Jacob's Room

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Title: Jacob's Room
Author: Virginia Woolf
Posting Date: June 5, 2011 [EBook #5670]
Release Date: May, 2004
[This file was first posted on August 6, 2002]
Language: English
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Jacob's Room
VIRGINIA WOOLF
CHAPTER ONE
"So of course," wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper
in the sand, "there was nothing for it but to leave."
Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved
the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly
filled them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she
had the illusion that the mast of Mr. Connor's little yacht was bending
like a wax candle in the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awful
things. She winked again. The mast was straight; the waves were regular;
the lighthouse was upright; but the blot had spread.
"... nothing for it but to leave," she read.
"Well, if Jacob doesn't want to play" (the shadow of Archer, her eldest
son, fell across the notepaper and looked blue on the sand, and she felt
chilly--it was the third of September already), "if Jacob doesn't want
to play"--what a horrid blot! It must be getting late.
"Where IS that tiresome little boy?" she said. "I don't see him. Run and
find him. Tell him to come at once." "... but mercifully," she
scribbled, ignoring the full stop, "everything seems satisfactorily
arranged, packed though we are like herrings in a barrel, and forced to
stand the perambulator which the landlady quite naturally won't
allow...."
Such were Betty Flanders's letters to Captain Barfoot--many-paged,
tear-stained. Scarborough is seven hundred miles from Cornwall: Captain
Barfoot is in Scarborough: Seabrook is dead. Tears made all the dahlias
in her garden undulate in red waves and flashed the glass house in her
eyes, and spangled the kitchen with bright knives, and made Mrs. Jarvis,
the rector's wife, think at church, while the hymn-tune played and Mrs.
Flanders bent low over her little boys' heads, that marriage is a
fortress and widows stray solitary in the open fields, picking up
stones, gleaning a few golden straws, lonely, unprotected, poor
creatures. Mrs. Flanders had been a widow for these two years.
"Ja--cob! Ja--cob!" Archer shouted.
"Scarborough," Mrs. Flanders wrote on the envelope, and dashed a bold
line beneath; it was her native town; the hub of the universe. But a
stamp? She ferreted in her bag; then held it up mouth downwards; then
fumbled in her lap, all so vigorously that Charles Steele in the Panama
hat suspended his paint-brush.
Like the antennae of some irritable insect it positively trembled. Here
was that woman moving--actually going to get up--confound her! He struck
the canvas a hasty violet-black dab. For the landscape needed it. It was
too pale--greys flowing into lavenders, and one star or a white gull
suspended just so--too pale as usual. The critics would say it was too
pale, for he was an unknown man exhibiting obscurely, a favourite with
his landladies' children, wearing a cross on his watch chain, and much
gratified if his landladies liked his pictures--which they often did.
"Ja--cob! Ja--cob!" Archer shouted.
Exasperated by the noise, yet loving children, Steele picked nervously
at the dark little coils on his palette.
"I saw your brother--I saw your brother," he said, nodding his head, as
Archer lagged past him, trailing his spade, and scowling at the old
gentleman in spectacles.
"Over there--by the rock," Steele muttered, with his brush between his
teeth, squeezing out raw sienna, and keeping his eyes fixed on Betty
Flanders's back.
"Ja--cob! Ja--cob!" shouted Archer, lagging on after a second.
The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from
all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking
against rocks--so it sounded.
Steele frowned; but was pleased by the effect of the black--it was just
THAT note which brought the rest together. "Ah, one may learn to paint
at fifty! There's Titian..." and so, having found the right tint, up he
looked and saw to his horror a cloud over the bay.
Mrs. Flanders rose, slapped her coat this side and that to get the sand
off, and picked up her black parasol.
The rock was one of those tremendously solid brown, or rather black,
rocks which emerge from the sand like something primitive. Rough with
crinkled limpet shells and sparsely strewn with locks of dry seaweed, a
small boy has to stretch his legs far apart, and indeed to feel rather
heroic, before he gets to the top.
But there, on the very top, is a hollow full of water, with a sandy
bottom; with a blob of jelly stuck to the side, and some mussels. A fish
darts across. The fringe of yellow-brown seaweed flutters, and out
pushes an opal-shelled crab--
"Oh, a huge crab," Jacob murmured--and begins his journey on weakly legs
on the sandy bottom. Now! Jacob plunged his hand. The crab was cool and
very light. But the water was thick with sand, and so, scrambling down,
Jacob was about to jump, holding his bucket in front of him, when he
saw, stretched entirely rigid, side by side, their faces very red, an
enormous man and woman.
An enormous man and woman (it was early-closing day) were stretched
motionless, with their heads on pocket-handkerchiefs, side by side,
within a few feet of the sea, while two or three gulls gracefully
skirted the incoming waves, and settled near their boots.
The large red faces lying on the bandanna handkerchiefs stared up at
Jacob. Jacob stared down at them. Holding his bucket very carefully,
Jacob then jumped deliberately and trotted away very nonchalantly at
first, but faster and faster as the waves came creaming up to him and he
had to swerve to avoid them, and the gulls rose in front of him and
floated out and settled again a little farther on. A large black woman
was sitting on the sand. He ran towards her.
"Nanny! Nanny!" he cried, sobbing the words out on the crest of each
gasping breath.
The waves came round her. She was a rock. She was covered with the
seaweed which pops when it is pressed. He was lost.
There he stood. His face composed itself. He was about to roar when,
lying among the black sticks and straw under the cliff, he saw a whole
skull--perhaps a cow's skull, a skull, perhaps, with the teeth in it.
Sobbing, but absent-mindedly, he ran farther and farther away until he
held the skull in his arms.
"There he is!" cried Mrs. Flanders, coming round the rock and covering
the whole space of the beach in a few seconds. "What has he got hold of?
Put it down, Jacob! Drop it this moment! Something horrid, I know. Why
didn't you stay with us? Naughty little boy! Now put it down. Now come
along both of you," and she swept round, holding Archer by one hand and
fumbling for Jacob's arm with the other. But he ducked down and picked
up the sheep's jaw, which was loose.
Swinging her bag, clutching her parasol, holding Archer's hand, and
telling the story of the gunpowder explosion in which poor Mr. Curnow
had lost his eye, Mrs. Flanders hurried up the steep lane, aware all the
time in the depths of her mind of some buried discomfort.
There on the sand not far from the lovers lay the old sheep's skull
without its jaw. Clean, white, wind-swept, sand-rubbed, a more
unpolluted piece of bone existed nowhere on the coast of Cornwall. The
sea holly would grow through the eye-sockets; it would turn to powder,
or some golfer, hitting his ball one fine day, would disperse a little
dust--No, but not in lodgings, thought Mrs. Flanders. It's a great
experiment coming so far with young children. There's no man to help
with the perambulator. And Jacob is such a handful; so obstinate
already.
"Throw it away, dear, do," she said, as they got into the road; but
Jacob squirmed away from her; and the wind rising, she took out her
bonnet-pin, looked at the sea, and stuck it in afresh. The wind was
rising. The waves showed that uneasiness, like something alive, restive,
expecting the whip, of waves before a storm. The fishing-boats were
leaning to the water's brim. A pale yellow light shot across the purple
sea; and shut. The lighthouse was lit. "Come along," said Betty
Flanders. The sun blazed in their faces and gilded the great
blackberries trembling out from the hedge which Archer tried to strip as
they passed.
"Don't lag, boys. You've got nothing to change into," said Betty,
pulling them along, and looking with uneasy emotion at the earth
displayed so luridly, with sudden sparks of light from greenhouses in
gardens, with a sort of yellow and black mutability, against this
blazing sunset, this astonishing agitation and vitality of colour, which
stirred Betty Flanders and made her think of responsibility and danger.
She gripped Archer's hand. On she plodded up the hill.
"What did I ask you to remember?" she said.
"I don't know," said Archer.
"Well, I don't know either," said Betty, humorously and simply, and who
shall deny that this blankness of mind, when combined with profusion,
mother wit, old wives' tales, haphazard ways, moments of astonishing
daring, humour, and sentimentality--who shall deny that in these
respects every woman is nicer than any man?
Well, Betty Flanders, to begin with.
She had her hand upon the garden gate.
"The meat!" she exclaimed, striking the latch down.
She had forgotten the meat.
There was Rebecca at the window.
The bareness of Mrs. Pearce's front room was fully displayed at ten
o'clock at night when a powerful oil lamp stood on the middle of the
table. The harsh light fell on the garden; cut straight across the lawn;
lit up a child's bucket and a purple aster and reached the hedge. Mrs.
Flanders had left her sewing on the table. There were her large reels of
white cotton and her steel spectacles; her needle-case; her brown wool
wound round an old postcard. There were the bulrushes and the Strand
magazines; and the linoleum sandy from the boys' boots. A
daddy-long-legs shot from corner to corner and hit the lamp globe. The
wind blew straight dashes of rain across the window, which flashed
silver as they passed through the light. A single leaf tapped hurriedly,
persistently, upon the glass. There was a hurricane out at sea.
Archer could not sleep.
Mrs. Flanders stooped over him. "Think of the fairies," said Betty
Flanders. "Think of the lovely, lovely birds settling down on their
nests. Now shut your eyes and see the old mother bird with a worm in her
beak. Now turn and shut your eyes," she murmured, "and shut your eyes."
The lodging-house seemed full of gurgling and rushing; the cistern
overflowing; water bubbling and squeaking and running along the pipes
and streaming down the windows.
"What's all that water rushing in?" murmured Archer.
"It's only the bath water running away," said Mrs. Flanders.
Something snapped out of doors.
"I say, won't that steamer sink?" said Archer, opening his eyes.
"Of course it won't," said Mrs. Flanders. "The Captain's in bed long
ago. Shut your eyes, and think of the fairies, fast asleep, under the
flowers."
"I thought he'd never get off--such a hurricane," she whispered to
Rebecca, who was bending over a spirit-lamp in the small room next door.
The wind rushed outside, but the small flame of the spirit-lamp burnt
quietly, shaded from the cot by a book stood on edge.
"Did he take his bottle well?" Mrs. Flanders whispered, and Rebecca
nodded and went to the cot and turned down the quilt, and Mrs. Flanders
bent over and looked anxiously at the baby, asleep, but frowning. The
window shook, and Rebecca stole like a cat and wedged it.
The two women murmured over the spirit-lamp, plotting the eternal
conspiracy of hush and clean bottles while the wind raged and gave a
sudden wrench at the cheap fastenings.
Both looked round at the cot. Their lips were pursed. Mrs. Flanders
crossed over to the cot.
"Asleep?" whispered Rebecca, looking at the cot.
Mrs. Flanders nodded.
"Good-night, Rebecca," Mrs. Flanders murmured, and Rebecca called her
ma'm, though they were conspirators plotting the eternal conspiracy of
hush and clean bottles.
Mrs. Flanders had left the lamp burning in the front room. There were
her spectacles, her sewing; and a letter with the Scarborough postmark.
She had not drawn the curtains either.
The light blazed out across the patch of grass; fell on the child's
green bucket with the gold line round it, and upon the aster which
trembled violently beside it. For the wind was tearing across the coast,
hurling itself at the hills, and leaping, in sudden gusts, on top of its
own back. How it spread over the town in the hollow! How the lights
seemed to wink and quiver in its fury, lights in the harbour, lights in
bedroom windows high up! And rolling dark waves before it, it raced over
the Atlantic, jerking the stars above the ships this way and that.
There was a click in the front sitting-room. Mr. Pearce had extinguished
the lamp. The garden went out. It was but a dark patch. Every inch was
rained upon. Every blade of grass was bent by rain. Eyelids would have
been fastened down by the rain. Lying on one's back one would have seen
nothing but muddle and confusion--clouds turning and turning, and
something yellow-tinted and sulphurous in the darkness.
The little boys in the front bedroom had thrown off their blankets and
lay under the sheets. It was hot; rather sticky and steamy. Archer lay
spread out, with one arm striking across the pillow. He was flushed; and
when the heavy curtain blew out a little he turned and half-opened his
eyes. The wind actually stirred the cloth on the chest of drawers, and
let in a little light, so that the sharp edge of the chest of drawers
was visible, running straight up, until a white shape bulged out; and a
silver streak showed in the looking-glass.
In the other bed by the door Jacob lay asleep, fast asleep, profoundly
unconscious. The sheep's jaw with the big yellow teeth in it lay at his
feet. He had kicked it against the iron bed-rail.
Outside the rain poured down more directly and powerfully as the wind
fell in the early hours of the morning. The aster was beaten to the
earth. The child's bucket was half-full of rainwater; and the
opal-shelled crab slowly circled round the bottom, trying with its
weakly legs to climb the steep side; trying again and falling back, and
trying again and again.
CHAPTER TWO
"MRS. FLANDERS"--"Poor Betty Flanders"--"Dear Betty"--"She's very
attractive still"--"Odd she don't marry again!" "There's Captain Barfoot
to be sure--calls every Wednesday as regular as clockwork, and never
brings his wife."
"But that's Ellen Barfoot's fault," the ladies of Scarborough said. "She
don't put herself out for no one."
"A man likes to have a son--that we know."
"Some tumours have to be cut; but the sort my mother had you bear with
for years and years, and never even have a cup of tea brought up to you
in bed."
(Mrs. Barfoot was an invalid.)
Elizabeth Flanders, of whom this and much more than this had been said
and would be said, was, of course, a widow in her prime. She was
half-way between forty and fifty. Years and sorrow between them; the
death of Seabrook, her husband; three boys; poverty; a house on the
outskirts of Scarborough; her brother, poor Morty's, downfall and
possible demise--for where was he? what was he? Shading her eyes, she
looked along the road for Captain Barfoot--yes, there he was, punctual
as ever; the attentions of the Captain--all ripened Betty Flanders,
enlarged her figure, tinged her face with jollity, and flooded her eyes
for no reason that any one could see perhaps three times a day.
True, there's no harm in crying for one's husband, and the tombstone,
though plain, was a solid piece of work, and on summer's days when the
widow brought her boys to stand there one felt kindly towards her. Hats
were raised higher than usual; wives tugged their husbands' arms.
Seabrook lay six foot beneath, dead these many years; enclosed in three
shells; the crevices sealed with lead, so that, had earth and wood been
glass, doubtless his very face lay visible beneath, the face of a young
man whiskered, shapely, who had gone out duck-shooting and refused to
change his boots.
"Merchant of this city," the tombstone said; though why Betty Flanders
had chosen so to call him when, as many still remembered, he had only
sat behind an office window for three months, and before that had broken
horses, ridden to hounds, farmed a few fields, and run a little
wild--well, she had to call him something. An example for the boys.
Had he, then, been nothing? An unanswerable question, since even if it
weren't the habit of the undertaker to close the eyes, the light so soon
goes out of them. At first, part of herself; now one of a company, he
had merged in the grass, the sloping hillside, the thousand white
stones, some slanting, others upright, the decayed wreaths, the crosses
of green tin, the narrow yellow paths, and the lilacs that drooped in
April, with a scent like that of an invalid's bedroom, over the
churchyard wall. Seabrook was now all that; and when, with her skirt
hitched up, feeding the chickens, she heard the bell for service or
funeral, that was Seabrook's voice--the voice of the dead.
The rooster had been known to fly on her shoulder and peck her neck, so
that now she carried a stick or took one of the children with her when
she went to feed the fowls.
"Wouldn't you like my knife, mother?" said Archer.
Sounding at the same moment as the bell, her son's voice mixed life and
death inextricably, exhilaratingly.
"What a big knife for a small boy!" she said. She took it to please him.
Then the rooster flew out of the hen-house, and, shouting to Archer to
shut the door into the kitchen garden, Mrs. Flanders set her meal down,
clucked for the hens, went bustling about the orchard, and was seen from
over the way by Mrs. Cranch, who, beating her mat against the wall, held
it for a moment suspended while she observed to Mrs. Page next door that
Mrs. Flanders was in the orchard with the chickens.
Mrs. Page, Mrs. Cranch, and Mrs. Garfit could see Mrs. Flanders in the
orchard because the orchard was a piece of Dods Hill enclosed; and Dods
Hill dominated the village. No words can exaggerate the importance of
Dods Hill. It was the earth; the world against the sky; the horizon of
how many glances can best be computed by those who have lived all their
lives in the same village, only leaving it once to fight in the Crimea,
like old George Garfit, leaning over his garden gate smoking his pipe.
The progress of the sun was measured by it; the tint of the day laid
against it to be judged.
"Now she's going up the hill with little John," said Mrs. Cranch to Mrs.
Garfit, shaking her mat for the last time, and bustling indoors. Opening
the orchard gate, Mrs. Flanders walked to the top of Dods Hill, holding
John by the hand. Archer and Jacob ran in front or lagged behind; but
they were in the Roman fortress when she came there, and shouting out
what ships were to be seen in the bay. For there was a magnificent view
--moors behind, sea in front, and the whole of Scarborough from one end
to the other laid out flat like a puzzle. Mrs. Flanders, who was growing
stout, sat down in the fortress and looked about her.
The entire gamut of the view's changes should have been known to her;
its winter aspect, spring, summer and autumn; how storms came up from
the sea; how the moors shuddered and brightened as the clouds went over;
she should have noted the red spot where the villas were building; and
the criss-cross of lines where the allotments were cut; and the diamond
flash of little glass houses in the sun. Or, if details like these
escaped her, she might have let her fancy play upon the gold tint of the
sea at sunset, and thought how it lapped in coins of gold upon the
shingle. Little pleasure boats shoved out into it; the black arm of the
pier hoarded it up. The whole city was pink and gold; domed;
mist-wreathed; resonant; strident. Banjoes strummed; the parade smelt of
tar which stuck to the heels; goats suddenly cantered their carriages
through crowds. It was observed how well the Corporation had laid out
the flower-beds. Sometimes a straw hat was blown away. Tulips burnt in
the sun. Numbers of sponge-bag trousers were stretched in rows. Purple
bonnets fringed soft, pink, querulous faces on pillows in bath chairs.
Triangular hoardings were wheeled along by men in white coats. Captain
George Boase had caught a monster shark. One side of the triangular
hoarding said so in red, blue, and yellow letters; and each line ended
with three differently coloured notes of exclamation.
So that was a reason for going down into the Aquarium, where the sallow
blinds, the stale smell of spirits of salt, the bamboo chairs, the
tables with ash-trays, the revolving fish, the attendant knitting behind
six or seven chocolate boxes (often she was quite alone with the fish
for hours at a time) remained in the mind as part of the monster shark,
he himself being only a flabby yellow receptacle, like an empty
Gladstone bag in a tank. No one had ever been cheered by the Aquarium;
but the faces of those emerging quickly lost their dim, chilled
expression when they perceived that it was only by standing in a queue
that one could be admitted to the pier. Once through the turnstiles,
every one walked for a yard or two very briskly; some flagged at this
stall; others at that.
But it was the band that drew them all to it finally; even the fishermen
on the lower pier taking up their pitch within its range.
The band played in the Moorish kiosk. Number nine went up on the board.
It was a waltz tune. The pale girls, the old widow lady, the three Jews
lodging in the same boarding-house, the dandy, the major, the
horse-dealer, and the gentleman of independent means, all wore the same
blurred, drugged expression, and through the chinks in the planks at
their feet they could see the green summer waves, peacefully, amiably,
swaying round the iron pillars of the pier.
But there was a time when none of this had any existence (thought the
young man leaning against the railings). Fix your eyes upon the lady's
skirt; the grey one will do--above the pink silk stockings. It changes;
drapes her ankles--the nineties; then it amplifies--the seventies; now
it's burnished red and stretched above a crinoline--the sixties; a tiny
black foot wearing a white cotton stocking peeps out. Still sitting
there? Yes--she's still on the pier. The silk now is sprigged with
roses, but somehow one no longer sees so clearly. There's no pier
beneath us. The heavy chariot may swing along the turnpike road, but
there's no pier for it to stop at, and how grey and turbulent the sea is
in the seventeenth century! Let's to the museum. Cannon-balls;
arrow-heads; Roman glass and a forceps green with verdigris. The Rev.
Jaspar Floyd dug them up at his own expense early in the forties in the
Roman camp on Dods Hill--see the little ticket with the faded writing on
it.
And now, what's the next thing to see in Scarborough?
Mrs. Flanders sat on the raised circle of the Roman camp, patching
Jacob's breeches; only looking up as she sucked the end of her cotton,
or when some insect dashed at her, boomed in her ear, and was gone.
John kept trotting up and slapping down in her lap grass or dead leaves
which he called "tea," and she arranged them methodically but
absent-mindedly, laying the flowery heads of the grasses together,
thinking how Archer had been awake again last night; the church clock
was ten or thirteen minutes fast; she wished she could buy Garfit's
acre.
"That's an orchid leaf, Johnny. Look at the little brown spots. Come, my
dear. We must go home. Ar-cher! Ja-cob!"
"Ar-cher! Ja-cob!" Johnny piped after her, pivoting round on his heel,
and strewing the grass and leaves in his hands as if he were sowing
seed. Archer and Jacob jumped up from behind the mound where they had
been crouching with the intention of springing upon their mother
unexpectedly, and they all began to walk slowly home.
"Who is that?" said Mrs. Flanders, shading her eyes.
"That old man in the road?" said Archer, looking below.
"He's not an old man," said Mrs. Flanders. "He's--no, he's not--I
thought it was the Captain, but it's Mr. Floyd. Come along, boys."
"Oh, bother Mr. Floyd!" said Jacob, switching off a thistle's head, for
he knew already that Mr. Floyd was going to teach them Latin, as indeed
he did for three years in his spare time, out of kindness, for there was
no other gentleman in the neighbourhood whom Mrs. Flanders could have
asked to do such a thing, and the elder boys were getting beyond her,
and must be got ready for school, and it was more than most clergymen
would have done, coming round after tea, or having them in his own room
--as he could fit it in--for the parish was a very large one, and Mr.
Floyd, like his father before him, visited cottages miles away on the
moors, and, like old Mr. Floyd, was a great scholar, which made it so
unlikely--she had never dreamt of such a thing. Ought she to have
guessed? But let alone being a scholar he was eight years younger than
she was. She knew his mother--old Mrs. Floyd. She had tea there. And it
was that very evening when she came back from having tea with old Mrs.
Floyd that she found the note in the hall and took it into the kitchen
with her when she went to give Rebecca the fish, thinking it must be
something about the boys.
"Mr. Floyd brought it himself, did he?--I think the cheese must be in
the parcel in the hall--oh, in the hall--" for she was reading. No, it
was not about the boys.
"Yes, enough for fish-cakes to-morrow certainly--Perhaps Captain
Barfoot--" she had come to the word "love." She went into the garden and
read, leaning against the walnut tree to steady herself. Up and down
went her breast. Seabrook came so vividly before her. She shook her head
and was looking through her tears at the little shifting leaves against
the yellow sky when three geese, half-running, half-flying, scuttled
across the lawn with Johnny behind them, brandishing a stick.
Mrs. Flanders flushed with anger.
"How many times have I told you?" she cried, and seized him and snatched
his stick away from him.
"But they'd escaped!" he cried, struggling to get free.
"You're a very naughty boy. If I've told you once, I've told you a
thousand times. I won't have you chasing the geese!" she said, and
crumpling Mr. Floyd's letter in her hand, she held Johnny fast and
herded the geese back into the orchard.
"How could I think of marriage!" she said to herself bitterly, as she
fastened the gate with a piece of wire. She had always disliked red hair
in men, she thought, thinking of Mr. Floyd's appearance, that night when
the boys had gone to bed. And pushing her work-box away, she drew the
blotting-paper towards her, and read Mr. Floyd's letter again, and her
breast went up and down when she came to the word "love," but not so
fast this time, for she saw Johnny chasing the geese, and knew that it
was impossible for her to marry any one--let alone Mr. Floyd, who was so
much younger than she was, but what a nice man--and such a scholar too.
"Dear Mr. Floyd," she wrote.--"Did I forget about the cheese?" she
wondered, laying down her pen. No, she had told Rebecca that the cheese
was in the hall. "I am much surprised..." she wrote.
But the letter which Mr. Floyd found on the table when he got up early
next morning did not begin "I am much surprised," and it was such a
motherly, respectful, inconsequent, regretful letter that he kept it for
many years; long after his marriage with Miss Wimbush, of Andover; long
after he had left the village. For he asked for a parish in Sheffield,
which was given him; and, sending for Archer, Jacob, and John to say
good-bye, he told them to choose whatever they liked in his study to
remember him by. Archer chose a paper-knife, because he did not like to
choose anything too good; Jacob chose the works of Byron in one volume;
John, who was still too young to make a proper choice, chose Mr. Floyd's
kitten, which his brothers thought an absurd choice, but Mr. Floyd
upheld him when he said: "It has fur like you." Then Mr. Floyd spoke
about the King's Navy (to which Archer was going); and about Rugby (to
which Jacob was going); and next day he received a silver salver and
went--first to Sheffield, where he met Miss Wimbush, who was on a visit
to her uncle, then to Hackney--then to Maresfield House, of which he
became the principal, and finally, becoming editor of a well-known
series of Ecclesiastical Biographies, he retired to Hampstead with his
wife and daughter, and is often to be seen feeding the ducks on Leg of
Mutton Pond. As for Mrs. Flanders's letter--when he looked for it the
other day he could not find it, and did not like to ask his wife whether
she had put it away. Meeting Jacob in Piccadilly lately, he recognized
him after three seconds. But Jacob had grown such a fine young man that
Mr. Floyd did not like to stop him in the street.
"Dear me," said Mrs. Flanders, when she read in the Scarborough and
Harrogate Courier that the Rev. Andrew Floyd, etc., etc., had been made
Principal of Maresfield House, "that must be our Mr. Floyd."
A slight gloom fell upon the table. Jacob was helping himself to jam;
the postman was talking to Rebecca in the kitchen; there was a bee
humming at the yellow flower which nodded at the open window. They were
all alive, that is to say, while poor Mr. Floyd was becoming Principal
of Maresfield House.
Mrs. Flanders got up and went over to the fender and stroked Topaz on
the neck behind the ears.
"Poor Topaz," she said (for Mr. Floyd's kitten was now a very old cat, a
little mangy behind the ears, and one of these days would have to be
killed).
"Poor old Topaz," said Mrs. Flanders, as he stretched himself out in the
sun, and she smiled, thinking how she had had him gelded, and how she
did not like red hair in men. Smiling, she went into the kitchen.
Jacob drew rather a dirty pocket-handkerchief across his face. He went
upstairs to his room.
The stag-beetle dies slowly (it was John who collected the beetles).
Even on the second day its legs were supple. But the butterflies were
dead. A whiff of rotten eggs had vanquished the pale clouded yellows
which came pelting across the orchard and up Dods Hill and away on to
the moor, now lost behind a furze bush, then off again helter-skelter in
a broiling sun. A fritillary basked on a white stone in the Roman camp.
