of them—they
were formidable—exciting—strange. You wanted to find out what they
meant. They weren’t just tidy and clean and in love with you.
Viola put out the light and snuggled down into the vast expanse of her
very soft dark bed. She tried to see Reggie’s face—she ought to
accustom herself to dream of it, but she couldn’t—his eyeglasses seemed
to get in the way, and quite unbidden, startling—almost alarming in
their intensity—she saw a pair of very vivid blue eyes looking straight
at her—the darkness could not hide them—the enormous security of her
engagement was no barrier to them. All that was built up around her for
defence and solidity slipped away from her. She was alone in the dark
facing those blue eyes—they asked her nothing at all, but they were
extraordinarily formidable.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Viola awoke in the morning to that sharp contraction of the heart with
which instinct defies reason.
She knew that there was nothing wrong; but she didn’t want to have to
talk to her mother.
It was not the first time she had felt that her intimacy with Mrs.
Egerton had penalties attached to it. If a person knows you very well
they may cross without warning the threshold of your consciousness. You
feel that their mind impinges upon your mind, and that when they
withdraw they take away with them something precious and secret which
was your own.
The young, with their undefined dreams and insecure possessions, resent
these pressures and disclosures. They have no ready weapon against the
mastery of searching love. They only know that what they have not yet
found for themselves, they do not want found, and perhaps judged, by
more expert eyes.
Viola dressed slowly; she wondered if she would be clever enough to
avoid talking about that strange man? She had nothing to do with him
really, but she found his image waiting for her, without impatience, but
with a curious solidity, wherever her imagination turned. It was not
like being pursued, but it was like constantly arriving at the same
spot.
Viola had read that people who get lost walk round and round in circles
continually coming to where they had started from; but then they didn’t
want to arrive there.
They didn’t have that curious little shock of half pleasure and half
surprise that Viola had when at any pause in her mind—quite
unexpectedly—she saw Jim. She went to her mother’s room at her usual
time, but her eyes had a veiled look, and she spoke in a tiresome modern
tone, a kind of slangy nonchalance which she knew her mother
particularly disliked. Mrs. Egerton made no secret of the fact that
jauntiness made her flesh creep, and she knew that Viola was never
jaunty unless she had something to hide.
Viola kissed her mother with tenderness and tried to put conviction into
her inquiries about the headache. Mrs. Egerton dismissed it with a
heroic gesture.
‘My poor darling,’ she said pityingly. ‘Did you have a perfectly
wretched evening?’
Viola straightened her slim figure and looked vaguely about her for a
chair.
‘It wasn’t half bad,’ she dropped. ‘Reggie was quite amusing.’ After all
it was perfectly natural for her to talk as if it was Reggie who
mattered.
‘Darling, he’s brilliant,’ Mrs. Egerton murmured. Her private reflection
was that Reggie had probably done something silly, and that she had
better find out what it was. ‘And that dreadful man,’ she said aloud, ‘I
suppose he turned up? Mr. What’s-his name, who belongs to the Salvation
Army?’
‘Does he?’ asked Viola, not meeting her mother’s eyes; ‘I thought he had
a sect of his own. Yes, he turned up all right.’
‘Poor dear!’ sighed Mrs. Egerton. ‘I suppose he wore blue serge and
tried to shake hands with Hobbs in the hall. I can’t quite see why we
should have had the bother of him; but I do hope that, as you and Reggie
had to sacrifice your evening together, this eccentric young docker
agreed to whatever your father had in mind?’
‘I don’t think he did agree particularly,’ Viola replied. ‘He wasn’t a
very agreeing kind of person.’
‘They never are,’ said Mrs. Egerton resignedly. ‘It’s so unfortunate
that when the poor become educated they lose all sense of gratitude to
the class above them. When I was young, if you asked a person like that
to dinner—only, of course, you never did—they would have agreed to
anything.’ Viola looked up quickly. She couldn’t have said exactly what
she felt; part of it was anger, and part of it astonishment at a
familiar point of view, which suddenly seemed astonishing; but most of
it was downright pain.
She was so much hurt that she instantly fell back upon her safest line
of defence; she didn’t say anything at all.
‘Your father, and Reggie as well, seemed to think it important to tone
him down a little,’ Mrs. Egerton went on after a pause, ‘so I hoped you
had helped them to succeed. What did you wear, darling?’
‘Oh, that nasturtium thing with the lace,’ said Viola. ‘Can we get
anything for you while we are shopping, mother? I am going out with
Reggie furniture hunting.’
‘Nothing, dearest, thank you; and you sang to them?’
‘Yes,’ said Viola.
‘And afterwards you and Reggie had a nice little talk?’
‘We had an hour alone together, I think,’ said Viola steadily. ‘I looked
at the clock.’
‘My dearest child,’ murmured Mrs. Egerton, ‘how modern you are! We poor
old lovers never looked at clocks!’
Viola turned suddenly towards her mother, her cheeks turned from their
pale clear cream to deep carnation. ‘You don’t mind my asking you, do
you,’ she said with terrible young directness. ‘But _were_ you and
father really lovers?’
Mrs. Egerton put down her cup of chocolate very carefully. ‘I adored
your father,’ she said decisively. ‘He was like that picture of Sir
Galahad, you know the one we have in the hall behind the door? One’s not
quite sure if he’s meant to be dead or not. But, of course, your father
didn’t wear his hair quite so long.’
‘What stopped your adoring him, mother,’ Viola went on with a breathless
sensation of daring, which she felt might be going to cost her more than
it cost her mother.
Mrs. Egerton met her anxious eyes with an ironical indulgence.
‘Thirty years, I think, dear’ she said gently, ‘or perhaps the city. I
was very romantic and silly, your father was always thoroughly sensible.
We settled down perfectly. _You_ are my romance now, Viola. I never gave
romance up. I transferred it to you.’
‘Oh, but you’ve had it!’ cried Viola. She knew now she was giving
herself away, but she couldn’t help it—something in her had to come out
and find shelter. It was afraid to be alone in her heart. ‘What worries
me is—I don’t feel like that at all about Reggie. There isn’t any
romance!’
There was a short pause before Mrs. Egerton found the wisest thing to
say.
‘I think your’s,’ she said tenderly, ‘is all before you, Viola. You are
in some ways very immature, and love is coming to you slowly and
incompletely—as all great things (which are going to be permanent)
come. You do like and trust Reggie?’
‘I like him very much indeed,’ agreed Viola; ‘and of course I trust
him.’
‘Oh, how lightly you say that, darling,’ murmured her mother, ‘as if to
be able to trust a man was a very little thing! You don’t know what it
is yet—the immensity of being able to trust your husband! Why, half the
women in London can’t—and even the other half—— But you are quite
safe, for if I had not _known_ that Reggie was to be trusted——’
‘I should never have liked him, should I?’ Viola unexpectedly
interrupted.
‘No—I don’t suppose I ever liked any one you have not provided for me
to like——’
‘My darling girl,’ said her mother softly, ‘do you suppose I want you to
get your disappointments from my hands? If I can stand between you and
the first dreadful sharpness of young mistakes, I shall be infinitely
thankful.’
But that didn’t seem to be what Viola meant. She sat there obstinately
saying nothing, as if she wanted her young mistakes.
Mrs. Egerton’s skilled mind ran back swiftly over the conversation.
Viola was apparently ready to speak about Reggie, but she was unwilling,
or was she only bored, when the conversation turned on that unspeakable
socialist? Had the blue serge person said anything to upset her? Viola
had always been over-sensitive about the poor—her mother quite
sympathised with her attitude. It seemed to her, as long as you didn’t
do anything tiresome, quite the right feeling for a young girl to have.
She had herself suggested to Viola two very excellent societies: one for
giving factory girls holidays, and one for providing babies with
artificial food.
Whenever Viola felt badly about the poor, she had the societies, and
whenever she didn’t feel badly, the societies ran on quite comfortably
without her. Mrs. Egerton subscribed heavily to both.
It was an excellent arrangement, and it would be just like a socialist
to say something to upset it.
It did not enter into Mrs. Egerton’s conception of life that the
personality of the man himself could have upset Viola. It is doubtful if
she thought that people beneath a certain social standing had any
personality. They might have good looks, but girls, unless they were
fast, did not run any danger from a common man’s good looks.
‘Dearest,’ she said firmly, ‘I think you are worried about something.
Sometimes I know one feels oppressed with life, and everything seems to
stop pleasing. Directly you came in this morning I thought to myself
that you had something pricking against your happiness. Tell me what it
is?’
It was uncanny the power her mother had of slipping past her defences
into Viola’s mind, but there was something which had escaped her. Viola
herself did not know the importance of this escape.
She only felt faintly relieved that Jim Barton wasn’t really in the
conversation at all. She had nearly forgotten him herself now in her
anxiety about her engagement, but she hadn’t forgotten that she didn’t
want to talk about him.
‘I suppose the trouble is,’ she said slowly, ‘that I don’t really know
if I’m happy or not. I keep expecting to be happy.’
Her mother’s eyes darkened as they met hers.
‘Ah, my dear!’ she said. ‘Thank God you’ve never known unhappiness!’
‘No,’ agreed Viola quietly, ‘I don’t think I have—but what I feel is
that I may be going to!’
Mrs. Egerton kissed her, and said with decision, ‘Never, if I can help
it, darling. There’s a cold wind—put on your furs. And don’t worry
Reggie about your feelings. He’d be desperate about them, and we don’t
need to be desperate yet, do we?’
Viola returned her kiss, but she wasn’t perfectly satisfied. She wasn’t
quite sure whether she needed to be desperate or not.
As soon as Viola had closed the door Mrs. Egerton rang for the Bradshaw.
‘This is a very serious business,’ she said to herself, ‘and if I’m not
very careful something odious is sure to happen. Reggie hasn’t half
enough tact, he’s too much in love, poor boy; and as for Viola, she
deserves to be slapped. She has always had a curious tendency to avoid
what is suitable. It makes her very unreliable. I had better take her
away from Reggie for a month. Then Paris, then the wedding. Engagements
are always unsatisfactory.
‘There is a great deal too much emotion about, without one’s knowing
quite what to do with it. Perhaps I was silly not to let her get used to
flirting. But innocence is so rare nowadays, and whatever people say to
the contrary, still very attractive to men.
‘Unfortunately, Viola always carries things to extremes. At her age,
with even less experience, I had as much innocence as was convenient to
everybody, and no more. I think we’d better try Eastbourne; it’s
sufficiently amusing, and sounds healthy enough to make a good excuse.’
Mrs. Egerton’s mind was one that never overlooked details.
CHAPTER XXIX
Viola thought it the largest wardrobe she had ever seen; the largest,
the ugliest, and the most shining.
It hung over all the other furniture as a monstrous Royal Museum hangs
over the meaner dwelling places unfortunate enough to surround it. It
was not only hideous, it was dwarfing. Viola confronted it with
compressed lips and lifted eyebrows. She saw in its bright polished
surface the whole of her future. She would always have things like this,
in her new life—expensive, shining objects which she wouldn’t like.
Reggie stood beside her expectant and gratified.
‘This is a really good thing,’ he explained, ‘I thought it would do for
our own room. It costs a hundred guineas, and I think it’s worth it.’
‘It is indeed, sir,’ said the shopman respectfully. ‘We consider it one
of our finest articles.’
‘It was worth a hundred guineas,’ Viola said to herself, ‘but it wasn’t
worth anything else. It certainly wasn’t worth a thought.
‘It’s so large,’ she objected aloud. ‘We should have to let it out in
flats, and I should feel so terribly overlooked if I woke up face to
face with it in the morning.’
‘Well, we’ve got to have a wardrobe,’ said Reggie patiently. He had been
patient several times already, because Viola had been persistently
unsatisfactory.
She had not taken a proper interest in what he showed her; she asked if
they couldn’t order things in lumps without looking at them, and when he
had made her look at them she had seemed to fade away into something
unsubstantial.
She had, earlier in the day, expressed one or two personal preferences
for weird things, but Reggie wasn’t going to have anything weird in the
house.
He knew exactly what he wanted, and Viola obviously didn’t—she only
knew what she didn’t want.
Reggie wished to have his furniture a little better, a little more
expensive, and generally a little larger than other people’s; but of
course the same kind of furniture.
He was quite willing to have beautiful objects if they weren’t queer.
‘I don’t want this wardrobe,’ said Viola with unusual finality. ‘I don’t
want it at all!’
She had ceased to see it as a wardrobe. It became instead a polished
mirror of the future. In it she saw her mother-in-law, a stout,
good-looking woman with just the right jewels, hair, and finger-nails a
little too conscious of them, and of her religion, which didn’t
interfere with them, but was extremely high. She had been brought up a
Nonconformist in a small provincial town, but it was quite wonderful how
she had got on in London.
All Viola’s new sisters-in-law appeared in its polished surface,
successfully married to city men, and one even more successfully to a
Lord. Viola saw their fine pink children, their firm, fixed ideas. You
always knew just what they thought of the Government, food, education
and religion, and just what kind of places they would go to in the
summer.
If it wasn’t Buxton it would be Harrogate; and if it wasn’t Harrogate it
was Eastbourne, but it was always a place full of ozone and expensive
hotels, where every one had the same ideas.
In the end, Viola thought, they would have the same tombstones, but they
would have the same ideas until the tombstones came, fastened inflexibly
over them, like these wide marble slabs which made the bare idea of
resurrection incredible. It was a mistake to suppose the last trump
would rouse Reggie’s relations, unless it was blown by a butler and they
thought it was the dinner bell.
She turned away from the dreadful picture of her enveloped future to her
young, handsome lover, but in his eyes she divined the same spirit; he
had been pouring it into her all day on the torrent of his affections.
She couldn’t quite have said what the spirit was, but it seemed to stand
for the pressure of all the material world. Viola had always, from time
to time, secretly rebelled against the material world, but she had never
felt a rebellion as sharp as this.
‘It is guaranteed to keep its polish, madam,’ the shopman remarked
persuasively.
‘Oh, yes, I know, I know,’ said Viola a little wildly. ‘But it hasn’t
any shape; or if it has, it’s like a mausoleum without windows.’
‘Oh, come, Viola,’ Reggie objected, ‘it is exactly the same shape as any
other wardrobe.’
‘I won’t have it in my room,’ said Viola desperately, with the finality
of breaking glass.
The shopman turned discretely away, and Reggie met Viola’s eyes with
astonished hostility. He grasped in a flash that they were in the middle
of a crisis, one of those unexpected, important battlefields of love and
sex in which somebody was going to get their own way at the expense of
somebody else.
Reggie was an experienced hand in a crisis; he never gave way, and he
never spluttered. No one could manage a nervous horse or an angry
workman better.
All ignorant and weak creatures who based their opposition to Reggie on
the intensity of their emotion, found him easily their master.
But Reggie needed to have a good deal of power behind him, and he was
conscious that Viola’s small, pale face, set against him, robbed him of
half his force. He felt all the agonised ferocity of unshared passion,
and it made him want to shake Viola or to shout at her.
She stood there so maddeningly aloof, so lovely, so inciting, and such
an obstacle to what she incited. But Reggie quickly controlled every
feeling in him except that of his habitual mastery; it would never do to
let her see she could get her own way by showing temper.
‘My dear child,’ he said quietly, ‘you want your tea. I think we’d much
better take this wardrobe.’ He turned to the shopman. ‘You may put this
down on our list,’ he said with admirable coolness.
He knew Viola wouldn’t make a scene before the shopman, and she didn’t.
She didn’t even turn away from the wardrobe. For quite a perceptible
moment she went on looking at it. But when Reggie said, ‘Come along old
girl, and have some tea,’ she acted with curious decision.
‘I am going home now,’ Viola said quietly. ‘I don’t want any tea.’ But
as Reggie prepared to follow her into the motor she put up a small,
detaining hand and said to the footman, ‘John, you need not hold the
door open, Mr. Ainley is not coming back with me.’
Reggie lifted his alert eyebrows and wondered if this was a moment for a
further lesson in mastery. But there was none of the weakness of
provocation in the eyes which met his unflinchingly.
‘I am dismissed, then?’ he asked in a low voice. ‘But I shall see you
to-morrow—you are going to Clare’s?’
Viola’s slight inclination of the head might have been taken for
consent, or it might equally have been a sign to John to shut the door
and return to his seat. She gave no other sign before the motor slipped
off into Piccadilly.
It was an unsatisfactory stage in a quarrel for a parting, and Reggie
was hardly sure whether to consider it finished or not. Viola had not
smiled, but on the other hand Reggie had the wardrobe down on the list.
Mrs. Egerton met Viola in the hall.
‘You were so late, dear,’ she explained, ‘that I gave you up for tea and
came home, and now you look exhausted. You’ve not forgotten that we all
go to Clare’s to-morrow. She’s the new sister who has the pink pearls,
isn’t she?’
Viola’s eyes met her mother’s with precisely the same fixed opposition
Reggie had decided to override. ‘I am not going to Clare’s to-morrow,’
she said in a low voice. ‘I want to stay quietly at home.’
Mrs. Egerton’s lovely wondering eyes wavered for a moment, but they
showed no desire for mastery. On the contrary, they revealed nothing but
an access of maternal tenderness.
‘You’re tired, dearest,’ she murmured.
‘I want to be alone,’ said Viola, speaking as dispassionately as a girl
on the verge of tears could manage to speak.
‘I think you are very wise,’ said her mother soothingly. ‘Shopping is
terribly exhausting, and a quiet Sunday all by yourself is just what you
need. Of course Reggie will be broken-hearted, and Clare very
disappointed. It is never a good thing to disappoint one’s new
relations-in-law. But no doubt you’ve had it all out with Reggie
already?’
‘No,’ Viola admitted, ‘I don’t want to have it out. He’d make a fuss. I
don’t want to argue about it. I want to be left alone.’
‘But of course,’ agreed her mother, ‘nothing could be more simple and
natural. Go and lie down, darling. I will explain to Reggie.’
Mrs. Egerton’s explanations were not those which Viola would herself
have given, but they made everything seem more simple and natural;
everything—except a curious, hard, new sensation in Viola’s own heart.
Something very tender and sensitive in Viola had hardened, as all
sensitive things harden when they are handled by force.
It was curiously thrilling to find herself alone for Sunday. Viola could
not remember that she had ever been really alone before. Harry had
rushed in at the last moment with a hurried explanation and an indulgent
pat. He had been supposed to be spending the Sunday in town, but he
hadn’t really meant to, and his explanation was more perfunctory than
his pat. It left Viola wonderfully free.
She wandered about the house after a silent, lonely breakfast, asking
herself what she was going to do with her splendid, empty hours? She
certainly wasn’t going to see any of her friends, that would spoil it
all and drag her back into the circle of wardrobes. She thought she
would like to do something quite different, only when she sat down with
the _Observer_ and a sealyham puppy she couldn’t quite think what
different things there were to do. She felt she was being influenced by
the house, the distant servants, who would expect her to go to church,
and even the sealyham puppy, whose only idea was the hackneyed one of a
Sunday walk in the Park.
It was with a strange dart of relief that Viola remembered Poplar. Why
not go to Poplar and hear Jim Barton preach?
She couldn’t take the motor because it was Sunday, but there must be
some other way of getting to Poplar, though it was strangely difficult
when you had a motor to envisage any other methods of getting about. She
would like to hear that odd man again, who seemed to think that none of
the things mattered which Viola had been brought up to believe were the
only things that mattered.
If it were really true they didn’t matter, he ought to be able to
suggest substitutes.
Viola rang the bell and asked John how you got to Poplar.
John most conveniently had an aunt who lived in Poplar, so that he could
suggest without hesitation the tube, and then a tram; you took the tram
from a mysterious place called the ‘Lyre,’ which turned out, with
apologies from John for mentioning it, to be the name of a public house;
and when Viola said, ‘But, John, couldn’t I take a taxi from the Lyre,
or whatever it is called?’ John coughed as if he were amused, and said,
‘Well, of course, you could, if you ’appened to see one passing.’
Viola realised, after she had braved the fairly simple problem of the
tube and found herself outside the unaccountable Lyre, that taxis do not
pass in Poplar, unless they are moving rapidly away from it.
It was a different world—a large, full world, with a big, broad road to
move about on, driven into by a network of small and knife-like
cuttings, brimming over with unexpectedly dishevelled life. All its
inhabitants were completely unlike Viola. She felt herself hemmed in and
surrounded by fried fish and feathers, by loud, unusual voices, and a
certain openness of casual mirth. These people had their rules, their
emotions, and even their privacies, but they were jostled and infinitely
less private than the people Viola knew. They might have been a
different race, and not merely the same race under different conditions.
But if they were casual they were kind. They stared at Viola a good
deal, but they told her where she wanted to go, and when she mentioned
Jim Barton’s name it acted like a talisman.
‘Oh, well, if you’d said Jim Barton,’ they explained, ‘you’d ’ave got
there long ago.’
Calvary Church was only Mrs. Hodgkins’ fancy, Jim Barton was the
property of Poplar.
Viola soon found herself before a large, dirty building, through the
doors of which people passed slowly and persistently, like water passing
through the neck of a bottle. Calvary was always full, and Viola found
herself pushed resistlessly into it, and fixed solidly behind a column.
Very bad jingly music was being played on an organ. There was an altar
and two candles, but Calvary had not been built for a church and looked
a little lopsided. Somebody pushed a book into her hand, and the music
having wandered about in an agreeable waltz, pulled itself together into
a triumphant march.
The choir surged in, singing with exultation, but not by themselves; the
whole congregation opened its mouth and flung all its lung power into
the tune. It was not music, but it could have been suitably described as
a ‘joyful noise before the Lord.’
Mrs. Hodgkins looked very well in her mortar-board and spotless
surplice, and her husband marched beside her, as one who had been
blessed beyond his deserts and is a trifle obscured by the process.
A little way behind them walked Jim. His cassock and his surplice had
done very little to modify his appearance, his eyes were fixed on his
hymn book, his chin jutted out a little, and his hair was not as smooth
as Mrs. Hodgkins’s, thought it ought to have been.
Viola felt strangely disillusioned and upset at the sight of Jim. How
could she have supposed that this man could help her? He was just an
ordinary, common man, and all her problems stared inflexibly at her,
beyond all powers of his to solve them.
Viola disliked church services. Their reiteration bored her, and like
most fairly regular attendants at church, she had ceased to remember
what the words meant.
The Church of Cavalry sang its hearty, jagged way through its chosen
hymns and psalms as if it were breaking stones.
Mrs. Hodgkins read in an admirable monotone one of the nicer stories
about King David. There was some more precarious singing, and then Jim
put down his hymn book and prayed, silently at first, and with his
untidy head buried in his hands.
Jim loved the rough, loud music; it helped to shut him away into the
silence of prayer.
He could feel the Power he knew and believed was God behind the wall of
sound, speaking to him—wordless, wonderful things which could not be
uttered, but which took away all fear of man.
You can’t have more than one great overmastering fear at a time, and Jim
Barton feared God utterly. This morning he was in great need of Him,
because his heart was shaken by another image. An image that was useless
to his work and his life, and yet would not leave his imagination alone.
He had thought about Viola ever since he had seen her—that little
slender, butterfly creature with questioning eyes had lit his heart from
end to end with the precipitancy of lightning.
He prayed silently till the music stopped to be delivered from barren
longing, and then he lifted up his eyes, and across the church he met
Viola’s bent on him wonderingly, consideringly, as if his service of God
was a strange thing. Her presence was so astounding that for a moment
Jim thought it was not real, and then he shut out the actual image of
her again, and plunged back into the reality of his prayer. He dared not
pray any more to have the temptation removed from him; he only prayed
that he might be used in her service, since she was brought for him to
serve.
Then he spoke aloud, but still as if he were alone with God. There was a
complete silence in the building; Jim’s words had the power of
structural things and could not be allowed to pass as fugitive sounds
pass.
Viola felt the extraordinary tensity of the silence, but she could not
forget that Jim’s voice was blatantly cockney.
He got up and walked to the pulpit with a singular absence of
self-consciousness, as if he were simply in a hurry to get there. But
when he was there he stood silent for a long minute and looked at his
congregation.
Viola had, after all, not underestimated those deep, compelling eyes.
Jim gave out no text. He spoke as if he wasn’t in a pulpit at all. He
meant every word he said. A great deal of it was very funny, in a wry,
ironic manner, fun wrung out of Jim’s sense of the oddness, the
futility, the inconceivable disconcertingness of life, and some of it
was very fierce, with a sharp scorn of comfort and selfishness. He
stripped the soul bare and let the winds of Heaven play on it; and the
winds of Heaven play very rough games with a bare soul.
No one in Calvary Church ever felt comfortable for very long except Mrs.
Hodgkins. She knew that Jim was speaking about other people, and she
agreed with every word he said, except when he was a little coarse.
Viola didn’t agree with him. She felt raw and indignant. She wanted to
argue and answer back. She hated to be put in the wrong, and, after all,
that was where she was put—she was putting herself there, for all her
indignation, with every word Jim spoke.
Jim didn’t see her any more, he didn’t see anybody. He was lost, as all
great orators lose themselves, in his subject. He was trying to find out
what God loved, and being at least fairly certain what He hated.
But every soul to whom he spoke could have recognised themselves in what
Jim said, because every human soul is like every other human soul when
it is naked. Jim punished himself unmercifully, because he lived among
naked things and knew no safer method of punishment. All his sins thrust
at him like swords.
Viola felt that Jim demanded too much of human nature.
He appeared to believe you can really love your neighbour as yourself,
and give up without any flourish of a conscious sacrifice, not
things—that luxury of giving—but the will behind the things, which it
is the passion of all human creatures to keep inviolate.
Jim seemed to think that egoism shut out God, and that quite lovely,
usual things were egoism. And he asserted that you ought to find out
what you really did believe and then act on it, though all the walls of
Jericho fell at the sound of the trumpet, and yet how could you really
do this and yet be pleasant and beloved by the people who inhabit
Jericho? Jim didn’t explain what happened after the walls of Jericho
finished falling.
He just stopped suddenly, almost at once, it seemed to Viola, and yet he
had been speaking nearly an hour. The suddenness of his break with her
thoughts hurt and astounded her.
Why hadn’t he gone on? What right had he to stop so soon and shut the
door between her soul and his?
Jim left the pulpit and buried his head again in his hands—his heart
was shaking against his side. Had he harmed her? Had he helped her? Had
he left for one moment the side of his Master to reach her, and so
failed utterly in his loyalty to both? He dared not look at Viola again.
It was a priest she had come to see and not a man, and Jim felt himself
so very little a priest and so terribly much a man.
CHAPTER XXX
They all sat round the table looking at him. They were his disciples and
the friends of his heart, and yet as Jim met their ardent, excited
glances, he was aware that he had never been so much alone. They were
excited by the success of Calvary, by Jim’s enormous congregations, and
his passing celebrity. They didn’t like what he meant, because, half the
time they didn’t know what he meant, and when they did, it struck sharp
against the fruits of his success. They couldn’t be quite unselfish
about it; his success was theirs, they mounted on the wings of his
flight. They hadn’t been anything at all before Jim came to Poplar, not
even good. Now they had the Kingdom of Heaven, and a much better
position on earth. Naturally, they wanted to keep it.
It was a small committee: Mr. and Mrs. Hodgkins, Mr. Belk, the
churchwarden, Mr. Amble and Mr. Cadge, the two chief sidesmen. Mr. Belk
was a grocer by profession—all the week long sugar and sand, butter and
margarine, the grind of big wholesale firms and the petty pilfering of
subordinates kept his shrewd mind on the stretch. He had done very well
for himself in spite of everything, and he took to religion on Sunday as
weaker vessels take to theatres and dances—it exercised the muscles of
his soul. Behind his hard, commercial surface lay a very kind heart, and
in the end Jim always touched it.
Mr. Cadge had a violent faith. Religion excited him uncontrollably, like
alcohol. His pugnacity revelled in fighting sin; he pounced on
backsliding with the eager zest of a butterfly collector who succeeds in
netting a rare and splendid specimen. It must be owned that the scoring
off of badness meant more to Mr. Cadge than the cultivation of virtue.
He was a carpenter by profession, and a malignant Christian.
Mr. Amble, the other sidesman, wasn’t at all practical. He didn’t care
for life very much. What he had had of it had not been very nice. He
took his capacity for pleasure out in visions. The new Jerusalem
supplemented Poplar. Mr. Amble’s wife and three children had died early
and very horribly of diphtheria after a wild six years’ trying to make
Mr. Amble’s loose ends meet; and Mr. Amble had gone on ever since with
his ends looser than ever and his sense of pilgrimage more acute.
He had fallen from being a schoolmaster in a world of indeterminate
gentility into being a sandwich man in a world of no gentility at all.
Then he had met Jim, and been dragged back up the thorny, uneven path of
reformation, into being a schoolmaster again.
He did not really want alcohol when he was sure of Heaven.
There were two subjects down for the committee to discuss—free seats,
and the dismissal of Mr. Herbert Moggridge. Mr. Belk knew that they had
done very well financially already, but he wanted paid seats to ensure a
regular income; besides a man who has a seat of his own looks like
something.
He knew he couldn’t use the latter point in a discussion with Jim, and
he was a little uneasy lest Jim should put his finger on it, whether he
used it or not.
Mr. Cadge wanted paid seats because he thought there should be short,
sharp lines drawn between goats and sheep. Goats might come to church,
but they should be made to pay for it or go without seats.
Mrs. Hodgkins wished for paid seats because it was her own idea, and
wouldn’t be at all likely to be Jim’s.
Mr. Amble had never given the matter a thought, and Mr. Hodgkins fixed
agonised eyes upon Jim in the hope that he would be strong enough to get
his own way (he knew Jim’s way would be free seats) without calling on
him for support.
Mrs. Hodgkins summed up the prevalent feeling. ‘I am sure,’ she said,
after listening meekly to the male opinion which she had first provoked
and then guided, ‘that what we pay for we value. It is the sacrifice we
put into it, not, of course, the money that counts. I feel it would be
blessed to the congregation. They come in large numbers very regularly.
Their spiritual home is here; no doubt—just as in a real home—they
would appreciate a spot they could call their own. I know that Calvary
sets out to be freer than other religious institutions, but I think if
it were put to the congregation themselves they would choose to pay for
their places, partly in recognition of what we try to do for them here,
and partly as I have tried to explain, because they would value their
own place in the House of God.’
‘That’s the theory of the favourite arm-chair, isn’t it?’ Jim replied
bluntly. ‘I’m afraid of people having seats of their own. I’d like a
church to be a place where nobody had anything of their own—not even
his prayers.’
‘That’s loose,’ said Mr. Cadge emphatically; ‘I call that very loose,
Mr. Barton. Cain had a mark on his forehead, hadn’t he? You may be sure
it wasn’t there for nothing!’
‘Well, I dare say it was all right for Cain,’ said Jim, ‘but I notice
Abel didn’t, and I suppose we’d all rather consider ourselves on the
line of Abel.’
‘The way I look at it,’ said Mr. Belk, ‘is, a little goes a long
way—with regular payments we know where we are—offertories vary—it’s
the difference, to put it to a vulgar way, between cash payments and
running up an account. St. Paul’s Cathedral is all right free, but
that’s a large firm—relatively speaking, we are a small one.’
‘I call that godless,’ said Mr. Cadge heatedly, ‘mint and cummin, that’s
what I call that argument. Who wants to be like St. Paul’s? But what I
say is, I have never been in a cinema or a low haunt in my life, and why
shouldn’t I spend my money on a private seat in our own place of worship
if I want to? Is all our pockets to go into sinks of iniquity, and the
Church of God to be sent empty away?’
‘That’s the look out of your own conscience, Cadge,’ Jim said
good-humouredly. ‘I’m not going to stop your giving—you can give till
you burst—all I want to see is that giving is voluntary, not
compulsory, and that we don’t follow the Apostles’ handsome precedent
and ask for seats on the right hand and the left, when we ought to be
thankful to get into the building at all.’
‘I like to see people wandering in and out,’ Mr. Amble murmured vaguely.
Mr. Belk laid a fat and confidential finger on Jim’s arm. ‘The point I
should like to make, Mr. Barton,’ he said, ‘is let people of all sorts
have seats, and set aside certain seats for payment. That will surely
suit all parties. No one need feel shut out, and yet we could depend,
say, on church expenses regular.’
Jim grinned at him.
‘Belk,’ he said, ‘you have no more principle than a magnate. It sounds
all right, but it isn’t. This building wasn’t given for people who could
pay for it, but for people who wanted it. They pay, too, most of ’em,
all they can afford. I’m with that; whatever’s worth having is worth
paying for. Put it to the congregational vote if you like, but I’ll tell
them what I think of it first.’
‘It won’t be any good if you do that,’ said Mr. Belk disconsolately.
‘You always turn them.’
Mrs. Hodgkins did not sniff. She lifted her eyes to Heaven and prayed
inaudibly for grace. Jim saw that she was engaged in this provocative
practice, but though he was prepared to let Mrs. Hodgkins force him
along any line that merely involved externals, he wasn’t prepared to
submit to any force but his own in matters which led beyond. Still, he
always wanted to please her.
‘They’ve got to know what they are doing,’ he explained with an
appealing glance at Mrs. Hodgkins’ raised eyes and fervently moving
lips. ‘I can’t twist facts, Mrs. Hodgkins, but I’m pretty sure you’ve
stated your case already, and it’s only fair that I should state mine.’
Mrs. Hodgkins’ eyes came down and met Jim’s serenely. Grace had been
given to her. She had canvassed the entire district to get her views
accepted, but she saw what a vast difference there was between her
perfectly straightforward persuasions and Jim’s unscrupulous appeals.
‘Of course,’ she said gently, ‘if you prefer to appeal to the emotions,
I have no more to say.’
Jim hung his head; he always felt very miserable when people weren’t
fair, especially very good people, as if he couldn’t have been very fair
himself, or it wouldn’t have happened.
‘Shall we all think it over a bit?’ he asked apologetically, ‘and
perhaps some of us may see differently next week.’
To every one’s surprise Mr. Cadge leaned forward and exclaimed
impressively. ‘I see differently now. It is a temptation of the
devil—Jesus Christ spent all He had feeding the multitude; that’s why
’e ’ad the miracle in ’and. None of the four thousand paid for their
seats. Mr. Barton, I’ve made a mistake. Say no more. You were right and
I was wrong. You have my vote.’
Jim’s eyes rose and fixed themselves on his favourite disciple. Mr.
Hodgkins looked piteously from Jim to his wife. She was praying
again—her cheeks were flushed. Mr. Cadge had inadvertently coupled her
name with the devil. Her husband did worse. His was the casting vote. He
said in a trembling voice, ‘There seems to be much to be said for free
seats. I understand, in a sense, of course, there isn’t, but on the
whole—well, on the whole, I think perhaps there is.’
Mr. Belk capitulated good-naturedly. He privately intended to bring the
matter up again in a more attractive form. ‘A thing can be fig syrup
without being called fig syrup,’ he thought contentedly. ‘Let us adjourn
the question,’ he said aloud soothingly. ‘That’s what I suggest. And
now, friends, there’s the painful subject of Mr. ’Erbert Moggridge; ’e
comes next on the agenda.’
Mr. Cadge’s eyes lit up with joy.
‘Now,’ he said, with a sigh of relief, ‘we can get to business. Barton,
we’ve got to look facts in the face. This time we are dealing with open
sin. It’s a perfectly straight question; are we, or are we not, to have
as an organist a man who is a drunkard and a thief?’
Jim’s eyes went down on the table. He didn’t see the plain dark cloth
with an ink stain his impatient hand had caused; he saw, instead, the
face of Mr. Herbert Moggridge. It was not an attractive face—furtive,
narrow like a weasel’s, with watery blue eyes, and a perpetual tremor of
the lower lip. Mr. Moggridge was not even a clever thief. He had been
easily caught fumbling in an overcoat pocket at the working men’s club.
‘He hasn’t broken down at the organ,’ said Jim miserably.
‘Let’s stick to the point,’ said Mr. Cadge furiously. ‘Hasn’t he broken
down everywhere else? Is there a Saturday night he hasn’t been seen in a
disgraceful condition on the ’Igh? Answer me that, Mr. Barton, _and_ the
eighth commandment? Are we to have real religion here in this ’Ouse of
God, or are we to ’ave it a nest of permitted vagabonds and criminals?’
It was a splendid climax; the small, heated room shook with it; the
placid face of Mr. Belk responded to it. He was not a persecutor, but he
was a profiteer. He had all that dislike of thieves which people feel
for their poorer relatives.
Mrs. Hodgkins looked remote, but she didn’t feel remote; she meant to
cut in when she saw a good opportunity for scoring.
Mr. Hodgkins moved uneasily in his seat; beads of perspiration stood out
on his brow. He wanted Mr. Moggridge saved, but he wanted him saved
without his help. He had flown in the face of Providence once already
about free seats, but he couldn’t do it twice—his wings would not bear
him, and there was no angel to keep his feet from being dashed against
the stones. Jim’s eyes turned to meet his; they rested upon him kindly,
but he waited, to give his friend time to come to the rescue; then he
looked away again as if he knew that rescue wasn’t there.
Mr. Amble spoke suddenly with more vivacity than usual. ‘It’s the only
thing he’s got,’ he said, ‘the organ. I notice—I dare say I’m
wrong—but I do notice that if you take away from a man the only thing
he’s got, he gets worse.
‘I knew a man once who only had a canary. I don’t say the canary helped
to keep him straight. I don’t think he kept very straight. But when the
canary died he went to pieces. It was a case of what you might call _in
extremis_. Of course he was a very poor specimen indeed, I know that—a
very poor specimen——’ Mr. Amble’s voice faded reminiscently away.
Jim smiled at him. He loved the shrewdness of Mr. Belk, the pugnacity of
Mr. Cadge, and the unending ordered kindness of Mrs. Hodgkins, but he
loved Mr. Hodgkins and Mr. Amble for themselves; they usually failed
him, and they were invariably ineffectual in carrying out their duties,
but their spirits never went astray, the meaning behind their blunders
was more magnificent than success.
Jim had given Albert Hodgkins time—he looked again at him now still
smiling. Mr. Hodgkins cleared his throat.
‘In a sense,’ he said in a feeble, fluttering voice, ‘I see what Mr.
Amble means, perhaps severe talking to, a suspension even, and then one
more chance.’ He spoke pleadingly with his eyes on his wife’s face. She
had not spoken, but she looked at him; her look literally took him down,
picked him up and laid him in a drawer. The drawer shut on him with a
kind of snap. No more came from him.
‘I gave him a talking, too,’ said Jim reluctantly. ‘He won’t do much
better, of course, but I don’t think he’ll do much worse. What I should
suggest doing is to raise his stipend a little. We only pay him £10 a
year. I should think another £10 might keep him out of mischief. I don’t
think the habit of theft is very deep-seated.’
‘What about _gin_?’ demanded Mr. Cadge, trembling with resentment ‘Ten
pounds a year more on gin, because a man’s a thief! What price
respectability at Calvary?’
Mr. Belk frowned and blinked; the use of the word Calvary was
unfortunate. He saw that Jim was off on an inner trail of his own, and
he suspected him of laughter. Cadge was a poor teamster, he pulled too
hard.
‘If I might ask,’ Mr. Belk observed soothingly, ‘just as a guide to our
feelings, Mr. Barton, what passed between you and Mr. Moggridge on the
subject?’
Jim paused. He remembered exactly what he had said to the tearful,
cowering little man, dragged red-handed into his study; but it didn’t
sound suitable for repetition. He had said ‘You’re a bad old lot, aren’t
you, Moggridge?’ and then he had put him into his arm-chair and given
him a hot drink, and when Mr. Moggridge had stopped shivering and
crying, and looking about wild-eyed, for imaginary policemen, Jim had
said, ‘I’d go slow for a bit, you know, Moggridge. I would really.
Gin’ll rot your liver, and other people’s pockets will land you in jail.
It isn’t worth it, you know—it isn’t really. If you’re short of tobacco
you can always come in here and stop up your pipe with mine.’ And then
they’d talked about Palestrina masses and the music of the fifteenth
century. Jim didn’t know one note of music from another, and he hadn’t
the vaguest idea, even after Mr. Moggridge had finished talking, whether
Palestrina was an epoch, a river, or a man, but he saw that just to talk
about music put a little honour and grip back into Mr. Moggridge, and
Mr. Moggridge had so little honour that it was just as well to restore
promptly to him what he had mislaid.
Jim leaned forward and spoke with a flash of emotion.
‘The truth is,’ he said, ‘he’ll never be any better. He’s gin-sodden and
his will is like a damp match; but he could very easily get worse. Now,
I shouldn’t like to be responsible for making old Moggridge worse; would
you?’
‘Isn’t it a question of principle?’ asked Mrs. Hodgkins coldly; ‘what
about our duty to the church and its music?’
‘He’s no choir-master,’ agreed Mr. Belk.
‘Still, we have Higgins to train the choir,’ Jim pleaded ‘Higgins is as
efficient as a buzz saw. Moggridge does get something out of the organ
nobody else we’ve got can do, and the organ keeps him from all the gin
he’d soak up if he hadn’t got it. You see, the way I look at it is this:
if you’ve only got gin and an organ, and people take away the organ,
well, then, you’ve only got gin.’
‘It’s putting a premium on vice,’ said Mr. Cadge defiantly. ‘What we
want is a man at the organ we can point to and say, “That’s one of our
Calvary men,” not “Please look the other way—rolling down the ’Igh
comes the organist of—of——“’ Mr. Cadge pulled himself up short just
in time to avoid an involuntary plunge into rhyme.
‘Come,’ said Jim, ‘it’s nearly church time, and nobody has said old
Moggridge is a bad musician. Think of all the awful characters Jesus
Christ went about with in the gospels. Some of them would look a bit
shocking even in Poplar, but I wouldn’t like to think we shut any of
them out of the place that was meant for them, would you? There’s plenty
of room for the ninety-and-nine just persons in the West End, isn’t
there? What do you all think about that extra ten pounds? You couldn’t
make Moggridge any worse by it, could you? Let’s see if we can’t make
him any better.’
A slow, shrewd smile crept over Mr. Belk’s face. ‘I vote,’ he said, ‘we
raise Moggridge’s screw ten pounds—or else Mr. Barton’s—for I am of
the opinion if we don’t agree to do it, he’ll do it out of his own
pocket.’
The meeting ended in laughter. They all melted personally to Jim before
they left him, though Mr. Cadge and Mrs. Hodgkins kept their principles
intact.
Jim stood quite still for a moment after they’d gone, then he went into
a small inner room and put on his cassock. Jim didn’t like his cassock,
and he was a little afraid of tearing it; but he put it on carefully and
brushed his rebellious lock of hair down flat.
Then he kneeled down and prayed; he prayed that he might not grow
tyrannical, because it is so difficult not to be tyrannical when you see
things very plainly, and very differently from those around you.
The sense of loneliness deepened upon him. It wasn’t fair to count on
Hodgkins, it would only get him into trouble with his wife; and Amble
could never be trusted to remember anything outside his dreams.
God was very far away. There was the church and the settlement built for
His service—men’s and boys’ clubs—mothers’ meetings—girls’
classes—even a dining-hall and lounge for working people, all used and
loved as they had been in Jim’s old eager dreams. He had realised his
dreams now; only the quality in them which transcended fact had gone.
Could one’s heart be too full of other people’s business? Where beneath
all the lively, earnest bustle of his days was the fount of the Eternal?
Only a week ago he would have known, humbly but triumphantly, that the
strength of it was in himself. He loved his work then, it seemed vast
with possibilities. Now suddenly as if the sun shining at its zenith, on
a lovely land, went out and left it blind—he felt nothing. His work
looked useless in his hands, his heart was out of it.
Jim had never known what exhaustion meant. His magnificent physical
strength had kept him from depression. Nothing slackened in him from
use; body, mind, and will moved easily and as punctually as the ordered
stars.
But something had gone out of him now. He buried his head deeper in his
hands, he cried over and over again that prayer which comforts the soul
at its lowest moments of vitality—‘Lord, I believe—help Thou my
unbelief, increase my faith!’
His watch ticked warningly on, but he held his mind away from time,
fixed in silence.
It was nearly the hour for his service, and he would have to give, even
out of his empty heart, if he received nothing. But was it empty? What
was there instead of his church needs and daily interests, sharp in him,
as if against his bared heart he could feel the nails?
He knew only too well what face it was; it never left him and he could
not look away from it. Jim did not struggle against Viola’s image with
the sterile agony of the ascetic; he believed that not even his useless
love of her was wrong. But he tried always to go deeper to find for her
as well as for himself, an outlet into the love of God.
He wanted to keep love and be free, but no man, however strong, has ever
done this suddenly or once for all. The union of love and freedom must
always be a lifelong gradual task.
Jim had no memories to degrade her image or to set the love of Viola
apart from God. He knew that he was safe if he could keep them together,
but he had never valued his personal safety. What he wanted was to be
sure that Viola was safe—safe from life, from the corroding selfishness
of luxury, from the panic of idealism confronted by facts; and he knew
that he could not keep her safe, for all his prayers.
He prayed persistently that this virtue which had gone out of him might
go to her, and give her courage. He prayed that she might have all his
ardour—let him be dry, as dry as a dead leaf and as powerless—let him
find no consolation and no comradeship in his work—let him go halting,
all his days like Jacob after he had wrestled with the angel—but let
her be strong, companioned, whole! Jim could pray more freely now; he
could feel his heart beat and the tears rise. If only this little,
slender, lovely being who had hurt him with her beauty, might be safe.
It was time for him to go into his church. He wouldn’t be quite
empty-handed for his people after all, because he had lost something. He
was tried as they were, despondent as they were. He could go to them
with a quickened understanding, because for the first time in all his
ministry he did not want to go to them.
CHAPTER XXXI
Viola submitted to Eastbourne. It wouldn’t make very much difference
where Mrs. Egerton took her.
There would be fewer people than she knew in London, but they would be
the same kind of people, and they would be invited to the same kind of
meals; but if she went out and looked for it she would find the sea.
The feeling of panic she had begun to have in London left her. New
clothes and wedding presents stopped pouring in; they had reminded her
that she was being led in a procession of flowers and garlands up to a
perfectly cold stone, where she would feel a knife at her throat.
Viola knew vaguely what she was doing when she accepted Reggie; what she
hadn’t known was whom she was doing it for.
She had thought Reggie was a devout and insignificant lover, who would
make life freer and easier; and he was changing every day into a man
with rights, who meant to have his own way and intended Viola to be part
of it.
He was more in love with her than ever, but he was more important, and
she hadn’t thought Reggie would be important. Curiously enough her own
importance dwindled with her engagement. She had known girls who became
transformed by happy love into beings filled with power and beauty.
Their shyness had left them. They knew suddenly how to handle social
situations. They seemed to feel the riddle of the universe take them on
as interested accomplices. But Viola felt as if her personality was
being blotted out; something free and alert in her was conscious of
being abruptly checked. She felt as if to give her life to Reggie meant
simply to stifle it and to live wholly outside the circle of her own
desires.
She hadn’t been sure before what her own desires were, but she was sure
now. She was sure they weren’t like Reggie’s.
Mrs. Egerton had cut Viola’s life to fit her, but she had done so with
enormous skill and with no pitched battles, and Viola was about to give
herself into hands that had already shown themselves to be harder and
less skilful than her mother’s.
Viola didn’t want to be Reggie’s, and she didn’t want to make Reggie
hate her. She wanted passionately to be her own self, and still to be
approved.
But there wasn’t a single person in Viola’s world who wouldn’t
disapprove of her for breaking her engagement.
It would be so unaccountable, and in Viola’s world if you couldn’t
account for things you were reproached for them. Viola deliberately shut
out the image of her mother. She dared not think what meals and after
life would be, face to face with Mrs. Egerton, if she deliberately
crossed her will.
She felt conscious of her mother’s will at every turn, when they were
laughing over the morning paper, or strolling on the green, listening to
light comedies, or watching people play lawn tennis; Mrs. Egerton was
always at Viola’s disposal for jokes, and memories and plans, and always
making Viola feel as if there were no other plans, no other jokes, no
other memories.
There wasn’t any way out when Viola thought of her mother.
She told herself sharply that she was very wicked. Why should she want a
way out when it would mean upsetting every one she knew and cutting
Reggie to the very heart?
She had much better put up with a situation she had made for herself,
and where she would be, if she kept quiet and reasonable, the only
sufferer.
One morning she went by herself for a walk on Beachy Head. It was too
windy for her mother, and she left Cèleste in the town shopping. She
would be late for lunch, but she didn’t care. The salt, bright air set
something reckless free in her. She climbed up the short-grassed height
as if she were taking the hill by storm.
There was a strong wind blowing, and seagulls dipped to and fro in it.
The sea below was colourless with white-snatched edges. Viola could not
go very close to the cliffs edge, the rushing air bullied and
discouraged her; but she loved the taste and feel of it on her lips and
against her beaten cheeks. For a little while she saw no one at all—the
world was empty of everything, but the free life of the wind.
What was the use of shutting herself down into a life like a padded
velvet box? Wasn’t half her desire to spare pain and be unselfish—fear?
She wasn’t afraid up here, on the height of the world where there was no
room for the small subterfuges of security. Pain for pain if she
submitted now and without love—what kind of gift was she giving, and
how long would it spare Reggie suffering? Was it really Reggie that she
was trying to spare?
Motives are a puzzling hunt at best, with crossed scents and a poor
chance of finding. But Viola told herself she could at least look facts
in the face. Jim Barton had said she didn’t see things straight. Of
course he was wrong, but he had put her on her mettle.
No one in her world would agree with her, and this man with his opposite
standards and his hard bitten look of reality—would he agree with her?
Perhaps he would say no; the only thing that mattered was sticking to a
given word—like monks were supposed to; but even that would be a
comfort. If Viola felt she had to marry Reggie, it wouldn’t be as dull
or as petty as to marry him because she was afraid to say, and stick to
it, ‘I don’t like you enough.’
But in order to get his opinion Viola would have to see this curious
person first.
It was odd how elated and expectant seagulls and high winds make you
feel on the top of a cliff. For a little while it seemed to Viola as if
everything in life was perfectly plain and gay. Then she went back to
the hotel; she was very late for lunch. Mrs. Egerton had waited for
Viola. She made no complaint, but when she said, ‘Of course, I waited
for you, dearest,’ the feeling of elation went out of Viola’s heart.
When she told her mother that she wanted to go up to town for the
week-end, Mrs. Egerton made no direct objection. She wondered if the
flicker of restlessness in her daughter did not indicate that the child
was more in love than she knew.
‘One doesn’t,’ she observed aloud, ‘usually go to London for week-ends,
and you won’t, of course, be able to see any dressmakers. What are
Reggie’s plans?’
Viola felt that her mother’s eyes were on her and that if she said
Reggie wasn’t even to be told, she wouldn’t be allowed to go.
‘I’m writing to Reggie,’ she said with a vivid blush, which helped to
allay Mrs. Egerton’s suspicions.
‘He could come down here quite easily,’ Mrs. Egerton said reflectively.
‘In fact, he has written to suggest it.’
‘It wouldn’t be the same to me,’ Viola said quickly. ‘As a matter of
fact I want to go to church in London.’
‘My dear,’ said Mrs. Egerton, ‘how very odd, you so seldom do! And
aren’t the rivers of Abana and Pharpar, or whatever the churches here
call themselves, quite as good as our poor little Jordan round the
corner at home?’
‘It’s just a fancy,’ Viola murmured lamely; ‘I wanted to go to a
particular church; but it doesn’t matter really.’ She felt the wind die
out of her sails; if her mother persisted she knew she wouldn’t go. She
couldn’t say which church—she’d rather marry Reggie than drag in Jim
Barton’s name. But Mrs. Egerton didn’t persist, she smiled and said,—
‘Well, dear, of course if it’s a particular church——’
Viola saw in a relieved and horrified instant that she had actually
deceived Mrs. Egerton; her mother thought she was going to choose a
church for the wedding. She gasped, recovered herself, and accepted the
delusion.
Everything was arranged for her to go up easily with Cèleste. Reggie
would meet her with the motor. She couldn’t get out of it now, and it
seemed to Viola as the train slid smoothly off and Cèleste wrapped a rug
round her knees, as if she would never be able to get out of anything.
She was being more watched, more catered for and met and handled than
she had ever been in her life.
If she didn’t make this one outrageous dash she would never have another
chance, and she would have to be outrageous in order to make it.
She met Reggie with a smile which she felt was false. He had been told
to be tactful, and he was tactful; but of course he wanted to know what
she had come up for.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s just a religious fad, and you aren’t included till
tea-time.’
A religious fad sounded all right to Reggie. He knew his mother was
inclined to go off suddenly into churches, and came out of them very
much as usual.
But Viola hated herself for saying it, she hated the sparkling
contentment in Reggie’s eyes. She wanted to make him at least
uncomfortable looking. She felt as if her discomfort must break through
and warn him; but it requires perception to register even the intense
suffering of another human being. Reggie was not perceptive. Nothing
came through to him but the fact that she was there, and the prettiest
girl on the platform.
Mr. Egerton patted Viola on the back and offered her a glass of port, as
if she were an invalid. Nobody asked her any more questions. She slipped
out of the house next morning at an unearthly hour in a waterproof. It
was raining heavily, the London trees were light green with black stems.
The streets were shining and empty. London was finishing its Sunday
breakfast. The tubes might have been magic arrangements evolved for
Viola’s private benefit.
It was far too early for any service that wasn’t a celebration, and most
of them were over.
Calvary had been filled once and had emptied again, but Viola knew where
Jim lived, and she wrote on a card at the door, ‘It would be very kind
of you to see me for half an hour.—Viola Egerton.’ But she did not
realise how very kind it would be, because she had no idea what half an
hour out of an over-filled Sunday means to a well-known preacher.
A lady in a flowing cassock fingered Viola’s card thoughtfully in a very
small black entry. Viola had a pang of fear when her eyes fell on Mrs.
Hodgkins. Could Jim be married? If he was, she felt that his opinion
would cease to have any value for her particular case.
‘It is hardly the moment,’ began Mrs. Hodgkins in her clear, decisive
monotone, and then a door on the left abruptly opened—‘If that’s Mrs.
Bisset drunk again,’ remarked a cheerful voice, ‘show her in; I told her
to come straight here.’
‘I’m afraid I’m not drunk,’ said Viola a little stiffly.
A chair was pushed back hurriedly and Jim’s head appeared round the
door.
‘You!’ he said. He forgot to introduce Mrs. Hodgkins. She stiffened
visibly and said, ‘I’m very busy just now, Mr. Barton,’ and prepared to
vanish.
‘You’d better come in if you want to,’ Jim said to Viola. ‘I’ve got half
an hour. Do be an angel,’ he added to the retreating lady in the
cassock, ‘and if Mrs. Bisset does come give her a cup of black coffee
and let her lie down for a bit. This is a kind of church house,’ he
explained to Viola. ‘It’s not mine really, but they’re very kind about
letting me see my friends. I’m afraid I’ve got rather a late breakfast
on, there was a row after church this morning and I had to stay out.
You’ve had yours?’
Viola suppressed a shudder at the breakfast table. There was a good deal
of bacon on a cracked dish, and though it was not exactly dirty, nothing
upon the table matched or shone. She wasn’t sure that Jim had shaved,
and his hair looked untidier than ever.
‘You won’t mind if I go on eating while we talk, will you?’ he asked.
‘You see, church begins at eleven, and I’ve got to speak. I saw you
several Sundays ago at church, and I wondered if I should ever see you
again.’
Viola sat down on a black horsehair arm-chair. If she leaned back her
feet didn’t touch the floor, and if she leaned forward she nearly
slipped off it.
It was not a chair that made confidences easy. Jim looked at her over
his coffee cup, with something in his eyes which was alive and laughing.
It was not what Viola had expected from a spiritual adviser, but it gave
her a companionable feeling.
‘I’m not your parishioner,’ Viola began, ‘and I’ve no real right to
bother you, but your sermon made me think, so you are a little
responsible for my coming down on you like this.’
‘I hope I am,’ said Jim. ‘I like being responsible.’
Viola went straight to her point.
‘You said, do you remember? that if people weren’t honest about what
they loved they couldn’t really be kind? Because kindness stopped
growing if you fed it with lies?’
‘Did I say that?’ Jim asked. ‘Well! It sounds all right doesn’t it? Like
most things do before you begin to apply them; and then generally one
has to start a little formula of one’s own.’
‘I think I’m in some kind of a lie now,’ Viola said, with her heart
beginning to beat hurriedly. ‘I didn’t mean to be when I started. It
didn’t look like a lie then. It was just saying “Yes,” when some one I
liked very much asked me to marry him, and now—and now I see it wasn’t
enough.’
Jim had gone on with his breakfast, but at this point he pushed his
plate away, and resting his elbows on the table, looked across at Viola
with knitted brows.
‘It’s a nuisance saying “Yes” easily,’ he agreed. ‘It rather lets people
in.’
‘It has let me in,’ said Viola defensively. Jim did not say anything to
this, almost as if letting oneself in didn’t matter.
‘I didn’t know what to do,’ Viola went on nervously. ‘You see, my people
like him so much and there’s nothing against him really—no kind of
excuse——’
Jim nodded. ‘It’s you there’s something against,’ he agreed. ‘You’ll
have to face that.’
‘If I break my engagement, of course,’ said Viola a little sharply. ‘But
I’m not sure that I ought to break my word—even if I want to.’
‘What was your word?’ Jim asked unexpectedly. ‘I mean—did you say “Yes,
I’ll marry you”? or “Yes, I love you”? Because, you see, if you said
“Yes, I love you,” you’ve broken that already.’
Viola dropped her eyes to the carpet. It was an odd shabby carpet, and
it could never have been handsome when it was new.
‘I don’t know that I said anything,’ she observed a little stiffly.
‘But even if you were entirely dumb,’ objected Jim, ‘I suppose you
_meant_ something? If we could get at what you _meant_——?’
‘Oh,’ said Viola impatiently, ‘as if it matters what I meant then! Can’t
you see what I mean _now_?’
‘No,’ said Jim decisively, ‘I can’t say that I do. You don’t seem to me
to know what you mean yourself. You say it’s wrong to break your word,
quite as if it’s being wrong (if it is wrong) would stop you? But why
should it stop you? It was obviously wrong to give it, before you knew
what you felt—but that didn’t stop your giving it—did it?’
‘But I didn’t know then,’ said Viola with crimson cheeks, and tears of
annoyance in her eyes, ‘It’s not as easy as you think. He wanted me
to—most awfully—they all did——!’
‘They do now, don’t they?’ interrupted Jim.
‘Oh, of course they do,’ said Viola, ‘or there wouldn’t be this bother.
But how can I when I don’t love him?’
‘Ah,’ said Jim, ‘now you’ve hit it! That’s what you’ve got to face,
isn’t it? Do you really know now that you don’t love him—better than
you knew when you thought you did?’
‘Yes,’ said Viola after a moment’s pause. ‘I know perfectly well now. I
don’t love him.’
‘That’s something,’ Jim agreed. ‘You can make a start from that, can’t
you? What is your main difficulty—that it’s wrong to marry a man you
don’t love, or that it’s too uncomfortable to say so?’
Viola’s figure stiffened suddenly.
‘Is that the way to talk to people when they’re in trouble?’
‘I don’t know that it is,’ said Jim. ‘But as far as I can see, it’s the
man who’s in love with you who’s in trouble, or going to be shortly, not
you.’
Viola rose to her feet. ‘I am in the most dreadful trouble,’ she said
with quivering lips, ‘or I shouldn’t have come to you. But I see I’ve
made a mistake.’
Jim groaned.
‘Sit down again, won’t you?’ he pleaded. ‘I thought I’d got to be
honest. I can be much nicer than that!’
Viola moved with unchanged dignity towards the door, but before she
reached it she looked back at Jim. He was on his feet now, and his eyes
rested on her with supplication behind the gleam in them. She hesitated,
and without any warning her indignation melted into sudden laughter.
Jim smiled in a relieved way.
‘Now we can talk properly,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what you thought I
was before, some kind of Johnnie who settled things by rule of thumb,
didn’t you? You took the nerve out of me. I’m only a man you don’t
generally agree with. Of course I’d love to help you—any man would.’