From the valley came the sound of church bells. They were all eating
roast beef in Scarborough; for it was Sunday when Jacob caught the pale
clouded yellows in the clover field, eight miles from home.
Rebecca had caught the death's-head moth in the kitchen.
A strong smell of camphor came from the butterfly boxes.
Mixed with the smell of camphor was the unmistakable smell of seaweed.
Tawny ribbons hung on the door. The sun beat straight upon them.
The upper wings of the moth which Jacob held were undoubtedly marked
with kidney-shaped spots of a fulvous hue. But there was no crescent
upon the underwing. The tree had fallen the night he caught it. There
had been a volley of pistol-shots suddenly in the depths of the wood.
And his mother had taken him for a burglar when he came home late. The
only one of her sons who never obeyed her, she said.
Morris called it "an extremely local insect found in damp or marshy
places." But Morris is sometimes wrong. Sometimes Jacob, choosing a very
fine pen, made a correction in the margin.
The tree had fallen, though it was a windless night, and the lantern,
stood upon the ground, had lit up the still green leaves and the dead
beech leaves. It was a dry place. A toad was there. And the red
underwing had circled round the light and flashed and gone. The red
underwing had never come back, though Jacob had waited. It was after
twelve when he crossed the lawn and saw his mother in the bright room,
playing patience, sitting up.
"How you frightened me!" she had cried. She thought something dreadful
had happened. And he woke Rebecca, who had to be up so early.
There he stood pale, come out of the depths of darkness, in the hot
room, blinking at the light.
No, it could not be a straw-bordered underwing.
The mowing-machine always wanted oiling. Barnet turned it under Jacob's
window, and it creaked--creaked, and rattled across the lawn and creaked
again.
Now it was clouding over.
Back came the sun, dazzlingly.
It fell like an eye upon the stirrups, and then suddenly and yet very
gently rested upon the bed, upon the alarum clock, and upon the
butterfly box stood open. The pale clouded yellows had pelted over the
moor; they had zigzagged across the purple clover. The fritillaries
flaunted along the hedgerows. The blues settled on little bones lying on
the turf with the sun beating on them, and the painted ladies and the
peacocks feasted upon bloody entrails dropped by a hawk. Miles away from
home, in a hollow among teasles beneath a ruin, he had found the commas.
He had seen a white admiral circling higher and higher round an oak
tree, but he had never caught it. An old cottage woman living alone,
high up, had told him of a purple butterfly which came every summer to
her garden. The fox cubs played in the gorse in the early morning, she
told him. And if you looked out at dawn you could always see two
badgers. Sometimes they knocked each other over like two boys fighting,
she said.
"You won't go far this afternoon, Jacob," said his mother, popping her
head in at the door, "for the Captain's coming to say good-bye." It was
the last day of the Easter holidays.
Wednesday was Captain Barfoot's day. He dressed himself very neatly in
blue serge, took his rubber-shod stick--for he was lame and wanted two
fingers on the left hand, having served his country--and set out from
the house with the flagstaff precisely at four o'clock in the afternoon.
At three Mr. Dickens, the bath-chair man, had called for Mrs. Barfoot.
"Move me," she would say to Mr. Dickens, after sitting on the esplanade
for fifteen minutes. And again, "That'll do, thank you, Mr. Dickens." At
the first command he would seek the sun; at the second he would stay the
chair there in the bright strip.
An old inhabitant himself, he had much in common with Mrs.
Barfoot--James Coppard's daughter. The drinking-fountain, where West
Street joins Broad Street, is the gift of James Coppard, who was mayor
at the time of Queen Victoria's jubilee, and Coppard is painted upon
municipal watering-carts and over shop windows, and upon the zinc blinds
of solicitors' consulting-room windows. But Ellen Barfoot never visited
the Aquarium (though she had known Captain Boase who had caught the
shark quite well), and when the men came by with the posters she eyed
them superciliously, for she knew that she would never see the Pierrots,
or the brothers Zeno, or Daisy Budd and her troupe of performing seals.
For Ellen Barfoot in her bath-chair on the esplanade was a
prisoner--civilization's prisoner--all the bars of her cage falling
across the esplanade on sunny days when the town hall, the drapery
stores, the swimming-bath, and the memorial hall striped the ground with
shadow.
An old inhabitant himself, Mr. Dickens would stand a little behind her,
smoking his pipe. She would ask him questions--who people were--who now
kept Mr. Jones's shop--then about the season--and had Mrs. Dickens
tried, whatever it might be--the words issuing from her lips like crumbs
of dry biscuit.
She closed her eyes. Mr. Dickens took a turn. The feelings of a man had
not altogether deserted him, though as you saw him coming towards you,
you noticed how one knobbed black boot swung tremulously in front of the
other; how there was a shadow between his waistcoat and his trousers;
how he leant forward unsteadily, like an old horse who finds himself
suddenly out of the shafts drawing no cart. But as Mr. Dickens sucked in
the smoke and puffed it out again, the feelings of a man were
perceptible in his eyes. He was thinking how Captain Barfoot was now on
his way to Mount Pleasant; Captain Barfoot, his master. For at home in
the little sitting-room above the mews, with the canary in the window,
and the girls at the sewing-machine, and Mrs. Dickens huddled up with
the rheumatics--at home where he was made little of, the thought of
being in the employ of Captain Barfoot supported him. He liked to think
that while he chatted with Mrs. Barfoot on the front, he helped the
Captain on his way to Mrs. Flanders. He, a man, was in charge of Mrs.
Barfoot, a woman.
Turning, he saw that she was chatting with Mrs. Rogers. Turning again,
he saw that Mrs. Rogers had moved on. So he came back to the bath-chair,
and Mrs. Barfoot asked him the time, and he took out his great silver
watch and told her the time very obligingly, as if he knew a great deal
more about the time and everything than she did. But Mrs. Barfoot knew
that Captain Barfoot was on his way to Mrs. Flanders.
Indeed he was well on his way there, having left the tram, and seeing
Dods Hill to the south-east, green against a blue sky that was suffused
with dust colour on the horizon. He was marching up the hill. In spite
of his lameness there was something military in his approach. Mrs.
Jarvis, as she came out of the Rectory gate, saw him coming, and her
Newfoundland dog, Nero, slowly swept his tail from side to side.
"Oh, Captain Barfoot!" Mrs. Jarvis exclaimed.
"Good-day, Mrs. Jarvis," said the Captain.
They walked on together, and when they reached Mrs. Flanders's gate
Captain Barfoot took off his tweed cap, and said, bowing very
courteously:
"Good-day to you, Mrs. Jarvis."
And Mrs. Jarvis walked on alone.
She was going to walk on the moor. Had she again been pacing her lawn
late at night? Had she again tapped on the study window and cried: "Look
at the moon, look at the moon, Herbert!"
And Herbert looked at the moon.
Mrs. Jarvis walked on the moor when she was unhappy, going as far as a
certain saucer-shaped hollow, though she always meant to go to a more
distant ridge; and there she sat down, and took out the little book
hidden beneath her cloak and read a few lines of poetry, and looked
about her. She was not very unhappy, and, seeing that she was
forty-five, never perhaps would be very unhappy, desperately unhappy
that is, and leave her husband, and ruin a good man's career, as she
sometimes threatened.
Still there is no need to say what risks a clergyman's wife runs when
she walks on the moor. Short, dark, with kindling eyes, a pheasant's
feather in her hat, Mrs. Jarvis was just the sort of woman to lose her
faith upon the moors--to confound her God with the universal that
is--but she did not lose her faith, did not leave her husband, never
read her poem through, and went on walking the moors, looking at the
moon behind the elm trees, and feeling as she sat on the grass high
above Scarborough... Yes, yes, when the lark soars; when the sheep,
moving a step or two onwards, crop the turf, and at the same time set
their bells tinkling; when the breeze first blows, then dies down,
leaving the cheek kissed; when the ships on the sea below seem to cross
each other and pass on as if drawn by an invisible hand; when there are
distant concussions in the air and phantom horsemen galloping, ceasing;
when the horizon swims blue, green, emotional--then Mrs. Jarvis, heaving
a sigh, thinks to herself, "If only some one could give me... if I could
give some one...." But she does not know what she wants to give, nor who
could give it her.
"Mrs. Flanders stepped out only five minutes ago, Captain," said
Rebecca. Captain Barfoot sat him down in the arm-chair to wait. Resting
his elbows on the arms, putting one hand over the other, sticking his
lame leg straight out, and placing the stick with the rubber ferrule
beside it, he sat perfectly still. There was something rigid about him.
Did he think? Probably the same thoughts again and again. But were they
"nice" thoughts, interesting thoughts? He was a man with a temper;
tenacious, faithful. Women would have felt, "Here is law. Here is order.
Therefore we must cherish this man. He is on the Bridge at night," and,
handing him his cup, or whatever it might be, would run on to visions of
shipwreck and disaster, in which all the passengers come tumbling from
their cabins, and there is the captain, buttoned in his pea-jacket,
matched with the storm, vanquished by it but by none other. "Yet I have
a soul," Mrs. Jarvis would bethink her, as Captain Barfoot suddenly blew
his nose in a great red bandanna handkerchief, "and it's the man's
stupidity that's the cause of this, and the storm's my storm as well as
his"... so Mrs. Jarvis would bethink her when the Captain dropped in to
see them and found Herbert out, and spent two or three hours, almost
silent, sitting in the arm-chair. But Betty Flanders thought nothing of
the kind.
"Oh, Captain," said Mrs. Flanders, bursting into the drawing-room, "I
had to run after Barker's man... I hope Rebecca... I hope Jacob..."
She was very much out of breath, yet not at all upset, and as she put
down the hearth-brush which she had bought of the oil-man, she said it
was hot, flung the window further open, straightened a cover, picked up
a book, as if she were very confident, very fond of the Captain, and a
great many years younger than he was. Indeed, in her blue apron she did
not look more than thirty-five. He was well over fifty.
She moved her hands about the table; the Captain moved his head from
side to side, and made little sounds, as Betty went on chattering,
completely at his ease--after twenty years.
"Well," he said at length, "I've heard from Mr. Polegate."
He had heard from Mr. Polegate that he could advise nothing better than
to send a boy to one of the universities.
"Mr. Floyd was at Cambridge... no, at Oxford... well, at one or the
other," said Mrs. Flanders.
She looked out of the window. Little windows, and the lilac and green of
the garden were reflected in her eyes.
"Archer is doing very well," she said. "I have a very nice report from
Captain Maxwell."
"I will leave you the letter to show Jacob," said the Captain, putting
it clumsily back in its envelope.
"Jacob is after his butterflies as usual," said Mrs. Flanders irritably,
but was surprised by a sudden afterthought, "Cricket begins this week,
of course."
"Edward Jenkinson has handed in his resignation," said Captain Barfoot.
"Then you will stand for the Council?" Mrs. Flanders exclaimed, looking
the Captain full in the face.
"Well, about that," Captain Barfoot began, settling himself rather
deeper in his chair.
Jacob Flanders, therefore, went up to Cambridge in October, 1906.
CHAPTER THREE
"This is not a smoking-carriage," Mrs. Norman protested, nervously but
very feebly, as the door swung open and a powerfully built young man
jumped in. He seemed not to hear her. The train did not stop before it
reached Cambridge, and here she was shut up alone, in a railway
carriage, with a young man.
She touched the spring of her dressing-case, and ascertained that the
scent-bottle and a novel from Mudie's were both handy (the young man was
standing up with his back to her, putting his bag in the rack). She
would throw the scent-bottle with her right hand, she decided, and tug
the communication cord with her left. She was fifty years of age, and
had a son at college. Nevertheless, it is a fact that men are dangerous.
She read half a column of her newspaper; then stealthily looked over the
edge to decide the question of safety by the infallible test of
appearance.... She would like to offer him her paper. But do young men
read the Morning Post? She looked to see what he was reading--the Daily
Telegraph.
Taking note of socks (loose), of tie (shabby), she once more reached his
face. She dwelt upon his mouth. The lips were shut. The eyes bent down,
since he was reading. All was firm, yet youthful, indifferent,
unconscious--as for knocking one down! No, no, no! She looked out of the
window, smiling slightly now, and then came back again, for he didn't
notice her. Grave, unconscious... now he looked up, past her... he
seemed so out of place, somehow, alone with an elderly lady... then he
fixed his eyes--which were blue--on the landscape. He had not realized
her presence, she thought. Yet it was none of HER fault that this was
not a smoking-carriage--if that was what he meant.
Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite
a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole--they see
all sorts of things--they see themselves.... Mrs. Norman now read three
pages of one of Mr. Norris's novels. Should she say to the young man
(and after all he was just the same age as her own boy): "If you want to
smoke, don't mind me"? No: he seemed absolutely indifferent to her
presence... she did not wish to interrupt.
But since, even at her age, she noted his indifference, presumably he
was in some way or other--to her at least--nice, handsome, interesting,
distinguished, well built, like her own boy? One must do the best one
can with her report. Anyhow, this was Jacob Flanders, aged nineteen. It
is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly
what is said, nor yet entirely what is done--for instance, when the
train drew into the station, Mr. Flanders burst open the door, and put
the lady's dressing-case out for her, saying, or rather mumbling: "Let
me" very shyly; indeed he was rather clumsy about it.
"Who..." said the lady, meeting her son; but as there was a great crowd
on the platform and Jacob had already gone, she did not finish her
sentence. As this was Cambridge, as she was staying there for the
week-end, as she saw nothing but young men all day long, in streets and
round tables, this sight of her fellow-traveller was completely lost in
her mind, as the crooked pin dropped by a child into the wishing-well
twirls in the water and disappears for ever.
They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked,
exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought, and no doubt if you
are of a mystical tendency, consolation, and even explanation, shower
down from the unbroken surface. But above Cambridge--anyhow above the
roof of King's College Chapel--there is a difference. Out at sea a great
city will cast a brightness into the night. Is it fanciful to suppose
the sky, washed into the crevices of King's College Chapel, lighter,
thinner, more sparkling than the sky elsewhere? Does Cambridge burn not
only into the night, but into the day?
Look, as they pass into service, how airily the gowns blow out, as
though nothing dense and corporeal were within. What sculptured faces,
what certainty, authority controlled by piety, although great boots
march under the gowns. In what orderly procession they advance. Thick
wax candles stand upright; young men rise in white gowns; while the
subservient eagle bears up for inspection the great white book.
An inclined plane of light comes accurately through each window, purple
and yellow even in its most diffused dust, while, where it breaks upon
stone, that stone is softly chalked red, yellow, and purple. Neither
snow nor greenery, winter nor summer, has power over the old stained
glass. As the sides of a lantern protect the flame so that it burns
steady even in the wildest night--burns steady and gravely illumines the
tree-trunks--so inside the Chapel all was orderly. Gravely sounded the
voices; wisely the organ replied, as if buttressing human faith with the
assent of the elements. The white-robed figures crossed from side to
side; now mounted steps, now descended, all very orderly.
... If you stand a lantern under a tree every insect in the forest
creeps up to it--a curious assembly, since though they scramble and
swing and knock their heads against the glass, they seem to have no
purpose--something senseless inspires them. One gets tired of watching
them, as they amble round the lantern and blindly tap as if for
admittance, one large toad being the most besotted of any and
shouldering his way through the rest. Ah, but what's that? A terrifying
volley of pistol-shots rings out--cracks sharply; ripples
spread--silence laps smooth over sound. A tree--a tree has fallen, a
sort of death in the forest. After that, the wind in the trees sounds
melancholy.
But this service in King's College Chapel--why allow women to take part
in it? Surely, if the mind wanders (and Jacob looked extraordinarily
vacant, his head thrown back, his hymn-book open at the wrong place), if
the mind wanders it is because several hat shops and cupboards upon
cupboards of coloured dresses are displayed upon rush-bottomed chairs.
Though heads and bodies may be devout enough, one has a sense of
individuals--some like blue, others brown; some feathers, others pansies
and forget-me-nots. No one would think of bringing a dog into church.
For though a dog is all very well on a gravel path, and shows no
disrespect to flowers, the way he wanders down an aisle, looking,
lifting a paw, and approaching a pillar with a purpose that makes the
blood run cold with horror (should you be one of a congregation--alone,
shyness is out of the question), a dog destroys the service completely.
So do these women--though separately devout, distinguished, and vouched
for by the theology, mathematics, Latin, and Greek of their husbands.
Heaven knows why it is. For one thing, thought Jacob, they're as ugly as
sin.
Now there was a scraping and murmuring. He caught Timmy Durrant's eye;
looked very sternly at him; and then, very solemnly, winked.
"Waverley," the villa on the road to Girton was called, not that Mr.
Plumer admired Scott or would have chosen any name at all, but names are
useful when you have to entertain undergraduates, and as they sat
waiting for the fourth undergraduate, on Sunday at lunch-time, there was
talk of names upon gates.
"How tiresome," Mrs. Plumer interrupted impulsively. "Does anybody know
Mr. Flanders?"
Mr. Durrant knew him; and therefore blushed slightly, and said,
awkwardly, something about being sure--looking at Mr. Plumer and
hitching the right leg of his trouser as he spoke. Mr. Plumer got up and
stood in front of the fireplace. Mrs. Plumer laughed like a
straightforward friendly fellow. In short, anything more horrible than
the scene, the setting, the prospect, even the May garden being
afflicted with chill sterility and a cloud choosing that moment to cross
the sun, cannot be imagined. There was the garden, of course. Every one
at the same moment looked at it. Owing to the cloud, the leaves ruffled
grey, and the sparrows--there were two sparrows.
"I think," said Mrs. Plumer, taking advantage of the momentary respite,
while the young men stared at the garden, to look at her husband, and
he, not accepting full responsibility for the act, nevertheless touched
the bell.
There can be no excuse for this outrage upon one hour of human life,
save the reflection which occurred to Mr. Plumer as he carved the
mutton, that if no don ever gave a luncheon party, if Sunday after
Sunday passed, if men went down, became lawyers, doctors, members of
Parliament, business men--if no don ever gave a luncheon party--
"Now, does lamb make the mint sauce, or mint sauce make the lamb?" he
asked the young man next him, to break a silence which had already
lasted five minutes and a half.
"I don't know, sir," said the young man, blushing very vividly.
At this moment in came Mr. Flanders. He had mistaken the time.
Now, though they had finished their meat, Mrs. Plumer took a second
helping of cabbage. Jacob determined, of course, that he would eat his
meat in the time it took her to finish her cabbage, looking once or
twice to measure his speed--only he was infernally hungry. Seeing this,
Mrs. Plumer said that she was sure Mr. Flanders would not mind--and the
tart was brought in. Nodding in a peculiar way, she directed the maid to
give Mr. Flanders a second helping of mutton. She glanced at the mutton.
Not much of the leg would be left for luncheon.
It was none of her fault--since how could she control her father
begetting her forty years ago in the suburbs of Manchester? and once
begotten, how could she do other than grow up cheese-paring, ambitious,
with an instinctively accurate notion of the rungs of the ladder and an
ant-like assiduity in pushing George Plumer ahead of her to the top of
the ladder? What was at the top of the ladder? A sense that all the
rungs were beneath one apparently; since by the time that George Plumer
became Professor of Physics, or whatever it might be, Mrs. Plumer could
only be in a condition to cling tight to her eminence, peer down at the
ground, and goad her two plain daughters to climb the rungs of the
ladder.
"I was down at the races yesterday," she said, "with my two little
girls."
It was none of THEIR fault either. In they came to the drawing-room, in
white frocks and blue sashes. They handed the cigarettes. Rhoda had
inherited her father's cold grey eyes. Cold grey eyes George Plumer had,
but in them was an abstract light. He could talk about Persia and the
Trade winds, the Reform Bill and the cycle of the harvests. Books were
on his shelves by Wells and Shaw; on the table serious six-penny
weeklies written by pale men in muddy boots--the weekly creak and
screech of brains rinsed in cold water and wrung dry--melancholy papers.
"I don't feel that I know the truth about anything till I've read them
both!" said Mrs. Plumer brightly, tapping the table of contents with her
bare red hand, upon which the ring looked so incongruous.
"Oh God, oh God, oh God!" exclaimed Jacob, as the four undergraduates
left the house. "Oh, my God!"
"Bloody beastly!" he said, scanning the street for lilac or
bicycle--anything to restore his sense of freedom.
"Bloody beastly," he said to Timmy Durrant, summing up his discomfort at
the world shown him at lunch-time, a world capable of existing--there
was no doubt about that--but so unnecessary, such a thing to believe
in--Shaw and Wells and the serious sixpenny weeklies! What were they
after, scrubbing and demolishing, these elderly people? Had they never
read Homer, Shakespeare, the Elizabethans? He saw it clearly outlined
against the feelings he drew from youth and natural inclination. The
poor devils had rigged up this meagre object. Yet something of pity was
in him. Those wretched little girls--
The extent to which he was disturbed proves that he was already agog.
Insolent he was and inexperienced, but sure enough the cities which the
elderly of the race have built upon the skyline showed like brick
suburbs, barracks, and places of discipline against a red and yellow
flame. He was impressionable; but the word is contradicted by the
composure with which he hollowed his hand to screen a match. He was a
young man of substance.
Anyhow, whether undergraduate or shop boy, man or woman, it must come as
a shock about the age of twenty--the world of the elderly--thrown up in
such black outline upon what we are; upon the reality; the moors and
Byron; the sea and the lighthouse; the sheep's jaw with the yellow teeth
in it; upon the obstinate irrepressible conviction which makes youth so
intolerably disagreeable--"I am what I am, and intend to be it," for
which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for
himself. The Plumers will try to prevent him from making it. Wells and
Shaw and the serious sixpenny weeklies will sit on its head. Every time
he lunches out on Sunday--at dinner parties and tea parties--there will
be this same shock--horror--discomfort--then pleasure, for he draws into
him at every step as he walks by the river such steady certainty, such
reassurance from all sides, the trees bowing, the grey spires soft in
the blue, voices blowing and seeming suspended in the air, the springy
air of May, the elastic air with its particles--chestnut bloom, pollen,
whatever it is that gives the May air its potency, blurring the trees,
gumming the buds, daubing the green. And the river too runs past, not at
flood, nor swiftly, but cloying the oar that dips in it and drops white
drops from the blade, swimming green and deep over the bowed rushes, as
if lavishly caressing them.
Where they moored their boat the trees showered down, so that their
topmost leaves trailed in the ripples and the green wedge that lay in
the water being made of leaves shifted in leaf-breadths as the real
leaves shifted. Now there was a shiver of wind--instantly an edge of
sky; and as Durrant ate cherries he dropped the stunted yellow cherries
through the green wedge of leaves, their stalks twinkling as they
wriggled in and out, and sometimes one half-bitten cherry would go down
red into the green. The meadow was on a level with Jacob's eyes as he
lay back; gilt with buttercups, but the grass did not run like the thin
green water of the graveyard grass about to overflow the tombstones, but
stood juicy and thick. Looking up, backwards, he saw the legs of
children deep in the grass, and the legs of cows. Munch, munch, he
heard; then a short step through the grass; then again munch, munch,
munch, as they tore the grass short at the roots. In front of him two
white butterflies circled higher and higher round the elm tree.
"Jacob's off," thought Durrant looking up from his novel. He kept
reading a few pages and then looking up in a curiously methodical
manner, and each time he looked up he took a few cherries out of the bag
and ate them abstractedly. Other boats passed them, crossing the
backwater from side to side to avoid each other, for many were now
moored, and there were now white dresses and a flaw in the column of air
between two trees, round which curled a thread of blue--Lady Miller's
picnic party. Still more boats kept coming, and Durrant, without getting
up, shoved their boat closer to the bank.
"Oh-h-h-h," groaned Jacob, as the boat rocked, and the trees rocked, and
the white dresses and the white flannel trousers drew out long and
wavering up the bank.
"Oh-h-h-h!" He sat up, and felt as if a piece of elastic had snapped in
his face.
"They're friends of my mother's," said Durrant. "So old Bow took no end
of trouble about the boat."
And this boat had gone from Falmouth to St. Ives Bay, all round the
coast. A larger boat, a ten-ton yacht, about the twentieth of June,
properly fitted out, Durrant said...
"There's the cash difficulty," said Jacob.
"My people'll see to that," said Durrant (the son of a banker,
deceased).
"I intend to preserve my economic independence," said Jacob stiffly. (He
was getting excited.)
"My mother said something about going to Harrogate," he said with a
little annoyance, feeling the pocket where he kept his letters.
"Was that true about your uncle becoming a Mohammedan?" asked Timmy
Durrant.
Jacob had told the story of his Uncle Morty in Durrant's room the night
before.
"I expect he's feeding the sharks, if the truth were known," said Jacob.
"I say, Durrant, there's none left!" he exclaimed, crumpling the bag
which had held the cherries, and throwing it into the river. He saw Lady
Miller's picnic party on the island as he threw the bag into the river.
A sort of awkwardness, grumpiness, gloom came into his eyes.
"Shall we move on... this beastly crowd..." he said.
So up they went, past the island.
The feathery white moon never let the sky grow dark; all night the
chestnut blossoms were white in the green; dim was the cow-parsley in
the meadows.
The waiters at Trinity must have been shuffling china plates like cards,
from the clatter that could be heard in the Great Court. Jacob's rooms,
however, were in Neville's Court; at the top; so that reaching his door
one went in a little out of breath; but he wasn't there. Dining in Hall,
presumably. It will be quite dark in Neville's Court long before
midnight, only the pillars opposite will always be white, and the
fountains. A curious effect the gate has, like lace upon pale green.
Even in the window you hear the plates; a hum of talk, too, from the
diners; the Hall lit up, and the swing-doors opening and shutting with a
soft thud. Some are late.
Jacob's room had a round table and two low chairs. There were yellow
flags in a jar on the mantelpiece; a photograph of his mother; cards
from societies with little raised crescents, coats of arms, and
initials; notes and pipes; on the table lay paper ruled with a red
margin--an essay, no doubt--"Does History consist of the Biographies of
Great Men?" There were books enough; very few French books; but then any
one who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes
him, with extravagant enthusiasm. Lives of the Duke of Wellington, for
example; Spinoza; the works of Dickens; the Faery Queen; a Greek
dictionary with the petals of poppies pressed to silk between the pages;
all the Elizabethans. His slippers were incredibly shabby, like boats
burnt to the water's rim. Then there were photographs from the Greeks,
and a mezzotint from Sir Joshua--all very English. The works of Jane
Austen, too, in deference, perhaps, to some one else's standard. Carlyle
was a prize. There were books upon the Italian painters of the
Renaissance, a Manual of the Diseases of the Horse, and all the usual
text-books. Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the
curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker arm-chair
creaks, though no one sits there.