Viola sat down again but she was conscious that she wasn’t as free to
speak to him about her feelings as she had felt while he was being rude.
‘The truth is,’ she said doubtfully, ‘I don’t know if I’m being a coward
or not. I’m terrified of hurting people and of being scolded. If I could
break my engagement without doing any more harm than keeping it, I’d
break it, but I am afraid that breaking it means a fearful lot of harm.
And yet if I keep it——’ she turned her face away from Jim. ‘Well,
then, what harm should I do, to any one except myself, I mean?’
‘Do you really seriously mean me to answer that?’ Jim asked her. His
voice was not laughing any more, it had become curiously gentle and
kind. Viola did not turn her head but she murmured, ‘Yes.’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but wouldn’t that be too rough on a man? You say he
likes you; what’ll he feel when he finds you don’t like him? You know
you can hide all kinds of little things quite easily, and even some big
ones—but you can’t hide that! You wouldn’t want to tie a man up to
you—would you—when you haven’t anything to give him but the rope?’
‘But if he wants it,’ said Viola in a small, uncertain voice, ‘he must
know now, I don’t care very much; I suppose he hopes——’
‘Is there anything in what he hopes?’ Jim asked. Viola shook her head
decisively.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I like him less than I did, and I don’t like his life.
Reggie is too settled.’
She was not looking at Jim, so that she did not see him start at the
name she had mentioned. He pulled himself together sharply; whatever
happened to his own heart, he had only to think of hers.
‘I should tell him the truth,’ he said quietly. ‘Just what you’ve told
me. Don’t you think so?’
‘Oh!’ cried Viola with a pang of terror, ‘how could I—— He wouldn’t
believe it!’
‘But you can make him believe it,’ said Jim relentlessly.
‘And if he still wants me, what am I to do?’ asked Viola.
‘You’ll have to do,’ said Jim, ‘what you’ve got the grit for. That’s
what life always comes back to. You know well enough what you ought to
do. A man who marries an unloving woman does so because he’s mad for
her, and can’t see sense. Both are bound to suffer, and she deserves to,
if she lets him marry her. You’re not mad, you see, so it’s up to you to
get him out of it.’
‘Ah,’ said Viola, ‘but you don’t know what it’s like——’ A mingled pain
and anger seized her. How could this man with his fighting eyes know how
she hated struggle—how much worse it seemed to her, to pit her
fluctuating will against Reggie’s sharp desire, than to suffer any mere
collapse of personal integrity.
Her reason was silenced in her, and she fell back on tears.
The church bell started ringing. Mrs. Bisset found the front door and
had to be diplomatically piloted through the small entry calling loudly
for Jim Barton. A dreadful sense of the multiplicity of other people’s
affairs surged through Viola.
She had come to a place where people couldn’t have their crises in
peace.
Jim looked at her bowed head and at the door. He was so nervous that he
nearly pulled off the tablecloth.
He could think of nothing to say that could quench her tears.
‘Look here,’ he began unsteadily, ‘you mustn’t cry, you really mustn’t.’
But Viola cried on.
Jim left the table and stood over her. She wore a ridiculous small toque
made out of primroses. He put his hand on it, but she didn’t move. He
knelt down beside her, but she was still absorbed in the struggle before
her. Jim would have given all he possessed to take her battle on
himself.
If he had been God he couldn’t have given free will to Viola; it seemed
too dire a penalty for such a gentle soul to pay for liberty.
‘Oh, damn,’ he said suddenly, ‘I shall have to go to church and leave
you.’
She flashed a perplexed, reproachful glance at him from under the
primroses. She couldn’t remember ever having been left before by any man
who wanted to go to church. He got up awkwardly from his knees. ‘I’m
sorry,’ he muttered without looking at her, ‘I can’t help you.’ Then he
went away.
All sorts of noises began and stopped. The front door closed sharply
after Jim with a decisiveness that shook the badly-built house; then it
shut more quietly under more cautious hands. The church bell’s iron
tongue jerked its last broken phrase into an astonishing silence. Nobody
came to clear the breakfast things away or to show Viola to the door.
There didn’t seem to be anybody who cleared things away.
Jim hadn’t said good-bye to her. He had felt that if he made any such
effort he wouldn’t have been able to force himself out of her presence.
Love was shaking him to pieces; it would not leave him judicial and
intact.
It threatened to break through into her presence. He felt it shining in
his eyes and menacing his voice with its enormous tenderness. He dragged
his overwhelming emotion relentlessly away with him, but he felt as if
everything in the room must cry aloud to her his absurd, abysmal secret.
He couldn’t remember what he had said to her, even to blame himself,
because his mind was full of all the things he hadn’t said.
Viola stopped crying after he had gone. The sun had come out and filled
the little trivial room with warmth and kindliness. It wasn’t, she
thought to herself, a bad little room after all.
She saw a slip of paper lying by Jim’s place on the table, and a curious
impulse seized her. With a quick look around the room as if she was
afraid that some of the very ugly furniture was watching her, she drew
out a pencil and wrote on it, ‘You have helped me.’
CHAPTER XXXII
When Viola left Jim Barton she saw that every one was pouring into
Calvary, and she let herself go with the stream. The service seemed
interminable; it had nothing to do with hymns and prayers. All Viola’s
feelings struggled in it and became part of it.
She could scarcely wait for the preceding prayer to finish and Jim to
move with that careless forgetfulness of cassock and surplice to his
place in the new pulpit, so that she could hear again what he felt about
life.
He stood there with a look of something withheld and yet near, a power
that he was waiting for but which would surely come.
Then he leaned over the pulpit with that absurd, untidy lock of
tow-coloured hair spreading down to his eyes and talked urgently and
honestly to his people.
He spoke as if pleasing God was vital, and all other qualities, Sunday
clothes and the power of opinion, as insignificant as last year’s
newspaper. The look on people’s faces changed; they forgot their dinner
and their debts and even whether they had been properly noticed, faded
out of their minds.
For half an hour second-hand things were second-hand, and only primary
things mattered. The question of breaking her engagement became
curiously simple to Viola. It would hurt just as much as she had thought
it was going to hurt, perhaps more, but it was no longer confusing. No
one but Reggie mattered. Even her mother and her formidable resentment
dwindled; as for that dreadful ring of people, the outer world, she saw
them for what they were—as irrelevant as faces in a dream.
She owed Reggie mercy and truth, and though they seemed conflicting, it
was only because mercy is not usually associated with pain, and truth is
too frequently considered an unkindness. She saw that unless she hurt
Reggie a good deal now, she would hurt him continuously and much more
seriously later. She felt the same rush of strength and refreshment that
she had known on the top of Beachy Head. It had seemed then as if the
little mixed up life of London had blown over the edge of the cliff.
Wedding presents and cardboard boxes had become trifles light as air,
and she had been one with the serene and unchangeable life of nature.
She felt the same sense of exultation now as if there was a Law which,
the moment you came into actual contact with it, set you free. It didn’t
let you off the consequences of your acts, but it didn’t let you be
suffocated by all sorts of extras that couldn’t really be called
consequences at all.
Viola saw that she had been careless and cowardly, and she knew that she
must take the consequences and see the person involved take them.
Unfortunately carelessness and cowardice always mean pain and effort for
somebody else, and no very kind person with feelings for others, can
afford to be either careless or cowardly. Viola was very kind, and her
heart ached miserably; but at least she could prevent worse happening,
she needn’t for an instant more stand her own cowardice. She went away
from Poplar feeling like a murderer, but like a murderer who has
resolved to face his punishment. She wasn’t being hunted any more.
It was a wet, interminable Sunday; her father had stayed in to lunch on
purpose to cheer Viola up, but he was full of the gloomiest forebodings.
England was already effete, democracy had destroyed it. There were no
master minds, and the person who was responsible for the present
iniquitous Budget was a fiend. The House of Commons was just a mob of
uncultured, insolent people whom one couldn’t invite to meet one’s
family.
Did Viola know where Harry was? No! No one ever did, except Jews and
scoundrels off the turf. Harry was unfilial and extravagant. Why didn’t
he tell his father what he was up to? He expected him to pay for it,
whatever it was, and never gave him his confidence.
Viola smoothed Mr. Egerton down. She said quite truly that Harry never
confided in anybody, because he had usually forgotten what there was to
confide; but on the whole he never did anything very silly either, did
he? Something formed and automatic in him stopped him several yards from
precipices. Harry merely wanted, like all young creatures, to look over
the top.
She diverted Mr. Egerton with descriptions of their friends at
Eastbourne. Her father took a curiously narrow interest in his friends,
but he let himself be diverted.
He liked to be reminded whom his friends had married, the size of their
families, and the probable extent of their incomes. All the curiosities
and expectations of Viola’s youthful mind went off him as if his mind
was covered with an impenetrable spiritual waterproof.
He remembered, while they were drinking coffee, to ask where Viola had
been to church. Viola said ‘Calvary’ and waited for the first of her
explosions.
But nothing exploded at all. Mr. Egerton said he’d never heard of it,
and had always thought churches were called after saints, or you
remembered them by the squares they were in.
Viola kissed the top of his head and went upstairs to wait for her
ordeal. She wondered if middle-aged people closely related to you were
ever very much help.
Women usually have to wait for their ordeals and it is not a reassuring
process.
Viola sat on a most comfortable sofa with her heart in her mouth. She
had every magazine she could possibly want on her lap, and at the end of
two hours and a half she couldn’t have said if she’d been reading the
record of the world’s greatest criminal or the Study of the Differential
Calculus.
Then Reggie came in. He looked triumphantly well and happy.
He was at the height of human prosperity. Life had denied him very
little, and never shaken him at all. He had done brilliantly in business
and seen the dreams of his early youth fulfilled. His father and Mr.
Egerton, both solid and successful men, relied on his judgment. He was
socially the most popular young man of his circle, and engaged to be
married at twenty-four to the most lovely girl he knew.
He had just bought a new motor and had never done anything at all
discreditable.
Reggie’s love for Viola was as real as his self-esteem.
He never looked at a shop window or let his eye rest carelessly on
another woman without wondering if what he saw in the window or on the
woman might not suit Viola. If she had a finger ache he would have
ransacked London to allay it. But he knew nothing at all about her, and
her opinions when he listened to them, annoyed him.
Reggie had no wish to be arrogant, and he was generally good-natured,
but he couldn’t help feeling that most people’s misfortunes could be
helped, and that if a fellow was too down on his luck, it was almost
certain to be his own fault.
He had been ill once, but not painfully, and he had forgotten all about
it.
When Viola said, ‘Please don’t kiss me, Reggie,’ he thought she must
have a cold, but he had sense enough not to kiss her.
He remembered in time that Mrs. Egerton had said girls must be humoured
before marriage and managed afterwards. Viola got up as he entered and
sat down on a chair at some little distance from him.
‘Reggie,’ she said quickly. ‘I want to tell you something horrid. Please
sit down quietly and let me get through with it.’
Reggie sat down with his legs crossed and his foot shaking impatiently.
He thought that Viola looked a little white and ‘nervy’ and perhaps
needed a tonic, but she flushed as she met the firm apprising look of
his bright, hard eyes.
‘It’s not very easy to say, Reggie,’ she began apologetically, ‘and I
want you to believe how sorry and ashamed I am—horribly ashamed—but
I’ve made a great mistake—I can’t marry you, I don’t love you enough.’
So that was what Mrs. Egerton had meant by having to humour Viola and
carting her off to Eastbourne! Reggie had never believed in the
Eastbourne plan, and he had always thought that there was something at
the bottom of the Wardrobe! Now he would have to use tact.
‘But, my dear good child,’ he said with his eyes a perceptible shade
harder. ‘You needn’t be in the least sorry. If there is any mistake I’ll
shoulder it. You simply don’t understand. Girls—the sort of girl at
least that you are—never feel much in love until they’re married.’
‘Oh, I’m not a sort!’ cried Viola, with flaming cheeks, ‘I’m just like
any other girl, and I _must_ be in love before I marry!’
Reggie didn’t answer her for a moment; his eyes had a curious look as if
he was both very pleased and very angry at the same time. Then he got up
and took Viola out of her chair. She felt his arms around her, hard and
inescapable, and his kisses on her lips and face like fire.
‘You little fool! You little fool!’ he murmured softly. ‘Do you suppose
I can’t make you love me?’
He really thought violence would make any woman love him.
Viola made no attempt to escape; she left herself passive in his
constraining arms, but her mind felt curiously cold and free. There was
no response to his passion in her. He let her go at last and walked up
and down the room without speaking. She was conscious that something she
neither understood nor wanted to understand was taking place in Reggie.
Her coldness had put no barrier between them. He wanted her as much as
if she wanted him. He could not understand a covenant.
She was vaguely relived when John came in with the tea-table. She waited
for him to go out again, and then she said gently, ‘It isn’t the least
use, Reggie—on the contrary, you simply make me see how much I dislike
your making love to me.’
She was astonished at herself for being so rude, and she saw that Reggie
was astonished too—he was also shocked.
It seemed rather funny to Viola that she should shock Reggie. But she
saw in a flash that probably she would have to go on shocking him or
else what she said would make no impression on him at all.
‘But this is all nonsense,’ he said, pulling himself together and
standing in front of her. ‘You can’t mean what you say. Who the devil
did you meet down at Eastbourne?’
Viola shook her head; there wouldn’t be much use telling Reggie that
she’d seen seagulls blown about by the wind and remembered what some one
had said in a sermon.
‘Oh, no one,’ she said wearily.
‘Are you telling me the truth?’ asked Reggie brutally.
‘If I had met any one else at Eastbourne,’ said Viola, ‘I should have
stayed down there. What I felt, I felt before I went down—but not so
clearly.’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s it, is it—sheer bad temper about that cursed
wardrobe?’
A gleam of laughter passed over Viola’s face.
‘No,’ she said, ‘it isn’t the wardrobe, Reggie, though it did rather
crush me. It’s what made the wardrobe so curiously terrible.’
‘Do talk sense,’ said Reggie irritably; ‘I gave way about it, didn’t I?’
‘Yes, but you liked it,’ said Viola.
‘I’m damned if I know what you mean!’ grumbled Reggie.
Viola made the tea in silence, then she said, ‘It’s no use, Reggie. We
aren’t suited. You like one kind of thing and I like another; and it
would be just the same all through.’
‘Fortunately,’ said Reggie, ‘we can afford a large house to suit both
our tastes. We can have two houses if we like.’
‘If we had a hundred,’ said Viola inexorably, ‘it would be the same
thing.’
Viola’s heart was still beating uncomfortably fast, but she
congratulated herself that the worst was over. Reggie would have to
understand now, and if he really understood he wouldn’t mind.
When Reggie raised his head and spoke again, the solid ground seemed to
fall away from her and she saw that the real struggle had only just
begun.
‘If you really mean this, Viola,’ he said in a queer, desperate tone, ‘I
shall go to pieces—I can’t stand it. Can’t you see I’m mad for you? I
don’t care what you say. I’ll give you anything you like—but for God’s
sake don’t turn me down.’
This was the real Reggie. He did not attempt to drink his tea. Viola saw
with rising pity and horror that his hands were shaking too much to hold
a cup.
Nothing that she said had made any difference. Blows cannot be softened.
People can only strike and then shut their eyes so as not to see what
they have done, and nothing in Viola helped her to shut her eyes.
‘Oh, Reggie!’ she cried, ‘I’m so frightfully sorry!’
‘Don’t!’ he muttered, ‘don’t—I can’t stand it. Give me a chance. If you
turn me out of this room, away from you, I’m done.’
‘But I’ve got to!’ Viola cried. ‘Don’t you see, if it’s bad now, how
much worse it would be?’
‘I don’t see anything but you,’ said Reggie doggedly.
He sat before her with his trembling hands like a creature mortally
bereft.
Only half an hour ago he had come into the room as if the world belonged
to him and as if he owed his mastery of it to his own skill. But with
his possession menaced, his powers had abruptly left him. He had not got
the kind of power which is independent of possession.
‘I can’t do anything to make it easier!’ moaned Viola. ‘You’d better go,
Reggie. Oh, do be angry with me!’
‘I am angry with you,’ said Reggie in a low voice, ‘angry enough to kill
you.’
‘Well, kill me, then!’ said Viola desperately. ‘You see, if it was only
being dead—I wouldn’t mind; but I can’t go on being alive with you!’
‘I am not ugly! I’m not deformed!’ Reggie burst out suddenly. ‘I haven’t
any bad habits—and I’m not, I should suppose, common or unclean. What
the devil have you got against me?’
‘I don’t love you,’ said Viola steadily. ‘You aren’t what I thought and
I’m not what you think, Reggie——’
‘Oh, think!’ sneered Reggie. ‘Do you suppose I care what you think, or
what I think either for that matter? You’re you, aren’t you? What you
think won’t alter the colour of your eyes or prevent those damned
provocative lips of yours from haunting me! Oh, my God!’
He sprang up quickly and began walking up and down the room again. It
seemed to Viola as if passion was a cage, and you never got any farther
in it than walking up and down a narrow space between iron bars.
Mr. Egerton came in for his tea, and Reggie turned his white, tortured
face towards him.
‘Your daughter’s just been refusing to marry me,’ he said. ‘Do you know
what she means by it?’
Mr. Egerton had seen a good deal of annoyance in his life, but nothing
like torture, and he had been more or less comfortable for thirty years.
He said, ‘Oh nonsense! My dear fellow, nonsense!’ because torture really
seemed like nonsense to him, and then he looked angrily at Viola.
Both of them looked at Viola. On her lay the full burden of their
feelings and their way of escape.
Viola had always longed for a great moment of decision—and now that it
had occurred to her, she felt that nothing in the world could be as
terrible as to feel your own power and have to use it. If only she could
say, ‘Oh, no! I don’t mean it, really! I was only upset.’ They’d believe
that, and believing it, they would forgive her. Men can always forgive a
woman’s weakness. What they can never forgive her is the moment of her
strength, and of her truthfulness. She had to answer them, and in order
to do it she had to violate every decency she possessed. She had to
deliberately smash her world before she could get off (if she could get
off then!) with her own soul.
‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated stubbornly, ‘but I can’t marry you, Reggie.
It’s no use father—I can’t do it.’
The room went round with her, and she was conscious of their floating
faces, but it steadied again. She wasn’t going to do anything so easy as
to faint.
Reggie swore under his breath and moved towards the door. She heard her
father say soothingly that she wasn’t quite herself. It was curious that
he should say that of her, when for the first time in her life, that
which was herself, had risen up in her and acted.
It had hurt her more than she had dreamed that what you did could hurt
you, but she knew that if she had to do it all over again, now, with no
breath, and the bitter memory of Reggie’s stricken eyes acute in
her—she would somehow or other find strength to do it.
CHAPTER XXXIII
If there had been any side to take in favour of Viola Mr. Egerton would
have taken it. It would have brought him into opposition with his wife
in defence of her own child, and he was usually brought into opposition
with her merely in self-defence; and he had, besides, all a father’s
dislike to the idea of his daughter’s marrying any one, even his own
choice. But there was no side to take. Viola had broken her engagement
without a single creditable excuse.
Mr. Egerton had at first supposed that Reggie had ‘done something.’
Something which wasn’t of the slightest consequence, but which should
never be told to a young girl before marriage when she wasn’t in a
position to judge of it leniently.
Men in love made these disastrous confessions sometimes, and were
punished for them with all the vindictive high-handedness of innocence.
But Viola said quite plainly that she had no fault to find with Reggie.
He hadn’t told her anything at all. It was just a repetition of one of
the most confusing of human situations when the horse is brought to
water and cannot be persuaded to drink.
Mr. Egerton lost his temper several times in the course of his arguments
with Viola, and even appealed to Heaven, a place he never thought of,
except when his children disagreed with him! His relationship with Viola
had been that common to many fathers. It consisted mainly of
inarticulate affection, irrelevant family conversations, and nervous
misunderstandings.
Finally he said with a groan. ‘Well! I can’t do anything with you, I
see. You must go down to your mother.’
‘Oh, father, must I?’ cried Viola. For a moment their eyes met and
sounded each other, as if they weren’t father and daughter at all, but
two human creatures frightened by the crack of the same whip.
Mr. Egerton cleared his throat nervously, and then the smothered
jealousy of years overcome the pity of the fellow victim.
‘You have always been inseparable from your mother!’ he said bitterly.
‘It’s no use turning to me now.’
Viola spent the journey down in a hundred imaginary interviews with her
mother. She hoped she had allayed the full horror of the opening
sentences by telegraphing ‘Have broken my engagement with Reggie, arrive
at 4:15 to-morrow.’ She wouldn’t have actually to say it. Cèleste sat
opposite to her with her mouth nipped up. Nobody had told her anything,
but Viola saw that she knew.
She had repacked Viola’s things as if the bags of lavender between them
had been packets of poison.
Viola had destroyed Cèleste’s future with her own. She was one more
person whose success and happiness had been bound up in Viola’s personal
choice, and she wasn’t going to let Viola off feeling it.
Viola turned her head away so that she couldn’t see Cèleste, and looked
out on the soft, neat, green fields for protection. But they were too
protected to look very reassuring. She wished the country between London
and Eastbourne was wilder and less cared for. Being cared for was such a
responsibility, the very trees looked as if they were doing somebody or
other credit and daren’t for a moment forget it, and grow for
themselves.
Viola hoped her mother would be in their private sitting room, it would
be dreadful to be alone with her, but it would be more dreadful to go on
waiting for it. The short, actual moment of the plunging knife couldn’t
be as bad as when you just knew it would plunge, and wondered where it
would strike you.
She tried to make herself believe that after all there wouldn’t be any
knife. Her mother loved her so much; they were so like friends, it would
be easy to say what she really felt to her mother, if her mother let
her. But she knew that their friendship, even their love, was something
that lay in Mrs. Egerton’s will. You couldn’t count on it if you didn’t
please her.
Mrs. Egerton was sitting waiting for her in the hotel lounge; her eyes
met Viola’s inscrutably and without harshness. She scarcely raised her
graceful, reclining figure to greet her. They couldn’t, of course, say
anything with the whole hotel surging and murmuring about them.
The band was playing light, bad music, which brought tears to Viola’s
eyes.
They were tunes she and Reggie had so often danced to, when her heart
was as light as her feet, and everything seemed casual and gay, and
without penalties.
She felt sick and bewildered with what she had lost in him.
If only she could have kept him to dance with and laugh with and take
her part.
She knew from the moment she saw her mother that what she wanted to
escape was still there. She wasn’t any freer, really—she was only more
exposed.
She was a real culprit now, a person nailed to a sin which does not only
blacken him to others, but blackens the world for himself. Viola could
only sit and crumble bread and butter and wonder what she had done it
for. While her mother looked at her indifferently as if she were a
stranger who hadn’t been very well brought up.
At last Viola could bear it no longer.
‘Did you get my telegram?’ she asked abruptly.
Mrs. Egerton’s fine eyebrows lifted, and she glanced at Viola as if she
had been speaking in too loud a voice.
‘My dear,’ she said tranquilly, ‘should I have had tea ready if I were
not expecting you? I understood you to say that you were arriving by the
four fifteen.’
Viola’s eyes dropped; she remembered the infrequent occasions in her
early youth when she had been really naughty. The most terrible thing to
face had been that her mother ignored it. It was not until she was
forgiven that the question of what she had done had ever been allowed to
come up.
‘You will like to rest, perhaps,’ Mrs. Egerton said, after the ritual of
tea. ‘You will find your room waiting for you.’
People they knew came up, and Viola felt herself being firmly propelled
through wastes of interminable conversations.
It did not seem possible to her that people were still going on with
what they had talked about on Saturday; and that they expected her to go
on talking about it too. Surely enough had happened to stop dances and
dinner parties, or was there in the world she lived in never anything
that was enough to stop them? She found herself with set, shaking lips,
and eyes which she tried to keep attentively smiling, agreeing to their
incomprehensible arrangements.
This time yesterday afternoon Reggie had been showing her what a man’s
heart looks like when it has been suddenly exposed by pain, and ever
since that, life had been opening and growing more terrible to her, like
something relentlessly expanded by invisible elastic. She didn’t know
that she wanted to see it, but if she had got to see it she did want to
know what it meant, and all this bad music and flutter about
arrangements prevented her from knowing. They kept calling her back into
a world where the only significances are appearances, and nobody notices
invisible elastic.
Mrs. Egerton said nothing further to Viola until after dinner. She
stared a little when Viola said she had a headache and couldn’t play
bridge.
‘Very well then, dear,’ she murmured, ‘I’ll look in on you on my way up
to bed.’
Mrs. Egerton was no earlier than usual. Punctually at eleven o’clock she
came into Viola’s room. She held her head high, and the soft folds of
her pearl-coloured velvet tea-gown followed every movement of her
pliable, decisive figure. She had lost heavily at bridge that evening,
but she looked as if she had won. She sat down by Viola’s bedside, and
after asking punctiliously if her head was any better, she said without
a change of tone, ‘Have you written to the _Morning Post_, yet?’
‘Done what?’ stammered Viola.
‘Announced,’ said Mrs. Egerton in a clear expressionless voice, ‘the
breaking of your engagement. I understand that when people break their
promises of marriage they usually have the courtesy to let the fact be
known publicly. It saves troublesome private explanations afterwards.’
‘Oh, no—not yet——’ said Viola. It almost seemed as if her mother
wasn’t going to try to make her change her mind.
Mrs. Egerton picked up her lace fan and began waving it softly to and
fro. She was enormously relieved by Viola’s admission, but she did not
show any signs of relief.
‘It would be interesting to know,’ she said without looking at her
daughter, ‘why you have chosen to break the heart of the nicest man of
your acquaintance? That is to say, of course, if the rupture is of your
doing, and not as the world will naturally suppose, Reggie’s?’
‘Oh, mother,’ said Viola brokenly. She felt as if the world wouldn’t
matter if she could only get her mother away from it, but if she
couldn’t, how was she going to face the world? Her mother had always
faced it for them both before.
‘No, my dear, I don’t at all suppose it,’ said Mrs. Egerton, laying down
her fan and confronting Viola with unrelenting, narrowed eyes. ‘I happen
to know that Reginald Ainley is a man of honour as well as a very dear
fellow. He would never dream of breaking any one’s heart, or spoiling
their reputation. Whatever has been done, has been done, I feel sure, by
you alone, in a fit of very awkward ignorance—innocence, as you would
no doubt prefer my calling it. Mercifully, it is not too late to be
perfectly frank with me. What has caused you to take such a violent
step?’
‘I couldn’t marry him,’ said Viola. She looked piteously at her mother’s
mature, wise eyes. ‘I didn’t love him.’
It was such a poor little narrow plea, flung out in the cold, before a
cosmopolitan, experienced mind.
Her mother brushed it impatiently aside.
‘My dear,’ she said, ‘do remember you are not in the servants’ hall, or
even in the act of writing a penny novelette to be read there. In our
class of life we can very well marry a man we like very much without
appealing to melodrama.’
‘But, mother,’ Viola urged, ‘not marry him! Not just liking him—how
could I? I tried. You don’t know how hard I tried, but he wouldn’t have
liked it himself—he didn’t really, _now_—and it would have been worse
_after_.’
She had begun to tremble with a strange feeling of physical cold. It was
as if everything that warmed and comforted her heart was being dragged
relentlessly from her. If her mother didn’t understand, her whole world
must topple over, because it would show that the foundation of it was
false—the life they had lived together, the immense reassurance of
their mutual give and take wouldn’t be real at all. Either they saw this
fundamental thing together, or they had been deceived in each other.
They weren’t friends, companions and twin souls—they were just a mother
and daughter who had nothing between them but a painful, unequal love.
She put her hand out beseechingly on her mother’s lap, but Mrs. Egerton
did not touch it. She, too, knew that the crisis of their life together
had been reached. If Viola’s will failed her now the purpose of her
whole life failed.
The love within her receded and turned to ice. All her strength rallied
to her will; she must make Viola yield. An appeal to her emotions
wouldn’t last, but a broken will always lasts, it can never really
reassert itself again.
‘My very dear child,’ she said quietly, ‘you know nothing at all about
life, though you are very clever and intelligent. I hoped you weren’t
too clever to trust me; I was not afraid about the engagement, for I
thought when you chose we had chosen together. I knew that Reggie would
make you happy. You do not know, but as a matter of fact any good young
man who is suitable and loves a girl with the best that is in him, can
make her happy, unless she is in love with some one else.
‘You are not in love with any one else, are you?’
Viola shook her head. She was sure she did not love any one else. But
she knew there was a man who would not take the consent of her lips and
her eyes and leave untouched the spirit behind them.
It was perhaps true, as her mother said, that the outside of you could
be content if you forced it to, with youth, and (what her mother would
never have dreamed of calling) passion, and plenty of all the good
things you were used to—so used to that they sometimes seemed like
chains around your feet; but what of this new old self that had never
cared for the doll instead of the puppy, the pretty book against the
true book, the sheltered pane instead of the clean cold air?
‘The whole thing is so silly,’ her mother went on with a delicate,
restrained impatience. In a few months’ time you would be a contented
wife with a delightful home and a perfect husband. You need not fear
that Reggie’s love would bother you. That only lasts for the first few
weeks or months, and you would be to Reggie very much what Reggie would
be to you, a nice, intimate contemporary with the same interests as your
own. You need not upset yourself in any way—life is always perfectly
simple if you are with suitable people.
‘But you must act reasonably, and in the main, as other people act.
Breaking an engagement implies that you are either unbalanced or
unattractive—and I should extremely resent your being thought either of
these things.
‘I know men are often stupid and inconsiderate. Can you point out to me
any particular thing which Reggie could do, or not do, to please you?’
Viola sat up straight in bed, her dark hair hung down in two long
plaits, and her eyes shone with a sudden queer fire.
‘Oh, mother,’ she said, ‘I don’t care about being pleased, but there is
something I care about which Reggie hasn’t got—he hasn’t got any
feeling—about me being me; and when I try to find out what he is
like—I don’t like him at all.’
‘My dear,’ said Mrs. Egerton with a little ironic smile, ‘that is where
you make your mistake. You shouldn’t try to find out what men are like.
It is your business to find out what pleases and what displeases
them—but nothing more. Women don’t really like men, or men, women. We
put up with each other for the good of the race.’
‘Oh, but that’s awful!’ cried Viola, sinking back on her pillow. ‘That’s
simply awful! Is there no such thing as love?’
‘Oh, yes, there is love,’ said Mrs. Egerton, with a sudden vibration in
her voice. ‘I love you, Viola. I gave you life. I held you little and
helpless in my arms. I would have given my body to be burned for you.
‘You were a very delicate child. Sometimes I never took my clothes off
for five nights together, fighting for you with death, and I won. I gave
you day by day all my best thoughts. I had no plan that you were not the
centre of. You were in my heart and part of me, as much as when I
carried you. If you are beautiful and strong and clever enough to argue
with me now, it is with my love for you that you do it. You never look
in the glass without seeing my love for you, nor use your cruel young
strength without feeling it! Oh, my dear—you say is there any
love?—there is a love that never leaves you—and which counts all its
honours and its joys only for you! If I had thought you would not be
happy with Reggie I would never have let him near you. But you will be
happy with him. He is not a husband who refuses the co-operation of his
wife, and yet is not strong enough to do anything alone.
‘Reggie will hold power in his hands, his children will be privileged.
Your heart will be full of pride and content, and from the moment of
your wedding till the day when you are ready to send the life out of
your heart, as I am ready now to send you, you will have triumphed.
‘And I shall be glad of it, living or dead, I shall be glad of it—as I
have never been glad of any triumph of my own!’
Mrs. Egerton leaned back, her breath came quickly, her eyes never left
the white, startled face of her child.
All the power in her concentrated itself on this one moment’s struggle.
She felt her grasp over the child’s soul strengthen. She did not say
another word to break the binding silence.
Viola could never get away from her now; moment by moment vanished, and
it seemed as if there was no protest left in her.
And then she said in a perfectly steady, reasoning little voice, ‘But,
mother, I don’t call that love at all—you just don’t give me any room
to live.’
Mrs. Egerton rose steadily to her feet; but she was stricken.
The fruit of her life had fallen rotten at the root, she could not bear
to look at the cruel child whose touch had brought it down. The ice
spread over her heart again, encasing it for ever. Viola did not know
what she had done, but a panic seized her—she felt, if her mother had
left the room without speaking to her, as if she would never see her
again. She cried out, ‘Mother! Mother!’ But Mrs. Egerton, moving slowly
towards the door, never turned her head. There was a curious and awful
silence in the room, as if some one had just died.
Viola had asked her mother for space to live; but she had given her
mother only space—in which to die.
CHAPTER XXXIV
Viola was withdrawn from Eastbourne in disgrace and replanted in London
under a cloud.
From morning till night she was aware of a tacit disapproval. No one
reproached her in words. It was a relief to receive by post a piece of
Mrs. Ainley’s mind. The veneer of Reggie’s mother gave way under the
prick of her maternity.
She wrote four pages of under-scored anger in a perfectly religious
tone. But Viola’s own mother said nothing, and the things she didn’t say
remained ineffaceably in Viola’s heart.
There is no intimacy so deep, and no hostility so bitter as that between
a mother and daughter when their wills conflict.
For twenty-one years Mrs. Egerton and Viola had been literally all the
world to each other.
Viola knew when her mother felt a draught, or disliked the wording of a
phrase.
The turn of a vexed eyelash or the annoyed inflection of her mother’s
voice were as sharp as a blow to her. She could not get away from the
weight of her mother’s anger, it lay on her spirit with the
inflexibility of frost.
She knew that her father was angry with her too; he showed it by a
curtness of manner and the absence of his usual jokes. He remembered
whenever he saw Viola that she was the cause of trouble; but he did not
see her very often and he was not thinking of her when she was not
there, so that he had no accumulation of anger to visit upon her.
But there was no interval in Mrs. Egerton’s anger. It was perfectly
smooth, bare and stationary.
Nothing could be done with it but surrender to it, and Viola often felt
herself on the verge of surrender. She had none of the secret pleasures
of obstinacy, her opinions were not important to her, and her emotions
wavered. But there was something in her that called out for air and knew
that submission meant suffocation. Her conscience, goaded by perpetual
disapproval, enlarged its margin.
It permitted Viola to do things that if the disapproval had lifted would
have been automatically forbidden to her.
She was secretly astonished by this feeling of inner latitude, but she
took advantage of it.
She went for queer little walks by herself, and insisted on visiting
people she knew her mother didn’t like—strange people who read books as
if they were important and went to Sunday afternoon concerts even when
they hadn’t got proper seats.
Viola reached the summit of her secret violence when she saw the
announcement of a big labour meeting, and decided to attend it.
‘What on earth do you want to go to a Labour meeting for?’ her father
asked her irritably. ‘No decent person is ever seen at a place like
that! Why, the fellow James Barton is going to speak, and I consider him
personally responsible for the dock strike. He’s holding up the whole
river, confound him! The man ought to be imprisoned and the strike funds
seized, and would be if any one knew how to govern the country! And you
want to go and hear him talking about it?’
‘I want,’ said Viola firmly, ‘to hear what they have to say for
themselves.’
‘Say for themselves!’ cried Mr. Egerton, helping himself to turbot with
a splash, ‘what on earth does it matter what fellows like that say for
themselves? They get their arguments out of inflammatory rags, and are
paid for repeating the lies they find there!’
‘Wherever they get their arguments from, I should like to hear them,’
said Viola; ‘after all, we get our own arguments from newspapers, too, I
suppose?’
‘Really, my dear child,’ said Mrs. Egerton, ‘I hope you don’t mean to
suggest as well, that your father and I draw our income from our
political views? But of course you do not know what you are talking
about, nor have you yet mentioned with whom you purpose to go?’
‘Go—she mustn’t go at all,’ said Mr. Egerton. ‘I can’t have it said
that my daughter is rushing about to places of that kind.’
Mrs. Egerton changed the conversation. She wanted it to stop with the
full force of her husband’s authority unwatered down by any further
reflections from Viola. She would not forbid Viola to do anything
herself. She had gone beyond the intimacy of orders, but she wanted her
to be prevented from attending the meeting. She did not realise that
Viola had moved also, she had gone beyond the force of prevention.
She had been hanged for lambs for three penitential weeks, and now she
hardened her heart and presented her parents with a sheep.
The night of the meeting arrived, and Viola, having dressed as usual for
dinner, went out and took her latchkey.
She was sorry afterwards that she wore a blue velvet coat trimmed with
ermine and her pearls, but she had never been to a Labour meeting
before, and she vaguely intended to join her mother at a reception
afterwards.
The hall was crammed to its capacious brim, almost everybody was dressed
in something dark that looked a little rough.
A great many women wore glasses and must have been school teachers;
there were shop-girls, too, who looked a little smarter, but most of the
audience were men.
Viola had never seen so many men before in her life—they ware like an
army. Men with curious white lustreless faces and blue shadows under
their eyes, who worked in mines or were engineers, and had had the
colour bleached out of them by furnaces.
Hundreds of narrow-chested young men who had never had enough to eat, or
games to play themselves alive; clerks and shop-men and factory hands,
and the unlabelled multitude of fugitive Londoners, who can be divided
chiefly by age. When they were young their salaries were big enough to
make them a little irresponsible; they bought large ties and their eyes
had a flicker of expectation. Sometimes they played football and
sometimes they were in love. But when they were middle-aged the flicker
in their eyes went out. They did not make money enough for expectations,
they struggled on, driven by domestic difficulties under the harrow of
their narrow incomes.
Viola sat back thoughtfully in her seat and studied the faces around
her.
There was something odd and stirring in the air as if every man and
woman in the hall had a personal stake and knew what they meant by it.
The seat by Viola’s side was empty, but just before the meeting began a
girl slipped unobtrusively into it. She had an expressionless face,
which was very nearly pretty, and odd eyes which seemed to hover over
what she looked on, as if she might, if it were worth while, strike.
She looked quite well off, but as if she were accustomed to going about
a good deal alone.
She glanced at Viola, her pearls, her soft blue velvet cloak, and down
at her little gray suède slippers with paste buckles. It was an
impersonal glance, bright and hard, like an animal’s in a hedge. Viola
wondered if the girl’s eyes had ever looked friendly.
The meeting opened dully with a radical peer. None of the audience could
forget he was a peer, and he couldn’t forget he was a radical.
He spent most of his time explaining how unimportant he was, while the
people waited.
The vast audience grew restless under his explanations, they cheered
good-naturedly, but they wanted him to stop. They knew he was
unimportant. The chairman, a shrewd, heavy-browed man with luminous
eyes, introduced each of the speakers in turn, he made no speeches
himself, but he said plainly and loudly who each speaker was and what
subject he was going to speak about.
It was a large programme, and Viola was astonished at the clearness and
character of the speakers.
Sometimes they began stumblingly, as if the huge crowded hall blocked
their utterance and shook their nerves, but after a moment or two of
floundering, something in the urgency of what they had to say, or a wave
of fellow-feeling from their audience drew them into self-forgetfulness.
These men were there to say what they had thought about for years. They
had run risks to say it and gone to great expense.
They could not afford to fail in saying what they meant.
Their words came out steadily, solidly, with the weight of familiar
facts.
Viola had often been to political meetings before, but the clear, fluent
platitudes of people she agreed with, had passed over her mind as
colourlessly as water.
These words shook her.
One by one men got up and said what their work was like. Very few of
them had any style beyond their sincerity. They were tied to narrow
vocabularies. But they were all workers, and the people who listened to
them were workers. Some of them worked with their hands and some with
their heads, but they were part of the same correspondence between
personal effort and daily bread.
Very few people were there for fun or had any resources that came
without struggle.
It was this which gave to the meeting what Viola had never felt before,
an acuteness of interest and an extraordinary comradeship.
None of these people knew each other, but they knew one fact about each
other which made them feel as compact and involved as a family.
When a mill girl from the north in clogs and a shawl got up and stood
facing the gathered multitudes of London, to tell them she had been
fined for sneezing, the angry wave that stirred the whole audience was
as personal as if they had shared the injustice. They knew what fines
meant. They knew the personal humiliation of them and the havoc they
made in the weekly budget.
Some of them could check from personal experience the tyrannical
inhibitions of the living-in system, and most of them knew the deadly
ruthlessness of lock-outs for unpunctuality.
It seemed incredible to Viola that two hundred workers could be left in
a strange neighbourhood without shelter, losing half a day’s pay because
of a belated train.
She was stirred to the bottom of her heart by tragedies newspapers never
tell, tragedies that do not end fatally because they do not end at all.
She listened with burning cheeks to the sometimes reasonable and
sometimes merely vindictive diatribes against men in the position of her
father. Their privileges, their perfunctory attention to their
work-people’s claims, their inaccessibility.
No one there spoke up for their benevolence. Viola had heard so much
always about the care and kindness of capitalists, that she had been
unable to judge fairly of a system in which cultured good-heartedness
had such an apparent scope. She had not thought of poor people as
necessarily bad, but she had taken for granted that they were ignorant,
and without the capacity for knowledge; and that power is only safe with
knowledge, and that knowledge does not filter down much beneath four
hundred a year.
Her mind flinched before Jim’s name on the programme. He was to speak of
the issue between her father himself (her father and Reggie, and
Reggie’s father) and the dockers. She dreaded it so much that she felt
cold and trembled, and she wanted it so much that nothing else in the
world seemed to matter.
She had forgotten her private problems.
Her heart, bewildered and submerged in its personal struggle, was flung
out suddenly on to a wider sea.
She held her head up with a relieved sense as if she were breathing
again.
People weren’t disgraceful because they stood out for freedom. They were
only disgraceful when they tried to stop other people from standing out,
or felt sure they were right and nothing need be changed because they
were not personally hampered.
Viola was glad she was hampered now, it was her only point of union with
the people around her.
There was an interval half-way through the meeting. She turned to the
girl beside her.
‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ she said eagerly. ‘I’ve never heard anything in
the least like it before.’
The girl lifted her quick, hovering eyes to Viola without answering her
for a moment; then she said, ‘I don’t often come to Labour meetings
myself, but it happens my brother is to speak at this one, and they gave
me a free ticket at the door.’
‘Your brother!’ cried Viola. ‘How awfully interesting! Has he spoken
yet?’
The girl shook her head.
‘I see him coming on to the platform now,’ she said. ‘He speaks for the
dockers.’
‘Oh!’ cried Viola in astonishment, ‘but that’s Jim Barton—is he your
brother? I admire him so much—I’ve heard him preach twice.’
‘Have you?’ said Eliza without enthusiasm. ‘I can’t say that I have. He
seems to be fond of religion.’
‘It must be wonderful to have a brother like that!’ Viola went on. ‘Do
you live with him and take care of him?’ Then she remembered the lady
with the mortar-board, and somehow or other Viola could not connect the
lady with the mortar-board and Eliza.
‘I don’t,’ said Eliza quietly, ‘hold much with religion myself. Of
course I don’t say Jim hasn’t done wisely by sticking to it. He needed
education and now he’s got it. So that’s all to the good. But he doesn’t
make what he might out of it.’ Eliza dismissed Jim and his projects. She
looked more fixedly at Viola. ‘You won’t mind my saying it,’ she asked,
‘will you, but do you think it’s very safe to wear pearls in a big
meeting like this? There are rough people about.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ said Viola, ‘but they have a safety catch; I think they
must be all right, don’t you? Papa said it was such a good one.’
Eliza’s eyes raised themselves to the catch and looked away again. ‘I
should put them in my handbag if I were you,’ she said, ‘a man might
make a snatch at them coming out.’
Viola obediently unfastened her pearls and thrust them into her handbag.
‘Thanks so much for warning me,’ she said, ‘though I can hardly believe
any of these people would want to snatch pearls.’
‘I don’t know why not,’ said Eliza a little flatly. ‘Most of them are
poor, and poor people aren’t honest as a rule unless they have to be. I
dare say you haven’t noticed it, because you’d hardly miss what you
lost. But people like me have to be careful. It matters to us not to
lose things.’
Viola hesitated. ‘You don’t remind me very much of your brother,’ she
said after a pause.
‘I’m not like my brother,’ replied Eliza dryly. ‘Jim and I don’t often
meet.’
‘But you will to-night,’ pleaded Viola. ‘It would be so thrilling to
tell him to come and speak to us, especially if he doesn’t know you’re
here.’
‘Well, I don’t mind if you do,’ said Eliza good-naturedly.
‘Let’s send a man with a note to him now,’ Viola said quickly.
‘Not before he’s spoken,’ said Eliza with decision. ‘The man mustn’t
even give him the note till he’s finished.’
Viola thought this was very considerate of Eliza. It might put Jim off
his speech to know they were there unexpectedly.
The audience were back in their seats by now. An ex-Factory Inspector
spoke first, and then Jim.
Viola leaned forward oblivious of anything in the world but Jim’s face.
It was very far away and small. Jim sat at the back of the platform. He
had no nervous habits as he waited. He leaned forward to listen to the
speaker as if he were absorbed. When the Chairman rose to introduce him,
he flung back his head, and the relentless flaxen lock which would never
lie flat fell forward on to his forehead. He came to the front of the
platform with quick firm steps, looking straight at his audience. He did
not see them. Jim never saw his audiences—he saw only what he had to
say, point after point, in burning words. He read his speeches out of
the listening air.
Viola’s breath came so unevenly she could hardly catch his opening
words. She felt as if all her life and all who were dear to her were at
his mercy. But Jim made no personal attacks.
He was not bitter, and he was as nearly without prejudice as an
enthusiast can be. He spoke of the dockers’ cause point by point, and
out of his personal experience, as the other speakers had done, but he
spoke as no one else had yet done—with imagination.
He was not content with facts as they were; he showed without
exaggeration and with deadly simplicity what the facts meant.
No one else had made Viola see what really happens to people who can’t
get justice.
The other speakers had shown the faults of a system, but Jim showed what
became of human beings when they had been under the faults of a system.
Viola forgot about her father; she forgot that if Jim was right,
everything that she believed in was wrong. She forgot everything but the
issue between the dockers and the owners. She felt herself drawn into
their stubborn tussle, passionately upon the dockers’ side.
Jim did nothing to minimise what it meant if their struggle succeeded;
sooner or later it would bring about the crash and breakage of her
world.
There was not a sound or stir in all the building but his voice.
Sometimes Jim would stop with a queer little jerk of his head, and let
out a flying, fiery joke which sent a sharp burst of laughter through
his audience. Sometimes he would lift his hand with an awkward gesture,
and his voice rising suddenly with passion would lose its penetrating
cockney accent and shake his hearers with its intensity. Every now and
then after an impressive point he paused, and while he paused his whole
audience swung into silence with him. He ended with a sudden drop on to
a level phrase, not of petition, but of statement. It was as if he had
come through sympathy and had nothing left but fact.
Viola gave a long sigh of relief. She had been unbearably stirred, and
under the stir her mind had changed. She knew that she would never look
at anything in quite the same way again. Eliza sat unmoved and
apparently uninterested. She watched a man step forward and give Jim
Viola’s note.
Jim got up at once as if there was something urgent in it.
‘Did you ever hear any one speak like your brother?’ Viola asked her
breathlessly.
Eliza paused for a moment; a curious reflective look passed over her
face.
‘He has a good deal to say for himself,’ she said at last. ‘I grant you.
That’s what education does, but it seems to me a pity he should pour it
all out like this. It isn’t, you see, much of a profession. I understand
they don’t pay him anything for his speeches.’
‘But I suppose his profession,’ said Viola tentatively, ‘is helping poor
people, isn’t it?’
Eliza answered her with a certain bitterness.
‘He might help them who help themselves,’ she said coldly. ‘Not those
who can’t. But Jim was always soft.’
Viola stared at her apprehensively. There was something in the small,
neat figure beside her which had the effect of a drop of acid.
Viola turned, with a curious feeling of relief as if she had been near
something dangerous, towards Jim. He came quickly, and as he reached
Viola’s side his eyes and Eliza’s met across her with the quick, upward
jerk of a knife.
‘How on earth,’ Jim muttered, ‘did you turn up here, Eliza?’
Somebody else began to speak. Jim looked curiously disturbed and
upset—it was a moment or two before Viola made him smile at her, and
then they found that Eliza had gone! She must have moved like a streak
of lightning in the interval when their eyes met. How she had slipped
along the row and up the narrow aisle to the door at the top was a
mystery, but when they turned their heads to look for her she was
nowhere in sight.
‘The devil! She’s gone!’ Jim muttered to himself.
‘She really _was_ your sister?’ Viola asked. She had a funny sensation
as if she would rather Eliza hadn’t been Jim’s sister; but he nodded
grudgingly.
Viola did not hear what any of the other speakers said. She was absorbed
in a curious consciousness of the man beside her. He was a common man,
nothing in him had changed from the first night she saw him, but she was
losing sight, losing sight with a curious haste, of all his little
mannerisms. It was as if a tide was covering over a vast expanse of mud
flats. The mud was there still, but it was hidden, glorified by racing
waters—there was no sense in it any more of being a thing to despise.
Her imagination had begun to yield to him. She knew that there was
largeness in him, and a power that could stand any man’s ridicule. He
wasn’t bounded by rules, or by arrangements, and he wouldn’t topple over
if anything awkward happened.
Viola had always thought it was security to be with people who seldom
let awkward things happen, who, when they nevertheless did happen, had
to perfection the art of saving themselves.
But that was not Jim’s strength. With him the security would be that the
social disaster didn’t matter, simply didn’t count whether it happened
or not.
Jim had none of the insolent mastery which Reggie understood and used in
all his relations with women. He had roused and moved her, humiliated
and hurt her, and yet now he was beside her, he looked shy and very
humble, as if he only wanted not to be in her way.
It was not until they got up to go that Viola discovered, in spite of
Eliza’s kind precautions, that her pearls were gone.
It surprised Viola that Jim should care so much about the loss of
pearls.
He looked as shaken and bereft as if a terrible accident had happened.
‘Come,’ she said laughingly, ‘they’re only property, and you’ve been
telling us to-night just how bad property is for us!’
‘Yes,’ he said grimly, ‘you’re right, I did; but I happen to think other
people’s property rather worse for us than our own.’
For a moment she wondered if he was even going to take her home.
Then he said abruptly, ‘Am I to walk back with you?’ He would not speak
about anything but the pearls. He made her tell him every particular,
and he listened intently to everything about them, even Eliza’s warning,
and the handbag. He told her that directly he had taken her back he
would go straight to Scotland Yard for her.
Viola wanted to tell him that his words had changed her life, but he did
not seem to want to hear how she had liked his speech.
Almost before he reached her door he said ‘Good-bye,’ without holding
out his hand.
She put her hand on his arm. ‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘that the poor
thief will get some dreadful long sentence if he’s caught? I do wish you
wouldn’t go to Scotland Yard for me.’ But she saw that her wish was
useless.
‘Somebody’s life will be smashed up, no doubt,’ he answered, ‘but you
ought to get your pearls back just the same.’
‘But why will you make me feel so miserable,’ she pleaded; ‘I told you I
didn’t want them.’
‘It’ll be much worse,’ he said in a softened voice, ‘for the person who
keeps them. It’s always worse for people not to get caught.’
Viola held out her hand to him, but he stepped quickly away from it.
‘Oh,’ she said, half laughing, half crying, ‘do you hate me, Mr. Barton,
just because I had my pearls stolen?’
Jim shook his head; his eyes had a hard light in them as if he were
wrestling with a physical opponent.
‘I wish to Heaven I did!’ he said hoarsely. ‘I’m handicapped by the
opposite feeling. I’m fighting your father to a finish. It’ll be him or
me down in the end of it. And you? I can’t get you out of my head. It
hurts like fun to look at you, and remember all you stand for. But I
suppose I’d rather have the eyes out of my head than not look at you!
‘You have a home, and every one who sees you loves you, don’t they?
They’d be mad if they didn’t. You don’t know what it is to have nothing
else to care about but a woman you’ll never touch!
‘This is your house, isn’t it? I wish to heaven I’d never set foot in
it. Don’t be frightened! Everything in the world is on your side, even
my heart.
‘You’re as safe from me as if I hated you—only don’t ask impossible
things of me. Don’t you see, standing there staring at me with your
innocent eyes that nothing ever happened to—why, I’m a bit upset. My
sister Eliza has just run off with your pearls.’
Viola moved back suddenly as if Jim had struck her in the face. He had
told her too much, she could not take it in, she didn’t want to take it
in; and before she had regained her self-control he had left her. She
was quite safe now, a policeman sauntered slowly towards the house.
Jim had left her close to her own doorstep. A flight of theatre taxis
swept the Square. People she knew, two doors off, were giving a dance.
Viola slipped into the hall and closed the door behind her.
It was all safe and soft, quiet and full of light. There was no violence
there. But she had been face to face with violence—incredible violence
of feeling and taste. She had to sit down suddenly to save herself from
falling.
The violence hadn’t all been left outside, some of it was in her swiftly
beating heart, and in her failure of breath, and in something far more
permanent and real than any shock to her senses.
There was a violence in the fact that although a common man had told her
that he loved her, she had not been able to feel angry, nor even
ashamed.
CHAPTER XXXV
Jim tore himself away from Viola with an angry heart. It was too hard
that she should choose this moment of his deepest abasement to taunt him
with her friendliness. Couldn’t she see he was down and out?
Roused by the vehemence of his own speech he had sat by her side for
half the evening, fighting with his love for her.
He had never dreamed human love was like this, a creature that took no
denial, choked and tortured you for expression, flooded you like light,
and retreated from you with the same astonishing rapidity, leaving you
in utter darkness.
Jim had felt full of gentleness and chivalry for Viola one moment, and
full of fierceness and stubborn anger against her the next. His shame
about Eliza confused his judgment.
He wanted to let Viola alone and keep her ignorant of his despair, and
then crowding in upon this want rushed a sharp desire to see her share
his knowledge, and let her know, if only for a moment his own personal
stress.
Well, he had let her know; he had shocked her like some savage, clumsy
animal and frightened her away from him for ever.
Wivvle wouldn’t have shocked her. Wivvle could break your heart and be
like a bog under your feet, but he wouldn’t, beneath any weight of
ineptitude, turn nasty.
It was always Wivvle and not Ainley to whom Jim compared himself in his
moments of abasement. Ainley hadn’t that indefinable charm which made
the idea of shock or offence from Wivvle inconceivable.
In all moments of crisis Jim felt the roughness of his origin break out
in him. The men spoke of his fierceness as powerful and splendid.
‘There’s old Jim roused at last!’ they would say appreciatively. But Jim
dreaded his moments of passion, he knew them for what they
were—dangerous defeats of the will.
His gusts of feeling shook him when he was at his weakest. Strength
wasn’t violence, it was steadiness. It wasn’t shaking other people, it
was keeping your own heart unshaken when everything else around you was
unsteady.
The summer night soothed him like the touch of a hand. London, with all
its trivial havoc of the day, was covered by the soft, friendly dark.
The air tasted of far away orchards, the buses had stopped and the
swift, infrequent motors plunging through the night only broke for a
moment the increasing silences.
Jim walked quickly across the Square and by the solid shadow of the
Park. His anger flickered and went out. He turned his thoughts down into
his heart till they found rest. His love for Viola went deeper than the
hunger for possession.
After all, he did possess her still, however much he had lost her. She
was beautiful enough to go on loving, even if she didn’t belong to him.
Life was no longer an impersonal job; once she had come to him for help,
and once she had stood there and wanted him for herself—wanted him,
however little, as a friend.
Some wall in his mind had broken down at her touch, and let in a new
light upon the world. Jim had never understood lovers before. The
foolish and the terrible things they did to satisfy their hearts had
seemed unreal and puzzling to him.
His own controlled passions and steady common sense had recoiled before
the blind and headlong eagerness of this strange hunger in the dark.
He had thought love a little thing to distract and ruin lives, and not
enough to crown them. He would never feel it a little thing again, and
if he could not have the love he wanted, he found that his love for men
and women was quickened even by its loss.
He knew even now in this first quiet hour, that people were suddenly as
important to him as causes. He cared with a new depth for the wisps of
humanity, blown like thistledown across a field on to embankment
benches.
The lost and fallen by the way did not seem to him despicable any more;
he thought of them with tenderness. They had found all the lessons of
life too hard to bear, and, slipping out of them, had reached the
hardest of all—and were learning it.
Even his anger against Eliza seemed a less final thing. He wished that
he could meet her now with this new feeling in him. But Eliza had not
sunk to the embankment. She was not like thistledown, she was more like
the wind that drove it.
Eliza had slipped into Piccadilly Circus and by an inconspicuous route
worked her way home to the most evasive of her haunts. She supposed that
Jim had found her out, but she thought that, for his own sake, he would
hold his tongue.
She had no fear of Viola whatever. Viola was soft.
Eliza would have been as astonished as she would have been furious if
she had known that Jim meant to report her to the police. She wouldn’t
have seen the sense of it.
But not even his new tenderness for her deflected Jim. It was horrible
to think of Eliza caught and behind bars, but his only alternative was
more horrible still—always to see her predatory and hovering with the
world her victim.
Jim knew the Yard well; he had gone there again and again to befriend
criminals, but never to report them. He was not afraid or ashamed of the
detectives’ keen impersonal knowledge.
It wasn’t people’s knowing that Jim minded most about Eliza, it was
having to stand there as if he were different from her, and on the side
of the world, and not her brother and on her side against all her
enemies.
It was monstrous to him to have to tell against her—all his instinct
was with Eliza and against the world. But his reason wasn’t. His reason
pointed out that though the world was almost always wrong in its methods
it was seldom wrong in its aims.
People like Eliza couldn’t be allowed to prey on the innocent. You had
got, if you cared for any system of protection at all, to be on the side
of protection against robbery. Eliza wouldn’t be any worse for going to
prison; she would always be as bad as she could. The only limit Eliza
set on crime was that of her own capacity for carrying it out.
The moon stood high above the river, catching the small gardens under
Westminster. Rodin’s ‘Burghers of Calais,’ huddled against the dark mass
of Parliament buildings, stood out sharp and clear on its small silvered
patch of grass.
They knew what they were about, these patient, reluctant men, giving
themselves up with halters on their necks (to save their free city) into
the hands of Kings. They didn’t like it. Their wavering, huge hands and
dragging feet revealed their natural shrinking from death. But they had
perfectly agreed to it. They were the steadiest of champions, men who
had counted the cost and knew that it was worth while to pay it.
It was a great comfort to Jim to see them, and to feel that they were
going to do what they had to do without enthusiasm. They were the first
heroes he had ever seen who hadn’t any charm.
They helped him to go to Scotland Yard and give his evidence against
Eliza.
The Superintendent whom he saw was extremely considerate.
‘You’d be surprised,’ he said after he had taken down the details of
Jim’s story, ‘what people have criminals in their families. It seems to
go about like measles, stealing does, taking first one and then the
other. A pity there isn’t a rash to trace them by, that’s all.
‘Now, about your sister, you’ll bring us all the information that comes
your way, and when we’re on her track (and in the long run we catch out
the neatest if they’re habitual) we’ll communicate with you. But don’t
expect anything in a hurry, and I’ll advise Mr. Egerton not to advertise
or make a fuss. Your sister won’t sell the necklace as a necklace—it’ll
go pearl by pearl, and it’ll take some tracing, and if she thinks we
aren’t moving she’ll be all the more likely to slip up. I only wish we
knew as much as you do about river thieves, but I suppose you’d as soon
tell me as take a dive off the Bridge?’
Jim nodded, but he winced as he turned away from the inspector. Every
one, apparently, was safe with him, except his sister.
Jim had done what he had set out to do, but it would have been a good
deal easier if he could have done it with the pride and anger he had
felt when he left Viola. It was like paying Viola back to give up Eliza
then, but to give her up when his love had got the better of his temper
was like black treachery.
He felt as if nothing beautiful could ever happen to him again.
He was nearly thirty, and for the rest of his life he would do what he
meant, and have nothing beyond what he expected.
After all, the Burghers of Calais, walking out to their doom with their
halters around their necks, had got off better than Jim. They had worn
their own halters and thought they were going to die, and Jim had put a
halter on somebody else’s neck, and knew that he was going to face
nothing so final or so adventurous as death.
CHAPTER XXXVI
Reggie had gone abroad. He couldn’t face London or himself in his
accustomed life. He was a popular man, and every one would have taken
his side; but they would have been very sorry for him. Reggie had always
succeeded in everything he had undertaken, and he had never had to have
any one sorry for him before.