Coming down the steps a little sideways [Jacob sat on the window-seat
talking to Durrant; he smoked, and Durrant looked at the map], the old
man, with his hands locked behind him, his gown floating black, lurched,
unsteadily, near the wall; then, upstairs he went into his room. Then
another, who raised his hand and praised the columns, the gate, the sky;
another, tripping and smug. Each went up a staircase; three lights were
lit in the dark windows.
If any light burns above Cambridge, it must be from three such rooms;
Greek burns here; science there; philosophy on the ground floor. Poor
old Huxtable can't walk straight;--Sopwith, too, has praised the sky any
night these twenty years; and Cowan still chuckles at the same stories.
It is not simple, or pure, or wholly splendid, the lamp of learning,
since if you see them there under its light (whether Rossetti's on the
wall, or Van Gogh reproduced, whether there are lilacs in the bowl or
rusty pipes), how priestly they look! How like a suburb where you go to
see a view and eat a special cake! "We are the sole purveyors of this
cake." Back you go to London; for the treat is over.
Old Professor Huxtable, performing with the method of a clock his change
of dress, let himself down into his chair; filled his pipe; chose his
paper; crossed his feet; and extracted his glasses. The whole flesh of
his face then fell into folds as if props were removed. Yet strip a
whole seat of an underground railway carriage of its heads and old
Huxtable's head will hold them all. Now, as his eye goes down the print,
what a procession tramps through the corridors of his brain, orderly,
quick-stepping, and reinforced, as the march goes on, by fresh runnels,
till the whole hall, dome, whatever one calls it, is populous with
ideas. Such a muster takes place in no other brain. Yet sometimes there
he'll sit for hours together, gripping the arm of the chair, like a man
holding fast because stranded, and then, just because his corn twinges,
or it may be the gout, what execrations, and, dear me, to hear him talk
of money, taking out his leather purse and grudging even the smallest
silver coin, secretive and suspicious as an old peasant woman with all
her lies. Strange paralysis and constriction--marvellous illumination.
Serene over it all rides the great full brow, and sometimes asleep or in
the quiet spaces of the night you might fancy that on a pillow of stone
he lay triumphant.
Sopwith, meanwhile, advancing with a curious trip from the fire-place,
cut the chocolate cake into segments. Until midnight or later there
would be undergraduates in his room, sometimes as many as twelve,
sometimes three or four; but nobody got up when they went or when they
came; Sopwith went on talking. Talking, talking, talking--as if
everything could be talked--the soul itself slipped through the lips in
thin silver disks which dissolve in young men's minds like silver, like
moonlight. Oh, far away they'd remember it, and deep in dulness gaze
back on it, and come to refresh themselves again.
"Well, I never. That's old Chucky. My dear boy, how's the world treating
you?" And in came poor little Chucky, the unsuccessful provincial,
Stenhouse his real name, but of course Sopwith brought back by using the
other everything, everything, "all I could never be"--yes, though next
day, buying his newspaper and catching the early train, it all seemed to
him childish, absurd; the chocolate cake, the young men; Sopwith summing
things up; no, not all; he would send his son there. He would save every
penny to send his son there.
Sopwith went on talking; twining stiff fibres of awkward speech--things
young men blurted out--plaiting them round his own smooth garland,
making the bright side show, the vivid greens, the sharp thorns,
manliness. He loved it. Indeed to Sopwith a man could say anything,
until perhaps he'd grown old, or gone under, gone deep, when the silver
disks would tinkle hollow, and the inscription read a little too simple,
and the old stamp look too pure, and the impress always the same--a
Greek boy's head. But he would respect still. A woman, divining the
priest, would, involuntarily, despise.
Cowan, Erasmus Cowan, sipped his port alone, or with one rosy little
man, whose memory held precisely the same span of time; sipped his port,
and told his stories, and without book before him intoned Latin, Virgil
and Catullus, as if language were wine upon his lips. Only--sometimes it
will come over one--what if the poet strode in? "THIS my image?" he
might ask, pointing to the chubby man, whose brain is, after all,
Virgil's representative among us, though the body gluttonize, and as for
arms, bees, or even the plough, Cowan takes his trips abroad with a
French novel in his pocket, a rug about his knees, and is thankful to be
home again in his place, in his line, holding up in his snug little
mirror the image of Virgil, all rayed round with good stories of the
dons of Trinity and red beams of port. But language is wine upon his
lips. Nowhere else would Virgil hear the like. And though, as she goes
sauntering along the Backs, old Miss Umphelby sings him melodiously
enough, accurately too, she is always brought up by this question as she
reaches Clare Bridge: "But if I met him, what should I wear?"--and then,
taking her way up the avenue towards Newnham, she lets her fancy play
upon other details of men's meeting with women which have never got into
print. Her lectures, therefore, are not half so well attended as those
of Cowan, and the thing she might have said in elucidation of the text
for ever left out. In short, face a teacher with the image of the taught
and the mirror breaks. But Cowan sipped his port, his exaltation over,
no longer the representative of Virgil. No, the builder, assessor,
surveyor, rather; ruling lines between names, hanging lists above doors.
Such is the fabric through which the light must shine, if shine it
can--the light of all these languages, Chinese and Russian, Persian and
Arabic, of symbols and figures, of history, of things that are known and
things that are about to be known. So that if at night, far out at sea
over the tumbling waves, one saw a haze on the waters, a city
illuminated, a whiteness even in the sky, such as that now over the Hall
of Trinity where they're still dining, or washing up plates, that would
be the light burning there--the light of Cambridge.
"Let's go round to Simeon's room," said Jacob, and they rolled up the
map, having got the whole thing settled.
All the lights were coming out round the court, and falling on the
cobbles, picking out dark patches of grass and single daisies. The young
men were now back in their rooms. Heaven knows what they were doing.
What was it that could DROP like that? And leaning down over a foaming
window-box, one stopped another hurrying past, and upstairs they went
and down they went, until a sort of fulness settled on the court, the
hive full of bees, the bees home thick with gold, drowsy, humming,
suddenly vocal; the Moonlight Sonata answered by a waltz.
The Moonlight Sonata tinkled away; the waltz crashed. Although young men
still went in and out, they walked as if keeping engagements. Now and
then there was a thud, as if some heavy piece of furniture had fallen,
unexpectedly, of its own accord, not in the general stir of life after
dinner. One supposed that young men raised their eyes from their books
as the furniture fell. Were they reading? Certainly there was a sense of
concentration in the air. Behind the grey walls sat so many young men,
some undoubtedly reading, magazines, shilling shockers, no doubt; legs,
perhaps, over the arms of chairs; smoking; sprawling over tables, and
writing while their heads went round in a circle as the pen
moved--simple young men, these, who would--but there is no need to think
of them grown old; others eating sweets; here they boxed; and, well, Mr.
Hawkins must have been mad suddenly to throw up his window and bawl:
"Jo--seph! Jo--seph!" and then he ran as hard as ever he could across
the court, while an elderly man, in a green apron, carrying an immense
pile of tin covers, hesitated, balanced, and then went on. But this was
a diversion. There were young men who read, lying in shallow arm-chairs,
holding their books as if they had hold in their hands of something that
would see them through; they being all in a torment, coming from midland
towns, clergymen's sons. Others read Keats. And those long histories in
many volumes--surely some one was now beginning at the beginning in
order to understand the Holy Roman Empire, as one must. That was part of
the concentration, though it would be dangerous on a hot spring
night--dangerous, perhaps, to concentrate too much upon single books,
actual chapters, when at any moment the door opened and Jacob appeared;
or Richard Bonamy, reading Keats no longer, began making long pink
spills from an old newspaper, bending forward, and looking eager and
contented no more, but almost fierce. Why? Only perhaps that Keats died
young--one wants to write poetry too and to love--oh, the brutes! It's
damnably difficult. But, after all, not so difficult if on the next
staircase, in the large room, there are two, three, five young men all
convinced of this--of brutality, that is, and the clear division between
right and wrong. There was a sofa, chairs, a square table, and the
window being open, one could see how they sat--legs issuing here, one
there crumpled in a corner of the sofa; and, presumably, for you could
not see him, somebody stood by the fender, talking. Anyhow, Jacob, who
sat astride a chair and ate dates from a long box, burst out laughing.
The answer came from the sofa corner; for his pipe was held in the air,
then replaced. Jacob wheeled round. He had something to say to THAT,
though the sturdy red-haired boy at the table seemed to deny it, wagging
his head slowly from side to side; and then, taking out his penknife, he
dug the point of it again and again into a knot in the table, as if
affirming that the voice from the fender spoke the truth--which Jacob
could not deny. Possibly, when he had done arranging the date-stones, he
might find something to say to it--indeed his lips opened--only then
there broke out a roar of laughter.
The laughter died in the air. The sound of it could scarcely have
reached any one standing by the Chapel, which stretched along the
opposite side of the court. The laughter died out, and only gestures of
arms, movements of bodies, could be seen shaping something in the room.
Was it an argument? A bet on the boat races? Was it nothing of the sort?
What was shaped by the arms and bodies moving in the twilight room?
A step or two beyond the window there was nothing at all, except the
enclosing buildings--chimneys upright, roofs horizontal; too much brick
and building for a May night, perhaps. And then before one's eyes would
come the bare hills of Turkey--sharp lines, dry earth, coloured flowers,
and colour on the shoulders of the women, standing naked-legged in the
stream to beat linen on the stones. The stream made loops of water round
their ankles. But none of that could show clearly through the swaddlings
and blanketings of the Cambridge night. The stroke of the clock even was
muffled; as if intoned by somebody reverent from a pulpit; as if
generations of learned men heard the last hour go rolling through their
ranks and issued it, already smooth and time-worn, with their blessing,
for the use of the living.
Was it to receive this gift from the past that the young man came to the
window and stood there, looking out across the court? It was Jacob. He
stood smoking his pipe while the last stroke of the clock purred softly
round him. Perhaps there had been an argument. He looked satisfied;
indeed masterly; which expression changed slightly as he stood there,
the sound of the clock conveying to him (it may be) a sense of old
buildings and time; and himself the inheritor; and then to-morrow; and
friends; at the thought of whom, in sheer confidence and pleasure, it
seemed, he yawned and stretched himself.
Meanwhile behind him the shape they had made, whether by argument or
not, the spiritual shape, hard yet ephemeral, as of glass compared with
the dark stone of the Chapel, was dashed to splinters, young men rising
from chairs and sofa corners, buzzing and barging about the room, one
driving another against the bedroom door, which giving way, in they
fell. Then Jacob was left there, in the shallow arm-chair, alone with
Masham? Anderson? Simeon? Oh, it was Simeon. The others had all gone.
"... Julian the Apostate...." Which of them said that and the other
words murmured round it? But about midnight there sometimes rises, like
a veiled figure suddenly woken, a heavy wind; and this now flapping
through Trinity lifted unseen leaves and blurred everything. "Julian the
Apostate"--and then the wind. Up go the elm branches, out blow the
sails, the old schooners rear and plunge, the grey waves in the hot
Indian Ocean tumble sultrily, and then all falls flat again.
So, if the veiled lady stepped through the Courts of Trinity, she now
drowsed once more, all her draperies about her, her head against a
pillar.
"Somehow it seems to matter."
The low voice was Simeon's.
The voice was even lower that answered him. The sharp tap of a pipe on
the mantelpiece cancelled the words. And perhaps Jacob only said "hum,"
or said nothing at all. True, the words were inaudible. It was the
intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind
indelibly.
"Well, you seem to have studied the subject," said Jacob, rising and
standing over Simeon's chair. He balanced himself; he swayed a little.
He appeared extraordinarily happy, as if his pleasure would brim and
spill down the sides if Simeon spoke.
Simeon said nothing. Jacob remained standing. But intimacy--the room was
full of it, still, deep, like a pool. Without need of movement or speech
it rose softly and washed over everything, mollifying, kindling, and
coating the mind with the lustre of pearl, so that if you talk of a
light, of Cambridge burning, it's not languages only. It's Julian the
Apostate.
But Jacob moved. He murmured good-night. He went out into the court. He
buttoned his jacket across his chest. He went back to his rooms, and
being the only man who walked at that moment back to his rooms, his
footsteps rang out, his figure loomed large. Back from the Chapel, back
from the Hall, back from the Library, came the sound of his footsteps,
as if the old stone echoed with magisterial authority: "The young
man--the young man--the young man-back to his rooms."
CHAPTER FOUR
What's the use of trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those
little thin paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together
with sea-water? Although the plays of Shakespeare had frequently been
praised, even quoted, and placed higher than the Greek, never since they
started had Jacob managed to read one through. Yet what an opportunity!
For the Scilly Isles had been sighted by Timmy Durrant lying like
mountain-tops almost a-wash in precisely the right place. His
calculations had worked perfectly, and really the sight of him sitting
there, with his hand on the tiller, rosy gilled, with a sprout of beard,
looking sternly at the stars, then at a compass, spelling out quite
correctly his page of the eternal lesson-book, would have moved a woman.
Jacob, of course, was not a woman. The sight of Timmy Durrant was no
sight for him, nothing to set against the sky and worship; far from it.
They had quarrelled. Why the right way to open a tin of beef, with
Shakespeare on board, under conditions of such splendour, should have
turned them to sulky schoolboys, none can tell. Tinned beef is cold
eating, though; and salt water spoils biscuits; and the waves tumble and
lollop much the same hour after hour--tumble and lollop all across the
horizon. Now a spray of seaweed floats past-now a log of wood. Ships
have been wrecked here. One or two go past, keeping their own side of
the road. Timmy knew where they were bound, what their cargoes were,
and, by looking through his glass, could tell the name of the line, and
even guess what dividends it paid its shareholders. Yet that was no
reason for Jacob to turn sulky.
The Scilly Isles had the look of mountain-tops almost a-wash....
Unfortunately, Jacob broke the pin of the Primus stove.
The Scilly Isles might well be obliterated by a roller sweeping straight
across.
But one must give young men the credit of admitting that, though
breakfast eaten under these circumstances is grim, it is sincere enough.
No need to make conversation. They got out their pipes.
Timmy wrote up some scientific observations; and--what was the question
that broke the silence--the exact time or the day of the month? anyhow,
it was spoken without the least awkwardness; in the most matter-of-fact
way in the world; and then Jacob began to unbutton his clothes and sat
naked, save for his shirt, intending, apparently, to bathe.
The Scilly Isles were turning bluish; and suddenly blue, purple, and
green flushed the sea; left it grey; struck a stripe which vanished; but
when Jacob had got his shirt over his head the whole floor of the waves
was blue and white, rippling and crisp, though now and again a broad
purple mark appeared, like a bruise; or there floated an entire emerald
tinged with yellow. He plunged. He gulped in water, spat it out, struck
with his right arm, struck with his left, was towed by a rope, gasped,
splashed, and was hauled on board.
The seat in the boat was positively hot, and the sun warmed his back as
he sat naked with a towel in his hand, looking at the Scilly Isles
which--confound it! the sail flapped. Shakespeare was knocked overboard.
There you could see him floating merrily away, with all his pages
ruffling innumerably; and then he went under.
Strangely enough, you could smell violets, or if violets were impossible
in July, they must grow something very pungent on the mainland then. The
mainland, not so very far off--you could see clefts in the cliffs, white
cottages, smoke going up--wore an extraordinary look of calm, of sunny
peace, as if wisdom and piety had descended upon the dwellers there. Now
a cry sounded, as of a man calling pilchards in a main street. It wore
an extraordinary look of piety and peace, as if old men smoked by the
door, and girls stood, hands on hips, at the well, and horses stood; as
if the end of the world had come, and cabbage fields and stone walls,
and coast-guard stations, and, above all, the white sand bays with the
waves breaking unseen by any one, rose to heaven in a kind of ecstasy.
But imperceptibly the cottage smoke droops, has the look of a mourning
emblem, a flag floating its caress over a grave. The gulls, making their
broad flight and then riding at peace, seem to mark the grave.
No doubt if this were Italy, Greece, or even the shores of Spain,
sadness would be routed by strangeness and excitement and the nudge of a
classical education. But the Cornish hills have stark chimneys standing
on them; and, somehow or other, loveliness is infernally sad. Yes, the
chimneys and the coast-guard stations and the little bays with the waves
breaking unseen by any one make one remember the overpowering sorrow.
And what can this sorrow be?
It is brewed by the earth itself. It comes from the houses on the coast.
We start transparent, and then the cloud thickens. All history backs our
pane of glass. To escape is vain.
But whether this is the right interpretation of Jacob's gloom as he sat
naked, in the sun, looking at the Land's End, it is impossible to say;
for he never spoke a word. Timmy sometimes wondered (only for a second)
whether his people bothered him.... No matter. There are things that
can't be said. Let's shake it off. Let's dry ourselves, and take up the
first thing that comes handy.... Timmy Durrant's notebook of scientific
observations.
"Now..." said Jacob.
It is a tremendous argument.
Some people can follow every step of the way, and even take a little
one, six inches long, by themselves at the end; others remain observant
of the external signs.
The eyes fix themselves upon the poker; the right hand takes the poker
and lifts it; turns it slowly round, and then, very accurately, replaces
it. The left hand, which lies on the knee, plays some stately but
intermittent piece of march music. A deep breath is taken; but allowed
to evaporate unused. The cat marches across the hearth-rug. No one
observes her.
"That's about as near as I can get to it," Durrant wound up.
The next minute is quiet as the grave.
"It follows..." said Jacob.
Only half a sentence followed; but these half-sentences are like flags
set on tops of buildings to the observer of external sights down below.
What was the coast of Cornwall, with its violet scents, and mourning
emblems, and tranquil piety, but a screen happening to hang straight
behind as his mind marched up?
"It follows..." said Jacob.
"Yes," said Timmy, after reflection. "That is so."
Now Jacob began plunging about, half to stretch himself, half in a kind
of jollity, no doubt, for the strangest sound issued from his lips as he
furled the sail, rubbed the plates--gruff, tuneless--a sort of pasan,
for having grasped the argument, for being master of the situation,
sunburnt, unshaven, capable into the bargain of sailing round the world
in a ten-ton yacht, which, very likely, he would do one of these days
instead of settling down in a lawyer's office, and wearing spats.
"Our friend Masham," said Timmy Durrant, "would rather not be seen in
our company as we are now." His buttons had come off.
"D'you know Masham's aunt?" said Jacob.
"Never knew he had one," said Timmy.
"Masham has millions of aunts," said Jacob.
"Masham is mentioned in Domesday Book," said Timmy.
"So are his aunts," said Jacob.
"His sister," said Timmy, "is a very pretty girl."
"That's what'll happen to you, Timmy," said Jacob.
"It'll happen to you first," said Timmy.
"But this woman I was telling you about--Masham's aunt--"
"Oh, do get on," said Timmy, for Jacob was laughing so much that he
could not speak.
"Masham's aunt..."
Timmy laughed so much that he could not speak.
"Masham's aunt..."
"What is there about Masham that makes one laugh?" said Timmy.
"Hang it all--a man who swallows his tie-pin," said Jacob.
"Lord Chancellor before he's fifty," said Timmy.
"He's a gentleman," said Jacob.
"The Duke of Wellington was a gentleman," said Timmy.
"Keats wasn't."
"Lord Salisbury was."
"And what about God?" said Jacob.
The Scilly Isles now appeared as if directly pointed at by a golden
finger issuing from a cloud; and everybody knows how portentous that
sight is, and how these broad rays, whether they light upon the Scilly
Isles or upon the tombs of crusaders in cathedrals, always shake the
very foundations of scepticism and lead to jokes about God.
/*
"Abide with me:
Fast falls the eventide;
The shadows deepen;
Lord, with me abide,"
*/
sang Timmy Durrant.
"At my place we used to have a hymn which began
/*
Great God, what do I see and hear?"
*/
said Jacob.
Gulls rode gently swaying in little companies of two or three quite near
the boat; the cormorant, as if following his long strained neck in
eternal pursuit, skimmed an inch above the water to the next rock; and
the drone of the tide in the caves came across the water, low,
monotonous, like the voice of some one talking to himself.
/*
"Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in thee,"
*/
sang Jacob.
Like the blunt tooth of some monster, a rock broke the surface; brown;
overflown with perpetual waterfalls.
/*
"Rock of Ages,"
*/
Jacob sang, lying on his back, looking up into the sky at midday, from
which every shred of cloud had been withdrawn, so that it was like
something permanently displayed with the cover off.
By six o'clock a breeze blew in off an icefield; and by seven the water
was more purple than blue; and by half-past seven there was a patch of
rough gold-beater's skin round the Scilly Isles, and Durrant's face, as
he sat steering, was of the colour of a red lacquer box polished for
generations. By nine all the fire and confusion had gone out of the sky,
leaving wedges of apple-green and plates of pale yellow; and by ten the
lanterns on the boat were making twisted colours upon the waves,
elongated or squat, as the waves stretched or humped themselves. The
beam from the lighthouse strode rapidly across the water. Infinite
millions of miles away powdered stars twinkled; but the waves slapped
the boat, and crashed, with regular and appalling solemnity, against the
rocks.
Although it would be possible to knock at the cottage door and ask for a
glass of milk, it is only thirst that would compel the intrusion. Yet
perhaps Mrs. Pascoe would welcome it. The summer's day may be wearing
heavy. Washing in her little scullery, she may hear the cheap clock on
the mantelpiece tick, tick, tick ... tick, tick, tick. She is alone in
the house. Her husband is out helping Farmer Hosken; her daughter
married and gone to America. Her elder son is married too, but she does
not agree with his wife. The Wesleyan minister came along and took the
younger boy. She is alone in the house. A steamer, probably bound for
Cardiff, now crosses the horizon, while near at hand one bell of a
foxglove swings to and fro with a bumble-bee for clapper. These white
Cornish cottages are built on the edge of the cliff; the garden grows
gorse more readily than cabbages; and for hedge, some primeval man has
piled granite boulders. In one of these, to hold, an historian
conjectures, the victim's blood, a basin has been hollowed, but in our
time it serves more tamely to seat those tourists who wish for an
uninterrupted view of the Gurnard's Head. Not that any one objects to a
blue print dress and a white apron in a cottage garden.
"Look--she has to draw her water from a well in the garden."
"Very lonely it must be in winter, with the wind sweeping over those
hills, and the waves dashing on the rocks."
Even on a summer's day you hear them murmuring.
Having drawn her water, Mrs. Pascoe went in. The tourists regretted that
they had brought no glasses, so that they might have read the name of
the tramp steamer. Indeed, it was such a fine day that there was no
saying what a pair of field-glasses might not have fetched into view.
Two fishing luggers, presumably from St. Ives Bay, were now sailing in
an opposite direction from the steamer, and the floor of the sea became
alternately clear and opaque. As for the bee, having sucked its fill of
honey, it visited the teasle and thence made a straight line to Mrs.
Pascoe's patch, once more directing the tourists' gaze to the old
woman's print dress and white apron, for she had come to the door of the
cottage and was standing there.
There she stood, shading her eyes and looking out to sea.
For the millionth time, perhaps, she looked at the sea. A peacock
butterfly now spread himself upon the teasle, fresh and newly emerged,
as the blue and chocolate down on his wings testified. Mrs. Pascoe went
indoors, fetched a cream pan, came out, and stood scouring it. Her face
was assuredly not soft, sensual, or lecherous, but hard, wise, wholesome
rather, signifying in a room full of sophisticated people the flesh and
blood of life. She would tell a lie, though, as soon as the truth.
Behind her on the wall hung a large dried skate. Shut up in the parlour
she prized mats, china mugs, and photographs, though the mouldy little
room was saved from the salt breeze only by the depth of a brick, and
between lace curtains you saw the gannet drop like a stone, and on
stormy days the gulls came shuddering through the air, and the steamers'
lights were now high, now deep. Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's
night.
The picture papers were delivered punctually on Sunday, and she pored
long over Lady Cynthia's wedding at the Abbey. She, too, would have
liked to ride in a carriage with springs. The soft, swift syllables of
educated speech often shamed her few rude ones. And then all night to
hear the grinding of the Atlantic upon the rocks instead of hansom cabs
and footmen whistling for motor cars.... So she may have dreamed,
scouring her cream pan. But the talkative, nimble-witted people have
taken themselves to towns. Like a miser, she has hoarded her feelings
within her own breast. Not a penny piece has she changed all these
years, and, watching her enviously, it seems as if all within must be
pure gold.
The wise old woman, having fixed her eyes upon the sea, once more
withdrew. The tourists decided that it was time to move on to the
Gurnard's Head.
Three seconds later Mrs. Durrant rapped upon the door.
"Mrs. Pascoe?" she said.
Rather haughtily, she watched the tourists cross the field path. She
came of a Highland race, famous for its chieftains.
Mrs. Pascoe appeared.
"I envy you that bush, Mrs. Pascoe," said Mrs. Durrant, pointing the
parasol with which she had rapped on the door at the fine clump of St.
John's wort that grew beside it. Mrs. Pascoe looked at the bush
deprecatingly.
"I expect my son in a day or two," said Mrs. Durrant. "Sailing from
Falmouth with a friend in a little boat.... Any news of Lizzie yet, Mrs.
Pascoe?"
Her long-tailed ponies stood twitching their ears on the road twenty
yards away. The boy, Curnow, flicked flies off them occasionally. He saw
his mistress go into the cottage; come out again; and pass, talking
energetically to judge by the movements of her hands, round the
vegetable plot in front of the cottage. Mrs. Pascoe was his aunt. Both
women surveyed a bush. Mrs. Durrant stooped and picked a sprig from it.
Next she pointed (her movements were peremptory; she held herself very
upright) at the potatoes. They had the blight. All potatoes that year
had the blight. Mrs. Durrant showed Mrs. Pascoe how bad the blight was
on her potatoes. Mrs. Durrant talked energetically; Mrs. Pascoe listened
submissively. The boy Curnow knew that Mrs. Durrant was saying that it
is perfectly simple; you mix the powder in a gallon of water; "I have
done it with my own hands in my own garden," Mrs. Durrant was saying.
"You won't have a potato left--you won't have a potato left," Mrs.
Durrant was saying in her emphatic voice as they reached the gate. The
boy Curnow became as immobile as stone.
Mrs. Durrant took the reins in her hands and settled herself on the
driver's seat.
"Take care of that leg, or I shall send the doctor to you," she called
back over her shoulder; touched the ponies; and the carriage started
forward. The boy Curnow had only just time to swing himself up by the
toe of his boot. The boy Curnow, sitting in the middle of the back seat,
looked at his aunt.
Mrs. Pascoe stood at the gate looking after them; stood at the gate till
the trap was round the corner; stood at the gate, looking now to the
right, now to the left; then went back to her cottage.
Soon the ponies attacked the swelling moor road with striving forelegs.
Mrs. Durrant let the reins fall slackly, and leant backwards. Her
vivacity had left her. Her hawk nose was thin as a bleached bone through
which you almost see the light. Her hands, lying on the reins in her
lap, were firm even in repose. The upper lip was cut so short that it
raised itself almost in a sneer from the front teeth. Her mind skimmed
leagues where Mrs. Pascoe's mind adhered to its solitary patch. Her mind
skimmed leagues as the ponies climbed the hill road. Forwards and
backwards she cast her mind, as if the roofless cottages, mounds of
slag, and cottage gardens overgrown with foxglove and bramble cast shade
upon her mind. Arrived at the summit, she stopped the carriage. The pale
hills were round her, each scattered with ancient stones; beneath was
the sea, variable as a southern sea; she herself sat there looking from
hill to sea, upright, aquiline, equally poised between gloom and
laughter. Suddenly she flicked the ponies so that the boy Curnow had to
swing himself up by the toe of his boot.
The rooks settled; the rooks rose. The trees which they touched so
capriciously seemed insufficient to lodge their numbers. The tree-tops
sang with the breeze in them; the branches creaked audibly and dropped
now and then, though the season was midsummer, husks or twigs. Up went
the rooks and down again, rising in lesser numbers each time as the
sager birds made ready to settle, for the evening was already spent
enough to make the air inside the wood almost dark. The moss was soft;
the tree-trunks spectral. Beyond them lay a silvery meadow. The pampas
grass raised its feathery spears from mounds of green at the end of the
meadow. A breadth of water gleamed. Already the convolvulus moth was
spinning over the flowers. Orange and purple, nasturtium and cherry pie,
were washed into the twilight, but the tobacco plant and the passion
flower, over which the great moth spun, were white as china. The rooks
creaked their wings together on the tree-tops, and were settling down
for sleep when, far off, a familiar sound shook and trembled--increased
--fairly dinned in their ears--scared sleepy wings into the air
again--the dinner bell at the house.
After six days of salt wind, rain, and sun, Jacob Flanders had put on a
dinner jacket. The discreet black object had made its appearance now and
then in the boat among tins, pickles, preserved meats, and as the voyage
went on had become more and more irrelevant, hardly to be believed in.
And now, the world being stable, lit by candle-light, the dinner jacket
alone preserved him. He could not be sufficiently thankful. Even so his
neck, wrists, and face were exposed without cover, and his whole person,
whether exposed or not, tingled and glowed so as to make even black
cloth an imperfect screen. He drew back the great red hand that lay on
the table-cloth. Surreptitiously it closed upon slim glasses and curved
silver forks. The bones of the cutlets were decorated with pink
frills-and yesterday he had gnawn ham from the bone! Opposite him were
hazy, semi-transparent shapes of yellow and blue. Behind them, again,
was the grey-green garden, and among the pear-shaped leaves of the
escallonia fishing-boats seemed caught and suspended. A sailing ship
slowly drew past the women's backs. Two or three figures crossed the
terrace hastily in the dusk. The door opened and shut. Nothing settled
or stayed unbroken. Like oars rowing now this side, now that, were the
sentences that came now here, now there, from either side of the table.
"Oh, Clara, Clara!" exclaimed Mrs. Durrant, and Timothy Durrant adding,
"Clara, Clara," Jacob named the shape in yellow gauze Timothy's sister,
Clara. The girl sat smiling and flushed. With her brother's dark eyes,
she was vaguer and softer than he was. When the laugh died down she
said: "But, mother, it was true. He said so, didn't he? Miss Eliot
agreed with us...."
But Miss Eliot, tall, grey-headed, was making room beside her for the
old man who had come in from the terrace. The dinner would never end,
Jacob thought, and he did not wish it to end, though the ship had sailed
from one corner of the window-frame to the other, and a light marked the
end of the pier. He saw Mrs. Durrant gaze at the light. She turned to
him.
"Did you take command, or Timothy?" she said. "Forgive me if I call you
Jacob. I've heard so much of you." Then her eyes went back to the sea.
Her eyes glazed as she looked at the view.
"A little village once," she said, "and now grown...." She rose, taking
her napkin with her, and stood by the window.
"Did you quarrel with Timothy?" Clara asked shyly. "I should have."
Mrs. Durrant came back from the window.
"It gets later and later," she said, sitting upright, and looking down
the table. "You ought to be ashamed--all of you. Mr. Clutterbuck, you
ought to be ashamed." She raised her voice, for Mr. Clutterbuck was
deaf.
"We ARE ashamed," said a girl. But the old man with the beard went on
eating plum tart. Mrs. Durrant laughed and leant back in her chair, as
if indulging him.
"We put it to you, Mrs. Durrant," said a young man with thick spectacles
and a fiery moustache. "I say the conditions were fulfilled. She owes me
a sovereign."
"Not BEFORE the fish--with it, Mrs. Durrant," said Charlotte Wilding.
"That was the bet; with the fish," said Clara seriously. "Begonias,
mother. To eat them with his fish."
"Oh dear," said Mrs. Durrant.
"Charlotte won't pay you," said Timothy.
"How dare you ..." said Charlotte.
"That privilege will be mine," said the courtly Mr. Wortley, producing a
silver case primed with sovereigns and slipping one coin on to the
table. Then Mrs. Durrant got up and passed down the room, holding
herself very straight, and the girls in yellow and blue and silver gauze
followed her, and elderly Miss Eliot in her velvet; and a little rosy
woman, hesitating at the door, clean, scrupulous, probably a governess.
All passed out at the open door.
"When you are as old as I am, Charlotte," said Mrs. Durrant, drawing the
girl's arm within hers as they paced up and down the terrace.
"Why are you so sad?" Charlotte asked impulsively.
"Do I seem to you sad? I hope not," said Mrs. Durrant.
"Well, just now. You're NOT old."
"Old enough to be Timothy's mother." They stopped.
Miss Eliot was looking through Mr. Clutterbuck's telescope at the edge
of the terrace. The deaf old man stood beside her, fondling his beard,
and reciting the names of the constellations: "Andromeda, Bootes,
Sidonia, Cassiopeia...."
"Andromeda," murmured Miss Eliot, shifting the telescope slightly.
Mrs. Durrant and Charlotte looked along the barrel of the instrument
pointed at the skies.
"There are MILLIONS of stars," said Charlotte with conviction. Miss
Eliot turned away from the telescope. The young men laughed suddenly in
the dining-room.
"Let ME look," said Charlotte eagerly.
"The stars bore me," said Mrs. Durrant, walking down the terrace with
Julia Eliot. "I read a book once about the stars.... What are they
saying?" She stopped in front of the dining-room window. "Timothy," she
noted.
"The silent young man," said Miss Eliot.
"Yes, Jacob Flanders," said Mrs. Durrant.
"Oh, mother! I didn't recognize you!" exclaimed Clara Durrant, coming
from the opposite direction with Elsbeth. "How delicious," she breathed,
crushing a verbena leaf.
Mrs. Durrant turned and walked away by herself.
"Clara!" she called. Clara went to her.
"How unlike they are!" said Miss Eliot.
Mr. Wortley passed them, smoking a cigar.
"Every day I live I find myself agreeing ..." he said as he passed them.
"It's so interesting to guess ..." murmured Julia Eliot.
"When first we came out we could see the flowers in that bed," said
Elsbeth.
"We see very little now," said Miss Eliot.
"She must have been so beautiful, and everybody loved her, of course,"
said Charlotte. "I suppose Mr. Wortley ..." she paused.
"Edward's death was a tragedy," said Miss Eliot decidedly.
Here Mr. Erskine joined them.
"There's no such thing as silence," he said positively. "I can hear
twenty different sounds on a night like this without counting your
voices."
"Make a bet of it?" said Charlotte.
"Done," said Mr. Erskine. "One, the sea; two, the wind; three, a dog;
four ..."
The others passed on.
"Poor Timothy," said Elsbeth.
"A very fine night," shouted Miss Eliot into Mr. Clutterbuck's ear.
"Like to look at the stars?" said the old man, turning the telescope
towards Elsbeth.
"Doesn't it make you melancholy--looking at the stars?" shouted Miss
Eliot.
"Dear me no, dear me no," Mr. Clutterbuck chuckled when he understood
her. "Why should it make me melancholy? Not for a moment--dear me no."
"Thank you, Timothy, but I'm coming in," said Miss Eliot. "Elsbeth,
here's a shawl."
"I'm coming in," Elsbeth murmured with her eye to the telescope.
"Cassiopeia," she murmured. "Where are you all?" she asked, taking her
eye away from the telescope. "How dark it is!"
Mrs. Durrant sat in the drawing-room by a lamp winding a ball of wool.
Mr. Clutterbuck read the Times. In the distance stood a second lamp, and
round it sat the young ladies, flashing scissors over silver-spangled
stuff for private theatricals. Mr. Wortley read a book.
"Yes; he is perfectly right," said Mrs. Durrant, drawing herself up and
ceasing to wind her wool. And while Mr. Clutterbuck read the rest of
Lord Lansdowne's speech she sat upright, without touching her ball.
"Ah, Mr. Flanders," she said, speaking proudly, as if to Lord Lansdowne
himself. Then she sighed and began to wind her wool again.
"Sit THERE," she said.
Jacob came out from the dark place by the window where he had hovered.
The light poured over him, illuminating every cranny of his skin; but
not a muscle of his face moved as he sat looking out into the garden.
"I want to hear about your voyage," said Mrs. Durrant.
"Yes," he said.
"Twenty years ago we did the same thing."
"Yes," he said. She looked at him sharply.
"He is extraordinarily awkward," she thought, noticing how he fingered
his socks. "Yet so distinguished-looking."
"In those days ..." she resumed, and told him how they had sailed ...
"my husband, who knew a good deal about sailing, for he kept a yacht
before we married" ... and then how rashly they had defied the
fishermen, "almost paid for it with our lives, but so proud of
ourselves!" She flung the hand out that held the ball of wool.
"Shall I hold your wool?" Jacob asked stiffly.
"You do that for your mother," said Mrs. Durrant, looking at him again
keenly, as she transferred the skein. "Yes, it goes much better."
He smiled; but said nothing.
Elsbeth Siddons hovered behind them with something silver on her arm.
"We want," she said.... "I've come ..." she paused.
"Poor Jacob," said Mrs. Durrant, quietly, as if she had known him all
his life. "They're going to make you act in their play."
"How I love you!" said Elsbeth, kneeling beside Mrs. Durrant's chair.
"Give me the wool," said Mrs. Durrant.
"He's come--he's come!" cried Charlotte Wilding. "I've won my bet!"
"There's another bunch higher up," murmured Clara Durrant, mounting
another step of the ladder. Jacob held the ladder as she stretched out
to reach the grapes high up on the vine.
"There!" she said, cutting through the stalk. She looked
semi-transparent, pale, wonderfully beautiful up there among the vine
leaves and the yellow and purple bunches, the lights swimming over her
in coloured islands. Geraniums and begonias stood in pots along planks;
tomatoes climbed the walls.
"The leaves really want thinning," she considered, and one green one,
spread like the palm of a hand, circled down past Jacob's head.
"I have more than I can eat already," he said, looking up.
"It does seem absurd ..." Clara began, "going back to London...."
"Ridiculous," said Jacob, firmly.
"Then ..." said Clara, "you must come next year, properly," she said,
snipping another vine leaf, rather at random.
"If ... if ..."
A child ran past the greenhouse shouting. Clara slowly descended the
ladder with her basket of grapes.
"One bunch of white, and two of purple," she said, and she placed two
great leaves over them where they lay curled warm in the basket.
"I have enjoyed myself," said Jacob, looking down the greenhouse.
"Yes, it's been delightful," she said vaguely.
"Oh, Miss Durrant," he said, taking the basket of grapes; but she walked
past him towards the door of the greenhouse.
"You're too good--too good," she thought, thinking of Jacob, thinking
that he must not say that he loved her. No, no, no.
The children were whirling past the door, throwing things high into the
air.
"Little demons!" she cried. "What have they got?" she asked Jacob.
"Onions, I think," said Jacob. He looked at them without moving.
"Next August, remember, Jacob," said Mrs. Durrant, shaking hands with
him on the terrace where the fuchsia hung, like a scarlet ear-ring,
behind her head. Mr. Wortley came out of the window in yellow slippers,
trailing the Times and holding out his hand very cordially.
"Good-bye," said Jacob. "Good-bye," he repeated. "Good-bye," he said
once more. Charlotte Wilding flung up her bedroom window and cried out:
"Good-bye, Mr. Jacob!"
"Mr. Flanders!" cried Mr. Clutterbuck, trying to extricate himself from
his beehive chair. "Jacob Flanders!"
"Too late, Joseph," said Mrs. Durrant.
"Not to sit for me," said Miss Eliot, planting her tripod upon the lawn.
CHAPTER FIVE
"I rather think," said Jacob, taking his pipe from his mouth, "it's in
Virgil," and pushing back his chair, he went to the window.
The rashest drivers in the world are, certainly, the drivers of
post-office vans. Swinging down Lamb's Conduit Street, the scarlet van
rounded the corner by the pillar box in such a way as to graze the kerb
and make the little girl who was standing on tiptoe to post a letter
look up, half frightened, half curious. She paused with her hand in the
mouth of the box; then dropped her letter and ran away. It is seldom
only that we see a child on tiptoe with pity--more often a dim
discomfort, a grain of sand in the shoe which it's scarcely worth while
to remove--that's our feeling, and so--Jacob turned to the bookcase.
Long ago great people lived here, and coming back from Court past
midnight stood, huddling their satin skirts, under the carved door-posts
while the footman roused himself from his mattress on the floor,
hurriedly fastened the lower buttons of his waistcoat, and let them in.
The bitter eighteenth-century rain rushed down the kennel. Southampton
Row, however, is chiefly remarkable nowadays for the fact that you will
always find a man there trying to sell a tortoise to a tailor. "Showing
off the tweed, sir; what the gentry wants is something singular to catch
the eye, sir--and clean in their habits, sir!" So they display their
tortoises.
At Mudie's corner in Oxford Street all the red and blue beads had run
together on the string. The motor omnibuses were locked. Mr. Spalding
going to the city looked at Mr. Charles Budgeon bound for Shepherd's
Bush. The proximity of the omnibuses gave the outside passengers an
opportunity to stare into each other's faces. Yet few took advantage of
it. Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him
like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could
only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the
passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all--save "a man
with a red moustache," "a young man in grey smoking a pipe." The October
sunlight rested upon all these men and women sitting immobile; and
little Johnnie Sturgeon took the chance to swing down the staircase,
carrying his large mysterious parcel, and so dodging a zigzag course
between the wheels he reached the pavement, started to whistle a tune
and was soon out of sight--for ever. The omnibuses jerked on, and every
single person felt relief at being a little nearer to his journey's end,
though some cajoled themselves past the immediate engagement by promise
of indulgence beyond--steak and kidney pudding, drink or a game of
dominoes in the smoky corner of a city restaurant. Oh yes, human life is
very tolerable on the top of an omnibus in Holborn, when the policeman
holds up his arm and the sun beats on your back, and if there is such a
thing as a shell secreted by man to fit man himself here we find it, on
the banks of the Thames, where the great streets join and St. Paul's
Cathedral, like the volute on the top of the snail shell, finishes it
off. Jacob, getting off his omnibus, loitered up the steps, consulted
his watch, and finally made up his mind to go in.... Does it need an
effort? Yes. These changes of mood wear us out.
Dim it is, haunted by ghosts of white marble, to whom the organ for ever
chaunts. If a boot creaks, it's awful; then the order; the discipline.
The verger with his rod has life ironed out beneath him. Sweet and holy
are the angelic choristers. And for ever round the marble shoulders, in
and out of the folded fingers, go the thin high sounds of voice and
organ. For ever requiem--repose. Tired with scrubbing the steps of the
Prudential Society's office, which she did year in year out, Mrs.
Lidgett took her seat beneath the great Duke's tomb, folded her hands,
and half closed her eyes. A magnificent place for an old woman to rest
in, by the very side of the great Duke's bones, whose victories mean
nothing to her, whose name she knows not, though she never fails to
greet the little angels opposite, as she passes out, wishing the like on
her own tomb, for the leathern curtain of the heart has flapped wide,
and out steal on tiptoe thoughts of rest, sweet melodies.... Old Spicer,
jute merchant, thought nothing of the kind though. Strangely enough he'd
never been in St. Paul's these fifty years, though his office windows
looked on the churchyard. "So that's all? Well, a gloomy old place....
Where's Nelson's tomb? No time now--come again--a coin to leave in the
box.... Rain or fine is it? Well, if it would only make up its mind!"
Idly the children stray in--the verger dissuades them--and another and
another ... man, woman, man, woman, boy ... casting their eyes up,
pursing their lips, the same shadow brushing the same faces; the
leathern curtain of the heart flaps wide.
Nothing could appear more certain from the steps of St. Paul's than that
each person is miraculously provided with coat, skirt, and boots; an
income; an object. Only Jacob, carrying in his hand Finlay's Byzantine
Empire, which he had bought in Ludgate Hill, looked a little different;
for in his hand he carried a book, which book he would at nine-thirty
precisely, by his own fireside, open and study, as no one else of all
these multitudes would do. They have no houses. The streets belong to
them; the shops; the churches; theirs the innumerable desks; the
stretched office lights; the vans are theirs, and the railway slung high
above the street. If you look closer you will see that three elderly men
at a little distance from each other run spiders along the pavement as
if the street were their parlour, and here, against the wall, a woman
stares at nothing, boot-laces extended, which she does not ask you to
buy. The posters are theirs too; and the news on them. A town destroyed;
a race won. A homeless people, circling beneath the sky whose blue or
white is held off by a ceiling cloth of steel filings and horse dung
shredded to dust.
There, under the green shade, with his head bent over white paper, Mr.
Sibley transferred figures to folios, and upon each desk you observe,
like provender, a bunch of papers, the day's nutriment, slowly consumed
by the industrious pen. Innumerable overcoats of the quality prescribed
hung empty all day in the corridors, but as the clock struck six each
was exactly filled, and the little figures, split apart into trousers or
moulded into a single thickness, jerked rapidly with angular forward
motion along the pavement; then dropped into darkness. Beneath the
pavement, sunk in the earth, hollow drains lined with yellow light for
ever conveyed them this way and that, and large letters upon enamel
plates represented in the underworld the parks, squares, and circuses of
the upper. "Marble Arch--Shepherd's Bush"--to the majority the Arch and
the Bush are eternally white letters upon a blue ground. Only at one
point--it may be Acton, Holloway, Kensal Rise, Caledonian Road--does the
name mean shops where you buy things, and houses, in one of which, down
to the right, where the pollard trees grow out of the paving stones,
there is a square curtained window, and a bedroom.
Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a camp-stool with her back to
the stone wall of the Union of London and Smith's Bank, clasping a brown
mongrel tight in her arms and singing out loud, not for coppers, no,
from the depths of her gay wild heart--her sinful, tanned heart--for the
child who fetches her is the fruit of sin, and should have been in bed,
curtained, asleep, instead of hearing in the lamplight her mother's wild
song, where she sits against the Bank, singing not for coppers, with her
dog against her breast.
Home they went. The grey church spires received them; the hoary city,
old, sinful, and majestic. One behind another, round or pointed,
piercing the sky or massing themselves, like sailing ships, like granite
cliffs, spires and offices, wharves and factories crowd the bank;
eternally the pilgrims trudge; barges rest in mid stream heavy laden; as
some believe, the city loves her prostitutes.
But few, it seems, are admitted to that degree. Of all the carriages
that leave the arch of the Opera House, not one turns eastward, and when
the little thief is caught in the empty market-place no one in
black-and-white or rose-coloured evening dress blocks the way by pausing
with a hand upon the carriage door to help or condemn--though Lady
Charles, to do her justice, sighs sadly as she ascends her staircase,
takes down Thomas a Kempis, and does not sleep till her mind has lost
itself tunnelling into the complexity of things. "Why? Why? Why?" she
sighs. On the whole it's best to walk back from the Opera House. Fatigue
is the safest sleeping draught.
The autumn season was in full swing. Tristan was twitching his rug up
under his armpits twice a week; Isolde waved her scarf in miraculous
sympathy with the conductor's baton. In all parts of the house were to
be found pink faces and glittering breasts. When a Royal hand attached
to an invisible body slipped out and withdrew the red and white bouquet
reposing on the scarlet ledge, the Queen of England seemed a name worth
dying for. Beauty, in its hothouse variety (which is none of the worst),
flowered in box after box; and though nothing was said of profound
importance, and though it is generally agreed that wit deserted
beautiful lips about the time that Walpole died--at any rate when
Victoria in her nightgown descended to meet her ministers, the lips
(through an opera glass) remained red, adorable. Bald distinguished men
with gold-headed canes strolled down the crimson avenues between the
stalls, and only broke from intercourse with the boxes when the lights
went down, and the conductor, first bowing to the Queen, next to the
bald-headed men, swept round on his feet and raised his wand.
Then two thousand hearts in the semi-darkness remembered, anticipated,
travelled dark labyrinths; and Clara Durrant said farewell to Jacob
Flanders, and tasted the sweetness of death in effigy; and Mrs. Durrant,
sitting behind her in the dark of the box, sighed her sharp sigh; and
Mr. Wortley, shifting his position behind the Italian Ambassador's wife,
thought that Brangaena was a trifle hoarse; and suspended in the gallery
many feet above their heads, Edward Whittaker surreptitiously held a
torch to his miniature score; and ... and ...
In short, the observer is choked with observations. Only to prevent us
from being submerged by chaos, nature and society between them have
arranged a system of classification which is simplicity itself; stalls,
boxes, amphitheatre, gallery. The moulds are filled nightly. There is no
need to distinguish details. But the difficulty remains--one has to
choose. For though I have no wish to be Queen of England or only for a
moment--I would willingly sit beside her; I would hear the Prime
Minister's gossip; the countess whisper, and share her memories of halls
and gardens; the massive fronts of the respectable conceal after all
their secret code; or why so impermeable? And then, doffing one's own
headpiece, how strange to assume for a moment some one's--any one's--to
be a man of valour who has ruled the Empire; to refer while Brangaena
sings to the fragments of Sophocles, or see in a flash, as the shepherd
pipes his tune, bridges and aqueducts. But no--we must choose. Never was
there a harsher necessity! or one which entails greater pain, more
certain disaster; for wherever I seat myself, I die in exile: Whittaker
in his lodging-house; Lady Charles at the Manor.
A young man with a Wellington nose, who had occupied a
seven-and-sixpenny seat, made his way down the stone stairs when the
opera ended, as if he were still set a little apart from his fellows by
the influence of the music.
At midnight Jacob Flanders heard a rap on his door.
"By Jove!" he exclaimed. "You're the very man I want!" and without more
ado they discovered the lines which he had been seeking all day; only
they come not in Virgil, but in Lucretius.
"Yes; that should make him sit up," said Bonamy, as Jacob stopped
reading. Jacob was excited. It was the first time he had read his essay
aloud.
"Damned swine!" he said, rather too extravagantly; but the praise had
gone to his head. Professor Bulteel, of Leeds, had issued an edition of
Wycherley without stating that he had left out, disembowelled, or
indicated only by asterisks, several indecent words and some indecent
phrases. An outrage, Jacob said; a breach of faith; sheer prudery; token
of a lewd mind and a disgusting nature. Aristophanes and Shakespeare
were cited. Modern life was repudiated. Great play was made with the
professional title, and Leeds as a seat of learning was laughed to
scorn. And the extraordinary thing was that these young men were
perfectly right--extraordinary, because, even as Jacob copied his pages,
he knew that no one would ever print them; and sure enough back they
came from the Fortnightly, the Contemporary, the Nineteenth
Century--when Jacob threw them into the black wooden box where he kept
his mother's letters, his old flannel trousers, and a note or two with
the Cornish postmark. The lid shut upon the truth.
This black wooden box, upon which his name was still legible in white
paint, stood between the long windows of the sitting-room. The street
ran beneath. No doubt the bedroom was behind. The furniture--three
wicker chairs and a gate-legged table--came from Cambridge. These houses
(Mrs. Garfit's daughter, Mrs. Whitehorn, was the landlady of this one)
were built, say, a hundred and fifty years ago. The rooms are shapely,
the ceilings high; over the doorway a rose, or a ram's skull, is carved
in the wood. The eighteenth century has its distinction. Even the
panels, painted in raspberry-coloured paint, have their distinction....
"Distinction"--Mrs. Durrant said that Jacob Flanders was
"distinguished-looking." "Extremely awkward," she said, "but so
distinguished-looking." Seeing him for the first time that no doubt is
the word for him. Lying back in his chair, taking his pipe from his
lips, and saying to Bonamy: "About this opera now" (for they had done
with indecency). "This fellow Wagner" ... distinction was one of the
words to use naturally, though, from looking at him, one would have
found it difficult to say which seat in the opera house was his, stalls,
gallery, or dress circle. A writer? He lacked self-consciousness. A
painter? There was something in the shape of his hands (he was descended
on his mother's side from a family of the greatest antiquity and deepest
obscurity) which indicated taste. Then his mouth--but surely, of all
futile occupations this of cataloguing features is the worst. One word
is sufficient. But if one cannot find it?
"I like Jacob Flanders," wrote Clara Durrant in her diary. "He is so
unworldly. He gives himself no airs, and one can say what one likes to
him, though he's frightening because ..." But Mr. Letts allows little
space in his shilling diaries. Clara was not the one to encroach upon
Wednesday. Humblest, most candid of women! "No, no, no," she sighed,
standing at the greenhouse door, "don't break--don't spoil"--what?
Something infinitely wonderful.
But then, this is only a young woman's language, one, too, who loves, or
refrains from loving. She wished the moment to continue for ever
precisely as it was that July morning. And moments don't. Now, for
instance, Jacob was telling a story about some walking tour he'd taken,
and the inn was called "The Foaming Pot," which, considering the
landlady's name ... They shouted with laughter. The joke was indecent.
Then Julia Eliot said "the silent young man," and as she dined with
Prime Ministers, no doubt she meant: "If he is going to get on in the
world, he will have to find his tongue."
Timothy Durrant never made any comment at all.
The housemaid found herself very liberally rewarded.
Mr. Sopwith's opinion was as sentimental as Clara's, though far more
skilfully expressed.
Betty Flanders was romantic about Archer and tender about John; she was
unreasonably irritated by Jacob's clumsiness in the house.
Captain Barfoot liked him best of the boys; but as for saying why ...
It seems then that men and women are equally at fault. It seems that a
profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures
is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are
cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any
case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that
we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being
shadows. And why, if this--and much more than this is true, why are we
yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man
in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most
solid, the best known to us--why indeed? For the moment after we know
nothing about him.
Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.
("I'm twenty-two. It's nearly the end of October. Life is thoroughly
pleasant, although unfortunately there are a great number of fools
about. One must apply oneself to something or other--God knows what.
Everything is really very jolly--except getting up in the morning and
wearing a tail coat.")
"I say, Bonamy, what about Beethoven?"
("Bonamy is an amazing fellow. He knows practically everything--not more
about English literature than I do--but then he's read all those
Frenchmen.")
"I rather suspect you're talking rot, Bonamy. In spite of what you say,
poor old Tennyson...."
("The truth is one ought to have been taught French. Now, I suppose, old
Barfoot is talking to my mother. That's an odd affair to be sure. But I
can't see Bonamy down there. Damn London!") for the market carts were
lumbering down the street.
"What about a walk on Saturday?"
("What's happening on Saturday?")
Then, taking out his pocket-book, he assured himself that the night of
the Durrants' party came next week.
But though all this may very well be true--so Jacob thought and
spoke--so he crossed his legs--filled his pipe--sipped his whisky, and
once looked at his pocket-book, rumpling his hair as he did so, there
remains over something which can never be conveyed to a second person
save by Jacob himself. Moreover, part of this is not Jacob but Richard
Bonamy--the room; the market carts; the hour; the very moment of
history. Then consider the effect of sex--how between man and woman it
hangs wavy, tremulous, so that here's a valley, there's a peak, when in
truth, perhaps, all's as flat as my hand. Even the exact words get the
wrong accent on them. But something is always impelling one to hum
vibrating, like the hawk moth, at the mouth of the cavern of mystery,
endowing Jacob Flanders with all sorts of qualities he had not at
all--for though, certainly, he sat talking to Bonamy, half of what he
said was too dull to repeat; much unintelligible (about unknown people
and Parliament); what remains is mostly a matter of guess work. Yet over
him we hang vibrating.
"Yes," said Captain Barfoot, knocking out his pipe on Betty Flanders's
hob, and buttoning his coat. "It doubles the work, but I don't mind
that."
He was now town councillor. They looked at the night, which was the same
as the London night, only a good deal more transparent. Church bells
down in the town were striking eleven o'clock. The wind was off the sea.
And all the bedroom windows were dark--the Pages were asleep; the
Garfits were asleep; the Cranches were asleep--whereas in London at this
hour they were burning Guy Fawkes on Parliament Hill.
CHAPTER SIX
The flames had fairly caught.
"There's St. Paul's!" some one cried.
As the wood caught the city of London was lit up for a second; on other
sides of the fire there were trees. Of the faces which came out fresh
and vivid as though painted in yellow and red, the most prominent was a
girl's face. By a trick of the firelight she seemed to have no body. The
oval of the face and hair hung beside the fire with a dark vacuum for
background. As if dazed by the glare, her green-blue eyes stared at the
flames. Every muscle of her face was taut. There was something tragic in
her thus staring--her age between twenty and twenty-five.
A hand descending from the chequered darkness thrust on her head the
conical white hat of a pierrot. Shaking her head, she still stared. A
whiskered face appeared above her. They dropped two legs of a table upon
the fire and a scattering of twigs and leaves. All this blazed up and
showed faces far back, round, pale, smooth, bearded, some with billycock
hats on; all intent; showed too St. Paul's floating on the uneven white
mist, and two or three narrow, paper-white, extinguisher-shaped spires.
The flames were struggling through the wood and roaring up when,
goodness knows where from, pails flung water in beautiful hollow shapes,
as of polished tortoiseshell; flung again and again; until the hiss was
like a swarm of bees; and all the faces went out.
"Oh Jacob," said the girl, as they pounded up the hill in the dark, "I'm
so frightfully unhappy!"
Shouts of laughter came from the others--high, low; some before, others
after.
The hotel dining-room was brightly lit. A stag's head in plaster was at
one end of the table; at the other some Roman bust blackened and
reddened to represent Guy Fawkes, whose night it was. The diners were
linked together by lengths of paper roses, so that when it came to
singing "Auld Lang Syne" with their hands crossed a pink and yellow line
rose and fell the entire length of the table. There was an enormous
tapping of green wine-glasses. A young man stood up, and Florinda,
taking one of the purplish globes that lay on the table, flung it
straight at his head. It crushed to powder.
"I'm so frightfully unhappy!" she said, turning to Jacob, who sat beside
her.
The table ran, as if on invisible legs, to the side of the room, and a
barrel organ decorated with a red cloth and two pots of paper flowers
reeled out waltz music.
Jacob could not dance. He stood against the wall smoking a pipe.
"We think," said two of the dancers, breaking off from the rest, and
bowing profoundly before him, "that you are the most beautiful man we
have ever seen."
So they wreathed his head with paper flowers. Then somebody brought out
a white and gilt chair and made him sit on it. As they passed, people
hung glass grapes on his shoulders, until he looked like the figure-head
of a wrecked ship. Then Florinda got upon his knee and hid her face in
his waistcoat. With one hand he held her; with the other, his pipe.
"Now let us talk," said Jacob, as he walked down Haverstock Hill between
four and five o'clock in the morning of November the sixth arm-in-arm
with Timmy Durrant, "about something sensible."
The Greeks--yes, that was what they talked about--how when all's said
and done, when one's rinsed one's mouth with every literature in the
world, including Chinese and Russian (but these Slavs aren't civilized),
it's the flavour of Greek that remains. Durrant quoted Aeschylus--Jacob
Sophocles. It is true that no Greek could have understood or professor
refrained from pointing out--Never mind; what is Greek for if not to be
shouted on Haverstock Hill in the dawn? Moreover, Durrant never listened
to Sophocles, nor Jacob to Aeschylus. They were boastful, triumphant; it
seemed to both that they had read every book in the world; known every
sin, passion, and joy. Civilizations stood round them like flowers ready
for picking. Ages lapped at their feet like waves fit for sailing. And
surveying all this, looming through the fog, the lamplight, the shades
of London, the two young men decided in favour of Greece.
"Probably," said Jacob, "we are the only people in the world who know
what the Greeks meant."
They drank coffee at a stall where the urns were burnished and little
lamps burnt along the counter.
Taking Jacob for a military gentleman, the stall-keeper told him about
his boy at Gibraltar, and Jacob cursed the British army and praised the
Duke of Wellington. So on again they went down the hill talking about
the Greeks.
A strange thing--when you come to think of it--this love of Greek,
flourishing in such obscurity, distorted, discouraged, yet leaping out,
all of a sudden, especially on leaving crowded rooms, or after a surfeit
of print, or when the moon floats among the waves of the hills, or in
hollow, sallow, fruitless London days, like a specific; a clean blade;
always a miracle. Jacob knew no more Greek than served him to stumble
through a play. Of ancient history he knew nothing. However, as he
tramped into London it seemed to him that they were making the
flagstones ring on the road to the Acropolis, and that if Socrates saw
them coming he would bestir himself and say "my fine fellows," for the
whole sentiment of Athens was entirely after his heart; free,
venturesome, high-spirited.... She had called him Jacob without asking
his leave. She had sat upon his knee. Thus did all good women in the
days of the Greeks.
At this moment there shook out into the air a wavering, quavering,
doleful lamentation which seemed to lack strength to unfold itself, and
yet flagged on; at the sound of which doors in back streets burst
sullenly open; workmen stumped forth.
Florinda was sick.
Mrs. Durrant, sleepless as usual, scored a mark by the side of certain
lines in the Inferno.
Clara slept buried in her pillows; on her dressing-table dishevelled
roses and a pair of long white gloves.
Still wearing the conical white hat of a pierrot, Florinda was sick.
The bedroom seemed fit for these catastrophes--cheap, mustard-coloured,
half attic, half studio, curiously ornamented with silver paper stars,
Welshwomen's hats, and rosaries pendent from the gas brackets. As for
Florinda's story, her name had been bestowed upon her by a painter who
had wished it to signify that the flower of her maidenhood was still
unplucked. Be that as it may, she was without a surname, and for parents
had only the photograph of a tombstone beneath which, she said, her
father lay buried. Sometimes she would dwell upon the size of it, and
rumour had it that Florinda's father had died from the growth of his
bones which nothing could stop; just as her mother enjoyed the
confidence of a Royal master, and now and again Florinda herself was a
Princess, but chiefly when drunk. Thus deserted, pretty into the
bargain, with tragic eyes and the lips of a child, she talked more about
virginity than women mostly do; and had lost it only the night before,
or cherished it beyond the heart in her breast, according to the man she
talked to. But did she always talk to men? No, she had her confidante:
Mother Stuart. Stuart, as the lady would point out, is the name of a
Royal house; but what that signified, and what her business way, no one
knew; only that Mrs. Stuart got postal orders every Monday morning, kept
a parrot, believed in the transmigration of souls, and could read the
future in tea leaves. Dirty lodging-house wallpaper she was behind the
chastity of Florinda.
Now Florinda wept, and spent the day wandering the streets; stood at
Chelsea watching the river swim past; trailed along the shopping
streets; opened her bag and powdered her cheeks in omnibuses; read love
letters, propping them against the milk pot in the A.B.C. shop; detected
glass in the sugar bowl; accused the waitress of wishing to poison her;
declared that young men stared at her; and found herself towards evening
slowly sauntering down Jacob's street, when it struck her that she liked
that man Jacob better than dirty Jews, and sitting at his table (he was
copying his essay upon the Ethics of Indecency), drew off her gloves and
told him how Mother Stuart had banged her on the head with the tea-cosy.
Jacob took her word for it that she was chaste. She prattled, sitting by
the fireside, of famous painters. The tomb of her father was mentioned.
Wild and frail and beautiful she looked, and thus the women of the
Greeks were, Jacob thought; and this was life; and himself a man and
Florinda chaste.
She left with one of Shelley's poems beneath her arm. Mrs. Stuart, she
said, often talked of him.
Marvellous are the innocent. To believe that the girl herself transcends
all lies (for Jacob was not such a fool as to believe implicitly), to
wonder enviously at the unanchored life--his own seeming petted and even
cloistered in comparison--to have at hand as sovereign specifics for all
disorders of the soul Adonais and the plays of Shakespeare; to figure
out a comradeship all spirited on her side, protective on his, yet equal
on both, for women, thought Jacob, are just the same as men--innocence
such as this is marvellous enough, and perhaps not so foolish after all.
For when Florinda got home that night she first washed her head; then
ate chocolate creams; then opened Shelley. True, she was horribly bored.
What on earth was it ABOUT? She had to wager with herself that she would
turn the page before she ate another. In fact she slept. But then her
day had been a long one, Mother Stuart had thrown the tea-cosy;--there
are formidable sights in the streets, and though Florinda was ignorant
as an owl, and would never learn to read even her love letters
correctly, still she had her feelings, liked some men better than
others, and was entirely at the beck and call of life. Whether or not
she was a virgin seems a matter of no importance whatever. Unless,
indeed, it is the only thing of any importance at all.
Jacob was restless when she left him.
All night men and women seethed up and down the well-known beats. Late
home-comers could see shadows against the blinds even in the most
respectable suburbs. Not a square in snow or fog lacked its amorous
couple. All plays turned on the same subject. Bullets went through heads
in hotel bedrooms almost nightly on that account. When the body escaped
mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred. Little else
was talked of in theatres and popular novels. Yet we say it is a matter
of no importance at all.
What with Shakespeare and Adonais, Mozart and Bishop Berkeley--choose
whom you like--the fact is concealed and the evenings for most of us
pass reputably, or with only the sort of tremor that a snake makes
sliding through the grass. But then concealment by itself distracts the
mind from the print and the sound. If Florinda had had a mind, she might
have read with clearer eyes than we can. She and her sort have solved
the question by turning it to a trifle of washing the hands nightly
before going to bed, the only difficulty being whether you prefer your
water hot or cold, which being settled, the mind can go about its
business unassailed.
But it did occur to Jacob, half-way through dinner, to wonder whether
she had a mind.
They sat at a little table in the restaurant.
Florinda leant the points of her elbows on the table and held her chin
in the cup of her hands. Her cloak had slipped behind her. Gold and
white with bright beads on her she emerged, her face flowering from her
body, innocent, scarcely tinted, the eyes gazing frankly about her, or
slowly settling on Jacob and resting there. She talked:
"You know that big black box the Australian left in my room ever so long
ago? ... I do think furs make a woman look old.... That's Bechstein come
in now.... I was wondering what you looked like when you were a little
boy, Jacob." She nibbled her roll and looked at him.
"Jacob. You're like one of those statues.... I think there are lovely
things in the British Museum, don't you? Lots of lovely things ..." she
spoke dreamily. The room was filling; the heat increasing. Talk in a
restaurant is dazed sleep-walkers' talk, so many things to look at--so
much noise--other people talking. Can one overhear? Oh, but they mustn't
overhear US.
"That's like Ellen Nagle--that girl ..." and so on.
"I'm awfully happy since I've known you, Jacob. You're such a GOOD man."
The room got fuller and fuller; talk louder; knives more clattering.
"Well, you see what makes her say things like that is ..."
She stopped. So did every one.
"To-morrow ... Sunday ... a beastly ... you tell me ... go then!" Crash!
And out she swept.
It was at the table next them that the voice spun higher and higher.
Suddenly the woman dashed the plates to the floor. The man was left
there. Everybody stared. Then--"Well, poor chap, we mustn't sit staring.
What a go! Did you hear what she said? By God, he looks a fool! Didn't
come up to the scratch, I suppose. All the mustard on the tablecloth.
The waiters laughing."
Jacob observed Florinda. In her face there seemed to him something
horribly brainless--as she sat staring.
Out she swept, the black woman with the dancing feather in her hat.
Yet she had to go somewhere. The night is not a tumultuous black ocean
in which you sink or sail as a star. As a matter of fact it was a wet
November night. The lamps of Soho made large greasy spots of light upon
the pavement. The by-streets were dark enough to shelter man or woman
leaning against the doorways. One detached herself as Jacob and Florinda
approached.
"She's dropped her glove," said Florinda.
Jacob, pressing forward, gave it her.
Effusively she thanked him; retraced her steps; dropped her glove again.
But why? For whom? Meanwhile, where had the other woman got to? And the
man?
The street lamps do not carry far enough to tell us. The voices, angry,
lustful, despairing, passionate, were scarcely more than the voices of
caged beasts at night. Only they are not caged, nor beasts. Stop a man;
ask him the way; he'll tell it you; but one's afraid to ask him the way.
What does one fear?--the human eye. At once the pavement narrows, the
chasm deepens. There! They've melted into it--both man and woman.
Further on, blatantly advertising its meritorious solidity, a
boarding-house exhibits behind uncurtained windows its testimony to the
soundness of London. There they sit, plainly illuminated, dressed like
ladies and gentlemen, in bamboo chairs. The widows of business men prove
laboriously that they are related to judges. The wives of coal merchants
instantly retort that their fathers kept coachmen. A servant brings
coffee, and the crochet basket has to be moved. And so on again into the
dark, passing a girl here for sale, or there an old woman with only
matches to offer, passing the crowd from the Tube station, the women
with veiled hair, passing at length no one but shut doors, carved
door-posts, and a solitary policeman, Jacob, with Florinda on his arm,
reached his room and, lighting the lamp, said nothing at all.
"I don't like you when you look like that," said Florinda.
The problem is insoluble. The body is harnessed to a brain. Beauty goes
hand in hand with stupidity. There she sat staring at the fire as she
had stared at the broken mustard-pot. In spite of defending indecency,
Jacob doubted whether he liked it in the raw. He had a violent reversion
towards male society, cloistered rooms, and the works of the classics;
and was ready to turn with wrath upon whoever it was who had fashioned
life thus.
Then Florinda laid her hand upon his knee.
After all, it was none of her fault. But the thought saddened him. It's
not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's
the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
Any excuse, though, serves a stupid woman. He told her his head ached.
But when she looked at him, dumbly, half-guessing, half-understanding,
apologizing perhaps, anyhow saying as he had said, "It's none of my
fault," straight and beautiful in body, her face like a shell within its
cap, then he knew that cloisters and classics are no use whatever. The
problem is insoluble.
CHAPTER SEVEN
About this time a firm of merchants having dealings with the East put on
the market little paper flowers which opened on touching water. As it
was the custom also to use finger-bowls at the end of dinner, the new
discovery was found of excellent service. In these sheltered lakes the
little coloured flowers swam and slid; surmounted smooth slippery waves,
and sometimes foundered and lay like pebbles on the glass floor. Their
fortunes were watched by eyes intent and lovely. It is surely a great
discovery that leads to the union of hearts and foundation of homes. The
paper flowers did no less.
It must not be thought, though, that they ousted the flowers of nature.
Roses, lilies, carnations in particular, looked over the rims of vases
and surveyed the bright lives and swift dooms of their artificial
relations. Mr. Stuart Ormond made this very observation; and charming it
was thought; and Kitty Craster married him on the strength of it six
months later. But real flowers can never be dispensed with. If they
could, human life would be a different affair altogether. For flowers
fade; chrysanthemums are the worst; perfect over night; yellow and jaded
next morning--not fit to be seen. On the whole, though the price is
sinful, carnations pay best;--it's a question, however, whether it's
wise to have them wired. Some shops advise it. Certainly it's the only
way to keep them at a dance; but whether it is necessary at dinner
parties, unless the rooms are very hot, remains in dispute. Old Mrs.
Temple used to recommend an ivy leaf--just one--dropped into the bowl.
She said it kept the water pure for days and days. But there is some
reason to think that old Mrs. Temple was mistaken.
The little cards, however, with names engraved on them, are a more
serious problem than the flowers. More horses' legs have been worn out,
more coachmen's lives consumed, more hours of sound afternoon time
vainly lavished than served to win us the battle of Waterloo, and pay
for it into the bargain. The little demons are the source of as many
reprieves, calamities, and anxieties as the battle itself. Sometimes
Mrs. Bonham has just gone out; at others she is at home. But, even if
the cards should be superseded, which seems unlikely, there are unruly
powers blowing life into storms, disordering sedulous mornings, and
uprooting the stability of the afternoon--dressmakers, that is to say,
and confectioners' shops. Six yards of silk will cover one body; but if
you have to devise six hundred shapes for it, and twice as many
colours?--in the middle of which there is the urgent question of the
pudding with tufts of green cream and battlements of almond paste. It
has not arrived.
The flamingo hours fluttered softly through the sky. But regularly they
dipped their wings in pitch black; Notting Hill, for instance, or the
purlieus of Clerkenwell. No wonder that Italian remained a hidden art,
and the piano always played the same sonata. In order to buy one pair of
elastic stockings for Mrs. Page, widow, aged sixty-three, in receipt of
five shillings out-door relief, and help from her only son employed in
Messrs. Mackie's dye-works, suffering in winter with his chest, letters
must be written, columns filled up in the same round, simple hand that
wrote in Mr. Letts's diary how the weather was fine, the children
demons, and Jacob Flanders unworldly. Clara Durrant procured the
stockings, played the sonata, filled the vases, fetched the pudding,
left the cards, and when the great invention of paper flowers to swim in
finger-bowls was discovered, was one of those who most marvelled at
their brief lives.
Nor were there wanting poets to celebrate the theme. Edwin Mallett, for
example, wrote his verses ending:
/*
And read their doom in Chloe's eyes,
*/
which caused Clara to blush at the first reading, and to laugh at the
second, saying that it was just like him to call her Chloe when her name
was Clara. Ridiculous young man! But when, between ten and eleven on a
rainy morning, Edwin Mallett laid his life at her feet she ran out of
the room and hid herself in her bedroom, and Timothy below could not get
on with his work all that morning on account of her sobs.
"Which is the result of enjoying yourself," said Mrs. Durrant severely,
surveying the dance programme all scored with the same initials, or
rather they were different ones this time--R.B. instead of E.M.; Richard
Bonamy it was now, the young man with the Wellington nose.
"But I could never marry a man with a nose like that," said Clara.
"Nonsense," said Mrs. Durrant.
"But I am too severe," she thought to herself. For Clara, losing all
vivacity, tore up her dance programme and threw it in the fender.
Such were the very serious consequences of the invention of paper
flowers to swim in bowls.
"Please," said Julia Eliot, taking up her position by the curtain almost
opposite the door, "don't introduce me. I like to look on. The amusing
thing," she went on, addressing Mr. Salvin, who, owing to his lameness,
was accommodated with a chair, "the amusing thing about a party is to
watch the people--coming and going, coming and going."
"Last time we met," said Mr. Salvin, "was at the Farquhars. Poor lady!
She has much to put up with."
"Doesn't she look charming?" exclaimed Miss Eliot, as Clara Durrant
passed them.
"And which of them...?" asked Mr. Salvin, dropping his voice and
speaking in quizzical tones.
"There are so many ..." Miss Eliot replied. Three young men stood at the
doorway looking about for their hostess.
"You don't remember Elizabeth as I do," said Mr. Salvin, "dancing
Highland reels at Banchorie. Clara lacks her mother's spirit. Clara is a
little pale."
"What different people one sees here!" said Miss Eliot.
"Happily we are not governed by the evening papers," said Mr. Salvin.
"I never read them," said Miss Eliot. "I know nothing about politics,"
she added.
"The piano is in tune," said Clara, passing them, "but we may have to
ask some one to move it for us."
"Are they going to dance?" asked Mr. Salvin.
"Nobody shall disturb you," said Mrs. Durrant peremptorily as she
passed.
"Julia Eliot. It IS Julia Eliot!" said old Lady Hibbert, holding out
both her hands. "And Mr. Salvin. What is going to happen to us, Mr.
Salvin? With all my experience of English politics--My dear, I was
thinking of your father last night--one of my oldest friends, Mr.
Salvin. Never tell me that girls often are incapable of love! I had all
Shakespeare by heart before I was in my teens, Mr. Salvin!"
"You don't say so," said Mr. Salvin.
"But I do," said Lady Hibbert.
"Oh, Mr. Salvin, I'm so sorry...."
"I will remove myself if you'll kindly lend me a hand," said Mr. Salvin.
"You shall sit by my mother," said Clara. "Everybody seems to come in
here.... Mr. Calthorp, let me introduce you to Miss Edwards."
"Are you going away for Christmas?" said Mr. Calthorp.
"If my brother gets his leave," said Miss Edwards.
"What regiment is he in?" said Mr. Calthorp.
"The Twentieth Hussars," said Miss Edwards.
"Perhaps he knows my brother?" said Mr. Calthorp.
"I am afraid I did not catch your name," said Miss Edwards.
"Calthorp," said Mr. Calthorp.
"But what proof was there that the marriage service was actually
performed?" said Mr. Crosby.
"There is no reason to doubt that Charles James Fox ..." Mr. Burley
began; but here Mrs. Stretton told him that she knew his sister well;
had stayed with her not six weeks ago; and thought the house charming,
but bleak in winter.
"Going about as girls do nowadays--" said Mrs. Forster.
Mr. Bowley looked round him, and catching sight of Rose Shaw moved
towards her, threw out his hands, and exclaimed: "Well!"
"Nothing!" she replied. "Nothing at all--though I left them alone the
entire afternoon on purpose."
"Dear me, dear me," said Mr. Bowley. "I will ask Jimmy to breakfast."
"But who could resist her?" cried Rose Shaw. "Dearest Clara--I know we
mustn't try to stop you..."
"You and Mr. Bowley are talking dreadful gossip, I know," said Clara.
"Life is wicked--life is detestable!" cried Rose Shaw.
"There's not much to be said for this sort of thing, is there?" said
Timothy Durrant to Jacob.
"Women like it."
"Like what?" said Charlotte Wilding, coming up to them.
"Where have you come from?" said Timothy. "Dining somewhere, I suppose."
"I don't see why not," said Charlotte.
"People must go downstairs," said Clara, passing. "Take Charlotte,
Timothy. How d'you do, Mr. Flanders."
"How d'you do, Mr. Flanders," said Julia Eliot, holding out her hand.
"What's been happening to you?"
/*
"Who is Silvia? what is she?
That all our swains commend her?"
*/
sang Elsbeth Siddons.
Every one stood where they were, or sat down if a chair was empty.
"Ah," sighed Clara, who stood beside Jacob, half-way through.
/*
"Then to Silvia let us sing,
That Silvia is excelling;
She excels each mortal thing
Upon the dull earth dwelling.
To her let us garlands bring,"
*/
sang Elsbeth Siddons.
"Ah!" Clara exclaimed out loud, and clapped her gloved hands; and Jacob
clapped his bare ones; and then she moved forward and directed people to
come in from the doorway.
"You are living in London?" asked Miss Julia Eliot.
"Yes," said Jacob.
"In rooms?"
"Yes."
"There is Mr. Clutterbuck. You always see Mr. Clutterbuck here. He is
not very happy at home, I am afraid. They say that Mrs. Clutterbuck ..."
she dropped her voice. "That's why he stays with the Durrants. Were you
there when they acted Mr. Wortley's play? Oh, no, of course not--at the
last moment, did you hear--you had to go to join your mother, I
remember, at Harrogate--At the last moment, as I was saying, just as
everything was ready, the clothes finished and everything--Now Elsbeth
is going to sing again. Clara is playing her accompaniment or turning
over for Mr. Carter, I think. No, Mr. Carter is playing by himself--This
is BACH," she whispered, as Mr. Carter played the first bars.
"Are you fond of music?" said Mr. Durrant.
"Yes. I like hearing it," said Jacob. "I know nothing about it."
"Very few people do that," said Mrs. Durrant. "I daresay you were never
taught. Why is that, Sir Jasper?--Sir Jasper Bigham--Mr. Flanders. Why
is nobody taught anything that they ought to know, Sir Jasper?" She left
them standing against the wall.
Neither of the gentlemen said anything for three minutes, though Jacob
shifted perhaps five inches to the left, and then as many to the right.
Then Jacob grunted, and suddenly crossed the room.
"Will you come and have something to eat?" he said to Clara Durrant.
"Yes, an ice. Quickly. Now," she said.
Downstairs they went.
But half-way down they met Mr. and Mrs. Gresham, Herbert Turner, Sylvia
Rashleigh, and a friend, whom they had dared to bring, from America,
"knowing that Mrs. Durrant--wishing to show Mr. Pilcher.--Mr. Pilcher
from New York--This is Miss Durrant."
"Whom I have heard so much of," said Mr. Pilcher, bowing low.
So Clara left him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
About half-past nine Jacob left the house, his door slamming, other
doors slamming, buying his paper, mounting his omnibus, or, weather
permitting, walking his road as other people do. Head bent down, a desk,
a telephone, books bound in green leather, electric light.... "Fresh
coals, sir?" ... "Your tea, sir."... Talk about football, the Hotspurs,
the Harlequins; six-thirty Star brought in by the office boy; the rooks
of Gray's Inn passing overhead; branches in the fog thin and brittle;
and through the roar of traffic now and again a voice shouting:
"Verdict--verdict--winner--winner," while letters accumulate in a
basket, Jacob signs them, and each evening finds him, as he takes his
coat down, with some muscle of the brain new stretched.