It was a most serious and inconvenient moment for Reggie to leave his
business, but he liked the feeling that he was risking great financial
loss because of Viola’s heartlessness. The Egertons were risking great
financial loss as well.
Reggie had already risen out of flat grief into distinguishing
preferences. He was pleased to realise that he was looking white and
desperate, and that he had the most expensive room with the best view of
the Mediterranean in the hotel. He did not care in the least about the
view, but he felt that a man with a broken heart ought to have the best
of everything.
Reggie was young and astonished at not getting what he wanted. It was
incredible that pain should lay violent hands upon him, but his heart
was not broken because he had not gone deep enough into love to risk his
inner self. He was like a child forcibly deprived of a delightful toy,
but not like some one who has lost part of himself, and has to take up a
weakened life without an incentive.
He opened his letters eagerly to see how badly everything was going
without him.
Fortunately, things were going quite badly enough. The Dock Strike had
started and promised to be the longest, fiercest, and most
unsatisfactory strike that the dock and ship owners had ever strangled.
There was already talk of a Government commission, and if it came off,
more or less impartial people would be allowed to study profits and
conditions.
Mr. Egerton wrote hopelessly about it. He couldn’t put up a good case,
because he was so enraged at having to put up a case at all.
He felt as if he had been born right, whereas Reggie was perfectly aware
that righteousness could, and even at moments must, be worked. Feeling
sure was sentimental nonsense. You had to look sharp and prove things.
Mr. Egerton wrote that Jim Barton was at the bottom of it all. He was
fighting for a Government commission and keeping the men quiet.
There was no sabotage and less drinking than usual. The strike relief
was well organised, and though people suffered, there was nothing
inordinate about their suffering.
It was a summer strike and the funds were very well administered. The
owners might get men down from the north, but it was an appalling
expense, and they knew that they wouldn’t be left alone to work in peace
if they got them there. Jim Barton would be at them as he was day and
night at the strikers, with that hideous vivid gift he had of pouring
his vitality under other people’s skins.
Reggie cursed into his coffee cup when he thought of it. He was a clear,
good-tempered speaker himself, but he wasn’t an orator.
Mr. Egerton did not mention Viola until the end of his letter, then he
wrote: ‘I hear Viola is going to a Labour meeting against my express
wishes. I think her head has been completely turned, but I’m sure I
don’t know what has done it. Perhaps we oughtn’t to have had that
bounder to dinner.’
Reggie read the sentence twice. Was it conceivable that there had been
another man after all? Could the little, flower-like, well-bred girl he
had chosen for himself have stooped to think about this man of no birth,
who had risen laboriously above dropped ‘h’s’ and never above his
accent, who in any decent company must always be a man apart? You
couldn’t, Reggie thought, for all his education, mistake Barton for a
gentleman?
Reggie had one of those brains which always has all its information
ready for use. Neither anger, nor pity, not even fairness, ever
deflected him from using his wits.
He ran over Jim’s career at the Bligh’s, and every disagreeable incident
of their joint existence came at his call. He had paid the big,
truculent lump of a hog out for knocking him down on the lawn. Wivvle
would never have had the sense or the nerve to have got out of his
scrape through Barton, if it hadn’t been for Reggie. That unexplained
scrape attached itself remorselessly to Jim Barton. The Bligh’s
household would never forget it—the mention of Jim Barton, if he was
mentioned, would invariably bring back the cloud, and it might be so
arranged that he would be mentioned. Mrs. Egerton was a very clever
woman, and so was Mrs. Bligh; they were distant cousins and they both
had daughters.
Reggie finished his breakfast with more appetite than he had begun it;
he smoked a cigarette thoughtfully and then wrote a long, neat,
unhurried letter to Mrs. Egerton.
Mrs. Egerton received the letter at the same time as Cèleste gave her
Viola’s defiant message about the Labour meeting. It was too late to
stop Viola going, but it wasn’t too late to avert the consequences.
Mrs. Egerton went out as usual, but she left word that she would see her
daughter before breakfast next morning.
The house was empty when Viola returned, as empty as a big glittering
shell. Mr. Egerton had gone to his club. Harry was dancing the tango.
She went through the noiseless hall, and up the wide staircase to her
room, without seeing even a servant. The silence, the emptiness and the
light frightened her. She was haunted by the thought of Eliza’s small,
hard face, and burning eyes. It was the first time in Viola’s life that
she had come in contact with the hardness of evil. She realised suddenly
that people who had no quarrel with you at all might do terrible things
to hurt you. All the crimes she had ever read of flashed into her mind,
their ugliness and their precision. She had always felt vaguely sorry
for criminals before, as for those unfortunate people who went a little
too far—but she hadn’t known that they had faces like Eliza.
Why hadn’t she called Jim back and stopped him? She had nearly called
him, but the policeman with his heavy tread had startled her as if it
were she who was being pursued.
Or was it that after all custom had been too much for Viola, and that
strips of scarlet cloth two doors off had mocked at her as if she had
betrayed its chief treasure?
She was a coward; she shouldn’t have let Jim go without a word of
kindness. He might fall under suspicion: he had been with her when Eliza
left them. People would say, ‘That’s the kind of person who leads a
strike,’ and all that wonderful sense of fellowship she had felt
to-night would be shaken and blotted out by the loss of a wretched
string of pearls.
Viola felt confused by the enormity of chance. Why had she worn her
pearls, or sent for Jim, or talked to Eliza? And, above all, why had Jim
said so stupidly and so fiercely, just when she needed all her wits
about her to help him, that he would give his soul to touch her?
She had heard men use that phrase before, but they hadn’t meant it—nor
had they really, if they had taken the trouble to look for one—much of
a soul to produce. They simply meant they rather wanted to kiss her. Jim
had looked at her as if her kiss was worth a kingdom to him.
His eyes had shaken her; it was as if by looking he had held her closer
than any man had ever held her before; and yet when he had said that she
was as safe with him as if he hated her, she had known that it was true.
You could trust most men up to a certain conventional point, but not
beyond. There was no point, no check in the sea of trust she felt for
Jim.
She had been frightened by the strength of his passion, and shocked
because after all he was a common man; but she hadn’t been frightened by
what might happen to her with this common man.
Of course any relation between them was impossible, what Jim had said
was perfectly true. He was fighting her father, and Eliza was his
sister. Viola couldn’t make friends with a person, however interesting,
whose sister stole jewelry. There was Jim’s religion too. Viola didn’t
understand religion; Jim’s stood behind him, queer and ominous as a
cloud. She wasn’t sure what it could do to him, but she knew she feared
it.
Religion when it is real is as terrible as crime and as dividing.
It was what Jim meant all the time; even when he was alone.
Viola was sure of this because he hadn’t touched her hand, or waited for
an answer. She liked him more for these two things than she liked him
for anything; but it made her feel how very dangerous religion might be.
She leaned out of the window into the large, quiet Square. There was a
light, desultory breeze moving the leaves of the Square garden. She
watched them swing to and fro, dark and alive, like her young thoughts.
She listened with a new quickening of the heart to the far-off sounds of
the city, until they sank to rest.
Something curious had happened to the night; everything Viola saw and
heard was more vivid to her, and more acute; even the silence brought
with it a deeper significance.
The dawn came imperceptibly, the black, curved Square grew gray and the
lamp light pale. Birds twittered uncertainly, and were still.
Night prowlers slipped, like shadows, across the Square. The air grew
cool and fresh as if it had subdued the light, but still Viola could not
bear to leave the window. She did not want to shut her eyes and leave
the new touched world.
When she slept at last she dreamed that her string of pearls was broken,
and the pearls alive and scattering about her feet. She wanted to escape
from them, but they pursued her, crying out that she belonged to them
and could never escape.
In the morning Cèleste told her that her mother wished to see her
directly she was dressed.
Viola went to her mother’s room before breakfast.
Mrs. Egerton never began a difficult conversation with any one by
stating what she had to say. She always, as far as it was open to her,
laid waste the mind of her adversary until she had reached the end of
his resources. Then carefully and without hurry she inserted what she
intended to say, into the void.
She talked to Viola for half an hour the next morning before she
mentioned Mrs. Bligh.
She heard all that Viola had to tell her about the Labour meeting and
the loss of the pearls.
She forbore from pointing any moral, she did not even stoop to connect
the two incidents, though Viola knew that her mother felt it to be
obvious that people who went to Labour meetings would lose pearls.
Viola said in defence of this unattacked citadel that she had never seen
so many people before, and supposed that among all those thousands there
might very well be a pick-pocket or two. Mrs. Egerton looked as if it
was a pity so many people were there for such an immoral purpose,
whether they were pickpockets or not, but she did not say so.
Viola gave up the Labour meeting. She said diffidently and without
purpose that it had been a very warm night and must be beautiful in the
country just now.
‘I think it would be better for you to be there,’ her mother agreed
tranquilly.
If she had said, ‘Your conduct is disobedient, you are no longer to be
trusted, you break engagements, lose pearls and have vulgar tastes,
therefore you are better in the country, where the opportunities for
exposing these failings are fewer,’ she could not have made her meaning
clearer.
Viola bowed her head in acknowledgment of her sins. She felt as if she
were moving under a load of guilt. She wanted to be punished and exiled.
She didn’t mind what happened to her as long as she didn’t have to
confess. She hadn’t really done anything dreadful, even though she was
not quite sure what it was.
Her mother waited a little for Viola to protest or to make some
suggestion, but Viola said nothing.
‘I have just been telephoning to dear Annette Bligh,’ Mrs. Egerton said
after a sufficient pause. ‘They haven’t any of their tiresome pupils
there just now, and she very kindly suggests taking you. You have no
objection to going there, I suppose?’
‘No, mother,’ said Viola. She had so little objection that she wondered
with a fresh pang of remorse whether her mother remembered, or if she
had ever known, that Jim Barton had been one of the Bligh’s tiresome
pupils.
She raised her eyes to her mother’s, her candid, conscience-stricken
eyes. ‘I’m so dreadfully sorry about the pearls,’ she said falteringly.
‘You must be,’ said Mrs. Egerton suavely. ‘They are, of course,
irreplaceable. I should think you might be ready by the three-fifteen.
It gets in at five-thirty, I believe. They say they will meet you.
Annette’s eldest daughter Dora is nineteen. She is engaged, perhaps you
remember, to Sir Mark Flitton? Mabel, the youngest, is going into an
Anglican Sisterhood. Annette is intensely religious, and, after all, if
girls don’t want to marry, it’s much the most becoming thing they can
do, don’t you think?
‘I suppose so, if they’re really religious,’ said Viola, not meeting the
fine, shrewd gaze that rested searchingly upon her.
‘You must be something,’ said her mother a little dryly. ‘If you don’t
know how to play your cards, you had much better learn how to say your
prayers. Tell Cèleste to pack your boxes, and I will go out with you at
eleven this morning to help you to buy a few country clothes.’
‘Am I to stay there for ages and ages?’ asked Viola.
‘No doubt you will do as you like,’ said Mrs. Egerton tranquilly. ‘But I
should suggest your staying there until you have learned, for instance,
that one cannot be a satisfactory member of a household and act against
its prejudices. You are of age and can do as you like, of course, but we
have, you must remember, the same privilege, and if what you like is too
much of a contrast to our preferences, we are not obliged to have you
permanently under the same roof.’
‘Do you hate me, mother?’ Viola asked with a catch in her voice,
‘because I can’t do what you want?’
Mrs. Egerton reflected for a moment before replying, then she said, ‘I
think you would find you could do it if you tried. Protection is not a
form of hostility.’
‘But don’t you,’ Viola pleaded under her breath, ‘love me any more?’
Mrs. Egerton glanced away from her; as far as it was possible for her to
love—with every nerve of her angry being—she loved and hated this
exasperating, uncertain creature whom she had created and could not
control.
‘I am not particularly pleased with you, if that is what you mean,’ she
said without emotion.
It was a truthful answer, for to be pleased is what many people mean by
love.
Viola knew she only had to say ‘Send for Reggie,’ and the whole
household would be at her feet again; all the warmth and tenderness she
missed at every turn was waiting on the other side of that hidden
spring.
She turned away from her mother with a cold, sick feeling at her heart.
If she would only give in, she needn’t be chilled and frightened any
more, not by outer things—and did inner things matter?
Hortense, her mother’s maid, came in with the breakfast tray. She pulled
up the delicate, rose-coloured blinds and let the sunshine in. The room
shone as it always did, soft and gleaming, with a luxury too fine to
betray itself.
Her mother began opening her letters one by one with a small green jade
paper-knife. She had turned her attention off Viola as completely as if
she had ceased to exist. Mrs. Egerton never had any attention for what
she could not govern.
Viola knew that her father was waiting for her downstairs, and that he
would mind just as much. It was all very well to believe in freedom, and
love people who fought for it, but it was quite another thing to make
two very tender and indulgent parents thoroughly angry and unhappy.
Viola could never have opposed her parents at all if it hadn’t been for
Reggie, but since her engagement to Reggie she had imperceptibly moved a
little away from them, and now she couldn’t move back.
Mr. Egerton was very angry with her. He minded much more about the
pearls than her mother had, and much more about the Labour meeting.
‘I can’t expect loyalty from my workmen when I don’t get it from my own
daughter,’ he said bitterly.
Viola was overwhelmed with shame; but in the midst of her shame she
caught herself thinking, ‘Is loyalty having to believe whatever they
believe?’ And she knew that she would go on being ashamed, but that she
never would believe what they did.
CHAPTER XXXVII
Ten years had dealt lightly with Warren Manor. Everything was mellower
and a little more fixed.
There were more flowers in the garden and more moss on the red roof of
the house, the gleaming paddock between the orchard trees was like a
polished jewel.
A bloom as of things perpetually cultivated and cared for rested upon
the place.
Mrs. Bligh had changed very little; there was no gray in her thick
chestnut hair, her figure was as slim as a girl’s, but her face was
fuller and her mouth a little more set. Time had left her her grace, but
it had blurred the distinctness of her delicate features.
Mr. Bligh looked undeniably older. His optimism had received not so much
a shock as a series of undefinable arrests. His mouth drooped
pathetically at the corners. He had expected too much from life and from
himself, and he had not got what he had expected. He had simply gone on
being very comfortable for twenty years, when comfort was not what he
cared for most.
The world’s radicalism had pushed beyond the cheery optimism of his
early faith. There was something fiercer and cruder about it now; it was
more liable to take short and violent cuts across the comfortable world.
Mr. Bligh was less sure of the wisdom of youth. His children had not
disappointed him, indeed he had every reason to be proud of them. They
were well, good-looking, and socially popular. But they didn’t seem like
his children, they seemed like rather unsympathetic young strangers who
knew a great many things about Mr. Bligh which he would rather they
hadn’t known, whereas he knew, nothing at all about them.
Their mother understood them without agreeing with half they said, or
ever using their expressive slang. They talked to her as if she were one
of themselves, not as if they were waiting to go on until she had left
the room. She was as good a wife as ever, but her silences disconcerted
her husband more.
Mr. Bligh used to find himself talking a good deal to the gardener.
Denis had gone into the Navy and hardly ever came back. When he did he
went through the house like a gust of wind. His visits were a record of
wants.
Mr. Bligh tried to provide Denis with what he wanted, but he soon saw
that Denis wanted his father to provide, and not accompany, the objects
of his desires. Denis wanted friends of his own age and a great deal of
very hard exercise.
He thought his father a queer old sport. Unfortunately, Mr. Bligh could
not feel old at all, though he sometimes felt very queer.
He saw more of his daughters, but he knew even less about them. Dora was
her mother over again, fastidious, calm and reliable.
Even her engagement, which took everybody, but herself by surprise, did
not excite her. She was to be married very soon and Mr. Bligh would
never know what she felt about it. It was an even greater shock when his
wife told him that dear Mabel had a distinct vocation and was to go into
an Anglican Sisterhood in a year’s time.
Mabel had more of her father’s expressiveness than the other children,
and she was so unselfish and considerate that sometimes Mr. Bligh
thought she loved him.
He tried to explain to Mabel how old-fashioned monasteries and convents
were. He said they were effete survivals, like fossils from the earlier
ages. But something stuck in his throat when she said to him a little
wistfully, ‘But it isn’t old-fashioned to love God, daddy, is it?’ The
other two children always called him Father.
‘But must you go into a convent to love God?’ he asked helplessly. Even
before she answered him he saw that she must.
She answered as gently and diffidently as she always did, but beneath
her gentleness her decision was unshakable.
‘I feel,’ she said, ‘as if I couldn’t do it as easily anywhere else. I
want to give myself up to it for ever, and not to be interrupted.’
Mr. Bligh said no more; he saw himself as an interruption. For the sake
of his wife and children he had given up his ideals, and now his wife
and children regarded him as an interruption to their own. This
knowledge was at the bottom of his heart where he very seldom looked at
it.
He had his pupils and his garden, and he cared more about his food than
he used to, but the corners of his mouth turned down.
It was a great relief to Viola to be at Warren Manor. She was surprised
to find that nobody blamed her about Reggie. Nobody at Warren Manor ever
blamed people for not making loveless marriages, or thought the worse of
any one for a mistake, provided that it was not a sin. Mr. Bligh and
Mrs. Bligh had always thought Mrs. Egerton worldly, and rather liked to
see worldliness (wholly unassisted by Godliness) fail.
Dora was staying with the Flittons, and Mabel was always sorry for
everybody who felt uncomfortable about anything. They treated Viola as
if she were recovering from rather a tiresome illness, and ought to have
the best of everything.
No one ever mentioned Reggie or alluded to Jim Barton.
There was no reason why they should refer to Jim; he was buried long ago
beneath the weight of Mrs. Bligh’s displeasure. But Viola found herself
listening for the sound of his name.
This was the very garden where he must have watched, as she did, the
riotous late spring passing in swift processions.
This was the lawn, smooth and placid, with its atmosphere of regulated
care, where Jim must have learnt his first sharp lessons of civility.
She longed to hear, with a wave of pity and tenderness in her heart, the
history of his first mistakes. The gulf must have been so wide, and all
his young raw strength and ignorance so impotent to cross it.
She looked long into Mrs. Bligh’s kind, smiling eyes—these must have
saved him. When Mrs. Bligh spoke of her husband’s pupils, Viola could
hardly hide her eagerness to catch the familiar name. But the anecdotes
about the pupils Mrs. Bligh told her had no names.
One soft and sunny morning Viola asked if she might help Mrs. Bligh pick
sweet peas. The sweet peas stood up in long trellised rows on either
side of a tiled garden path. They were so high they hid the two women
from each other. Pale yellow and mauve, scarlet and the blue of summer
skies, flesh pink and deepest violet, the sweet peas made a wall of
dancing, tip-tilted colour.
It was like being surprised by an army of butterflies. The garden beyond
them was drowsy with the humming of bees among the lavender bushes.
A blackbird gave a long occasional chuckle, fresh as spring water, and
loud with hidden glee.
They picked in silence for a few minutes, and then Viola said,—
‘Mrs. Bligh, do you think I was wrong to break my engagement to Reggie?’
Mrs. Bligh snipped unerringly while she reflected.
‘My dear, I know so little about it,’ she said gently. ‘But I should
advise _no_ woman to marry unless she is sure of her own heart.’
‘You don’t think love comes with marriage?’ Viola asked.
Mrs. Bligh shook a mauve sweet pea out of her sleeve. She felt a faint
sense of irritation, as if she were being asked more than she wanted.
Nature itself was richer than she liked this morning—the sun was
hotter, the scents of the flowers less vague and fine.
‘I believe,’ she said cautiously, ‘that there are women who really can
adapt themselves to comfortable homes by accepting a husband as part of
it. But, personally, I cannot understand it. I understand my own dear
Mabel very much better.’
‘Oh,’ said Viola, ‘I can’t understand Mabel at all—especially not just
now. All the world seemed so full of—of what is young. I want to have
what is young belong to me.’
Mrs. Bligh made no direct answer. Then she said,—
‘Why should you not love—and when you love you will be sure of what you
want? You are very young yourself, my dear. I am sure you were right to
wait until you were more certain of yourself.’
‘Yes,’ said Viola with relief, ‘I think I’m sure—I think I am sure
now.’
Mrs. Bligh moved through the screen of sweet peas and looked at her in
astonishment. Mrs. Egerton had told her nothing yet about Jim Barton.
She meant the visit to be a long one, and it occurred to her that an
unconscious revelation inspired by Viola’s enthusiasm would be even
better than one she had privately instigated. Later on she would find
out what had happened, and if nothing had happened it could easily be
made to. But it would happen with more authority if Viola knew Mrs.
Bligh very well first.
‘My dear, I didn’t know,’ Mrs. Bligh said softly. ‘Of course if you care
for some one else—why then—more than ever you were right to free
yourself.’
Viola held her head up proudly, and met her companion’s kind, uncurious
eyes.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘there is some one else—but, oh, Mrs. Bligh, it isn’t
at all easy—I don’t even know if it’s right!’
Mrs. Bligh put down her basket and put her hand on Viola’s arm. ‘Let us
sit down under the oak tree and talk quietly,’ she said tenderly.
This was a confidence in which there could lurk no danger. Viola’s eyes
turned to hers, were young and hurt, but wholly innocent.
There would be nothing uncomfortable in listening to what Viola had to
say; and there was a secret pleasure to Mrs. Bligh in finding that the
children of other mothers sought her confidence as well as her own.
Viola sat down in front of her on the grass.
‘Why I wonder if it’s wrong is because he’s different,’ she explained.
‘He’s not married or anything dreadful like that. There’s no reason why
I shouldn’t marry him—and he’s, oh! wonderfully good—good like you and
dear Mabel—he really _cares_ for God—as if He lived next door and you
_could_!’
Mrs. Bligh laughed gently.
‘He lives nearer than next door,’ she said, ‘and you can! Never mind. I
like your good man—I wish there were more of them.’
‘And you do think goodness matters more than anything else?’ Viola
urged. She seemed to be anxious to establish this point, and Mrs. Bligh
saw no danger in it.
All her life goodness had mattered to her more than anything else; at
least what she had believed was goodness.
‘But mother would simply hate it,’ Viola went on in a low voice, ‘and
father and Harry—they’d think it hideous and indecent. I don’t believe
they’d ever speak to me again.’
‘Just because he’s poor?’ asked Mrs. Bligh incredulously. ‘Oh, Viola!’
‘It’s worse than that,’ said Viola bending over a daisy. ‘He’s not the
same as we are. He lives among the poor. Of course he’s educated and all
that, you know—but still he does _live_ there.’
Mrs. Bligh looked over the girl’s head into her herbaceous border.
Columbines and delphiniums, pansies and forget-me-not—the heavy, sweet
heads of pinks, a cascade of spirea and a background of pale pink
peonies, rested all her senses. These were her life’s greatest
pleasures, and her soul held their spiritual counterparts. After a long
pause she said gently,—
‘Dearest child, I do not think the outer life matters. Ideals are never
easy, but they are worth—even one of them—even half carried out—the
whole material universe.
‘It is a great vocation to give God to those who have nothing else. If
you love this man and what his life stands for, I should not think you
wrong to oppose your parents. The conscience must act for itself.’
Viola looked at her adoringly; this seemed a person she could trust.
‘I think I _do_ love him enough,’ she said consideringly, ‘but I don’t
honestly care about the life. I could only do it—if I do do it—because
he wouldn’t be happy any other way.
‘I don’t share his ideals, and I don’t like poor people very much. But
on the other hand I like him just as he is, and he wouldn’t be just as
he is without them.’
Mrs. Bligh murmured an assent. She believed theoretically in the
headship of a husband over his wife, that is to say, she believed in the
headship of an ideal husband over an ideal wife. It would be a hard
school for the child before her, brought up in luxury and spiritual
irresponsibility; but Mrs. Bligh, who had been brought up in very much
the same way, would not have shrunk from marrying a poor and hard-worked
clergyman herself. He might have ended by being a Bishop, but she would
have started with him poor. She stroked Viola’s head, which was still
turned away from her, with sympathy.
‘But,’ said Viola in a sudden rush, turning her head to face Mrs. Bligh
directly, ‘he’s not what people call a gentleman.’
Mrs. Bligh withdrew her hand. Her sympathy abruptly ceased. Poor curates
must be gentlemen.
‘And he’s worse than that,’ Viola went on rapidly. ‘He’s much more of a
Socialist than Mr. Bligh, and he’s something or other of the Dockers’
Union, and the dockers are daddy’s dockers, and they’re striking; so,
you see, it’s really awful!’
It was so awful that Mrs. Bligh completely ceased to see it; in her
experience when things were awful beyond a certain point they didn’t
happen.
‘But are you sure, darling,’ she said gently, ‘that you are in love with
this queer person? What has he done to make you so?’
‘He hasn’t done anything,’ said Viola defensively. ‘He’s quite plain,
really. He ran away when I wanted to make friends with him.
‘Oh, Mrs. Bligh, I want you to tell me about him. You know him better
than I do—it will help me so much what you say.’
‘I know him?’ exclaimed Mrs. Bligh. ‘My dear Viola—I know nobody——’
she checked herself from saying ‘Nobody out of my own class’—‘Nobody at
all astonishing,’ she finished tranquilly. ‘Perhaps he is some one you
have heard my husband mention?’
‘No you _both_ know him,’ said Viola obstinately. ‘His name’s Jim
Barton.’
Mrs. Bligh closed up suddenly like a sea anemone roughly handled. Every
line of her delicate face hardened. She sat very still, and though it
was a warm, fine day, she felt cold.
‘Jim Barton,’ she said at last. ‘Yes, I do know whom you mean. I’m very
sorry—I had no idea you had ever met him.’
‘He dined with us,’ said Viola in a flat, expressionless voice, ‘and
I’ve heard two or three of his addresses.’
‘But he isn’t in the Church,’ said Mrs. Bligh. There was no hiding the
disapproval of her voice now. ‘He calls himself a Christian, I believe,
but he doesn’t even pretend to be a churchman.’
‘He doesn’t pretend anything,’ said Viola firmly. ‘Why do you speak as
if you didn’t like him?’ She twisted the arm on which she leaned, so
that she sat looking straight into her companion’s eyes.
Mrs. Bligh drew her lips together into a strange, unbecoming line. She
didn’t like Jim Barton because he made her feel as if she were in the
wrong. Her conscience flinched at the sound of his name. She told
herself sharply that she was not in the wrong—she had reasoned the
whole thing out point by point so that there was no room left for
remorse—only instinct crept in between her reasonings and shook her.
Less than a year after Jim Barton had left them she had learned the
truth. Emily had written and told her. Emily had lost her child, and Jim
had found her a place. Wivvle had done nothing. Emily told Mrs. Bligh
the whole story and referred her to the lawyer for proof.
‘I won’t tell any one else,’ Emily wrote, ‘because I should lose my
money from Mr. Wivvle, and I wouldn’t have told you but I thought Jim
Barton minded your misjudging him. He was such a one for those early
services.’
Mrs. Bligh had read the letter very carefully. She had prayed over it
and kept it near her for a week, then she had destroyed it. She did not
believe a word that Emily said.
Emily was immoral and immoral women told lies. She had no need of any
further witnesses. Jim himself was the proof. Had he not admitted it to
her in that dreadful interview he forced upon her over the Christmas
roses? She had never liked Christmas roses since, they had been sullied
by Jim’s presence. If he was not a sinner why had he demanded so
brutally and passionately her uncovenanted mercy? If there had been any
other truth would he not have told her? Of course he would have told
her—he would have told her because he loved her—well—not loved her in
any bad, real sense, but in the proper sublimated way in which Mrs.
Bligh liked to be loved. He had wronged this feeling for her, he had
wronged his spiritual birth, he wouldn’t have looked at her with those
agonised eyes if he hadn’t; and she would, of course, if he had been
innocent, have understood and saved him.
Still, she hadn’t told her husband about Emily’s letter, nor gone to see
the lawyer. She was morally certain that Emily’s new story was not true,
but she didn’t like to be reminded of it.
Her face grew very stern under Viola’s searching eyes.
‘I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘I could only, if I spoke to you about Mr.
Barton at all, tell you a very painful story, a story I do not even feel
sure I know the rights of; but in any case I am convinced that Mr.
Barton is not a person you should marry. I would much rather you asked
me no more questions.’
But Viola was twenty years younger than Mrs. Bligh. She belonged to a
generation whose sensitiveness is less than its curiosity. She was not
ashamed to ask questions when the answers were vital to her happiness.
‘I simply must ask you,’ she said, ‘how could I decide anything unless I
know myself what there is against him?’
‘But you know already enough things against him, do you not?’ asked Mrs.
Bligh.
Viola gave her an astonished look. ‘I mean _real_ things,’ she said;
‘those things I told you are not real things.’
Mrs. Bligh’s delicate eyebrows drew together, but she spoke a shade more
gently.
‘Is it really necessary,’ she asked, ‘to discuss these things, if Mr.
Barton has not shown any signs of returning your fancy?’
Viola felt an angry wave of colour cover her face. Something stabbed at
her heart—it gave her a curious sense of shock, as if Mrs. Bligh wasn’t
after all an angel, but just an older woman meaning to be unkind to her.
‘But,’ she stammered, ‘I thought you knew—of course he said—he said
when he was going away—he cared for me.’
It hurt her like a physical violence to say these words. She bowed her
head in her hands after uttering them. Mrs. Bligh said nothing for a
long time.
‘It is very distasteful to me,’ she began at last, ‘to discuss such a
subject, nor is it a suitable one for a young girl even to know.’
‘If I was old enough to marry Reggie,’ said Viola doggedly, ‘I’m old
enough to know why I shouldn’t marry Jim.’
Mrs. Bligh drew a deep breath. She felt a curious distaste from putting
into words what she believed to be true.
‘While Mr. Barton was here,’ she said, ‘ten years ago, under my roof, he
got an innocent girl into trouble. We had to send her to a sisterhood,
and Mr. Barton, we were compelled to dismiss from our house.’
Mrs. Bligh had a perfect right to make this statement, she was not bound
to believe Emily’s word, and it was obviously her duty to save her
cousin’s child from disaster. She had also relieved a curious feeling in
her own heart, a feeling which, if she had not been so religious a
woman, might have been called spite.
But something stopped her from putting out her hand to touch and comfort
Viola.
Viola got up slowly and walked aimlessly away towards the orchard. Her
head was bent, and the hand that hung by her side was clenched as if she
was still holding on to something which she should have let go. Mrs.
Bligh followed her for a moment with an uneasy glance.
Neither Dora nor Mabel would have left her like that. They would have
cried with their heads in her lap, and they would have let her gently
eradicate Jim.
But then she would have been very gentle, and she had not been
altogether gentle to this girl who had given her her confidence.
Mrs. Bligh saw Jim’s eyes again looking into hers, so watchfully, so
generously, with such a passionate desire to serve her, ‘the desire of
the moth for the star,’ the pathetic, useless, blundering moth for the
remote and wholly uninvolved star.
She felt again her disgust for his fall, the cold repulsion of her safe
virtue for his endangered passion.
She had not blamed herself because her safety had made his passion
dangerous to him. She did not know enough to realise that she had shaken
his control; but she felt again the cold wave of her anger when she
realised that in spite of his feeling for her he was capable of any
feeling for Emily. His courage in facing her afterwards had enraged her,
and his agony had set the seal upon her anger. He had reproached her
with his pain, and though she had judged him tranquilly and finally in
spite of it, she had never been able to wipe out that astonished feeling
of his reproach. What had he to reproach her for? What had he now? She
had done her duty. We know that duty is a very painful process, but
perhaps to people who go through it as often and as circumspectly as
Mrs. Bligh, it ceases to be painful.
Mrs. Bligh had examined most of her feelings very thoroughly before she
responded to the music of the luncheon gong, but she hadn’t examined the
first feeling of satisfaction in her heart, which came from her knowing
that after her intervention the girl in the orchard probably wouldn’t
marry Jim.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
Viola did not get any farther than the paddock. She only wanted to set a
screen between herself and any human eyes.
She sat down under the trees and saw between the green dancing of the
leaves a vague, firm line of blue.
The air was alive, as if the pulse of the day beat through it. It was
the noon hour, still and full of scent. The drowsy, persistent song of
the bees was the only sound she heard. It seemed an ancient sound, older
than birds’ songs, as old as the silence of the dreaming earth. Her
thoughts ran through her mind disconnectedly, like intermittent pain.
She watched the light in the trees, and the small, hovering, gold bodies
of the bees, between her and the hedge shadows.
Viola’s heart was heavy within her, heavy and sick. She was not yet
conscious how sharp a blow she had received, because she had not yet had
time to connect it with her dreams and watch them die.
All her life long she had hated and avoided ugliness, she would not look
at it; she had not needed to look at it, and every one had praised this
evasion in her as a virtue.
She had never known badness, and though she lived in a world permeated
by hidden irregularities and where innuendo was the spice of wit, she
had either not understood it, or she had escaped it by laughter.
Laughter was always safe. It was safer than dignity, safer than
self-respect. You got away from whatever you didn’t like by it, and it
didn’t make you look like a prig.
But there are situations even in modern life which cannot be met by
laughter.
If it had only been Reggie! Viola knew that she could have forgiven
Reggie.
Reggie wouldn’t really have meant it. His whole character didn’t go into
his acts. All day long he did things that weren’t a part of him. If he
had infidelities they couldn’t have reached his heart. They would have
been as careless as the clever way he put on his clothes.
But for Jim to do a cruel act and not to let it count was incredible. If
Jim had done it, he was not Jim. He was a man like other men, only not
nearly so nice. No other man that Viola knew had a sister who was a
thief, and spoke with a Cockney accent.
These disadvantages did not make her believe Jim was more likely to be
guilty, but if he was guilty, it somehow made it all more irredeemable
and squalid.
Her imagination was as shaken and solitary in its world of blossoms and
sunshine as Jim’s had been long ago, struggling through a snowstorm.
Beauty was a bitter taste on her lips.
She put her hand up with a little nervous gesture to shut out the
loveliness of the unconscious world.
The earth was made of flowers and light. Buttercups and daisies, wood
sorrel and tiny speedwell stood up transfixed and shining in the
sunlight. By the hedge the cow parsley spread high its filmy lace. There
was nothing to match her desolation, or to make it seem less mocking to
take the name of God in vain.
Viola had a very dim idea of God; she had never thought very seriously
about an Invisible World, but she liked to see somebody else believe in
Him, and she thought, for she was very young, you could not sin and keep
the sense of God alive in you.
If Jim had wronged and left a woman, Viola knew he must have wronged and
left God.
Nor was she as sure now that he had ever had Him.
She couldn’t ask Jim, because if he was that kind of man she wouldn’t
believe him, and she wouldn’t ever know if he was that kind of man or
not, unless she could believe in him.
She wished she could have asked Mrs. Bligh more questions, but Mrs.
Bligh was like her mother. She knew too much, experience had robbed her
doubts of all their benefits. She would dash all Viola’s challenging
hopes with axioms.
‘Men are like that,’ she would say. ‘God sends us these crosses. Be
thankful you have found out in time.’
But Viola wasn’t at all thankful. She wasn’t sure God did send crosses
in the shape of the failure of other people’s hearts, and she could not
believe that all men had so little honour.
She couldn’t speak to Mr. Bligh because he didn’t like painful subjects.
He dodged them as if they were blows.
She wondered with a queer little flash of self-reproach if people had
ever wanted to speak to her of their troubles and hadn’t dared because
she shrank from pain.
It was the first time she had discovered that fastidiousness could be a
weakness and not a strength. She buried her head in the cool grass and
wished that she could keep the darkness over her.
She felt unsure of herself. Who was she to steer a course unlike the
world around her? To put aside the beliefs and practices of her own
people; and where had this presumption led her? Hadn’t the inner life
failed?
The outer life didn’t promise so much, but it didn’t fail. Money bought
what it set out to buy. You could appreciate possessions at their full
value. You weren’t robbed of lovely surfaces. But if you pushed all
these aside and stood out for what was at the bottom of your heart, you
could be more robbed than any bank could rob you.
If the inner life went, everything she had went, except material
comfort.
It had been the inner life which made her release herself from Reggie,
and read _Ann Veronica_, and cry because she saw two old people sitting
on a doorstep in the rain. It had not absorbed much of her time, but it
had occasionally pushed its way up and shaken her—it had shaken her
most often and most strangely since she had met Jim’s formidable eyes.
Was her inner life simply perversity, like a craving for something
indigestible to eat?
Then a very strange thought occurred to Viola. Supposing she wasn’t
Viola Egerton, supposing she was a housemaid—that particular housemaid.
Supposing she was what people call ‘wronged.’ Who would help her most?
Where did people like this poor creature turn?
She thought of her mother and Mrs. Bligh, and she found herself
trembling. Their way of dealing with the world was so short and cold. Of
course they were good women, so far above temptation that no wind of it
had ever shaken them, but they wouldn’t be particularly consoling to
take sins to.
She thought of Reggie and how he had said, ‘I have no patience with
failures—I never give a workman two warnings.’ She thought of herself,
if some one came to her in great trouble, wouldn’t she just feel
terribly uncomfortable and tell somebody else about it?
Jim wouldn’t. Jim would take troubles, his own or somebody else’s. Even
if Jim had sinned, was it worse than not knowing how to be kind? Was the
question really so much what people had done as what their doing had
made of them? Of course this was going rather far, but when you are
unhappy you do go rather far.
Mrs. Bligh had said she didn’t know the rights of the case—but perhaps
somebody else did. Perhaps she could find out?
Viola buried her head deeper in the grass. She didn’t want to find out.
She thought it would be nicer than anything to melt into the earth and
forget; not to find out anything, nor to believe anything.
It was curious, but she had never wanted to be without consciousness
before. She did not know how unhappy she was, nor that the panic longing
to be blotted out is the last stronghold of the nerves before the will
frees them into action. When she raised her head she had thought of
something to do.
Mrs. Bevan, the Bligh’s cook, had been with them for twelve years. She
must have known this housemaid—she might know her still.
Viola moved quickly through the paddock and the walled garden to the
kitchen door.
Mrs. Bevan had just finished dinner. She stared with a certain severity
at the visitor who, without an engagement, had missed a profitable meal.
‘Would you take anything to eat on a tray, miss?’ she asked without
enthusiasm.
‘No thank you, Mrs. Bevan,’ said Viola quickly. ‘I came to ask you a
question. Do you know anything about a housemaid who left here ten years
ago—a housemaid who was in trouble?’
Mrs. Bevan, whose colour was always high, rapidly purpled.
‘I do and I don’t,’ she said shortly. ‘Girls who have married and live
respectably with several children and a sober husband shouldn’t be asked
questions—not to my mind.’
Viola put a small, persuasive hand on Mrs. Bevan’s arm.
‘I only want to know where she lives,’ she said gently. ‘I wouldn’t hurt
or worry her for the world, but there’s something I want to see her
about, and I thought you might know her name and address? Mrs. Bligh has
lost sight of her.’
Mrs. Bevan softened, but she still felt that if she was appealed to she
ought also to be confided in. It was difficult, however, to press this
point, as the young lady seemed oblivious of it. So she gave Viola,
Emily Dunstan’s address, and finished up with, ‘There’s nothing wrong, I
hope, to come down sudden upon either of them?’
Viola shook her head, and with that curious air of finality common to
the ruling class, she thanked Mrs. Bevan and retreated towards the
garage.
Emily Dunstan lived only fourteen miles away. Mr. Bligh had a small car
which he drove very badly. He had been amazed at the expertness of Viola
and had put the car at her disposal.
She moved without hesitation now, and told no one where she was going.
The sun poured down upon her small, tense figure, the car shot over the
broad, white road, which ran like a streak of milk under its wheels.
The flying trees raced by with an unreal air. It was difficult to say
where speed began and time ended. The world went by in a flash, but it
kept going by for ever.
Emily Dunstan lived at Three Mile End, and a local builder had been let
loose upon the country-side. Mrs. Dunstan’s small and feverish red house
next to the Police Station might have been in London, but it had
wall-flowers, a strip of pansies in front of the gate, and a brave show
of calceolarias on the window ledges.
Mrs. Dunstan was a tall, good-looking woman; she had a high colour and
fine, short-tempered brown eyes.
She did not, to Viola’s surprise, look like a person who had ever been
in trouble.
She glanced with respect at Viola’s motor, dusted a chair for her in a
small, prim parlour whose fantastic rigidity was broken by a
rocking-horse and a baby’s perambulator, and stood in front of her,
determined to keep her place.
Viola was less sure of hers. She asked Emily twice if she was Mrs.
Dunstan, Mrs. Emily Dunstan? and then seemed hardly to know what she had
asked her for.
Emily felt sure that Viola wanted her husband’s vote; her car hadn’t
electioneering ribbons on, but it was only when ladies wanted something
out of you that they were nervous.
She couldn’t give Viola her husband’s vote as it was already promised to
the Liberal member, who was always wanting something done to his
greenhouses. But Emily knew how to speak to ladies, even persuasive
ones, when she had to say ‘No’ to them.
‘I’m afraid you will think me dreadfully interfering and even perhaps
impertinent,’ Viola said at last. ‘But I’ve come to ask you a question,
and I have this much right to ask it, Mrs. Dunstan—it matters to me
terribly what the answer is!’
‘I’m sure, Miss,’ said Emily serenely, ‘I’d gladly answer you anything
you like, though if it’s about politics I can’t say my head’s as clear
as my husband’s. Men always having more time to read the paper and more
language after having read it, than what, if we have a pride in our
homes we could afford to spend on it. Of course ladies are different.’
‘But, Mrs. Dunstan,’ said Viola, ‘what I have to ask you hasn’t anything
to do with politics. It has to do with your former life.’
Emily had ten years and five children between her and the past, but her
eyes hardened a little.
‘Yes, miss,’ she said, with a warning hostility in her voice.
‘It’s when you were with Mrs. Bligh—I come from there——’ Viola said
more quickly. ‘I’m their friend, Mrs. Dunstan, but I’m even more the
friend of some one they knew—about whom there is a rumour which perhaps
you could help me to contradict. I hate to bother you about it—I know
for you it is all over and put away for ever—but, Mrs. Dunstan, will
you—can you tell me—if it was Jim Barton, in that other life, who did
you a great wrong?’
Mrs. Dunstan’s face changed curiously. The memory of that incident was
buried, but it was not dead. A softer expression came into her eyes.
‘No, Miss,’ she said after a pause, ‘he didn’t ever wrong me. I’d rather
not go into particulars, if you don’t mind. It’s all over now, and the
least said soonest mended. But there’s one thing you don’t forget, when
you’ve been down, and that’s being—well, being treated just as if you
were like anybody else, stood by, as you might call it. I knew even at
the time it was better that the poor little thing should die, and I’ve
nothing to complain of on the part of them I was with—they gave it a
funeral, but they said flowers wasn’t suitable, and I had no money at
the time, of course, of my own. Jim Barton—he’d been asking about me,
though he had no call to, I was angry when I heard about it, and I
wouldn’t see him; but he sent the flowers, a cross made of white lilies
and pink and white roses. I can see them now. It was the middle of
winter and that cross cost money. And he hadn’t anything more to do with
the child than you had. There’s things women don’t forget, you know,
Miss, whether they’re respectable or not. He found me a good place
afterwards, too, but I thought more of them roses than I did of anything
else.
‘I wrote and told Mrs. Bligh there’d been a mistake made about the
child’s father, and who it was, for I knew Jim Barton thought the world
of her, and I wanted her to know the truth of it, if nobody else did.
‘But she didn’t answer me—a perfect lady Mrs. Bligh always was, but not
much help to you if you wasn’t what she expected.
‘If you’ll excuse me asking, Miss, why do you want to know?’
‘Because,’ said Viola, ‘I’m going to marry Mr. Barton.’
‘Reely!’ said Emily. She wasn’t Mrs. Dunstan now, nor the mother of the
dead baby who was forgotten—she was Emily who had lived at Mrs.
Bligh’s, and she deeply disapproved of a lady, a very obvious lady,
marrying Jim Barton.
Viola had not kept her place. She did not even see that Mrs. Dunstand
had. Her eyes were full of tears. She got up and took Mrs. Dunstan’s
slightly reluctant hand in hers.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I can’t thank you—I wanted so much to know the truth.
I think I did really all the time, in my heart, know it, but not enough.
Forgive me if I have hurt you, and remember if you want him to be happy,
that I shall try to make him happy, and that you have helped me.’
Mrs. Dunstan withdrew her hand.
‘I’m sure I hope you’ll both be very happy, Miss,’ she said, ‘and I’ll
be much obliged if you’ll give my kind remembrances to Mr. Barton when
you see him next.’
Emily’s eyes held no more memories. She took her visitor to the door and
watched her drive off with qualified approval. She was a lovely young
lady and she knew how to drive a car, but Emily herself would never have
dreamed of marrying Jim Barton.
CHAPTER XXXIX
It was a relief to Viola when she got back to Warren Manor to find that
Mrs. Bligh and Mabel had gone to tea at the Vicarage, and only Mr. Bligh
was in the garden.
Viola had never noticed Mr. Bligh before, he had always seemed to her
the rather voluble, boring member so often found in an attractive
family, who has to be suppressed; and between whom, and the rest of the
world the family acts as a shield.
Now she suddenly realised that he was old and tired, and kind—very
particularly kind.
He fussed about getting her a comfortable chair, he wanted her to have
tea, and cream and cushions, and behind his fussing, even tactfully
behind it, was an unspoken sympathy with whatever had caused Viola’s
absence. He pretended that what he minded was her having missed her
lunch, but Viola knew that it was her not having wanted it which really
upset him.
She drank her cup of tea in silence, and then she said suddenly, ‘Mr.
Bligh, I want you to help me.’
Mr. Bligh dropped the sugar tongs on the grass. It was years since any
one had wanted him to help them. Help was what, unless it was money,
people usually didn’t want from Mr. Bligh, and there was nothing he
liked giving nearly so much.
‘But, my dear child,’ he said, ‘of course I’ll help you—if I can, you
know. I don’t say I’m Napoleon or Marlborough, or even the last of the
Doges, but if I haven’t their power or their wisdom, I shall have just
as much inclination, probably more; they weren’t as far as I remember,
helpfully inclined.’
Viola leaned forward, her small, pale face was more alive than Mr. Bligh
had ever seen it. She had seemed too passive to him before, like a
creature submerged and still, in some foreign element. But she was not
passive now. Her eyes woke and flashed at him, her lips trembled. The
picture of her in white with a jade green scarf fluttering about her
head and shoulders remained ineffaceably in Mr. Bligh’s mind; it was
like young spring caught in a storm. Viola looked as if she wanted to
shake off the fetters of the world of which she had been so still and
unconscious a part; and as if, in order to do it, she wouldn’t be still
any more.
She told her story simply and plainly. Mr. Bligh could follow it without
any other difficulty than that of seeing for the first time that he had
made a great mistake.
‘But Mr. Bligh,’ she finished, ‘your wife knew the truth. Emily had told
her, and she let me think——’ her voice broke, she knew she oughtn’t to
have told Mr. Bligh, this about his wife. She should have spared Mrs.
Bligh, muffled her up in some way, but she couldn’t resist the
temptation. Mrs. Bligh was too good to be muffled up—she challenged
exposure.
But Mr. Bligh did not seem as shocked or surprised as Viola had
expected. After all he had been married to Mrs. Bligh for twenty years.
He was a devoted and loyal husband, and he believed his wife to be the
most superior of women—but she was of that type of superiority which is
liable to shuffle out of the rigour of unacceptable facts.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said tolerantly, ‘but I dare say she didn’t believe
Emily, you know.’
Viola said relentlessly, ‘She could have found out. If you don’t take
the trouble to find out whether a thing is true or not, you ought to
believe it.’
‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ agreed Mr. Bligh, ‘no doubt. Mind
you, I don’t say it isn’t the more direct way, but very few people take
it. They follow their prejudices, you know, and prejudices wriggle. I
know that myself. I always try to take a perfectly unbiased line, but
I’m not sure that I always know where to lay my hand on it, especially
when my feelings come in. Feelings flurry me, you know. They’re the
deuce, and a delicate, high-minded woman like my wife—well, you can’t
be sure what she’ll lay her hand on in a crisis! She didn’t like it, you
see, the whole business upset her very much; and Jim didn’t make any
protest. I dare say he was being very noble and all that, you know, my
dear; but nobility is apt to be misleading. I can’t blame Annette, but I
blame myself, of course—I blame myself. I might have seen deeper. There
are one or two points, now I come to look back on it, that never seemed
very convincing. I’m afraid we all of us took the easiest way, except
Jim, you know, except Jim. But what is it you want me to do about it
now?’
‘First,’ said Viola, ‘I want you to go to the lawyer and satisfy
yourself that what Emily says is true. I’m satisfied but I shall have to
prove more than my own belief; this story will be used against me, you
know, to prevent my seeing Jim Barton again, and I want to feel I can
fight it.’
‘Fight it?’ asked Mr. Bligh deprecatingly, ‘but—I don’t believe in
fighting stories, you know—I don’t really—stories accumulate so when
you begin to fight them, and other people get dragged in, and it’s
rather like stones thrown in a riot, you know—somebody bringing back a
joint for dinner gets done in, while the leaders of the riot go home to
tea. It’s all very rough and uncertain. I shouldn’t start fighting about
Jim.’
‘I won’t if I can help it,’ said Viola, but if they attack me about him
I must know what I’ve got to fight back with—and, Mr. Bligh, I want to
see him! I can’t at home, and I couldn’t go to see him again at Poplar!
But could you ask him down here for me? Say that I want particularly to
see him—I think he would come.’
‘Sure to come,’ agreed Mr. Bligh reluctantly, ‘there’s no doubt of that
whatever; but it isn’t all perfectly simple, you know, very few things
are.
‘Young people always imagine that if you arrange for them to meet,
nothing else matters.
‘But there are other things to be considered. I like Jim Barton, you
know; I always did like him. I don’t say this story didn’t stick in my
throat; still, I was prepared to make allowances all round. Emily was a
very handsome strap—— I mean youth is youth, you know, and it makes
mistakes, and then every one concerned has to come forward and pay for
them. But I’ve followed his career, you know, and I’m very proud of him.
‘But all the same, my dear child, he’s a man, a man of the people, a
hero of the people, if you like—but heroes—well—they aren’t heroic
all the time, and they are men all the time, you have to consider that!
I think you might make a mistake if you thought of him as a hero—rather
a cruel one for him as well as for you.
‘If you ask him to come down here, what are you prepared to do with
him?’
The colour came into Viola’s face, but she met Mr. Bligh’s eyes
steadily.
‘I am prepared to marry him,’ she said gravely. ‘I think it is what he
wants, and I think it is what I do.’
Mr. Bligh looked away from her. His eyes had a curious look in them as
if they were reconsidering very distant dreams, looking at them, not as
they were once to him, but as, with his riper knowledge, he knew them to
have been. He shrank from interfering with the generosity of youth, but
he was wondering how far the generosity could carry, and what would
happen to Viola, and even more to Jim, if it dropped.
‘You are sure,’ he said quietly, ‘that you are not taking this step
because you admired Jim and then misjudged him, and now have for him as
well as your former admiration, all the pity and remorse you feel for
having—even for a little while—deprived him of his due? Marriage is
rather what I should call a readjustment, you know—a watering down here
and a pulling together there, and it doesn’t do—at least I should
hardly think it would do—to have anything extra to readjust.’
‘Ah!’ Viola said with a little distracted sigh, ‘how can I tell till I
see him, what there is to readjust?’ Beneath her breath she murmured,
‘Love is a miracle, isn’t it? Love is a miracle.’
Viola wasn’t as hard as she wanted to be, she wasn’t as up to date, she
clung with all the force of her strong, unpractised heart to a dream
that can shake the world, but makes on the whole very little difference
to most people. Mr. Bligh was not one of these to whom love had come
lightly. The ardour and the bloom of it had never died for him, the
image which had held it had become indifferent to his worship, but
worship does not die because images are not responsive.
‘Very well, then,’ he said with unexpected decision. ‘You shall see him,
my dear. I will do as you suggest I will go and see old Simmons and get
him to tell me, as a privileged person, the facts of the case. I fear—I
greatly fear—I have a suspicion who was at the bottom of it, and then
I’ll write to Jim and ask him down here.’
He paused for a moment, and then said a little apologetically, ‘And I
think, my dear, we will choose the day of the garden party at Downley.’
Mr. Bligh was going to take a very strong and independent line, but he
thought the actual incident had better take place while his wife wasn’t
there.
Viola leaned back in her chair and smiled at him gratefully. She
wondered that she could ever have thought him insignificant and
tiresome; but Mr. Bligh was still insignificant and tiresome, only Viola
was too young to admit that it is very often insignificant and tiresome
people who understand most perfectly their duty towards their neighbour.
He hovered in front of her for one more precaution.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘that we had better not mention the subject to my
wife. She has such a high moral sense, you know. Of course she’d be
relieved, very much relieved about Jim. There is no doubt of that
whatever. But on the other hand, if it wasn’t Jim—I don’t want to press
the point—but it must have been somebody, mustn’t it? And that might
upset her more. Well, well, we needn’t go into who it was, of
course—most unsuitable, but if she were to come to know of any definite
arrangement, you know, to have Jim down here, she might think it her
duty to tell your parents, and then there would be—wouldn’t there?—the
deuce of a row. Not that I entirely take the modern view of parents,
disagreeable excrescences eating up the life of their young. I don’t
think—I really don’t think I eat up Denis’s life, or Dora’s, and
certainly not Mabel’s; but then I have always allowed a margin, you
know—quite a substantial margin. But in your case, I’m sure, I’ve got
the highest respect for your father and mother, you know, but I fancy
you’re a little pushed as to margin, aren’t you? And if Jim were to drop
in unexpectedly for lunch or tea, while Annette and Mabel are over at
Downley, I don’t quite see how anybody is going to be blamed for it. I
always gave Jim a general invitation to look upon me as a friend.’
‘Dear Mr. Bligh,’ Viola murmured gratefully, ‘I think that will do
beautifully.’ Her eyes wavered and laughed across the lawn at him. ‘I
don’t want to get into a row any more than you do,’ she added, ‘but of
course in the end I shall.’
Mr. Bligh shook his head and sighed sympathetically; she said she was
afraid of rows, but she smiled while she said it; she was obviously less
afraid of them than he was.
The end of Viola’s row would be an open future, but the end of Mr.
Bligh’s row meant to look once again upon the closed door of the past.
CHAPTER XL
In the rejuvenating effect of a conspiracy Mr. Bligh consoled himself
for the shock of Wivvle’s depravity.
On the whole he wasn’t as much shocked as he would have been ten years
earlier. Wivvle wasn’t under his charge any more, and seduction is an
aristocratic vice. No one would ever know anything about it.
Mr. Simmons was his own family lawyer, and they moved cautiously around
the subject and the documents concerned with it over some excellent
port. Mr. Simmons recalled how very good-looking Emily had been, and
they talked for some time about the awkwardness of handsome housemaids.
Mr. Bligh wrote a very verbose and cordial letter of invitation to Jim,
and Jim wrote back in three words that he would come on the date and at
the hour mentioned.
Mrs. Bligh did not mind Viola’s staying away from the garden party at
Downley. It was her yearly duty, and she took Mabel to it for the last
time. Mabel wasn’t to go to any more parties.
They went off together dressed in blue and white like the Madonna and
the very youngest and most innocent of the St. Catherines.
The communion between mother and daughter was so intense that there were
moments when it seemed as if Mrs. Bligh was going into the convent,
too—her imagination never left her daughter’s side.
It was not easy for Jim to get away from London. Mr. Bligh’s letter
reached him when he was submerged in the strike. It was as difficult for
him to snatch his mind off it as it is for a watcher in the sick room to
take notice of the outside world. The work he lived in had the same
urgency as illness—hundreds of people were swayed by his presence and
fed on his vitality. To leave them for a few hours was to wrench himself
away from a need.
He could not guess why Viola wanted him, the thought of her cut across
his judgment and left him helpless and afraid. She asked too much of him
if she did not ask all he had, and she would never ask that. It did not
occur to Jim that she could, in her unimaginable life, be as swayed by
him as he was by her. He knew she believed in him and even relied on
him, but he was used to this reliance of others on his strength; it was
an irrelevant reliance and did not shake his heart, even when it touched
it. He did not dream that Viola could like him for himself as women like
men.
Jim did not feel any pain at re-visiting Warren Manor. The boy who had
left it had passed out of his life. He thought of it indistinctly,
without unfriendliness. But when he pushed open the gate and saw the
same rush of flowers—the wide, smooth placidness of the green lawns,
the rich, contented strength of the old red walls, as of a ripe fruit
for ever hanging in a patch of sun, memory shot into his heart, and he
almost expected to see Mrs. Bligh behind the tea-table, smiling at him
with her serene, protective eyes. He found instead Mr. Bligh, older and
less formidable than ever, full of incoherent friendliness and
apologetic enthusiasm.
Mr. Bligh did not, of course, touch on anything painful, but his
attitude itself was a little painful. He seemed to take it so for
granted that he was in the wrong; and Jim had forgotten what the wrong
was. He only wanted to enjoy the garden and see Viola.
But when he saw Viola at lunch she seemed incredibly far away. He was
struck as he had been long ago, with the innate leisure of prosperous
lives.
Nothing critical ever took place at once.
Viola greeted him like a casual acquaintance, and then there was a gong
and lunch. Even after lunch Mr. Bligh held him back with port wine which
he never drank, and a cigar which he was much too nervous to smoke.
Mr. Bligh was nervous, too; only Viola appeared at all composed, she
looked in at the long French window at exactly the time she intended to
talk to Jim, and suggested a stroll in the orchard.
Jim joined her without a word. Mr. Bligh watched them a little
wistfully. They did not look as happy and lawless as he liked. They
looked as if they dreaded what lay before them. It was not Mr. Bligh’s
idea of a comfortable flirtation. They walked far apart without looking
at each other until they disappeared into the orchard.
There was a pause in the life of the spring. The blossoms were over, and
the young leaves hid the promise of the fruit.
Viola’s powers of speech were stopped by something trembling within her.
‘I haven’t found the pearls,’ Jim said at last in a constrained voice.
‘I’m afraid I shan’t now, the police say they have been on her track for
a long time. Occasionally she lets me know where she is, but of course
she won’t now. I’m very sorry.’
Viola sat down with her back to a tree and looked away into the
sunlight.
‘I don’t care in the least about the pearls,’ she said slowly, ‘and I
hope they’ll never catch Eliza.’
A separating wall of silence cut them off from each other.
Then Jim said as if he were breaking it down stone by stone,—‘Well, I’m
here—what do you want with me?’
She gave him a quick look and glanced away again. It was strange how
with Reggie she had always had to try to make up for what she didn’t
find in him by his handsome exterior. She had relied on him physically
to let her off an innate distaste, and to smooth down a curious
hostility. But with Jim it was just the opposite. She knew profoundly
that he was dear to her, that she revered and longed for his strength
and companionship, but she had always to get used to his physical
awkwardness, to his heavy features, and his holding himself as if it
didn’t matter. This didn’t make her feel hostile, but it made her want
to hide her eyes, and keep him only in her heart. She felt responsible
for Jim and for his appearance as she had never felt for Reggie. It was
as if he was curiously near her, yet he had never touched her, and
Reggie had been her demonstrative lover; but Reggie’s demonstrations had
never been solidly a part of her imagination, they had happened to her
as accidents happen. Her nearness to Jim was as organic as the air she
drew into her lungs, and as vital to her.
‘I wanted to tell you,’ she said, hardly speaking above a whisper, ‘that
I know all about Emily——’
Jim stared at her without speaking. Then he said—
‘Who is Emily?’
It was incredible that he had forgotten! Viola could not imagine how
Jim, and even Emily, had recovered from such a blow from destiny.
She thought that tragedies were lifelong and continuous. She did not
know that even the heaviest sorrows are rarely continuous. They maim,
but their consciousness passes. Emily and Jim had been too busy and too
brave to keep any dramatic memories, they had stood what they had to
stand; and then gone on without the luxury of a perpetual record.