Then, sometimes a game of chess; or pictures in Bond Street, or a long
way home to take the air with Bonamy on his arm, meditatively marching,
head thrown back, the world a spectacle, the early moon above the
steeples coming in for praise, the sea-gulls flying high, Nelson on his
column surveying the horizon, and the world our ship.
Meanwhile, poor Betty Flanders's letter, having caught the second post,
lay on the hall table--poor Betty Flanders writing her son's name, Jacob
Alan Flanders, Esq., as mothers do, and the ink pale, profuse,
suggesting how mothers down at Scarborough scribble over the fire with
their feet on the fender, when tea's cleared away, and can never, never
say, whatever it may be--probably this--Don't go with bad women, do be a
good boy; wear your thick shirts; and come back, come back, come back to
me.
But she said nothing of the kind. "Do you remember old Miss Wargrave,
who used to be so kind when you had the whooping-cough?" she wrote;
"she's dead at last, poor thing. They would like it if you wrote. Ellen
came over and we spent a nice day shopping. Old Mouse gets very stiff,
and we have to walk him up the smallest hill. Rebecca, at last, after I
don't know how long, went into Mr. Adamson's. Three teeth, he says, must
come out. Such mild weather for the time of year, the little buds
actually on the pear trees. And Mrs. Jarvis tells me--"Mrs. Flanders
liked Mrs. Jarvis, always said of her that she was too good for such a
quiet place, and, though she never listened to her discontent and told
her at the end of it (looking up, sucking her thread, or taking off her
spectacles) that a little peat wrapped round the iris roots keeps them
from the frost, and Parrot's great white sale is Tuesday next, "do
remember,"--Mrs. Flanders knew precisely how Mrs. Jarvis felt; and how
interesting her letters were, about Mrs. Jarvis, could one read them
year in, year out--the unpublished works of women, written by the
fireside in pale profusion, dried by the flame, for the blotting-paper's
worn to holes and the nib cleft and clotted. Then Captain Barfoot. Him
she called "the Captain," spoke of frankly, yet never without reserve.
The Captain was enquiring for her about Garfit's acre; advised chickens;
could promise profit; or had the sciatica; or Mrs. Barfoot had been
indoors for weeks; or the Captain says things look bad, politics that
is, for as Jacob knew, the Captain would sometimes talk, as the evening
waned, about Ireland or India; and then Mrs. Flanders would fall musing
about Morty, her brother, lost all these years--had the natives got him,
was his ship sunk--would the Admiralty tell her?--the Captain knocking
his pipe out, as Jacob knew, rising to go, stiffly stretching to pick up
Mrs. Flanders's wool which had rolled beneath the chair. Talk of the
chicken farm came back and back, the women, even at fifty, impulsive at
heart, sketching on the cloudy future flocks of Leghorns, Cochin Chinas,
Orpingtons; like Jacob in the blur of her outline; but powerful as he
was; fresh and vigorous, running about the house, scolding Rebecca.
The letter lay upon the hall table; Florinda coming in that night took
it up with her, put it on the table as she kissed Jacob, and Jacob
seeing the hand, left it there under the lamp, between the biscuit-tin
and the tobacco-box. They shut the bedroom door behind them.
The sitting-room neither knew nor cared. The door was shut; and to
suppose that wood, when it creaks, transmits anything save that rats are
busy and wood dry is childish. These old houses are only brick and wood,
soaked in human sweat, grained with human dirt. But if the pale blue
envelope lying by the biscuit-box had the feelings of a mother, the
heart was torn by the little creak, the sudden stir. Behind the door was
the obscene thing, the alarming presence, and terror would come over her
as at death, or the birth of a child. Better, perhaps, burst in and face
it than sit in the antechamber listening to the little creak, the sudden
stir, for her heart was swollen, and pain threaded it. My son, my
son--such would be her cry, uttered to hide her vision of him stretched
with Florinda, inexcusable, irrational, in a woman with three children
living at Scarborough. And the fault lay with Florinda. Indeed, when the
door opened and the couple came out, Mrs. Flanders would have flounced
upon her--only it was Jacob who came first, in his dressing-gown,
amiable, authoritative, beautifully healthy, like a baby after an
airing, with an eye clear as running water. Florinda followed, lazily
stretching; yawning a little; arranging her hair at the
looking-glass--while Jacob read his mother's letter.
Let us consider letters--how they come at breakfast, and at night, with
their yellow stamps and their green stamps, immortalized by the
postmark--for to see one's own envelope on another's table is to realize
how soon deeds sever and become alien. Then at last the power of the
mind to quit the body is manifest, and perhaps we fear or hate or wish
annihilated this phantom of ourselves, lying on the table. Still, there
are letters that merely say how dinner's at seven; others ordering coal;
making appointments. The hand in them is scarcely perceptible, let alone
the voice or the scowl. Ah, but when the post knocks and the letter
comes always the miracle seems repeated--speech attempted. Venerable are
letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.
Life would split asunder without them. "Come to tea, come to dinner,
what's the truth of the story? have you heard the news? life in the
capital is gay; the Russian dancers...." These are our stays and props.
These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe. And yet,
and yet ... when we go to dinner, when pressing finger-tips we hope to
meet somewhere soon, a doubt insinuates itself; is this the way to spend
our days? the rare, the limited, so soon dealt out to us--drinking tea?
dining out? And the notes accumulate. And the telephones ring. And
everywhere we go wires and tubes surround us to carry the voices that
try to penetrate before the last card is dealt and the days are over.
"Try to penetrate," for as we lift the cup, shake the hand, express the
hope, something whispers, Is this all? Can I never know, share, be
certain? Am I doomed all my days to write letters, send voices, which
fall upon the tea-table, fade upon the passage, making appointments,
while life dwindles, to come and dine? Yet letters are venerable; and
the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound
together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps--who
knows?--we might talk by the way.
Well, people have tried. Byron wrote letters. So did Cowper. For
centuries the writing-desk has contained sheets fit precisely for the
communications of friends. Masters of language, poets of long ages, have
turned from the sheet that endures to the sheet that perishes, pushing
aside the tea-tray, drawing close to the fire (for letters are written
when the dark presses round a bright red cave), and addressed themselves
to the task of reaching, touching, penetrating the individual heart.
Were it possible! But words have been used too often; touched and
turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seek
hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the
leaf.
Mrs. Flanders wrote letters; Mrs. Jarvis wrote them; Mrs. Durrant too;
Mother Stuart actually scented her pages, thereby adding a flavour which
the English language fails to provide; Jacob had written in his day long
letters about art, morality, and politics to young men at college. Clara
Durrant's letters were those of a child. Florinda--the impediment
between Florinda and her pen was something impassable. Fancy a
butterfly, gnat, or other winged insect, attached to a twig which,
clogged with mud, it rolls across a page. Her spelling was abominable.
Her sentiments infantile. And for some reason when she wrote she
declared her belief in God. Then there were crosses--tear stains; and
the hand itself rambling and redeemed only by the fact--which always did
redeem Florinda--by the fact that she cared. Yes, whether it was for
chocolate creams, hot baths, the shape of her face in the looking-glass,
Florinda could no more pretend a feeling than swallow whisky.
Incontinent was her rejection. Great men are truthful, and these little
prostitutes, staring in the fire, taking out a powder-puff, decorating
lips at an inch of looking-glass, have (so Jacob thought) an inviolable
fidelity.
Then he saw her turning up Greek Street upon another man's arm.
The light from the arc lamp drenched him from head to toe. He stood for
a minute motionless beneath it. Shadows chequered the street. Other
figures, single and together, poured out, wavered across, and
obliterated Florinda and the man.
The light drenched Jacob from head to toe. You could see the pattern on
his trousers; the old thorns on his stick; his shoe laces; bare hands;
and face.
It was as if a stone were ground to dust; as if white sparks flew from a
livid whetstone, which was his spine; as if the switchback railway,
having swooped to the depths, fell, fell, fell. This was in his face.
Whether we know what was in his mind is another question. Granted ten
years' seniority and a difference of sex, fear of him comes first; this
is swallowed up by a desire to help--overwhelming sense, reason, and the
time of night; anger would follow close on that--with Florinda, with
destiny; and then up would bubble an irresponsible optimism. "Surely
there's enough light in the street at this moment to drown all our cares
in gold!" Ah, what's the use of saying it? Even while you speak and look
over your shoulder towards Shaftesbury Avenue, destiny is chipping a
dent in him. He has turned to go. As for following him back to his
rooms, no--that we won't do.
Yet that, of course, is precisely what one does. He let himself in and
shut the door, though it was only striking ten on one of the city
clocks. No one can go to bed at ten. Nobody was thinking of going to
bed. It was January and dismal, but Mrs. Wagg stood on her doorstep, as
if expecting something to happen. A barrel-organ played like an obscene
nightingale beneath wet leaves. Children ran across the road. Here and
there one could see brown panelling inside the hall door.... The march
that the mind keeps beneath the windows of others is queer enough. Now
distracted by brown panelling; now by a fern in a pot; here improvising
a few phrases to dance with the barrel-organ; again snatching a detached
gaiety from a drunken man; then altogether absorbed by words the poor
shout across the street at each other (so outright, so lusty)--yet all
the while having for centre, for magnet, a young man alone in his room.
"Life is wicked--life is detestable," cried Rose Shaw.
The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have
been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any
adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our
passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this
corner?
"Holborn straight ahead of you," says the policeman. Ah, but where are
you going if instead of brushing past the old man with the white beard,
the silver medal, and the cheap violin, you let him go on with his
story, which ends in an invitation to step somewhere, to his room,
presumably, off Queen's Square, and there he shows you a collection of
birds' eggs and a letter from the Prince of Wales's secretary, and this
(skipping the intermediate stages) brings you one winter's day to the
Essex coast, where the little boat makes off to the ship, and the ship
sails and you behold on the skyline the Azores; and the flamingoes rise;
and there you sit on the verge of the marsh drinking rum-punch, an
outcast from civilization, for you have committed a crime, are infected
with yellow fever as likely as not, and--fill in the sketch as you like.
As frequent as street corners in Holborn are these chasms in the
continuity of our ways. Yet we keep straight on.
Rose Shaw, talking in rather an emotional manner to Mr. Bowley at Mrs.
Durrant's evening party a few nights back, said that life was wicked
because a man called Jimmy refused to marry a woman called (if memory
serves) Helen Aitken.
Both were beautiful. Both were inanimate. The oval tea-table invariably
separated them, and the plate of biscuits was all he ever gave her. He
bowed; she inclined her head. They danced. He danced divinely. They sat
in the alcove; never a word was said. Her pillow was wet with tears.
Kind Mr. Bowley and dear Rose Shaw marvelled and deplored. Bowley had
rooms in the Albany. Rose was re-born every evening precisely as the
clock struck eight. All four were civilization's triumphs, and if you
persist that a command of the English language is part of our
inheritance, one can only reply that beauty is almost always dumb. Male
beauty in association with female beauty breeds in the onlooker a sense
of fear. Often have I seen them--Helen and Jimmy--and likened them to
ships adrift, and feared for my own little craft. Or again, have you
ever watched fine collie dogs couchant at twenty yards' distance? As she
passed him his cup there was that quiver in her flanks. Bowley saw what
was up-asked Jimmy to breakfast. Helen must have confided in Rose. For
my own part, I find it exceedingly difficult to interpret songs without
words. And now Jimmy feeds crows in Flanders and Helen visits hospitals.
Oh, life is damnable, life is wicked, as Rose Shaw said.
The lamps of London uphold the dark as upon the points of burning
bayonets. The yellow canopy sinks and swells over the great four-poster.
Passengers in the mail-coaches running into London in the eighteenth
century looked through leafless branches and saw it flaring beneath
them. The light burns behind yellow blinds and pink blinds, and above
fanlights, and down in basement windows. The street market in Soho is
fierce with light. Raw meat, china mugs, and silk stockings blaze in it.
Raw voices wrap themselves round the flaring gas-jets. Arms akimbo, they
stand on the pavement bawling--Messrs. Kettle and Wilkinson; their wives
sit in the shop, furs wrapped round their necks, arms folded, eyes
contemptuous. Such faces as one sees. The little man fingering the meat
must have squatted before the fire in innumerable lodging-houses, and
heard and seen and known so much that it seems to utter itself even
volubly from dark eyes, loose lips, as he fingers the meat silently, his
face sad as a poet's, and never a song sung. Shawled women carry babies
with purple eyelids; boys stand at street corners; girls look across the
road--rude illustrations, pictures in a book whose pages we turn over
and over as if we should at last find what we look for. Every face,
every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture
feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do
we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the
pages--oh, here is Jacob's room.
He sat at the table reading the Globe. The pinkish sheet was spread flat
before him. He propped his face in his hand, so that the skin of his
cheek was wrinkled in deep folds. Terribly severe he looked, set, and
defiant. (What people go through in half an hour! But nothing could save
him. These events are features of our landscape. A foreigner coming to
London could scarcely miss seeing St. Paul's.) He judged life. These
pinkish and greenish newspapers are thin sheets of gelatine pressed
nightly over the brain and heart of the world. They take the impression
of the whole. Jacob cast his eye over it. A strike, a murder, football,
bodies found; vociferation from all parts of England simultaneously. How
miserable it is that the Globe newspaper offers nothing better to Jacob
Flanders! When a child begins to read history one marvels, sorrowfully,
to hear him spell out in his new voice the ancient words.
The Prime Minister's speech was reported in something over five columns.
Feeling in his pocket, Jacob took out a pipe and proceeded to fill it.
Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed. Jacob took the paper
over to the fire. The Prime Minister proposed a measure for giving Home
Rule to Ireland. Jacob knocked out his pipe. He was certainly thinking
about Home Rule in Ireland--a very difficult matter. A very cold night.
The snow, which had been falling all night, lay at three o'clock in the
afternoon over the fields and the hill. Clumps of withered grass stood
out upon the hill-top; the furze bushes were black, and now and then a
black shiver crossed the snow as the wind drove flurries of frozen
particles before it. The sound was that of a broom sweeping--sweeping.
The stream crept along by the road unseen by any one. Sticks and leaves
caught in the frozen grass. The sky was sullen grey and the trees of
black iron. Uncompromising was the severity of the country. At four
o'clock the snow was again falling. The day had gone out.
A window tinged yellow about two feet across alone combated the white
fields and the black trees .... At six o'clock a man's figure carrying a
lantern crossed the field .... A raft of twig stayed upon a stone,
suddenly detached itself, and floated towards the culvert .... A load of
snow slipped and fell from a fir branch .... Later there was a mournful
cry .... A motor car came along the road shoving the dark before it ....
The dark shut down behind it....
Spaces of complete immobility separated each of these movements. The
land seemed to lie dead .... Then the old shepherd returned stiffly
across the field. Stiffly and painfully the frozen earth was trodden
under and gave beneath pressure like a treadmill. The worn voices of
clocks repeated the fact of the hour all night long.
Jacob, too, heard them, and raked out the fire. He rose. He stretched
himself. He went to bed.
CHAPTER NINE
The Countess of Rocksbier sat at the head of the table alone with Jacob.
Fed upon champagne and spices for at least two centuries (four, if you
count the female line), the Countess Lucy looked well fed. A
discriminating nose she had for scents, prolonged, as if in quest of
them; her underlip protruded a narrow red shelf; her eyes were small,
with sandy tufts for eyebrows, and her jowl was heavy. Behind her (the
window looked on Grosvenor Square) stood Moll Pratt on the pavement,
offering violets for sale; and Mrs. Hilda Thomas, lifting her skirts,
preparing to cross the road. One was from Walworth; the other from
Putney. Both wore black stockings, but Mrs. Thomas was coiled in furs.
The comparison was much in Lady Rocksbier's favour. Moll had more
humour, but was violent; stupid too. Hilda Thomas was mealy-mouthed, all
her silver frames aslant; egg-cups in the drawing-room; and the windows
shrouded. Lady Rocksbier, whatever the deficiencies of her profile, had
been a great rider to hounds. She used her knife with authority, tore
her chicken bones, asking Jacob's pardon, with her own hands.
"Who is that driving by?" she asked Boxall, the butler.
"Lady Firtlemere's carriage, my lady," which reminded her to send a card
to ask after his lordship's health. A rude old lady, Jacob thought. The
wine was excellent. She called herself "an old woman"--"so kind to lunch
with an old woman"--which flattered him. She talked of Joseph
Chamberlain, whom she had known. She said that Jacob must come and
meet--one of our celebrities. And the Lady Alice came in with three dogs
on a leash, and Jackie, who ran to kiss his grandmother, while Boxall
brought in a telegram, and Jacob was given a good cigar.
A few moments before a horse jumps it slows, sidles, gathers itself
together, goes up like a monster wave, and pitches down on the further
side. Hedges and sky swoop in a semicircle. Then as if your own body ran
into the horse's body and it was your own forelegs grown with his that
sprang, rushing through the air you go, the ground resilient, bodies a
mass of muscles, yet you have command too, upright stillness, eyes
accurately judging. Then the curves cease, changing to downright hammer
strokes, which jar; and you draw up with a jolt; sitting back a little,
sparkling, tingling, glazed with ice over pounding arteries, gasping:
"Ah! ho! Hah!" the steam going up from the horses as they jostle
together at the cross-roads, where the signpost is, and the woman in the
apron stands and stares at the doorway. The man raises himself from the
cabbages to stare too.
So Jacob galloped over the fields of Essex, flopped in the mud, lost the
hunt, and rode by himself eating sandwiches, looking over the hedges,
noticing the colours as if new scraped, cursing his luck.
He had tea at the Inn; and there they all were, slapping, stamping,
saying, "After you," clipped, curt, jocose, red as the wattles of
turkeys, using free speech until Mrs. Horsefield and her friend Miss
Dudding appeared at the doorway with their skirts hitched up, and hair
looping down. Then Tom Dudding rapped at the window with his whip. A
motor car throbbed in the courtyard. Gentlemen, feeling for matches,
moved out, and Jacob went into the bar with Brandy Jones to smoke with
the rustics. There was old Jevons with one eye gone, and his clothes the
colour of mud, his bag over his back, and his brains laid feet down in
earth among the violet roots and the nettle roots; Mary Sanders with her
box of wood; and Tom sent for beer, the half-witted son of the
sexton--all this within thirty miles of London.
Mrs. Papworth, of Endell Street, Covent Garden, did for Mr. Bonamy in
New Square, Lincoln's Inn, and as she washed up the dinner things in the
scullery she heard the young gentlemen talking in the room next door.
Mr. Sanders was there again; Flanders she meant; and where an
inquisitive old woman gets a name wrong, what chance is there that she
will faithfully report an argument? As she held the plates under water
and then dealt them on the pile beneath the hissing gas, she listened:
heard Sanders speaking in a loud rather overbearing tone of voice:
"good," he said, and "absolute" and "justice" and "punishment," and "the
will of the majority." Then her gentleman piped up; she backed him for
argument against Sanders. Yet Sanders was a fine young fellow (here all
the scraps went swirling round the sink, scoured after by her purple,
almost nailless hands). "Women"--she thought, and wondered what Sanders
and her gentleman did in THAT line, one eyelid sinking perceptibly as
she mused, for she was the mother of nine--three still-born and one deaf
and dumb from birth. Putting the plates in the rack she heard once more
Sanders at it again ("He don't give Bonamy a chance," she thought).
"Objective something," said Bonamy; and "common ground" and something
else--all very long words, she noted. "Book learning does it," she
thought to herself, and, as she thrust her arms into her jacket, heard
something--might be the little table by the fire--fall; and then stamp,
stamp, stamp--as if they were having at each other--round the room,
making the plates dance.
"To-morrow's breakfast, sir," she said, opening the door; and there were
Sanders and Bonamy like two bulls of Bashan driving each other up and
down, making such a racket, and all them chairs in the way. They never
noticed her. She felt motherly towards them. "Your breakfast, sir," she
said, as they came near. And Bonamy, all his hair touzled and his tie
flying, broke off, and pushed Sanders into the arm-chair, and said Mr.
Sanders had smashed the coffee-pot and he was teaching Mr. Sanders--
Sure enough, the coffee-pot lay broken on the hearthrug.
"Any day this week except Thursday," wrote Miss Perry, and this was not
the first invitation by any means. Were all Miss Perry's weeks blank
with the exception of Thursday, and was her only desire to see her old
friend's son? Time is issued to spinster ladies of wealth in long white
ribbons. These they wind round and round, round and round, assisted by
five female servants, a butler, a fine Mexican parrot, regular meals,
Mudie's library, and friends dropping in. A little hurt she was already
that Jacob had not called.
"Your mother," she said, "is one of my oldest friends."
Miss Rosseter, who was sitting by the fire, holding the Spectator
between her cheek and the blaze, refused to have a fire screen, but
finally accepted one. The weather was then discussed, for in deference
to Parkes, who was opening little tables, graver matters were postponed.
Miss Rosseter drew Jacob's attention to the beauty of the cabinet.
"So wonderfully clever in picking things up," she said. Miss Perry had
found it in Yorkshire. The North of England was discussed. When Jacob
spoke they both listened. Miss Perry was bethinking her of something
suitable and manly to say when the door opened and Mr. Benson was
announced. Now there were four people sitting in that room. Miss Perry
aged 66; Miss Rosseter 42; Mr. Benson 38; and Jacob 25.
"My old friend looks as well as ever," said Mr. Benson, tapping the bars
of the parrot's cage; Miss Rosseter simultaneously praised the tea;
Jacob handed the wrong plates; and Miss Perry signified her desire to
approach more closely. "Your brothers," she began vaguely.
"Archer and John," Jacob supplied her. Then to her pleasure she
recovered Rebecca's name; and how one day "when you were all little
boys, playing in the drawing-room--"
"But Miss Perry has the kettle-holder," said Miss Rosseter, and indeed
Miss Perry was clasping it to her breast. (Had she, then, loved Jacob's
father?)
"So clever"--"not so good as usual"--"I thought it most unfair," said
Mr. Benson and Miss Rosseter, discussing the Saturday Westminster. Did
they not compete regularly for prizes? Had not Mr. Benson three times
won a guinea, and Miss Rosseter once ten and sixpence? Of course Everard
Benson had a weak heart, but still, to win prizes, remember parrots,
toady Miss Perry, despise Miss Rosseter, give tea-parties in his rooms
(which were in the style of Whistler, with pretty books on tables), all
this, so Jacob felt without knowing him, made him a contemptible ass. As
for Miss Rosseter, she had nursed cancer, and now painted water-colours.
"Running away so soon?" said Miss Perry vaguely. "At home every
afternoon, if you've nothing better to do--except Thursdays."
"I've never known you desert your old ladies once," Miss Rosseter was
saying, and Mr. Benson was stooping over the parrot's cage, and Miss
Perry was moving towards the bell....
The fire burnt clear between two pillars of greenish marble, and on the
mantelpiece there was a green clock guarded by Britannia leaning on her
spear. As for pictures--a maiden in a large hat offered roses over the
garden gate to a gentleman in eighteenth-century costume. A mastiff lay
extended against a battered door. The lower panes of the windows were of
ground glass, and the curtains, accurately looped, were of plush and
green too.
Laurette and Jacob sat with their toes in the fender side by side, in
two large chairs covered in green plush. Laurette's skirts were short,
her legs long, thin, and transparently covered. Her fingers stroked her
ankles.
"It's not exactly that I don't understand them," she was saying
thoughtfully. "I must go and try again."
"What time will you be there?" said Jacob.
She shrugged her shoulders.
"To-morrow?"
No, not to-morrow.
"This weather makes me long for the country," she said, looking over her
shoulder at the back view of tall houses through the window.
"I wish you'd been with me on Saturday," said Jacob.
"I used to ride," she said. She got up gracefully, calmly. Jacob got up.
She smiled at him. As she shut the door he put so many shillings on the
mantelpiece.
Altogether a most reasonable conversation; a most respectable room; an
intelligent girl. Only Madame herself seeing Jacob out had about her
that leer, that lewdness, that quake of the surface (visible in the eyes
chiefly), which threatens to spill the whole bag of ordure, with
difficulty held together, over the pavement. In short, something was
wrong.
Not so very long ago the workmen had gilt the final "y" in Lord
Macaulay's name, and the names stretched in unbroken file round the dome
of the British Museum. At a considerable depth beneath, many hundreds of
the living sat at the spokes of a cart-wheel copying from printed books
into manuscript books; now and then rising to consult the catalogue;
regaining their places stealthily, while from time to time a silent man
replenished their compartments.
There was a little catastrophe. Miss Marchmont's pile overbalanced and
fell into Jacob's compartment. Such things happened to Miss Marchmont.
What was she seeking through millions of pages, in her old plush dress,
and her wig of claret-coloured hair, with her gems and her chilblains?
Sometimes one thing, sometimes another, to confirm her philosophy that
colour is sound--or, perhaps, it has something to do with music. She
could never quite say, though it was not for lack of trying. And she
could not ask you back to her room, for it was "not very clean, I'm
afraid," so she must catch you in the passage, or take a chair in Hyde
Park to explain her philosophy. The rhythm of the soul depends on
it--("how rude the little boys are!" she would say), and Mr. Asquith's
Irish policy, and Shakespeare comes in, "and Queen Alexandra most
graciously once acknowledged a copy of my pamphlet," she would say,
waving the little boys magnificently away. But she needs funds to
publish her book, for "publishers are capitalists--publishers are
cowards." And so, digging her elbow into her pile of books it fell over.
Jacob remained quite unmoved.
But Fraser, the atheist, on the other side, detesting plush, more than
once accosted with leaflets, shifted irritably. He abhorred
vagueness--the Christian religion, for example, and old Dean Parker's
pronouncements. Dean Parker wrote books and Fraser utterly destroyed
them by force of logic and left his children unbaptized--his wife did it
secretly in the washing basin--but Fraser ignored her, and went on
supporting blasphemers, distributing leaflets, getting up his facts in
the British Museum, always in the same check suit and fiery tie, but
pale, spotted, irritable. Indeed, what a work--to destroy religion!
Jacob transcribed a whole passage from Marlowe.
Miss Julia Hedge, the feminist, waited for her books. They did not come.
She wetted her pen. She looked about her. Her eye was caught by the
final letters in Lord Macaulay's name. And she read them all round the
dome--the names of great men which remind us--"Oh damn," said Julia
Hedge, "why didn't they leave room for an Eliot or a Bronte?"