‘Oh, but you must remember,’ Viola exclaimed, ‘that poor Emily, who was
here—you took the blame for what happened to her, and then afterwards
you helped her?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Jim, ‘I remember Emily, of course. She’s all right,
isn’t she?’
Viola waived Emily’s present ease aside.
‘It’s the most dreadful thing I ever heard of,’ she said in an awestruck
voice, ‘and what makes it all even worse is that Mrs. Bligh knew the
real truth, and when I asked her about it she let me think it was you!’
To Viola’s surprise and horror Jim laughed outright.
‘No,’ he said, ‘not really! ’Pon my soul I shouldn’t have thought she’d
have dared!
‘Religious people do juggle with the Almighty. How she must hate me to
let herself tell a lie! Are you certain she knew?’ He wasn’t even sorry
now that Mrs. Bligh hated him.
‘Yes, but don’t you understand?’ said Viola, ‘if I hadn’t found out, and
Mr. Bligh hadn’t been a dear, and gone to the lawyer for me, that story
could have been used against you?’
Jim stopped laughing.
‘They could have used it against me any time these ten years,’ he said
gravely, ‘but they haven’t used it.’
‘I don’t mean the Blighs,’ said Viola, ‘I mean my parents. Mrs. Bligh
may tell them, only I think Mr. Bligh will stop her now.’
Jim whistled.
‘D’you mean the strike?’ he asked. ‘Your father would have dragged it
out, to down me? Yes, he might. I never thought of that.’
‘No, I didn’t mean the strike,’ said Viola under her breath. Jim looked
at her. She felt his gaze upon her, searching and tender, but as if he
dared not find what he searched for. He waited, saying nothing. ‘You
don’t seem to think,’ she said in a trembling voice, ‘how I might
mind—or why I tried to find out the truth.’
‘I suppose,’ he said slowly, choosing his words carefully, ‘because you
are a loyal person and a kind friend. I knew that already—I knew it the
first time I saw you. I couldn’t get you out of my head, and if you’d
been only pretty, I think I could have got you out of it. I can stand a
pretty face.’
‘It wasn’t only that,’ said Viola; ‘I don’t want to be kind.’
The silence between them widened out through the orchard until they
could not hear the birds twittering, or the soft, lazy, summer sounds
over the open fields. Viola hung dizzily upon the verge of miracle. She
held destiny on her lips, for Jim’s were sealed. He only looked at her
and waited. ‘I found out,’ she whispered, ‘because I had to,
Jim—because I loved you——’
She turned her head away to hide the acuteness of life. She dreaded the
change between them which she herself had made. But Jim did not stir, he
did not touch her or take any advantage of the change.
When he spoke it was very quietly and not as if she had done anything
tremendous.
‘I should lie if I pretended I wasn’t glad,’ he said, ‘to hear you say a
thing like that is like knowing the Kingdom of Heaven’s true. But you
see, the gladness can’t make any difference, can it? I shall just have
to bottle it up and sit on it for the rest of my life. I can’t act on
what you’ve told me.’
‘Oh, but why?’ she asked. ‘You’re not going to say because of those
stupid pearls?’
‘Well,’ said Jim, ‘Eliza counts. People who ought to go to prison, and
who will go to prison if they’re caught, must count, as family
connections, you know. But not wholly because of Eliza. If your father
had misappropriated trust funds—and, of course, from my perverse point
of view he practically _has_—I shouldn’t wish you to throw me over.
Eliza dots an “i” but she isn’t an “i.” I’m that myself, I know.
Viola—look at me.’
She raised her eyes obediently, they sank into his and became a part of
his being; she no longer saw him as ugly or awkward, or as outside
herself.
The barriers between them fell like straws.
‘I’m not,’ said Jim with a twist of his mouth, ‘attractive, not even to
you, and I’d have to be rather attractive to carry you off under all
your guns, shouldn’t I? No—don’t be nice to me, it’s bad enough without
that.
‘You don’t know how bad, because you’re romantic, and romance is like a
drop of laudanum to a toothache. You see, I can stand doing without you.
All my life I’ve done without things, not because I was virtuous, but
because I hadn’t got ’em. Doing without is a habit like any other.
‘When I saw you, I knew I’d got to have the edge of it against me
always. But it was worth it. I’ve never been in love before. I’ve wanted
women, but that’s natural; any man can stand what his senses do to him.
‘I knew I wasn’t going to get over what I felt for you. I know now why
I’m alive. Being let out of prison is pretty good—I’ve been let out of
prison, but not for stealing pearls. I’ll tell you about it some day—it
was the first decent thing I did—which got me locked up. But not even
getting out of prison was as good to me as seeing you. No—don’t touch
me.’
But she had touched him. She had put her small, fine hand over his
roughened fingers. Jim looked at it and then at her. He thought she was
too small and beautiful for love. He couldn’t go on talking; his voice
died away in a sigh of sheer content.
‘But I’m not just something in your mind,’ Viola said quietly. ‘I’m
myself—I’m like any other woman. I think I know everything in all the
world now, and I know that there aren’t any real barriers between us.’
‘You say that,’ he murmured, ‘but you don’t know, how can you? I’m raw
to you, my life’s hard and ugly, full of rough people, and I’m rough
myself. I’m not a mystery, I’m only a lout! Why, if you only knew what I
was like when I first came here—I couldn’t sit down in a chair or hold
a tea-cup, and I didn’t understand half any one said to me, even now I
don’t always understand your thoughts; I’m trained, I’m educated—but
I’m not like you. If you marry me you won’t only have to live with a
strange man, you’ll have to live with a strange man who isn’t a
gentleman.’
‘I don’t want you to be anything you aren’t,’ said Viola firmly. ‘I want
you to be what you are. I’ll take care of the rest.’
‘You don’t know what the rest is,’ said Jim, ‘and the Lord knows I don’t
know how to tell you! What I am is all mixed up, more than most men are.
I might not always be able even to _try_ to be what you like. I told you
I never loved any one before I saw you—but that’s not true. I’ve always
had in me something that I loved—I don’t know what to call it—but I
know it leads me, and it takes me into some damned queer places. I
believe it’s the love of God. But if you told me it wasn’t I should have
to go on following it just the same. It’s always telling me what I am to
do, and half of the time it makes me look all wrong. I can’t go by any
other rule, and people—even my own people down in Poplar—don’t like
it. When it suits their book they like it, of course, but it doesn’t
always suit their book. It doesn’t suit my own. How do I know it’ll suit
yours? You don’t please other people if you please God, and you mayn’t
be pleasing God either—that’s the risk, and you can’t keep them in
separate packets because I’ve tried—other people is what you’ve got to
learn God out of. You’re no good at all if you keep off by yourself, but
you’re less good still if you try to please people. You’ve got to be
with them and hold on to something outside of them. Why, even you, if
you were to see a thing that mattered differently from me—I’d have to
let you rip—can you face living with a man who’d let you rip?’
Viola smiled a queer little smile.
‘I’ll risk the love of God,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe I shall mind it.
You see, I shan’t have to take the risks most women take in other
directions. But, Jim, it’s only fair to tell you that though I’m
interested, I don’t know anything about it. I haven’t got the love of
God.’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you’re part of it!’
He bent his head till his lips touched her hand. He could not let it go
unless she took it away.
Nothing on earth could release him, his spirit and his body were as
bound to her as the sap is to the tree. He tried to drag himself back to
the obstacles which had seemed to him invulnerable an hour ago.
‘I haven’t said anything about your people,’ he said. ‘But don’t think
I’m not upset about them—they’ve loved you, and been good to you. This
will be worse to them than if you fell under a train. I feel rather as
if I’d pushed you under.’
Viola stood up suddenly with a little gesture of freedom.
‘Oh, no, you haven’t,’ she said. ‘If you’d pushed me I wouldn’t have
gone. I’m tired of being pushed under trains. This time I’ve jumped on
to the line myself.’
Jim looked up at her. The laughter and the joy were struck out of his
face.
‘Oh, but if the engine’s there,’ he said, ‘you’ll get smashed whichever
way you look at it.’
He had never been afraid since he had struggled out of his earlier life,
and he had never, even in those earlier days, learned the deadliest
lesson fear can teach—precaution. But he felt both now. He would rather
have left her where she stood, with all his hopes upon her, than let her
run the risk her heart was set on. But he could not leave her. He had
gone too far; to leave her now would be to forsake her. Love, which is
the most dangerous of all human accidents had broken Viola’s security.
CHAPTER XLI
The house was full of anger. A cloud had hung over it ever since Viola’s
retreat from Reggie, though life had gone on the same, but since her
return from Warren Manor it was as if Viola had literally broken up her
home.
She hadn’t been able to have it out. Her first words had the shattering
effect of an explosion; her father couldn’t listen to her, his
heartiness turned into ejaculatory anger. His face crimsoned, his voice
rose, his fist shook. They had to keep saying to him, ‘Hush! The
servants are coming in.’
Viola couldn’t make him sit down quietly and let her explain; it would
have been like asking a gale to stop blowing.
Mr. Egerton repudiated reason. He behaved as if Viola were struggling
for her life in the surf, and the only sane thing to do was to knock her
into unconsciousness, and drag her out by the hair.
Mrs. Egerton was more composed, but she was equally terrible. She shut
her eyes and winced when Viola spoke Jim’s name, and she looked suddenly
old. Viola had never seen her mother cry before, but Mrs. Egerton cried
now, pathetically tremulously, as if she couldn’t help it, her eyelids
were always red.
Viola had loved her better than any one in the world for twenty-one
years, and her mother’s tears shook her as nothing else could have
shaken her. Viola despised their prejudices, and she could easily
demolish all their reasons, but she couldn’t do anything with the look
on their faces. She—their child—was making them old and helpless. They
fled like quarries pursued by the fierceness of her will. She had been
afraid of their anger, but their anger was nothing when she was face to
face with it. It was their pain that pierced her to the heart.
Their trouble drew her parents mysteriously together. They were to be
met at any hour talking in dry, accusatory voices. They said the same
things over and over again, beating out the accumulated differences of
the years, but without anger. Their anger was concentrated on
Viola—they had none of it left for each other. The situation was
bewilderingly cruel, like the simple French opera of _Louise_.
Louise had to make her choice between her parents and her lover. Viola
had always thought that the whole problem was forced. Surely a
compromise was always possible? Louise had thought so, too, but her
parents hadn’t. Their daughter’s choice disintegrated and ruined
them—they insisted on being ruined and disintegrated by it, just as Mr.
and Mrs. Egerton insisted on being ruined and disintegrated by Viola’s
choice.
It wasn’t Louise who wouldn’t come to them when they were ill and dying,
it was they who wouldn’t be nursed by her unless she gave her lover up.
Viola would be just the same to her parents whether she married Jim or
Reggie, but they wouldn’t see it. It was she they cared for, not
Reggie’s houses and motors and steam yachts, and yet they behaved as if
she was depriving them personally of all Reggie’s possessions, as well
as becoming a perfectly different person.
They seemed to believe that having failed to convince her themselves she
would be more likely to listen to Harry.
When Harry had failed the family was turned on to her. Aunts and uncles
who lived in big houses and had sent her silver inkpots and leather
prayer books on great occasions, too took advantage of these unsolicited
gifts to become flatly intimate with Viola.
They insisted on discussing all her private feelings and telling her
that she must have got them from the Egertons or the Mannerings.
It seemed to Viola as if she had no private feeling left, but she saw
they could have been private if only they’d been like everybody else’s.
They had been private when it was a question of Reggie. People had
respected then the modesty of her youth; and she was only three months
older now, but Jim’s commonness untied their tongues. It set loose
vulgarities and humiliations. Viola heard things she had never heard
before. Base facts in the lives of people she loved and respected were
thrust at her like weapons. She was even told that the governess she
liked best, who had one day mysteriously left her, had turned out to be
the footman’s mistress.
They did not turn her from her purpose, but all their weapons had left
wounds. She was sure of nothing now. She was not sure of her love, that
great fact receded as if it had nothing to do with incomes (soap, that
was one of their arguments), and anger. It went literally out of her
head. She fought on all day, but love would have nothing to do with her.
It wouldn’t be used as a weapon.
They made one mistake. Nothing could be much more horrible than having
to hear the things they said—they forgot that.
The disgrace was the sin, and the sin was the disgrace, there was
nothing deeper in it. They wanted to tear her heart out by the roots, so
that no member of their family should deviate from the normal. But it
made her father and mother cry—she couldn’t get away from that. It was
irrelevant and important and absurd. There was no grandness in the
situation, and it couldn’t be stopped.
Even if Viola changed her mind, how could she give her parents happiness
again? They would always be afraid of what she would do next, and no one
could give happiness to suspicious parents out of a starved heart.
The person to whom Viola could still give happiness was Jim, and that
was why she still held on to him.
She had felt only for a moment how much joy she could give him, but the
sense of it had blotted out time. She could not remember what it had
felt like now, but she knew that she had felt it, and might feel it
again. The wrangle heaved, and broke, and collected itself like rain
clouds shepherded by wind, to break out afresh. Everybody was worn out
by it and nobody had any fresh ideas. They were reduced to the simple,
sodden phrases of repetition.
At the end of three weeks Mr. Egerton announced that he would see Jim.
‘If you see him I must see him,’ said Viola. She believed now that her
parents would not scruple to play tricks upon her. Human beings were not
as sacred to them as proper marriages.
The storm broke out afresh. Mr. and Mrs. Egerton realised now that their
only chance was Jim. They had believed Viola to be the weakest link, and
they had isolated her in order to attack her; but Viola knew them. They
could not take her by surprise. She had the same defences as theirs. Jim
might be more vulnerable if he could be kept by himself. Lovers united
are never vulnerable; they have alive in them the principle which
created the world.
You cannot part lovers unless you separate them.
Mr. and Mrs. Egerton dimly suspected this truth, but they thought they
could get out of it somehow—probably by giving in.
Jim saw Mr. Egerton first.
There was no geniality left in Mr. Egerton. He sat in his leather-lined,
deep-cushioned library chair, holding himself in hand. His mind was full
of Elizabethean images, and resented law.
Jim came in and sat down clumsily. He did not know what to say, nor how
to take what was going to be said to him. Half of his conscience was on
Mr. Egerton’s side. He had nothing but pity for the man before him, and
it is very difficult to make points out of an uneasy conscience in the
face of pity. Mr. Egerton looked a very great deal older and very red.
He did not offer to shake hands with Jim; he held the arms of his chair
as if he was having a tooth out. He spoke pompously at first, in a
controlled voice, but as the interview went on he raised it.
‘I have sent for you,’ he said slowly and coldly, ‘on a most unpleasant
matter. It is difficult for me to express what I feel about it to you in
civil terms, though I shall endeavour to be civil.’
Jim interrupted him.
‘You needn’t be civil,’ he said eagerly, ‘just say what you mean—I can
stand it.’ He was anxious to make things as easy for Mr. Egerton as
possible. Mr. Egerton glared at him. He did not wish Jim to be able to
stand what he had to say to him, and he considered his tone of sympathy
a horrible piece of impertinence.
‘I propose to say what I mean,’ he said stiffly, ‘if you will be good
enough to allow me to speak without interruption.
‘I hear from my daughter that in some clandestine and irregular manner
there have been meetings between you, leading to a most unfortunate
attachment.
‘You had an invitation to my house, it is true, but I should have
thought that such an incident put you under an obligation to us, and was
not (as it appears to have been taken by you) an incentive to an
unscrupulous pursuit.’
‘As far as I am concerned,’ said Jim, who began to feel a little more at
his ease under the studied insolence of Mr. Egerton’s manner, ‘there was
nothing clandestine in my meetings with your daughter.’
‘You prefer to imply,’ said Mr. Egerton, ‘that my daughter is solely to
blame?’
Jim flushed.
‘If I saw any blame,’ he said, ‘I’d take it; but I don’t. We aren’t
living in mediæval times; if your daughter is not a free agent in
choosing her friends, the fault lies at your door. She merely violates a
consent she ought to be able to take for granted.’
Mr. Egerton held himself together as if it was only by a violent effort
he could prevent himself from flying into small pieces. His anger ran in
him like a flame.
‘In our class of life,’ he said with controlled fury, ‘we feel ourselves
at liberty to deny our daughters the right of associating with bargees
who have murdered their fathers.’
‘Then you shouldn’t have invited me to dinner to meet her,’ said Jim
inexorably.
Mr. Egerton swallowed his passion as if it was a bad taste.
‘I made a mistake,’ he said more quietly, ‘and it is no doubt free to
you to comment on it. I believed you to be a man I could, at any rate,
socially, trust. It was inconceivable to me that you should take
advantage of my generosity.’
‘If it had been generosity,’ said Jim, fixing his steady, challenging
eyes on the angry man before him, ‘there might be some sense talking
about taking advantage of it. But you know as well as I do that you
asked me to dinner not to give me a pleasure but to get a concession out
of me; and I didn’t come for the pleasure of dining with you either. I
came because I wondered if I could square things for the men by a
personal discussion with you and Mr. Ainley.
‘I got nothing out of the discussion, and you got nothing out of it
either, so we were square about that dinner, weren’t we? Let’s talk
sense.
‘I want your daughter and I was a bargee, that’s what it comes to, isn’t
it?
‘Well, I _was_ a bargee, and I did kill my father, and I worked for
nearly a year on one of your docks. But I’m better off now, and I have
rather more education than your own son. I admit that it’s a facer for
you, but, to tell the truth, it’s a facer for me as well.
‘I didn’t mean to marry out of my class—people like you are my natural
enemies. You can’t want me less than I want you—that’s a fact!’
It was not, however, a fact to Mr. Egerton. It was a monstrous and
insulting statement. His intellect refused it as a donkey stops dead
when expected to cross water.
‘I can hardly credit,’ he said icily, ‘that people should easily believe
that their efforts produce no success. If you have any such
disinclination as you state, I am at a loss to conceive why I have been
subjected to the humiliation of this preposterous project?’
‘I’m sorry it’s humiliating,’ said Jim anxiously; ‘I don’t want to
humiliate you. I only want to stick to facts.
‘Of course I wouldn’t have told your daughter I loved her, if I could
have helped it. But when I saw I couldn’t help it and she convinced me
she couldn’t, there was nothing to be done but lump our prejudices and
carry it through.
‘After all, there is _one_ thing worth risking everybody’s feelings for
all round, and though I grant you, you’ve got to be tolerable sure
you’ve got it, it’s because we were sure, that I’m here now.’
Mr. Egerton scored his first point. He leaned forward and raised his
forefinger impressively.
‘My daughter,’ he said, ‘is twenty-one. I have known her for that amount
of time, and you have known her for a few interrupted and excitable
hours. Why should you be surer of her than I am?’
‘She has been brought up as blind to the life you know as a
fortnight-old kitten. Do you wonder that I should shrink from exposing
her to it?’
Jim hung his head. After all he knew nothing about ladies, except that
they were fragile and fine.
‘You say you are educated,’ Mr. Egerton went on. ‘Have you ever lived
with a delicate, fastidious girl out of your own class?’
Jim raised his head. ‘I’ve not lived with any woman,’ he said with more
confidence; ‘I’ve wanted them, but I’ve kept clear.’
‘You’ve kept clear as well,’ said Mr. Egerton scornfully, ‘of all
possible knowledge of how to do it.
‘Purity, if I understand you to make that claim, has just as much value
for a girl like Viola as not knowing how to make up a prescription has
for a chemist.’
This point of view was both new and disturbing to Jim. He swallowed
nervously and searched the room for assistance. His eyes moved from Mr.
Egerton, sophisticated and at ease, very nearly triumphant, to the
well-stocked, balanced library. Comfort and knowledge lived together in
equal quantities and with neither of them taking up too much room. This
was the Egertons’ ideal of vice and virtue as well; they liked a
convenient relation between them.
‘It’s odd you feel like that about it,’ Jim said at last. ‘But I don’t
suppose she does. I think she’d rather have me straight than not.
‘I’m sorry I’m not up to your standard, Mr. Egerton, because it’s rough
on you, our not getting on. But marriages are often like that. You
hardly ever see one that doesn’t hurt somebody else. But that can’t stop
people’s choosing, can it?
‘Viola’s young, but I’ve been as fair as I know how to her, I haven’t
let her think my life’s an easy one to share.’
‘There’s only one way of being fair to her,’ said Mr. Egerton
impressively, ‘and that’s by never setting eyes on her again.
‘She’d get over her feeling for you in six weeks then, and if you don’t
she’ll repent it all her life.’
‘I’ve only your word of that,’ said Jim sullenly, ‘I should have to have
hers.’
‘In the nature of things you can’t have that,’ said Mr. Egerton. ‘If you
ask her to choose, she’ll say she’s already made up her mind, but as she
doesn’t know anything about your kind of life, I think you’ll agree with
me that upon this point she hasn’t got a mind. She’s got a future, that
I admit is in your hands, to ruin or to save.’
Jim made no immediate answer. He was going over his hour with Viola in
the orchard.
He saw again her wavering eyes, steady and facing his; he felt the power
behind them, that as much as any power in him, had bound them together.
Was there not wisdom in her innocence?
After all he had nothing worse to reveal to her than an unsoiled heart
and a few material hardships.
There was a long silence, then Jim met Mr. Egerton’s eyes unflinchingly.
‘I’m sorry sir’ he said, ‘but it’s no good. You may be right. I
acknowledge I’m letting her take a big risk, but it’s not as big as you
think, and I’d be doing a worse thing, I feel, to stop her taking it.
‘I don’t know how to put it quite, but there’s something on the other
side of the risk which makes it worth taking, even for her.’
Jim got up to go. Mr. Egerton stopped him by a gesture of the hand.
He made his first effort to meet Jim as an equal. He stated what he
himself believed to be a fact.
‘Look here,’ he said, ‘you may take my word for it. I’m fifty and I know
life. This feeling that you think you have and that you think Viola has,
even if you both have it, is not worth a risk. You can marry the man or
woman you love and be a great deal worse off than if you hadn’t done so.
Nine times out of ten even in normal circumstances you make hash of it.
Love is no more immortal than a stomachache.’
Jim met his eyes in a long, searching look. He saw that he was being
faced honestly at last, and he saw why Mr. Egerton was tied down to his
money. Nothing else had lasted for him.
‘I can’t act on any one else’s experience,’ Jim said slowly. ‘I’ve
staked my life and hers on this—I believe what we’ve got will last.’
Mr. Egerton’s hand sunk to his side. He became again impassive and
calculating. He had one more weapon to use, though he had hoped not to
use it. And when he spoke again it was with a simulated cordiality.
‘I’m prepared to do the handsome thing by you, Barton,’ he said, ‘and
more than that, by the cause you stand for. I see you are an honest man,
though blindly mistaken. Perhaps you’re not altogether to blame for
being mistaken. Wiser men than you have had their head turned by a girl.
Financially, of course, Viola is penniless, and if she marries you will
remain so. But you care for your views, I know, and in the long run it
would mean more to you, wouldn’t it, to give your theories a leg up,
than have your own way? Well, there are concessions I can make and get
the other directors to make, which would, I think, meet even your
enlightened views.
‘If you give up this mad scheme about Viola, I’ll give you my influence
and back your scheme for the dockers. I’m prepared to meet you at my
lawyers’ and have the whole thing out in black and white. Your future,
and the future of your cause, will be safe in my hands.’
Jim held his breath. He knew what he could do if he had Mr. Egerton
behind him; he had long ago planned out a settled and studied schedule
of hours and conditions which would free half the river from its
top-heavy burdens. But his scheme was hopeless without revolution.
Nothing short of bloodshed or a hand from the top could shake the
shackles of the men from below; and here was this hand
outstretched—outstretched at the price of his private happiness. He
could get along without happiness if he won it for his men, but his old
suspicion of all employers kept him silent. He turned his eyes away from
Mr. Egerton’s. What must he resign to gain his help? Jim wasn’t to be
the only sacrifice. He was to resign Viola, and to resign her without
her consent.
In a flash his spirit seized upon the flaw in his enemies’ proposition,
and for the first time in their interview he was angry.
‘You can’t mix things up like that,’ he said fiercely. ‘I wouldn’t trust
a dog with you now. Why, by Heaven, you’re trying to bribe me to sack
Viola!’
Mr. Egerton pointed to the door. He was stuttering with rage. Only the
sight and feel of physical violence could have satisfied his outraged
senses; and he was an elderly Englishman who respected law. He felt as
if his honour had left him—but he did not know that he had taken it
away from himself.
CHAPTER XLII
Jim went out of Mr. Egerton’s study firm in his rage and his disgust. He
felt that it would be right to take Viola away from this place of moral
obliquity, where consequences and conveniences swallowed up sin, where a
man could be offered a bribe out of the very principles for which his
life was given.
But he was not to leave the house in quite so self-justified a frame of
mind. A footman met him as he crossed the hall and said that Mrs.
Egerton would like to see him. Would he come upstairs?
Viola had not told Jim anything about her mother. She had hoped that a
miracle might take place when they met, and miracles take place more
easily without preparation.
If only Jim and her mother could like each other!
Anger and violence could force their way into Mr. Egerton’s library;
tobacco and leather were a suitable background for the rougher qualities
of men; but they were incredible in Mrs. Egerton’s boudoir.
She possessed probably the best set of Louis Quatorze furniture in
London. It was so delicate, so slender, so dim in its soft gold and pale
brocades, the tapering of the slender chair legs and the inimitable
lightness of the matchless curves, that Jim hardly dared sit down at
all. He felt as if he had got by mistake into an old French fan.
Mrs. Egerton sat gracefully erect by the side of a high, slender table.
There was nothing on it but a cut glass bowl out of which sprang mauve
orchids.
She was dressed in a cloudy gray, her head and neck rose with formidable
distinctness from its vague, soft folds. All the ease and lightness of
the room and all its tensity of perfect form were matched by her.
She motioned to Jim to sit opposite to her, without speaking.
Her silence forced upon him so strong a sense of his helplessness and
clumsiness that if he had dared he would have turned and fled.
But he did not dare. He moved among the wand-like furniture in an agony
of discomfort. Suppose it should break under him!
Mrs. Egerton fixed her eyes upon him as impersonally as if he was
something she was looking at through the windows of a train.
‘I suppose,’ she said at last, ‘that you are Mr. Barton?’ She seemed to
have some lingering hope that he might be a man come to see about the
electric lights.
Jim nodded. His throat was parched and dry, his big hands shook. All the
years of his culture and his experience were wiped out, and he was back
at Warren Manor again, without any of its protective kindliness to
support him.
‘You have seen my husband,’ Mrs. Egerton went on tranquilly. ‘Has he
succeeded in convincing you that you have made a great mistake?’
Jim shook his head. He had this conviction now, but Mr. Egerton had not
produced it.
‘I can only hope,’ Mrs. Egerton said, ‘that I shall be more successful.
Mr. Barton, I am sure you are a good young man and I have heard you are
a very sensible one. Frankly, do you not think such an idea as a
marriage between yourself and my daughter preposterous?’
‘I see it might look so,’ Jim faltered, ‘if——’
‘I know what you are going to say,’ Mrs. Egerton interrupted him deftly,
as if she were saving him trouble, ‘If my unfortunate child had not lost
her heart to you. But, Mr. Barton, children—and Viola is only a
child—have no fixity of affection. It is barely three months since she
told me she had lost her heart to—your employer—Mr. Ainley.’
‘He isn’t my employer.’ Jim flushed and stumbled over the word, which
struck him as if he had been a thief stealing silver out of his master’s
pantry.
‘Your former employer,’ Mrs. Egerton corrected herself. ‘I believe I am
right in understanding that you have been a dock labourer?’
Jim bowed his head.
‘And before that?’ Mrs. Egerton inquired.
‘I was at Cambridge,’ muttered Jim, but it sounded incredible. Mrs.
Egerton waved Cambridge away.
‘And you had, I fancy,’ she said, ‘some other manual calling?’
‘I served on a barge,’ said Jim.
Mrs. Egerton’s eyebrows, which were like Viola’s, arched and
extraordinarily fine, lifted. She accepted the barge.
‘You must have been very young then,’ she said consideringly, ‘so that
perhaps before that——?
‘I was in prison,’ said Jim desperately.
‘I forget what for?’ Mrs. Egerton asked in even tones.
‘I killed my father,’ said Jim. It sounded much worse like this than
when Mr. Egerton had shouted it at him downstairs.
‘Ah!’ said Mrs. Egerton. She did not say anything more.
Jim had forgotten Viola. He wanted to get up and creep away from that
light gold room into the mercy of the dark. A very clear-toned French
clock ticked on inexorably.
The door opened softly and Viola came in. She did not trust her parents,
she knew their affections were unscrupulous. She had to see Jim with her
own eyes. She saw him sitting shamed in the middle of the shining room.
Mrs. Egerton did not move when Viola came in. She merely said, ‘Turn on
the light, dear.’
There was plenty of light in the room before, but this made it worse. It
was delicate, shaded light, but it penetrated and showed up everything.
It showed up Jim’s shame.
Viola did not look like a reinforcement. She came in very quietly
without a greeting, and sat on the other side of her mother. She looked
across at Jim as if she were judging him.
‘I have no doubt,’ said Mrs. Egerton gently, ‘that my husband has dealt
with what he considers your unsuitability for Viola. I am sure you will
not be surprised that this has occurred to us?’
‘No,’ said Jim, suddenly lifting up his head and looking desperately
from one to the other. ‘I—I see it.’
‘Naturally,’ agreed Mrs. Egerton smoothly. ‘Being a sensible man, Mr.
Barton, you would see it, though from our point of view, hardly
sufficiently strongly. But perhaps it has not occurred to you that the
other side of the situation is equally unfortunate. Viola is just as
little suited to you.’ She paused a moment. Viola turned towards her
mother with a little movement of entreaty, but her mother ignored it.
She had not once looked at her daughter since she came into the room. ‘I
do not know,’ Mrs. Egerton continued, ‘if you feel perfectly at home
here. I should hardly suppose it; but even if you assured me that it was
true, I am convinced that in your surroundings and with what I imagine
to be the circumstances and connections of your life, Viola could not be
at home.’
‘Oh! mother!’ murmured Viola.
‘My dear child,’ said Mrs. Egerton firmly, ‘I cannot pay Mr. Barton a
higher compliment than by stating facts to him, and what I have just
said _is_ a fact.’
Neither of them disputed it. All that they felt in their hearts seemed
trivial and childish confronted by their incompatibility of life.
‘I imagine,’ Mrs. Egerton continued after a pause, ‘that you are really
interested in the religious life? My daughter is not at all interested
in it. She has always disliked going to church, and I do not know if she
has what is usually called faith! Have you, darling?’
Viola made a helpless gesture with her hands.
‘I don’t know what I believe,’ she said in a low voice.
‘Is not that,’ inquired Mrs. Egerton, ‘what they call being an agnostic?
It hardly appears to be a sufficiently complete creed for a clergyman’s
wife. I doubt, Mr. Barton, if the emotion which has drawn you together
is founded on anything at all permanent. Your affection for each other
does not seem to me merely unsuitable, but quite ephemeral.
‘You are a man of integrity; you will not, I feel sure, insist on
drawing a young girl with a slight romantic attachment to you, into the
obligation of a lifetime?’
‘I shall not insist,’ said Jim. He lifted his haggard face from one to
the other.
Viola was changed. She did not look like the same person she had been in
the orchard. She was white and quiet and as utterly composed as if they
had been discussing ear-rings. All the life she had, she hid.
She belonged to that room where everything was pale and slender and had
never been roughly handled.
Suddenly she lifted her bent head and looked across at him.
‘Before Mr. Barton comes to any decision,’ she said, ‘I wish to speak to
him alone.’
‘My dear child,’ said her mother, ‘don’t you think you are going rather
far? Farther, perhaps, than Mr. Barton wants? Can you not perfectly say
anything you may have to say to him in my presence?’
‘No,’ said Viola. The two women looked at each other. Their sheathed
wills met and crossed. If Mrs. Egerton had conquered Viola before, she
would have conquered her finally now; but what had been unsubdued in
Viola at Eastbourne had grown stronger.
Mrs. Egerton hesitated and yielded. She dared not press the point. She
rose gracefully and said, ‘I will give you five minutes, then, Viola—no
more.’ It was a retreat, but she made a concession of it.
Viola sat still and rigid until the door closed softly behind her
mother. Even for a moment after she neither moved nor spoke. Then she
said quickly, almost roughly,—
‘Are you going to let me go?’
Jim was by her side in an instant.
‘Whatever I do,’ he said between his teeth, ‘is utterly unfair!’
‘Which do you owe most to?’ she asked fiercely, ‘them or me? Do you like
their way of thinking? I don’t only want you—I want to get away! I
never shall if you don’t take me!’ She spoke quickly, breathlessly, like
a creature leaving covert and fleeing, before her hunters.
‘That isn’t enough,’ said Jim despairingly; ‘nothing is enough—except
love! And I must be _sure_ if you have it! I can’t take you if I’m not
sure.’
She drew back a little before his burning eyes. They rested on her
stubbornly with a dumb passion that was all the more intense from his
physical control.
‘If I prove it to you—will you believe me?’ she asked. ‘Will you take
me then?’
‘Oh, my dear!’ he groaned, ‘will I take you!’ He turned away from her,
back to the terrible lightness of the room.
‘If there is any God at all,’ she cried under her breath, ‘He’ll send me
some chance to show you. I’m not all light and brittle—that when I
care—I care utterly so that all the other things don’t count—don’t
matter—don’t even—exist! But, oh, Jim! If you believe in prayer, pray
that this chance will come soon!’
He turned quickly back to her, and as she stood there with her hands
outstretched the door opened quietly and Mrs. Egerton came in. She moved
slowly across the wide, polished floor and resumed her seat by the mauve
orchids as if nothing unusual could possibly have been about to take
place.
‘Will you ring for tea, dear?’ she said to Viola, ‘and, Mr. Barton,
perhaps you will be kind enough to tell me what decision you have
arrived at?’
‘I can’t say I’ll give her up,’ Jim said hoarsely, ‘unless she wants it,
but I’ll wait. I’ll wait to make sure if she does want it. I know what
you say is true. It seems all wrong somehow. We’re too different. I
ought never to have come here, but you see I have.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Egerton, looking over the top of his head and
acknowledging the entrance of the footman.
‘Tea, John, please.
‘Yes, it has been extremely unfortunate, has it not? You will not be
able to stay for tea, I’m afraid?
‘I quite understand, and under the circumstances you will, I feel sure,
agree to keep the engagement, if we must call it an engagement, purely
nominal? I must ask you not to communicate with Viola in any way.
Otherwise you would not be giving absence a fair trial. Shall we say for
a year?’
Viola gave a long, low sigh.
Jim hesitated.
‘I’ll promise,’ he said, ‘not to seek an interview with her, nor to
write to her, for a year. If anything unforeseen happens meanwhile or we
meet unexpectedly—I couldn’t promise not to take advantage of it. But
I’ll take no steps whatever to bring such a meeting about.’
‘And you, Viola?’ asked Mrs. Egerton.
‘I agree to what Jim has agreed to,’ said Viola.
‘I should have liked a less restricted promise,’ said Mrs. Egerton, ‘but
you will be the more on your honour to keep your own restrictions. We
will not detain you, Mr. Barton.’
Jim’s eyes rested on Viola as if he were taking her image forcibly out
of a frame to keep it in his bare heart for ever.
He was as famished for her as a blind man for light.
He knew she did not know the piercing of the sword of love, her hand
rested upon its hilt, but it had never been drawn and turned against her
heart. He did not know that love has other penetrations, slower but no
less sharp than swords.
Viola lifted her eyes to him again, but they held no message; they were
wide and vacant, her heart was veiled before his search.
CHAPTER XLIII
There is no surer method of remembrance than to associate a man with a
cause. Viola might have forgotten Jim if she had not absorbed herself in
his aims. He had hardly left the house when she set herself to learn
what he stood for. She subscribed to a Labour paper. She went to the
London library and drew out of it Karl Marx, Jaurès, and Rolland. She
heard Bernard Shaw lecture. She talked for hours to some one who knew
Keir Hardie. She became conscious of Jim’s world in a new sense. She had
always known of it dimly as she had known of the movements and habits of
goldfish in a bowl. Jokes in _Punch_ illuminated it and funny books
about the conversations of char-women brought it before her eyes. But
she had not known that this world had its own system of thought as she
had hers, and that Socialists were not people who only wanted to take
away all that other people had. She learned with surprise that there
were other ideas of government; Syndicalist, Guild Socialists, and
Anarchists confronted her with drastic changes.
She tried to talk sometimes about her discoveries, but people either
laughed at her or turned mysteriously and suddenly angry.
Even people she had always respected as leaders of thought couldn’t bear
to be asked about ideas which they hadn’t entertained.
She learned that what would disagree with your ordinary life, if you
believed it, was a crank. Christianity was a crank, but not if it was
diluted and restrained. Anything which could affect law, food, clothes
or pleasure was anathema. It must not be alluded to except as a joke.
Her own life had swung back into its accustomed grooves from the moment
Viola had let Jim go. Nobody seemed to think love could survive a year
of silence. They were all extraordinarily nice to Viola, it reminded her
of the time when her tonsils had been removed and she had been presented
with a doll’s house. Her father went to Norway to fish and she and her
mother started on a round of summer visits.
The dock strike came to an end. The end that her father and Reggie had
spoken of as the Ruin of England. The Government commission found for
the dockers on the majority of their grievances, and let the employers
down as easily as they could on the rest.
It looked as if it was the other way round in the papers. But the
dockers went back to work, and England, relieved of an inconvenience,
continued placidly on her path to ruin. Even Mr. Egerton and Reggie
though they had been inconvenienced a great deal more than England, went
on much the same as usual.
The Labour papers were triumphant, but as nobody that Viola knew ever
read them, they merely gave her a peculiar sense of looking at things
out of the Tower of Babel with the added disadvantage of being the only
person to understand the difference of tongues.
The enormous unfairness of what her own people thought blinded her to
the equal unfairness of what Jim’s people thought. She had been too
cramped by the fetters of her own class not to imagine that the class
she hadn’t tried had no fetters.
She longed to plunge into it and be free, but she changed her clothes
three times a day and played golf and tennis; and in the evenings she
danced the tango. She danced beautifully and seriously, and had, in the
course of the dances, in spite of trying hard to avoid them, three more
proposals.
In the late autumn they went abroad. Mrs. Egerton believed that railway
trains and orange trees would cure Viola.
She gave Viola a great deal of freedom and encouraged her to flirt with
a handsome and extremely fast young Frenchman.
Viola for the first and last time in her life really flirted. She felt
curiously safe and very powerful. Nobody could have been more unlike Jim
than Monsieur Gustave de René. Flirtation is a curious and thrilling
game, and Monsieur de René played it extraordinarily well. It was a flat
surprise to the young Frenchman when Viola suddenly and for no apparent
reason snapped the flirtation off. He brooded over it for twenty-four
hours, and then left the hotel, leaving his address behind him. But
Viola did not miss him at all. She missed Jim suddenly a great deal
more, and she missed him differently.
She was sure that she was wasting her life, and life had stopped being
easy to waste.
She wanted to be alone so that she could think of Jim uninterruptedly.
Meals and gay halls full of people and perpetual dance music tired and
confused her.
She would escape by herself into distant olive gardens, and look through
smoke-like puffs of olives, down into the sea. Its unshared beauty hurt
her. She thought of what Gustave had said to her when she laughingly
told him to love the flowers on her knee. ‘If you let me kiss you,’ he
had said, ‘I shall love them—I shall love everything so much more, even
the dead fishes on the beach.’ She had not let him kiss her, but she had
realised that what he had said was true.
Without Jim’s kiss she could not love the sea.
They went home to London in March.
The tango had swept bridge aside. Harry was an adept at it. He thought
of nothing else. The golden room at Ciro’s was his universe.
‘I must take Viola there,’ he said to his mother. ‘It’ll knock the
nonsense out of her head.’
Viola listened to Harry’s offer with a peculiar look in her eyes. She
said, ‘Are there a good many people there, and can you slip in and out
easily if you’re bored?’
‘All London’s there,’ said Harry, ‘and unless you go all the time, like
I do, you’d not miss even a peach of a girl, there’s so many—no one
notices outsiders.’
Viola nodded, considering. ‘I don’t mind going with you to-morrow
night,’ she said indifferently.
When Harry left her, she took out a strange, scrawled piece of paper
some one unknown to her had slipped into her hand as she was going up
the steps of her house the day before: it ran, ‘Can you be where I can
speak to you alone, with no one knowing, to-morrow night. It is
absolutely urgent.—Eliza.’
Eliza gave her a number of a box at a neighbouring post office for an
answer.
It was not very easy in Viola’s usual life to arrange for secret hours.
But Ciro’s sounded secret enough; and perhaps after all this was a last
hour, an hour to break up once and for all her usual life.
She dressed with infinite care for her new adventure, she felt like a
priestess about to become a sacrifice.
She wanted to be a sacrifice, but she wanted to be as fine a one as she
could.
She wore a primrose-coloured dress with a purple cloak, and from her
throat to her waist hung a chain of uncut amethysts.
Beauty flowered in her; her eyes had in them the dream which is its own
fulfilment.
She held her grave, dark head high. There was a curious half-smile on
her lips. She wanted to see to the end of the life she was part of
to-night, for she might never see any of it again.
She wanted to look her best, to dance her lightest, and then to hear
midnight strike like Cinderella and fly off without leaving so much as a
glass slipper behind.
Harry had chosen a well-placed table where they could see the whole
room. The light quivered on it like moonlight over a field of flowers.
Each table seemed shut off in a brilliant life of its own, melting
suddenly into music.
Movement stirred behind the dancers like a magic wind pressing them into
action.
They sprang up lightly from their seats as if shaken into the room,
dizzy with pleasure and money. The most expensive passions in the world
were there, and the souls through which the passions rode their
incontinuous cheap way. The trivial, undermining music forced its
excitement into the blood.
Harry caught her hand, and her feet moved of themselves.
She danced and danced, but her mind never swerved from Eliza’s letter.
Moment by moment the crisis that awaited her came nearer, and she
belonged to it, to its compulsion, and its reality, not to these men
whose hands in turn were on her shoulders, whom she moved with her eyes
and swung from in her laughter.
These thing were as hollow to her as bubbles in wine, the intoxication
lay beneath the bubbles.
Suddenly she saw Reggie and was shaken half out of her dream. He asked
her to dance. She hesitated, and while she hesitated Harry said, ‘Of
course she will, old chap,’ and left her.
All the most thrilling memories of their old relationship had been while
they were dancing. Reggie was at his best dancing—pliant, skilful,
beautiful as all young forceful creatures in motion are beautiful. Viola
had felt nearest to surrender when she had been bound to him by music
and rhythm. She shut her eyes and tried to feel it again. This was the
old life on trial for the last time. If it could enchant her, let it
enchant her! She would be safe then from the compulsion of the unknown
which called to her.
Reggie’s eyes were on her face. He had summoned all his magnetism, and
the strength and torment of his passion for her, to force her into
sharing his emotion, and she could not even feel moved.
The lights and the mad, bad lilting tune, the swinging, self-created
movements, half surrender and half power, had lost their meaning.
Something was dead in her. It had not died in a moment. She did not know
what had killed it, but it was dead now. An excitement more real than
itself had swept it aside.
She lifted her eyes to Reggie’s absorbed, pleading face, and infinitely
gently, with half a smile and half a sigh, she shook her head.
It was all over—he would not ask her again. The life it meant, and that
he had shared, had slipped out of her hands. Reggie knew it was over. He
muttered something beneath his breath and stopped dancing. The music ran
on interminably. Harry had disappeared.
She moved quickly away, slipped behind tables and between flying
couples, into the cloak room, and through the hall. She was in the
street now, and feeling the sane, cold, March air on her face.
As she stood for a moment looking up and down the road for her car, she
was conscious that a slight, uncertain figure had slipped up to her and
stood beside her. She turned her head sharply, half expecting to find
that Reggie had followed her. But it was not Reggie.
It was a very small, white face with haunted eyes, a voice so small it
hardly reached her ears, said, ‘If you don’t take me with you, I’m done
in.’
In a flash Viola knew, and accepted this turning point of her life.
The car swept up to the kerb; Viola put her hand out dizzily.
‘Yes,’ she said under her breath, ‘yes—get in quickly——’
Eliza needed no second invitation. She was in the car as swiftly as a
flame licks the side of a hole. Viola sank beside her stupefied. It was
Eliza who put sixpence into the messenger boy’s hand, and said, ‘Home,
please,’ with a perfect imitation of Viola’s accent to the footman.
The car moved off discreet and silent, and then Eliza sank into the
corner, doubled up and panting, her bright, black eyes were darkened and
wide with fear, she drew her breath unevenly as if she were running. Her
face was white, with purple pockets under her eyes. Her hand and her
lips moved without ceasing, as if they had a consciousness of their own.
It was terrible to see her eyes, for though they were afraid they were
fierce. They were like the eyes of something cornered, determined to
strike.
‘God,’ she whispered, ‘that was a year ago. If you hadn’t come out just
then nothing could have saved me. I’d been waiting for you, I watched
you go in. It was my only chance.’
‘Chance!’ whispered Viola. ‘Are—is anybody after you?’
‘After me?’ Eliza laughed; ‘the whole Yard’s after me! And who set them
after me, d’you suppose?’ She leaned forward suddenly and from her
white, quivering lips poured forth such a string of blistering and evil
words that Viola sank back, sick and faint, shuddering away from her. It
was Jim Eliza was cursing, Jim and another man she called Bert. Jim—for
if he had not described her exact appearance no one would have known who
to look for. But Bert had given her away. They’d copped Bert, and Bert
had blabbed—the only man Eliza had ever worked with who’d let her down.
‘I’ll do for Bert,’ said Eliza with quiet intensity, ‘when he gets out.’
Bert had given away all her haunts and hiding-places. For twenty-four
hours she had been hunted, slipping away from one to the other only to
find fresh men out after her. She couldn’t stop to eat; she’d been going
down to the river unless Viola stopped for her at Ciro’s.
‘The river’s a lot of use,’ she explained parenthetically, ‘if you know
your way on to a barge.’ Then she pulled herself up abruptly. ‘How do I
know you’ll help me to get off?’ she asked abruptly.
Eliza fixed her eyes on Viola. They seemed to strip her of the purple
velvet cloak, and the primrose dress, to take away from her even her
flesh and blood, and point straight at her heart.
Eliza had never taken human life, but if she had, she would have looked
as she did at that moment. Viola had never seen any one look wicked or
dangerous before—it surprised her very much, but it did not frighten
her.
‘How can I help you?’ she asked.
‘Well, I don’t know yet myself,’ agreed Eliza, ‘and that’s a fact. I
must have some food before I can think. I’m nearly dead for food. I had
plenty of money on me but I didn’t like to stop. Take me into your
house, I’ll be safe there, and give me something to eat. Then I’ll see
what to do next.’
Viola wondered afterwards why she should have acted so instinctively
upon Eliza’s need. It never occurred to her to call John and send for
the police, it never even occurred to her to wait till they reached her
door and then let Eliza shift for herself. She acted automatically, as
if she too were hunted.
Mr. and Mrs. Egerton were out. She took Eliza into the dining-room where
there were sandwiches and soup waiting on a spirit lamp. Eliza cleared
the entire plate of sandwiches while Viola was preparing the soup for
her.
When she had finished drinking the soup, Eliza sat silent and huddled in
an arm-chair. It was one o’clock and snow had begun to fall.
Eliza’s clothes looked as if she had slept in them all night, her hair
hung loose about her face, she was tired and angry, but she still had
her wits about her.
‘Can you drive a car?’ she asked sharply.
Viola nodded.
‘Can you get hold of one to-night?’
Viola thought for a moment.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘if I go at once before the men shut up the garage. I
could get Harry’s racer. But we must be quick, he’ll miss me at Ciro’s
and come back here to look for me.’
‘Well, cut along,’ said Eliza. ‘I’ll hide in here if he comes, and meet
you outside directly you hoot. I haven’t any more breath for running.’
Viola left her. Whatever Jim thought, she must get Eliza away. If Eliza
wasn’t safe, Jim wasn’t. It was very terrible, and something—Viola
didn’t quite know what—about Eliza was more terrible still. But she
must do it. She flew round the corner to the garage—it was very cold
and she only had satin slippers on, but she had never had compulsion at
her heels before.
The men were putting away the big car. They were astonished at her
wanting Mr. Harry’s racer at that hour of the night, but they took it
out for her. She gave an explanation they couldn’t catch and turned it
swiftly into the Square.
Eliza stood by the lamp-post waiting. She had found two fur coats which
hung over her arm. She swung herself into the still moving car. A taxi
was driving towards them. Viola leaned forward and caught a glimpse of
Harry’s astonished face.
‘By Jove!’ he cried, ‘my car!’ But they were gone in a flash into the
cross lights, and out into the darkness.
Eliza said nothing for a few moments, then she cried, ‘Do you know the
Folkestone Road? We’ve got to get there to-night. That’s why I had to
have a car. All the stations are watched. The boats, too, but they won’t
trace me coming up in your car with proper clothes on. I bought my
ticket. Lucky you could drive—I can’t.’
Viola drove on in silence. She needed all her wits for the night drive.
They pulled out from the traffic at last, and she could let the car out
over the empty roads. From time to time, between endless unwound ribbons
of speed, she pulled up to make sure of her way. Eliza never spoke, she
slept. All her will and her strength were lost in physical exhaustion,
she flung her life into Viola’s hands and left it there. It struck Viola
that there was something grand in this act of reckless confidence.
Risk was the essence of the life beside her. But as Viola thought, she
realised that it was courage, not confidence. Eliza did not run risks
because she had confidence. She had no confidence whatever. She ran
risks because she had no alternative.
It was a curious drive. Viola had never in her life had to decide so
many things before. Eliza was ignorant of motors and the road.
Everything depended upon Viola. The darkness of the night was full of
danger. There was the occasional night traffic; once Viola almost ran
over a drunken man, and once she came up short against the mystery of a
strayed cow, bulking enormous against a hedge of shadows.
The wind and snow hit her cheeks and whipped her searching eyes. Her
head ached violently and felt empty. Once for miles she chased a hare
between the head lights. It seemed incapable of getting out of the way.
Again and again the car was all but on it. It ran like the wind, but
could not seem able to swerve into safety. On all sides of it were
safety, but it was bound to danger, just as the creature she was trying
to save seemed bound to danger. At length with a queer, shrill scream it
leapt at the opening of a gate and was gone, and when it had gone Viola
found that the tears were running down her cheeks.
Once she went almost to sleep on a long, even stretch of road, and
thought she was dancing at Ciro’s only that Ciro’s was a ship in a storm
and all the tables rocked.
She was faint with fatigue when a breath from the sea met her. She felt
her slack muscles tighten and breathed deep breaths. The lights of
Folkestone were sprinkled up and down between Shorncliffe and the sea.
Eliza woke with a start.
‘We want the early boat,’ she said. ‘We can’t wait in the town. Haul up
somewhere on the cliff. Hotels wouldn’t take us in this time of night.’
The darkness grew curiously vague. There was no light in the sky, but
the night seemed like a fabric worn thin and penetrable.
Viola knew that the dawn was near. She pulled up by the side of the road
and watched the retreat of night. The horizon moved back slowly. It grew
colder and colder, as if the cold were a gray substance pushing away the
vaguer kindliness of the dark. It was gray everywhere now, only the
telegraph poles were black, and far away Viola saw the startling black
shadows of the ships.
The sea came first, and then the sky over it, and at last the little,
shivering, clumsy town.
‘Now we’ll push on,’ said Eliza. Eliza had been tidying up in a
curiously complete and detached way. She wore one of Mrs. Egerton’s fur
coats, and had bound a purple scarf of Viola’s carefully round her head
with such skill that it looked like a motoring turban. ‘We’ll have to do
now,’ said Eliza, covering Viola carefully with the rug, and pulling the
second fur coat over all traces of her evening dress. ‘Drive straight to
the gates.’
The town was just awake; milk carts and newsboys passed them.
The car climbed the hill and slipped down it into the narrow streets,
and out on to the open space before the Pavilion Hotel.
‘Slow up and leave the car here,’ said Eliza. ‘Have you any money on
you! I’d be glad of all you got.’ But Viola had no money.
Eliza thought covetously of the amethysts, but something at the bottom
of her indurated conscience struck at asking for Viola’s amethysts.
‘I’ve got enough to see me to Paris,’ she said grudgingly. She looked at
Viola curiously for a moment.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t know why, I’m sure; but you’ve done me a good
turn.’
Viola felt her lips trembling and the tears coming into her eyes. Eliza
did not offer to shake hands with her. She walked towards the boat with
decision and confidence. Viola watched her with her heart in her throat.
It seemed all right. It must be all right.
At the gangway there was one sailor and two men who appeared to be just
stepping on to the gang-plank, but they had stopped to speak to each
other. There was no one else about. Every one was on board; they had
only driven up at the last moment. The two men went on speaking. Eliza
came up to them and then stopped dead. She stood quite still like
something that will never move again. One of the men stepped forward. He
fastened something on Eliza’s hands that clicked and flashed, and the
other man turned abruptly away from the boat, and Viola saw that he was
Jim.
She hadn’t saved him, she hadn’t saved Eliza.
The sailor stepped aside and the gang-plank was pulled up.
It had begun to rain, the light scurry of a passing squall. The waves
ran high and danced with white tops playfully.
The sun caught the sea beyond and made purple and silver stripes on it.
The cliffs stood hard and very white, with raw edges, leaning away from
the sky.
All the three figures fifty yards away from Viola looked small and
stiff. They did not seem to be ever going to move. Jim was explaining
something to the other man, and the other man nodded soothingly. At last
they approached Viola.
‘Yes, yes,’ the other man said, ‘I’ll get her a taxi.’ He turned to
Eliza. ‘You stay quiet, my girl,’ he said very much less soothingly.
Eliza stayed extremely quiet. The steamer moved off with a shrill shriek
of departure.
Eliza wet her lips and looked at Jim with a long, furtive look. ‘I’ll do
you in for this, my lad,’ she said. ‘You dirty hound; why couldn’t you
have kept quiet and let me be! It’ll be as bad for you as for me, thank
God! I’ll break you and your reputation till you won’t know the
difference between the Lord’s Prayer and a cat o’ nine tails!’
‘Steady, miss,’ said the detective, coming back with a taxi. ‘The less
you talk your head off the better it’ll be for you. As a matter of fact
this gentleman didn’t help us to cop you. He came down here because we’d
had you followed, and he wanted to make things pleasant all round, see!
He’s paying for your taxi.’
Eliza lifted her white lids and said something which turned the
inspector a dull purple. Jim put out his hand to touch her; he had
looked at her all the time, but he could not speak. He did not know what
to say.
He had half betrayed her, and that he loved and pitied her made nothing
any better for either of them. You couldn’t give people away and preach
at them afterwards. Jim wondered dumbly if Eliza could feel through his
silence, his passionate desire to help her. But Eliza did not feel
emotions of this kind unless they could be of a practical use to her.
She moved out of reach of his hand and said to Viola,—
‘I want to speak to you alone without these two men.’
‘You can’t,’ said the Inspector quickly; ‘you’ve got this young lady
into trouble enough already.’
‘You hop into the taxi,’ he said to Eliza. Eliza obeyed him, and Viola
moved quickly after her. Eliza saw that Jim and the detective were out
of earshot before she spoke. Then she said,—
‘Put your hand in my pocket, beneath my skirt, and you’ll find your
pearls. It’ll keep you out of the case if you take them now. They’re a
couple short, but you can spare two.’
‘Oh—I’m so sorry——’ said Viola. Her voice broke. Eliza stared
indifferently out of the window. She had nothing more to say.
Viola slipped the pearls into her bag. As she stepped back the Inspector
tapped her on the shoulder.
‘I’m sorry, Miss,’ she said, ‘but I must take over what she gave you.’
‘Oh, but not my own pearls!’ protested Viola. The inspector looked into
the bag, picked out the string of pearls, and laughed.
‘That was very neat of her,’ he said. ‘It’ll give her less time, and
they’re six short. However, if you wish to overlook it, there are plenty
of other accounts to settle. You’d better let me take her alone. The
gentleman here’ll look after you, Miss. You’ve got yourself into a
pretty pickle, but we can look into all that later.’
Jim crossed over and spoke to Eliza. Viola could not hear what he said,
but whatever it was, her white, shut face never changed under it.
Eliza drove off relentlessly without looking at either of them.
‘Oh, Jim,’ said Viola. He slipped his arm around her and led her back,
without speaking, to Harry’s little racing car.
She leaned against the side of it and began to cry. Jim seemed struck
dumb. Eliza had always had the power of drying up in him the springs of
spiritual adventure. She forced him back into the acid silences of fact.
He took Viola to a hotel and ordered coffee.
‘I didn’t give her away,’ he said, half to himself. ‘They rang me up and
said they were watching her outside Ciro’s, and then that she’d gone off
in a private car on to the Folkestone Road. They said she’d be sure to
try to catch the early boat, and if I went by train with Mulet we could
get here before the boat started. I didn’t dream it was you. They’d
shadowed her for days. I didn’t know, and if I’d known I couldn’t have
helped—I couldn’t have tried to get her off.’
‘Oughtn’t I to have tried?’ asked Viola.
Jim sank his head in his hands.
‘How do I know?’ he said at last. ‘I’ve always been all wrong about
Eliza—long ago I might have helped her—but I couldn’t help her. She
never cared. You can’t help people who don’t care. They never get away
from anything.’
‘Oh, Jim,’ she said, ‘but you couldn’t _want_ her to be caught!’
Jim shook his head. ‘I couldn’t have got her away,’ he said dully. ‘You
don’t know what harm she does. You don’t know what harm is. I hate
prisons, but Eliza’s safe there. She does less mischief there than she
could do outside. It’s what she’s done that’s crueller than being
caught.’
Viola’s heart was still shaken with pity and tears, but she was happier.
She could not but be happier—the great ache of separation was over.
She made Jim drink some coffee, and drank it eagerly herself. Then she
said,—
‘Jim, I’m never going to leave you again!’
‘Leave me!’ he muttered. ‘What do you mean by “leave me”? You can’t
stay. This is only the beginning of the business. It’s bad enough to
have you mixed up like this in the start, but the inspector thinks he
can keep you out of it.’
‘But I’m not going to be kept out of it,’ Viola said quietly. ‘It isn’t
any use putting me away. I’m not away any more. I couldn’t go back. It
was possible, perhaps, before I’d seen what I’ve seen to-night, but now
it will never be possible again.
‘I was afraid at first—terribly afraid of Eliza herself, and that
feeling in her that she wouldn’t mind being cruel to save herself; and
then I tried to help her and forgot all about being afraid. I forgot
everything but getting her away. Ah! I know I couldn’t!
‘But you try all your life, don’t you, to save people, and sometimes you
do get them away?’
‘Sometimes they do get away,’ Jim admitted. ‘I’ve been thinking all
these months that have seemed like years, while I couldn’t speak to you,
that I was all wrong. Sharing my life—why, I haven’t a life to share!
I’m pushed here and there into other people’s lives, into causes and
committees and sometimes into crimes. I’ve got just as much life to
offer you as if it was a scattered seed a bird carries away and drops
anywhere among strange islands.
‘Don’t think I’m grumbling—I’ve chosen my life. But you can’t choose
one thing and take another. And that’s what I was trying to do—wanting
you.’
‘But you do want me?’ Viola asked in a low voice.
Jim gave a queer little laugh. ‘I want you as much as a hungry man wants
bread,’ he said, ‘but I can do without you better!’
‘Well,’ said Viola, ‘I’m sorry if you can dispense with me so easily—I
sacrificed myself once to your pride—I went away to learn—all sorts of
different things—and every one of them pulled me back to you.
‘I’ll never go away again. I’ll share your committees and your causes.
Where you’re blamed I’ll be blamed, but I’ll not stay any more by
myself.
‘You say you don’t want me to share your life—but look at me, Jim—I am
your life.’
An iron bar in Jim’s heart gave way suddenly. His shame and his pride
gave way, and all his loneliness.
Beauty touched him. It was as if he saw, with a flash of jewelled wings,
a Kingfisher fly home.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple
spellings occur, majority use has been employed.
Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors
occur.
[The end of _The Kingfisher_ by Phyllis Bottome]
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