Unfortunate Julia! wetting her pen in bitterness, and leaving her shoe
laces untied. When her books came she applied herself to her gigantic
labours, but perceived through one of the nerves of her exasperated
sensibility how composedly, unconcernedly, and with every consideration
the male readers applied themselves to theirs. That young man for
example. What had he got to do except copy out poetry? And she must
study statistics. There are more women than men. Yes; but if you let
women work as men work, they'll die off much quicker. They'll become
extinct. That was her argument. Death and gall and bitter dust were on
her pen-tip; and as the afternoon wore on, red had worked into her
cheek-bones and a light was in her eyes.
But what brought Jacob Flanders to read Marlowe in the British Museum?
Youth, youth--something savage--something pedantic. For example, there
is Mr. Masefield, there is Mr. Bennett. Stuff them into the flame of
Marlowe and burn them to cinders. Let not a shred remain. Don't palter
with the second rate. Detest your own age. Build a better one. And to
set that on foot read incredibly dull essays upon Marlowe to your
friends. For which purpose one most collate editions in the British
Museum. One must do the thing oneself. Useless to trust to the
Victorians, who disembowel, or to the living, who are mere publicists.
The flesh and blood of the future depends entirely upon six young men.
And as Jacob was one of them, no doubt he looked a little regal and
pompous as he turned his page, and Julia Hedge disliked him naturally
enough.
But then a pudding-faced man pushed a note towards Jacob, and Jacob,
leaning back in his chair, began an uneasy murmured conversation, and
they went off together (Julia Hedge watched them), and laughed aloud
(she thought) directly they were in the hall.
Nobody laughed in the reading-room. There were shirtings, murmurings,
apologetic sneezes, and sudden unashamed devastating coughs. The lesson
hour was almost over. Ushers were collecting exercises. Lazy children
wanted to stretch. Good ones scribbled assiduously--ah, another day over
and so little done! And now and then was to be heard from the whole
collection of human beings a heavy sigh, after which the humiliating old
man would cough shamelessly, and Miss Marchmont hinnied like a horse.
Jacob came back only in time to return his books.
The books were now replaced. A few letters of the alphabet were
sprinkled round the dome. Closely stood together in a ring round the
dome were Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Shakespeare; the literature
of Rome, Greece, China, India, Persia. One leaf of poetry was pressed
flat against another leaf, one burnished letter laid smooth against
another in a density of meaning, a conglomeration of loveliness.
"One does want one's tea," said Miss Marchmont, reclaiming her shabby
umbrella.
Miss Marchmont wanted her tea, but could never resist a last look at the
Elgin Marbles. She looked at them sideways, waving her hand and
muttering a word or two of salutation which made Jacob and the other man
turn round. She smiled at them amiably. It all came into her
philosophy--that colour is sound, or perhaps it has something to do with
music. And having done her service, she hobbled off to tea. It was
closing time. The public collected in the hall to receive their
umbrellas.
For the most part the students wait their turn very patiently. To stand
and wait while some one examines white discs is soothing. The umbrella
will certainly be found. But the fact leads you on all day through
Macaulay, Hobbes, Gibbon; through octavos, quartos, folios; sinks deeper
and deeper through ivory pages and morocco bindings into this density of
thought, this conglomeration of knowledge.
Jacob's walking-stick was like all the others; they had muddled the
pigeon-holes perhaps.
There is in the British Museum an enormous mind. Consider that Plato is
there cheek by jowl with Aristotle; and Shakespeare with Marlowe. This
great mind is hoarded beyond the power of any single mind to possess it.
Nevertheless (as they take so long finding one's walking-stick) one
can't help thinking how one might come with a notebook, sit at a desk,
and read it all through. A learned man is the most venerable of all--a
man like Huxtable of Trinity, who writes all his letters in Greek, they
say, and could have kept his end up with Bentley. And then there is
science, pictures, architecture,--an enormous mind.
They pushed the walking-stick across the counter. Jacob stood beneath
the porch of the British Museum. It was raining. Great Russell Street
was glazed and shining--here yellow, here, outside the chemist's, red
and pale blue. People scuttled quickly close to the wall; carriages
rattled rather helter-skelter down the streets. Well, but a little rain
hurts nobody. Jacob walked off much as if he had been in the country;
and late that night there he was sitting at his table with his pipe and
his book.
The rain poured down. The British Museum stood in one solid immense
mound, very pale, very sleek in the rain, not a quarter of a mile from
him. The vast mind was sheeted with stone; and each compartment in the
depths of it was safe and dry. The night-watchmen, flashing their
lanterns over the backs of Plato and Shakespeare, saw that on the
twenty-second of February neither flame, rat, nor burglar was going to
violate these treasures--poor, highly respectable men, with wives and
families at Kentish Town, do their best for twenty years to protect
Plato and Shakespeare, and then are buried at Highgate.
Stone lies solid over the British Museum, as bone lies cool over the
visions and heat of the brain. Only here the brain is Plato's brain and
Shakespeare's; the brain has made pots and statues, great bulls and
little jewels, and crossed the river of death this way and that
incessantly, seeking some landing, now wrapping the body well for its
long sleep; now laying a penny piece on the eyes; now turning the toes
scrupulously to the East. Meanwhile, Plato continues his dialogue; in
spite of the rain; in spite of the cab whistles; in spite of the woman
in the mews behind Great Ormond Street who has come home drunk and cries
all night long, "Let me in! Let me in!"
In the street below Jacob's room voices were raised.
But he read on. For after all Plato continues imperturbably. And Hamlet
utters his soliloquy. And there the Elgin Marbles lie, all night long,
old Jones's lantern sometimes recalling Ulysses, or a horse's head; or
sometimes a flash of gold, or a mummy's sunk yellow cheek. Plato and
Shakespeare continue; and Jacob, who was reading the Phaedrus, heard
people vociferating round the lamp-post, and the woman battering at the
door and crying, "Let me in!" as if a coal had dropped from the fire, or
a fly, falling from the ceiling, had lain on its back, too weak to turn
over.
The Phaedrus is very difficult. And so, when at length one reads
straight ahead, falling into step, marching on, becoming (so it seems)
momentarily part of this rolling, imperturbable energy, which has driven
darkness before it since Plato walked the Acropolis, it is impossible to
see to the fire.
The dialogue draws to its close. Plato's argument is done. Plato's
argument is stowed away in Jacob's mind, and for five minutes Jacob's
mind continues alone, onwards, into the darkness. Then, getting up, he
parted the curtains, and saw, with astonishing clearness, how the
Springetts opposite had gone to bed; how it rained; how the Jews and the
foreign woman, at the end of the street, stood by the pillar-box,
arguing.
Every time the door opened and fresh people came in, those already in
the room shifted slightly; those who were standing looked over their
shoulders; those who were sitting stopped in the middle of sentences.
What with the light, the wine, the strumming of a guitar, something
exciting happened each time the door opened. Who was coming in?
"That's Gibson."
"The painter?"
"But go on with what you were saying."
They were saying something that was far, far too intimate to be said
outright. But the noise of the voices served like a clapper in little
Mrs. Withers's mind, scaring into the air blocks of small birds, and
then they'd settle, and then she'd feel afraid, put one hand to her
hair, bind both round her knees, and look up at Oliver Skelton
nervously, and say:
"Promise, PROMISE, you'll tell no one." ... so considerate he was, so
tender. It was her husband's character that she discussed. He was cold,
she said.
Down upon them came the splendid Magdalen, brown, warm, voluminous,
scarcely brushing the grass with her sandalled feet. Her hair flew; pins
seemed scarcely to attach the flying silks. An actress of course, a line
of light perpetually beneath her. It was only "My dear" that she said,
but her voice went jodelling between Alpine passes. And down she tumbled
on the floor, and sang, since there was nothing to be said, round ah's
and oh's. Mangin, the poet, coming up to her, stood looking down at her,
drawing at his pipe. The dancing began.
Grey-haired Mrs. Keymer asked Dick Graves to tell her who Mangin was,
and said that she had seen too much of this sort of thing in Paris
(Magdalen had got upon his knees; now his pipe was in her mouth) to be
shocked. "Who is that?" she said, staying her glasses when they came to
Jacob, for indeed he looked quiet, not indifferent, but like some one on
a beach, watching.
"Oh, my dear, let me lean on you," gasped Helen Askew, hopping on one
foot, for the silver cord round her ankle had worked loose. Mrs. Keymer
turned and looked at the picture on the wall.
"Look at Jacob," said Helen (they were binding his eyes for some game).
And Dick Graves, being a little drunk, very faithful, and very
simple-minded, told her that he thought Jacob the greatest man he had
ever known. And down they sat cross-legged upon cushions and talked
about Jacob, and Helen's voice trembled, for they both seemed heroes to
her, and the friendship between them so much more beautiful than women's
friendships. Anthony Pollett now asked her to dance, and as she danced
she looked at them, over her shoulder, standing at the table, drinking
together.
The magnificent world--the live, sane, vigorous world .... These words
refer to the stretch of wood pavement between Hammersmith and Holborn in
January between two and three in the morning. That was the ground
beneath Jacob's feet. It was healthy and magnificent because one room,
above a mews, somewhere near the river, contained fifty excited,
talkative, friendly people. And then to stride over the pavement (there
was scarcely a cab or policeman in sight) is of itself exhilarating. The
long loop of Piccadilly, diamond-stitched, shows to best advantage when
it is empty. A young man has nothing to fear. On the contrary, though he
may not have said anything brilliant, he feels pretty confident he can
hold his own. He was pleased to have met Mangin; he admired the young
woman on the floor; he liked them all; he liked that sort of thing. In
short, all the drums and trumpets were sounding. The street scavengers
were the only people about at the moment. It is scarcely necessary to
say how well-disposed Jacob felt towards them; how it pleased him to let
himself in with his latch-key at his own door; how he seemed to bring
back with him into the empty room ten or eleven people whom he had not
known when he set out; how he looked about for something to read, and
found it, and never read it, and fell asleep.
Indeed, drums and trumpets is no phrase. Indeed, Piccadilly and Holborn,
and the empty sitting-room and the sitting-room with fifty people in it
are liable at any moment to blow music into the air. Women perhaps are
more excitable than men. It is seldom that any one says anything about
it, and to see the hordes crossing Waterloo Bridge to catch the non-stop
to Surbiton one might think that reason impelled them. No, no. It is the
drums and trumpets. Only, should you turn aside into one of those little
bays on Waterloo Bridge to think the matter over, it will probably seem
to you all a muddle--all a mystery.
They cross the Bridge incessantly. Sometimes in the midst of carts and
omnibuses a lorry will appear with great forest trees chained to it.
Then, perhaps, a mason's van with newly lettered tombstones recording
how some one loved some one who is buried at Putney. Then the motor car
in front jerks forward, and the tombstones pass too quick for you to
read more. All the time the stream of people never ceases passing from
the Surrey side to the Strand; from the Strand to the Surrey side. It
seems as if the poor had gone raiding the town, and now trapesed back to
their own quarters, like beetles scurrying to their holes, for that old
woman fairly hobbles towards Waterloo, grasping a shiny bag, as if she
had been out into the light and now made off with some scraped chicken
bones to her hovel underground. On the other hand, though the wind is
rough and blowing in their faces, those girls there, striding hand in
hand, shouting out a song, seem to feel neither cold nor shame. They are
hatless. They triumph.
The wind has blown up the waves. The river races beneath us, and the men
standing on the barges have to lean all their weight on the tiller. A
black tarpaulin is tied down over a swelling load of gold. Avalanches of
coal glitter blackly. As usual, painters are slung on planks across the
great riverside hotels, and the hotel windows have already points of
light in them. On the other side the city is white as if with age; St.
Paul's swells white above the fretted, pointed, or oblong buildings
beside it. The cross alone shines rosy-gilt. But what century have we
reached? Has this procession from the Surrey side to the Strand gone on
for ever? That old man has been crossing the Bridge these six hundred
years, with the rabble of little boys at his heels, for he is drunk, or
blind with misery, and tied round with old clouts of clothing such as
pilgrims might have worn. He shuffles on. No one stands still. It seems
as if we marched to the sound of music; perhaps the wind and the river;
perhaps these same drums and trumpets--the ecstasy and hubbub of the
soul. Why, even the unhappy laugh, and the policeman, far from judging
the drunk man, surveys him humorously, and the little boys scamper back
again, and the clerk from Somerset House has nothing but tolerance for
him, and the man who is reading half a page of Lothair at the bookstall
muses charitably, with his eyes off the print, and the girl hesitates at
the crossing and turns on him the bright yet vague glance of the young.
Bright yet vague. She is perhaps twenty-two. She is shabby. She crosses
the road and looks at the daffodils and the red tulips in the florist's
window. She hesitates, and makes off in the direction of Temple Bar. She
walks fast, and yet anything distracts her. Now she seems to see, and
now to notice nothing.
CHAPTER TEN
Through the disused graveyard in the parish of St. Pancras, Fanny Elmer
strayed between the white tombs which lean against the wall, crossing
the grass to read a name, hurrying on when the grave-keeper approached,
hurrying into the street, pausing now by a window with blue china, now
quickly making up for lost time, abruptly entering a baker's shop,
buying rolls, adding cakes, going on again so that any one wishing to
follow must fairly trot. She was not drably shabby, though. She wore
silk stockings, and silver-buckled shoes, only the red feather in her
hat drooped, and the clasp of her bag was weak, for out fell a copy of
Madame Tussaud's programme as she walked. She had the ankles of a stag.
Her face was hidden. Of course, in this dusk, rapid movements, quick
glances, and soaring hopes come naturally enough. She passed right
beneath Jacob's window.
The house was flat, dark, and silent. Jacob was at home engaged upon a
chess problem, the board being on a stool between his knees. One hand
was fingering the hair at the back of his head. He slowly brought it
forward and raised the white queen from her square; then put her down
again on the same spot. He filled his pipe; ruminated; moved two pawns;
advanced the white knight; then ruminated with one finger upon the
bishop. Now Fanny Elmer passed beneath the window.
She was on her way to sit to Nick Bramham the painter.
She sat in a flowered Spanish shawl, holding in her hand a yellow novel.
"A little lower, a little looser, so--better, that's right," Bramham
mumbled, who was drawing her, and smoking at the same time, and was
naturally speechless. His head might have been the work of a sculptor,
who had squared the forehead, stretched the mouth, and left marks of his
thumbs and streaks from his fingers in the clay. But the eyes had never
been shut. They were rather prominent, and rather bloodshot, as if from
staring and staring, and when he spoke they looked for a second
disturbed, but went on staring. An unshaded electric light hung above
her head.
As for the beauty of women, it is like the light on the sea, never
constant to a single wave. They all have it; they all lose it. Now she
is dull and thick as bacon; now transparent as a hanging glass. The
fixed faces are the dull ones. Here comes Lady Venice displayed like a
monument for admiration, but carved in alabaster, to be set on the
mantelpiece and never dusted. A dapper brunette complete from head to
foot serves only as an illustration to lie upon the drawing-room table.
The women in the streets have the faces of playing cards; the outlines
accurately filled in with pink or yellow, and the line drawn tightly
round them. Then, at a top-floor window, leaning out, looking down, you
see beauty itself; or in the corner of an omnibus; or squatted in a
ditch--beauty glowing, suddenly expressive, withdrawn the moment after.
No one can count on it or seize it or have it wrapped in paper. Nothing
is to be won from the shops, and Heaven knows it would be better to sit
at home than haunt the plate-glass windows in the hope of lifting the
shining green, the glowing ruby, out of them alive. Sea glass in a
saucer loses its lustre no sooner than silks do. Thus if you talk of a
beautiful woman you mean only something flying fast which for a second
uses the eyes, lips, or cheeks of Fanny Elmer, for example, to glow
through.
She was not beautiful, as she sat stiffly; her underlip too prominent;
her nose too large; her eyes too near together. She was a thin girl,
with brilliant cheeks and dark hair, sulky just now, or stiff with
sitting. When Bramham snapped his stick of charcoal she started. Bramham
was out of temper. He squatted before the gas fire warming his hands.
Meanwhile she looked at his drawing. He grunted. Fanny threw on a
dressing-gown and boiled a kettle.
"By God, it's bad," said Bramham.
Fanny dropped on to the floor, clasped her hands round her knees, and
looked at him, her beautiful eyes--yes, beauty, flying through the room,
shone there for a second. Fanny's eyes seemed to question, to
commiserate, to be, for a second, love itself. But she exaggerated.
Bramham noticed nothing. And when the kettle boiled, up she scrambled,
more like a colt or a puppy than a loving woman.
Now Jacob walked over to the window and stood with his hands in his
pockets. Mr. Springett opposite came out, looked at his shop window, and
went in again. The children drifted past, eyeing the pink sticks of
sweetstuff. Pickford's van swung down the street. A small boy twirled
from a rope. Jacob turned away. Two minutes later he opened the front
door, and walked off in the direction of Holborn.
Fanny Elmer took down her cloak from the hook. Nick Bramham unpinned his
drawing and rolled it under his arm. They turned out the lights and set
off down the street, holding on their way through all the people, motor
cars, omnibuses, carts, until they reached Leicester Square, five
minutes before Jacob reached it, for his way was slightly longer, and he
had been stopped by a block in Holborn waiting to see the King drive by,
so that Nick and Fanny were already leaning over the barrier in the
promenade at the Empire when Jacob pushed through the swing doors and
took his place beside them.
"Hullo, never noticed you," said Nick, five minutes later.
"Bloody rot," said Jacob.
"Miss Elmer," said Nick.
Jacob took his pipe out of his mouth very awkwardly.
Very awkward he was. And when they sat upon a plush sofa and let the
smoke go up between them and the stage, and heard far off the
high-pitched voices and the jolly orchestra breaking in opportunely he
was still awkward, only Fanny thought: "What a beautiful voice!" She
thought how little he said yet how firm it was. She thought how young
men are dignified and aloof, and how unconscious they are, and how
quietly one might sit beside Jacob and look at him. And how childlike he
would be, come in tired of an evening, she thought, and how majestic; a
little overbearing perhaps; "But I wouldn't give way," she thought. He
got up and leant over the barrier. The smoke hung about him.
And for ever the beauty of young men seems to be set in smoke, however
lustily they chase footballs, or drive cricket balls, dance, run, or
stride along roads. Possibly they are soon to lose it. Possibly they
look into the eyes of faraway heroes, and take their station among us
half contemptuously, she thought (vibrating like a fiddle-string, to be
played on and snapped). Anyhow, they love silence, and speak
beautifully, each word falling like a disc new cut, not a hubble-bubble
of small smooth coins such as girls use; and they move decidedly, as if
they knew how long to stay and when to go--oh, but Mr. Flanders was only
gone to get a programme.
"The dancers come right at the end," he said, coming back to them.
And isn't it pleasant, Fanny went on thinking, how young men bring out
lots of silver coins from their trouser pockets, and look at them,
instead of having just so many in a purse?
Then there she was herself, whirling across the stage in white flounces,
and the music was the dance and fling of her own soul, and the whole
machinery, rock and gear of the world was spun smoothly into those swift
eddies and falls, she felt, as she stood rigid leaning over the barrier
two feet from Jacob Flanders.
Her screwed-up black glove dropped to the floor. When Jacob gave it her,
she started angrily. For never was there a more irrational passion. And
Jacob was afraid of her for a moment--so violent, so dangerous is it
when young women stand rigid; grasp the barrier; fall in love.
It was the middle of February. The roofs of Hampstead Garden Suburb lay
in a tremulous haze. It was too hot to walk. A dog barked, barked,
barked down in the hollow. The liquid shadows went over the plain.
The body after long illness is languid, passive, receptive of sweetness,
but too weak to contain it. The tears well and fall as the dog barks in
the hollow, the children skim after hoops, the country darkens and
brightens. Beyond a veil it seems. Ah, but draw the veil thicker lest I
faint with sweetness, Fanny Elmer sighed, as she sat on a bench in
Judges Walk looking at Hampstead Garden Suburb. But the dog went on
barking. The motor cars hooted on the road. She heard a far-away rush
and humming. Agitation was at her heart. Up she got and walked. The
grass was freshly green; the sun hot. All round the pond children were
stooping to launch little boats; or were drawn back screaming by their
nurses.
At mid-day young women walk out into the air. All the men are busy in
the town. They stand by the edge of the blue pond. The fresh wind
scatters the children's voices all about. My children, thought Fanny
Elmer. The women stand round the pond, beating off great prancing shaggy
dogs. Gently the baby is rocked in the perambulator. The eyes of all the
nurses, mothers, and wandering women are a little glazed, absorbed. They
gently nod instead of answering when the little boys tug at their
skirts, begging them to move on.
And Fanny moved, hearing some cry--a workman's whistle perhaps--high in
mid-air. Now, among the trees, it was the thrush trilling out into the
warm air a flutter of jubilation, but fear seemed to spur him, Fanny
thought; as if he too were anxious with such joy at his heart--as if he
were watched as he sang, and pressed by tumult to sing. There! Restless,
he flew to the next tree. She heard his song more faintly. Beyond it was
the humming of the wheels and the wind rushing.
She spent tenpence on lunch.
"Dear, miss, she's left her umbrella," grumbled the mottled woman in the
glass box near the door at the Express Dairy Company's shop.
"Perhaps I'll catch her," answered Milly Edwards, the waitress with the
pale plaits of hair; and she dashed through the door.
"No good," she said, coming back a moment later with Fanny's cheap
umbrella. She put her hand to her plaits.
"Oh, that door!" grumbled the cashier.
Her hands were cased in black mittens, and the finger-tips that drew in
the paper slips were swollen as sausages.
"Pie and greens for one. Large coffee and crumpets. Eggs on toast. Two
fruit cakes."
Thus the sharp voices of the waitresses snapped. The lunchers heard
their orders repeated with approval; saw the next table served with
anticipation. Their own eggs on toast were at last delivered. Their eyes
strayed no more.
Damp cubes of pastry fell into mouths opened like triangular bags.
Nelly Jenkinson, the typist, crumbled her cake indifferently enough.
Every time the door opened she looked up. What did she expect to see?
The coal merchant read the Telegraph without stopping, missed the
saucer, and, feeling abstractedly, put the cup down on the table-cloth.
"Did you ever hear the like of that for impertinence?" Mrs. Parsons
wound up, brushing the crumbs from her furs.
"Hot milk and scone for one. Pot of tea. Roll and butter," cried the
waitresses.
The door opened and shut.
Such is the life of the elderly.
It is curious, lying in a boat, to watch the waves. Here are three
coming regularly one after another, all much of a size. Then, hurrying
after them comes a fourth, very large and menacing; it lifts the boat;
on it goes; somehow merges without accomplishing anything; flattens
itself out with the rest.
What can be more violent than the fling of boughs in a gale, the tree
yielding itself all up the trunk, to the very tip of the branch,
streaming and shuddering the way the wind blows, yet never flying in
dishevelment away? The corn squirms and abases itself as if preparing to
tug itself free from the roots, and yet is tied down.
Why, from the very windows, even in the dusk, you see a swelling run
through the street, an aspiration, as with arms outstretched, eyes
desiring, mouths agape. And then we peaceably subside. For if the
exaltation lasted we should be blown like foam into the air. The stars
would shine through us. We should go down the gale in salt drops--as
sometimes happens. For the impetuous spirits will have none of this
cradling. Never any swaying or aimlessly lolling for them. Never any
making believe, or lying cosily, or genially supposing that one is much
like another, fire warm, wine pleasant, extravagance a sin.
"People are so nice, once you know them."
"I couldn't think ill of her. One must remember--" But Nick perhaps, or
Fanny Elmer, believing implicitly in the truth of the moment, fling off,
sting the cheek, are gone like sharp hail.
"Oh," said Fanny, bursting into the studio three-quarters of an hour
late because she had been hanging about the neighbourhood of the
Foundling Hospital merely for the chance of seeing Jacob walk down the
street, take out his latch-key, and open the door, "I'm afraid I'm
late"; upon which Nick said nothing and Fanny grew defiant.
"I'll never come again!" she cried at length.
"Don't, then," Nick replied, and off she ran without so much as
good-night.
How exquisite it was--that dress in Evelina's shop off Shaftesbury
Avenue! It was four o'clock on a fine day early in April, and was Fanny
the one to spend four o'clock on a fine day indoors? Other girls in that
very street sat over ledgers, or drew long threads wearily between silk
and gauze; or, festooned with ribbons in Swan and Edgars, rapidly added
up pence and farthings on the back of the bill and twisted the yard and
three-quarters in tissue paper and asked "Your pleasure?" of the next
comer.
In Evelina's shop off Shaftesbury Avenue the parts of a woman were shown
separate. In the left hand was her skirt. Twining round a pole in the
middle was a feather boa. Ranged like the heads of malefactors on Temple
Bar were hats--emerald and white, lightly wreathed or drooping beneath
deep-dyed feathers. And on the carpet were her feet--pointed gold, or
patent leather slashed with scarlet.
Feasted upon by the eyes of women, the clothes by four o'clock were
flyblown like sugar cakes in a baker's window. Fanny eyed them too. But
coming along Gerrard Street was a tall man in a shabby coat. A shadow
fell across Evelina's window--Jacob's shadow, though it was not Jacob.
And Fanny turned and walked along Gerrard Street and wished that she had
read books. Nick never read books, never talked of Ireland, or the House
of Lords; and as for his finger-nails! She would learn Latin and read
Virgil. She had been a great reader. She had read Scott; she had read
Dumas. At the Slade no one read. But no one knew Fanny at the Slade, or
guessed how empty it seemed to her; the passion for ear-rings, for
dances, for Tonks and Steer--when it was only the French who could
paint, Jacob said. For the moderns were futile; painting the least
respectable of the arts; and why read anything but Marlowe and
Shakespeare, Jacob said, and Fielding if you must read novels?
"Fielding," said Fanny, when the man in Charing Cross Road asked her
what book she wanted.
She bought Tom Jones.
At ten o'clock in the morning, in a room which she shared with a school
teacher, Fanny Elmer read Tom Jones--that mystic book. For this dull
stuff (Fanny thought) about people with odd names is what Jacob likes.
Good people like it. Dowdy women who don't mind how they cross their
legs read Tom Jones--a mystic book; for there is something, Fanny
thought, about books which if I had been educated I could have
liked--much better than ear-rings and flowers, she sighed, thinking of
the corridors at the Slade and the fancy-dress dance next week. She had
nothing to wear.
They are real, thought Fanny Elmer, setting her feet on the mantelpiece.
Some people are. Nick perhaps, only he was so stupid. And women
never--except Miss Sargent, but she went off at lunch-time and gave
herself airs. There they sat quietly of a night reading, she thought.
Not going to music-halls; not looking in at shop windows; not wearing
each other's clothes, like Robertson who had worn her shawl, and she had
worn his waistcoat, which Jacob could only do very awkwardly; for he
liked Tom Jones.
There it lay on her lap, in double columns, price three and sixpence;
the mystic book in which Henry Fielding ever so many years ago rebuked
Fanny Elmer for feasting on scarlet, in perfect prose, Jacob said. For
he never read modern novels. He liked Tom Jones.
"I do like Tom Jones," said Fanny, at five-thirty that same day early in
April when Jacob took out his pipe in the arm-chair opposite.
Alas, women lie! But not Clara Durrant. A flawless mind; a candid
nature; a virgin chained to a rock (somewhere off Lowndes Square)
eternally pouring out tea for old men in white waistcoats, blue-eyed,
looking you straight in the face, playing Bach. Of all women, Jacob
honoured her most. But to sit at a table with bread and butter, with
dowagers in velvet, and never say more to Clara Durrant than Benson said
to the parrot when old Miss Perry poured out tea, was an insufferable
outrage upon the liberties and decencies of human nature--or words to
that effect. For Jacob said nothing. Only he glared at the fire. Fanny
laid down Tom Jones.
She stitched or knitted.
"What's that?" asked Jacob.
"For the dance at the Slade."
And she fetched her head-dress; her trousers; her shoes with red
tassels. What should she wear?
"I shall be in Paris," said Jacob.
And what is the point of fancy-dress dances? thought Fanny. You meet the
same people; you wear the same clothes; Mangin gets drunk; Florinda sits
on his knee. She flirts outrageously--with Nick Bramham just now.
"In Paris?" said Fanny.
"On my way to Greece," he replied.
For, he said, there is nothing so detestable as London in May.
He would forget her.
A sparrow flew past the window trailing a straw--a straw from a stack
stood by a barn in a farmyard. The old brown spaniel snuffs at the base
for a rat. Already the upper branches of the elm trees are blotted with
nests. The chestnuts have flirted their fans. And the butterflies are
flaunting across the rides in the Forest. Perhaps the Purple Emperor is
feasting, as Morris says, upon a mass of putrid carrion at the base of
an oak tree.
Fanny thought it all came from Tom Jones. He could go alone with a book
in his pocket and watch the badgers. He would take a train at
eight-thirty and walk all night. He saw fire-flies, and brought back
glow-worms in pill-boxes. He would hunt with the New Forest Staghounds.
It all came from Tom Jones; and he would go to Greece with a book in his
pocket and forget her.
She fetched her hand-glass. There was her face. And suppose one wreathed
Jacob in a turban? There was his face. She lit the lamp. But as the
daylight came through the window only half was lit up by the lamp. And
though he looked terrible and magnificent and would chuck the Forest, he
said, and come to the Slade, and be a Turkish knight or a Roman emperor
(and he let her blacken his lips and clenched his teeth and scowled in
the glass), still--there lay Tom Jones.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
"Archer," said Mrs. Flanders with that tenderness which mothers so often
display towards their eldest sons, "will be at Gibraltar to-morrow."
The post for which she was waiting (strolling up Dods Hill while the
random church bells swung a hymn tune about her head, the clock striking
four straight through the circling notes; the glass purpling under a
storm-cloud; and the two dozen houses of the village cowering,
infinitely humble, in company under a leaf of shadow), the post, with
all its variety of messages, envelopes addressed in bold hands, in
slanting hands, stamped now with English stamps, again with Colonial
stamps, or sometimes hastily dabbed with a yellow bar, the post was
about to scatter a myriad messages over the world. Whether we gain or
not by this habit of profuse communication it is not for us to say. But
that letter-writing is practised mendaciously nowadays, particularly by
young men travelling in foreign parts, seems likely enough.
For example, take this scene.
Here was Jacob Flanders gone abroad and staying to break his journey in
Paris. (Old Miss Birkbeck, his mother's cousin, had died last June and
left him a hundred pounds.)
"You needn't repeat the whole damned thing over again, Cruttendon," said
Mallinson, the little bald painter who was sitting at a marble table,
splashed with coffee and ringed with wine, talking very fast, and
undoubtedly more than a little drunk.
"Well, Flanders, finished writing to your lady?" said Cruttendon, as
Jacob came and took his seat beside them, holding in his hand an
envelope addressed to Mrs. Flanders, near Scarborough, England.
"Do you uphold Velasquez?" said Cruttendon.
"By God, he does," said Mallinson.
"He always gets like this," said Cruttendon irritably.
Jacob looked at Mallinson with excessive composure.
"I'll tell you the three greatest things that were ever written in the
whole of literature," Cruttendon burst out. "'Hang there like fruit my
soul.'" he began....
"Don't listen to a man who don't like Velasquez," said Mallinson.
"Adolphe, don't give Mr. Mallinson any more wine," said Cruttendon.
"Fair play, fair play," said Jacob judicially. "Let a man get drunk if
he likes. That's Shakespeare, Cruttendon. I'm with you there.
Shakespeare had more guts than all these damned frogs put together.
'Hang there like fruit my soul,'" he began quoting, in a musical
rhetorical voice, flourishing his wine-glass. "The devil damn you black,
you cream-faced loon!" he exclaimed as the wine washed over the rim.
"'Hang there like fruit my soul,'" Cruttendon and Jacob both began again
at the same moment, and both burst out laughing.
"Curse these flies," said Mallinson, flicking at his bald head. "What do
they take me for?"
"Something sweet-smelling," said Cruttendon.
"Shut up, Cruttendon," said Jacob. "The fellow has no manners," he
explained to Mallinson very politely. "Wants to cut people off their
drink. Look here. I want grilled bone. What's the French for grilled
bone? Grilled bone, Adolphe. Now you juggins, don't you understand?"
"And I'll tell you, Flanders, the second most beautiful thing in the
whole of literature," said Cruttendon, bringing his feet down on to the
floor, and leaning right across the table, so that his face almost
touched Jacob's face.
"'Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,'" Mallinson interrupted,
strumming his fingers on the table. "The most ex-qui-sitely beautiful
thing in the whole of literature.... Cruttendon is a very good fellow,"
he remarked confidentially. "But he's a bit of a fool." And he jerked
his head forward.
Well, not a word of this was ever told to Mrs. Flanders; nor what
happened when they paid the bill and left the restaurant, and walked
along the Boulevard Raspaille.
Then here is another scrap of conversation; the time about eleven in the
morning; the scene a studio; and the day Sunday.
"I tell you, Flanders," said Cruttendon, "I'd as soon have one of
Mallinson's little pictures as a Chardin. And when I say that ..." he
squeezed the tail of an emaciated tube ... "Chardin was a great swell....
He sells 'em to pay his dinner now. But wait till the dealers get
hold of him. A great swell--oh, a very great swell."
"It's an awfully pleasant life," said Jacob, "messing away up here.
Still, it's a stupid art, Cruttendon." He wandered off across the room.
"There's this man, Pierre Louys now." He took up a book.
"Now my good sir, are you going to settle down?" said Cruttendon.
"That's a solid piece of work," said Jacob, standing a canvas on a
chair.
"Oh, that I did ages ago," said Cruttendon, looking over his shoulder.
"You're a pretty competent painter in my opinion," said Jacob after a
time.
"Now if you'd like to see what I'm after at the present moment," said
Cruttendon, putting a canvas before Jacob. "There. That's it. That's
more like it. That's ..." he squirmed his thumb in a circle round a lamp
globe painted white.
"A pretty solid piece of work," said Jacob, straddling his legs in front
of it. "But what I wish you'd explain ..."
Miss Jinny Carslake, pale, freckled, morbid, came into the room.
"Oh Jinny, here's a friend. Flanders. An Englishman. Wealthy. Highly
connected. Go on, Flanders...."
Jacob said nothing.
"It's THAT--that's not right," said Jinny Carslake.
"No," said Cruttendon decidedly. "Can't be done."
He took the canvas off the chair and stood it on the floor with its back
to them.
"Sit down, ladies and gentlemen. Miss Carslake comes from your part of
the world, Flanders. From Devonshire. Oh, I thought you said Devonshire.
Very well. She's a daughter of the church too. The black sheep of the
family. Her mother writes her such letters. I say--have you one about
you? It's generally Sundays they come. Sort of church-bell effect, you
know."
"Have you met all the painter men?" said Jinny. "Was Mallinson drunk? If
you go to his studio he'll give you one of his pictures. I say, Teddy...."
"Half a jiff," said Cruttendon. "What's the season of the year?" He
looked out of the window.
"We take a day off on Sundays, Flanders."
"Will he ..." said Jinny, looking at Jacob. "You ..."
"Yes, he'll come with us," said Cruttendon.
And then, here is Versailles. Jinny stood on the stone rim and leant
over the pond, clasped by Cruttendon's arms or she would have fallen in.
"There! There!" she cried. "Right up to the top!" Some sluggish,
sloping-shouldered fish had floated up from the depths to nip her
crumbs. "You look," she said, jumping down. And then the dazzling white
water, rough and throttled, shot up into the air. The fountain spread
itself. Through it came the sound of military music far away. All the
water was puckered with drops. A blue air-ball gently bumped the
surface. How all the nurses and children and old men and young crowded
to the edge, leant over and waved their sticks! The little girl ran
stretching her arms towards her air-ball, but it sank beneath the
fountain.
Edward Cruttendon, Jinny Carslake, and Jacob Flanders walked in a row
along the yellow gravel path; got on to the grass; so passed under the
trees; and came out at the summer-house where Marie Antoinette used to
drink chocolate. In went Edward and Jinny, but Jacob waited outside,
sitting on the handle of his walking-stick. Out they came again.
"Well?" said Cruttendon, smiling at Jacob.
Jinny waited; Edward waited; and both looked at Jacob.
"Well?" said Jacob, smiling and pressing both hands on his stick.
"Come along," he decided; and started off. The others followed him,
smiling.
And then they went to the little cafe in the by-street where people sit
drinking coffee, watching the soldiers, meditatively knocking ashes into
trays.
"But he's quite different," said Jinny, folding her hands over the top
of her glass. "I don't suppose you know what Ted means when he says a
thing like that," she said, looking at Jacob. "But I do. Sometimes I
could kill myself. Sometimes he lies in bed all day long--just lies
there.... I don't want you right on the table"; she waved her hands.
Swollen iridescent pigeons were waddling round their feet.
"Look at that woman's hat," said Cruttendon. "How do they come to think
of it? ... No, Flanders, I don't think I could live like you. When one
walks down that street opposite the British Museum--what's it
called?--that's what I mean. It's all like that. Those fat women--and
the man standing in the middle of the road as if he were going to have a
fit ..."
"Everybody feeds them," said Jinny, waving the pigeons away. "They're
stupid old things."
"Well, I don't know," said Jacob, smoking his cigarette. "There's St.
Paul's."
"I mean going to an office," said Cruttendon.
"Hang it all," Jacob expostulated.
"But you don't count," said Jinny, looking at Cruttendon. "You're mad. I
mean, you just think of painting."
"Yes, I know. I can't help it. I say, will King George give way about
the peers?"
"He'll jolly well have to," said Jacob.
"There!" said Jinny. "He really knows."
"You see, I would if I could," said Cruttendon, "but I simply can't."
"I THINK I could," said Jinny. "Only, it's all the people one dislikes
who do it. At home, I mean. They talk of nothing else. Even people like
my mother."
"Now if I came and lived here---" said Jacob. "What's my share,
Cruttendon? Oh, very well. Have it your own way. Those silly birds,
directly one wants them--they've flown away."
And finally under the arc lamps in the Gare des Invalides, with one of
those queer movements which are so slight yet so definite, which may
wound or pass unnoticed but generally inflict a good deal of discomfort,
Jinny and Cruttendon drew together; Jacob stood apart. They had to
separate. Something must be said. Nothing was said. A man wheeled a
trolley past Jacob's legs so near that he almost grazed them. When Jacob
recovered his balance the other two were turning away, though Jinny
looked over her shoulder, and Cruttendon, waving his hand, disappeared
like the very great genius that he was.
No--Mrs. Flanders was told none of this, though Jacob felt, it is safe
to say, that nothing in the world was of greater importance; and as for
Cruttendon and Jinny, he thought them the most remarkable people he had
ever met--being of course unable to foresee how it fell out in the
course of time that Cruttendon took to painting orchards; had therefore
to live in Kent; and must, one would think, see through apple blossom by
this time, since his wife, for whose sake he did it, eloped with a
novelist; but no; Cruttendon still paints orchards, savagely, in
solitude. Then Jinny Carslake, after her affair with Lefanu the American
painter, frequented Indian philosophers, and now you find her in
pensions in Italy cherishing a little jeweller's box containing ordinary
pebbles picked off the road. But if you look at them steadily, she says,
multiplicity becomes unity, which is somehow the secret of life, though
it does not prevent her from following the macaroni as it goes round the
table, and sometimes, on spring nights, she makes the strangest
confidences to shy young Englishmen.
Jacob had nothing to hide from his mother. It was only that he could
make no sense himself of his extraordinary excitement, and as for
writing it down---
"Jacob's letters are so like him," said Mrs. Jarvis, folding the sheet.
"Indeed he seems to be having ..." said Mrs. Flanders, and paused, for
she was cutting out a dress and had to straighten the pattern, "... a
very gay time."
Mrs. Jarvis thought of Paris. At her back the window was open, for it
was a mild night; a calm night; when the moon seemed muffled and the
apple trees stood perfectly still.
"I never pity the dead," said Mrs. Jarvis, shifting the cushion at her
back, and clasping her hands behind her head. Betty Flanders did not
hear, for her scissors made so much noise on the table.
"They are at rest," said Mrs. Jarvis. "And we spend our days doing
foolish unnecessary things without knowing why."
Mrs. Jarvis was not liked in the village.
"You never walk at this time of night?" she asked Mrs. Flanders.
"It is certainly wonderfully mild," said Mrs. Flanders.
Yet it was years since she had opened the orchard gate and gone out on
Dods Hill after dinner.
"It is perfectly dry," said Mrs. Jarvis, as they shut the orchard door
and stepped on to the turf.
"I shan't go far," said Betty Flanders. "Yes, Jacob will leave Paris on
Wednesday."
"Jacob was always my friend of the three," said Mrs. Jarvis.
"Now, my dear, I am going no further," said Mrs. Flanders. They had
climbed the dark hill and reached the Roman camp.
The rampart rose at their feet--the smooth circle surrounding the camp
or the grave. How many needles Betty Flanders had lost there; and her
garnet brooch.
"It is much clearer than this sometimes," said Mrs. Jarvis, standing
upon the ridge. There were no clouds, and yet there was a haze over the
sea, and over the moors. The lights of Scarborough flashed, as if a
woman wearing a diamond necklace turned her head this way and that.
"How quiet it is!" said Mrs. Jarvis.
Mrs. Flanders rubbed the turf with her toe, thinking of her garnet
brooch.
Mrs. Jarvis found it difficult to think of herself to-night. It was so
calm. There was no wind; nothing racing, flying, escaping. Black shadows
stood still over the silver moors. The furze bushes stood perfectly
still. Neither did Mrs. Jarvis think of God. There was a church behind
them, of course. The church clock struck ten. Did the strokes reach the
furze bush, or did the thorn tree hear them?
Mrs. Flanders was stooping down to pick up a pebble. Sometimes people do
find things, Mrs. Jarvis thought, and yet in this hazy moonlight it was
impossible to see anything, except bones, and little pieces of chalk.
"Jacob bought it with his own money, and then I brought Mr. Parker up to
see the view, and it must have dropped--" Mrs. Flanders murmured.
Did the bones stir, or the rusty swords? Was Mrs. Flanders's
twopenny-halfpenny brooch for ever part of the rich accumulation? and if
all the ghosts flocked thick and rubbed shoulders with Mrs. Flanders in
the circle, would she not have seemed perfectly in her place, a live
English matron, growing stout?
The clock struck the quarter.
The frail waves of sound broke among the stiff gorse and the hawthorn
twigs as the church clock divided time into quarters.
Motionless and broad-backed the moors received the statement "It is
fifteen minutes past the hour," but made no answer, unless a bramble
stirred.
Yet even in this light the legends on the tombstones could be read,
brief voices saying, "I am Bertha Ruck," "I am Tom Gage." And they say
which day of the year they died, and the New Testament says something
for them, very proud, very emphatic, or consoling.
The moors accept all that too.
The moonlight falls like a pale page upon the church wall, and illumines
the kneeling family in the niche, and the tablet set up in 1780 to the
Squire of the parish who relieved the poor, and believed in God--so the
measured voice goes on down the marble scroll, as though it could impose
itself upon time and the open air.
Now a fox steals out from behind the gorse bushes.
Often, even at night, the church seems full of people. The pews are worn
and greasy, and the cassocks in place, and the hymn-books on the ledges.
It is a ship with all its crew aboard. The timbers strain to hold the
dead and the living, the ploughmen, the carpenters, the fox-hunting
gentlemen and the farmers smelling of mud and brandy. Their tongues join
together in syllabling the sharp-cut words, which for ever slice asunder
time and the broad-backed moors. Plaint and belief and elegy, despair
and triumph, but for the most part good sense and jolly indifference, go
trampling out of the windows any time these five hundred years.
Still, as Mrs. Jarvis said, stepping out on to the moors, "How quiet it
is!" Quiet at midday, except when the hunt scatters across it; quiet in
the afternoon, save for the drifting sheep; at night the moor is
perfectly quiet.
A garnet brooch has dropped into its grass. A fox pads stealthily. A
leaf turns on its edge. Mrs. Jarvis, who is fifty years of age, reposes
in the camp in the hazy moonlight.
"... and," said Mrs. Flanders, straightening her back, "I never cared
for Mr. Parker."
"Neither did I," said Mrs. Jarvis. They began to walk home.
But their voices floated for a little above the camp. The moonlight
destroyed nothing. The moor accepted everything. Tom Gage cries aloud so
long as his tombstone endures. The Roman skeletons are in safe keeping.
Betty Flanders's darning needles are safe too and her garnet brooch. And
sometimes at midday, in the sunshine, the moor seems to hoard these
little treasures, like a nurse. But at midnight when no one speaks or
gallops, and the thorn tree is perfectly still, it would be foolish to
vex the moor with questions--what? and why?
The church clock, however, strikes twelve.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The water fell off a ledge like lead--like a chain with thick white
links. The train ran out into a steep green meadow, and Jacob saw
striped tulips growing and heard a bird singing, in Italy.
A motor car full of Italian officers ran along the flat road and kept up
with the train, raising dust behind it. There were trees laced together
with vines--as Virgil said. Here was a station; and a tremendous
leave-taking going on, with women in high yellow boots and odd pale boys
in ringed socks. Virgil's bees had gone about the plains of Lombardy. It
was the custom of the ancients to train vines between elms. Then at
Milan there were sharp-winged hawks, of a bright brown, cutting figures
over the roofs.
These Italian carriages get damnably hot with the afternoon sun on them,
and the chances are that before the engine has pulled to the top of the
gorge the clanking chain will have broken. Up, up, up, it goes, like a
train on a scenic railway. Every peak is covered with sharp trees, and
amazing white villages are crowded on ledges. There is always a white
tower on the very summit, flat red-frilled roofs, and a sheer drop
beneath. It is not a country in which one walks after tea. For one thing
there is no grass. A whole hillside will be ruled with olive trees.
Already in April the earth is clotted into dry dust between them. And
there are neither stiles nor footpaths, nor lanes chequered with the
shadows of leaves nor eighteenth-century inns with bow-windows, where
one eats ham and eggs. Oh no, Italy is all fierceness, bareness,
exposure, and black priests shuffling along the roads. It is strange,
too, how you never get away from villas.
Still, to be travelling on one's own with a hundred pounds to spend is a
fine affair. And if his money gave out, as it probably would, he would
go on foot. He could live on bread and wine--the wine in straw
bottles--for after doing Greece he was going to knock off Rome. The
Roman civilization was a very inferior affair, no doubt. But Bonamy
talked a lot of rot, all the same. "You ought to have been in Athens,"
he would say to Bonamy when he got back. "Standing on the Parthenon," he
would say, or "The ruins of the Coliseum suggest some fairly sublime
reflections," which he would write out at length in letters. It might
turn to an essay upon civilization. A comparison between the ancients
and moderns, with some pretty sharp hits at Mr. Asquith--something in
the style of Gibbon.
A stout gentleman laboriously hauled himself in, dusty, baggy, slung
with gold chains, and Jacob, regretting that he did not come of the
Latin race, looked out of the window.
It is a strange reflection that by travelling two days and nights you
are in the heart of Italy. Accidental villas among olive trees appear;
and men-servants watering the cactuses. Black victorias drive in between
pompous pillars with plaster shields stuck to them. It is at once
momentary and astonishingly intimate--to be displayed before the eyes of
a foreigner. And there is a lonely hill-top where no one ever comes, and
yet it is seen by me who was lately driving down Piccadilly on an
omnibus. And what I should like would be to get out among the fields,
sit down and hear the grasshoppers, and take up a handful of
earth--Italian earth, as this is Italian dust upon my shoes.
Jacob heard them crying strange names at railway stations through the
night. The train stopped and he heard frogs croaking close by, and he
wrinkled back the blind cautiously and saw a vast strange marsh all
white in the moonlight. The carriage was thick with cigar smoke, which
floated round the globe with the green shade on it. The Italian
gentleman lay snoring with his boots off and his waistcoat unbuttoned....
And all this business of going to Greece seemed to Jacob an
intolerable weariness--sitting in hotels by oneself and looking at
monuments--he'd have done better to go to Cornwall with Timmy Durrant....
"O--h," Jacob protested, as the darkness began breaking in front of
him and the light showed through, but the man was reaching across him to
get something--the fat Italian man in his dicky, unshaven, crumpled,
obese, was opening the door and going off to have a wash.
So Jacob sat up, and saw a lean Italian sportsman with a gun walking
down the road in the early morning light, and the whole idea of the
Parthenon came upon him in a clap.
"By Jove!" he thought, "we must be nearly there!" and he stuck his head
out of the window and got the air full in his face.
It is highly exasperating that twenty-five people of your acquaintance
should be able to say straight off something very much to the point
about being in Greece, while for yourself there is a stopper upon all
emotions whatsoever. For after washing at the hotel at Patras, Jacob had
followed the tram lines a mile or so out; and followed them a mile or so
back; he had met several droves of turkeys; several strings of donkeys;
had got lost in back streets; had read advertisements of corsets and of
Maggi's consomme; children had trodden on his toes; the place smelt of
bad cheese; and he was glad to find himself suddenly come out opposite
his hotel. There was an old copy of the Daily Mail lying among
coffee-cups; which he read. But what could he do after dinner?
No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without
our astonishing gift for illusion. At the age of twelve or so, having
given up dolls and broken our steam engines, France, but much more
probably Italy, and India almost for a certainty, draws the superfluous
imagination. One's aunts have been to Rome; and every one has an uncle
who was last heard of--poor man--in Rangoon. He will never come back any
more. But it is the governesses who start the Greek myth. Look at that
for a head (they say)--nose, you see, straight as a dart, curls,
eyebrows--everything appropriate to manly beauty; while his legs and
arms have lines on them which indicate a perfect degree of
development--the Greeks caring for the body as much as for the face. And
the Greeks could paint fruit so that birds pecked at it. First you read
Xenophon; then Euripides. One day--that was an occasion, by God--what
people have said appears to have sense in it; "the Greek spirit"; the
Greek this, that, and the other; though it is absurd, by the way, to say
that any Greek comes near Shakespeare. The point is, however, that we
have been brought up in an illusion.
Jacob, no doubt, thought something in this fashion, the Daily Mail
crumpled in his hand; his legs extended; the very picture of boredom.
"But it's the way we're brought up," he went on.
And it all seemed to him very distasteful. Something ought to be done
about it. And from being moderately depressed he became like a man about
to be executed. Clara Durrant had left him at a party to talk to an
American called Pilchard. And he had come all the way to Greece and left
her. They wore evening-dresses, and talked nonsense--what damned
nonsense--and he put out his hand for the Globe Trotter, an
international magazine which is supplied free of charge to the
proprietors of hotels.
In spite of its ramshackle condition modern Greece is highly advanced in
the electric tramway system, so that while Jacob sat in the hotel
sitting-room the trams clanked, chimed, rang, rang, rang imperiously to
get the donkeys out of the way, and one old woman who refused to budge,
beneath the windows. The whole of civilization was being condemned.
The waiter was quite indifferent to that too. Aristotle, a dirty man,
carnivorously interested in the body of the only guest now occupying the
only arm-chair, came into the room ostentatiously, put something down,
put something straight, and saw that Jacob was still there.
"I shall want to be called early to-morrow," said Jacob, over his
shoulder. "I am going to Olympia."
This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a
modern invention. Perhaps, as Cruttendon said, we do not believe enough.
Our fathers at any rate had something to demolish. So have we for the
matter of that, thought Jacob, crumpling the Daily Mail in his hand. He
would go into Parliament and make fine speeches--but what use are fine
speeches and Parliament, once you surrender an inch to the black waters?
Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our
veins--of happiness and unhappiness. That respectability and evening
parties where one has to dress, and wretched slums at the back of Gray's
Inn--something solid, immovable, and grotesque--is at the back of it,
Jacob thought probable. But then there was the British Empire which was
beginning to puzzle him; nor was he altogether in favour of giving Home
Rule to Ireland. What did the Daily Mail say about that?
For he had grown to be a man, and was about to be immersed in things--as
indeed the chambermaid, emptying his basin upstairs, fingering keys,
studs, pencils, and bottles of tabloids strewn on the dressing-table,
was aware.
That he had grown to be a man was a fact that Florinda knew, as she knew
everything, by instinct.
And Betty Flanders even now suspected it, as she read his letter, posted
at Milan, "Telling me," she complained to Mrs. Jarvis, "really nothing
that I want to know"; but she brooded over it.
Fanny Elmer felt it to desperation. For he would take his stick and his
hat and would walk to the window, and look perfectly absent-minded and
very stern too, she thought.
"I am going," he would say, "to cadge a meal of Bonamy."
"Anyhow, I can drown myself in the Thames," Fanny cried, as she hurried
past the Foundling Hospital.
"But the Daily Mail isn't to be trusted," Jacob said to himself, looking
about for something else to read. And he sighed again, being indeed so
profoundly gloomy that gloom must have been lodged in him to cloud him
at any moment, which was odd in a man who enjoyed things so, was not
much given to analysis, but was horribly romantic, of course, Bonamy
thought, in his rooms in Lincoln's Inn.
"He will fall in love," thought Bonamy. "Some Greek woman with a
straight nose."
It was to Bonamy that Jacob wrote from Patras--to Bonamy who couldn't
love a woman and never read a foolish book.
There are very few good books after all, for we can't count profuse
histories, travels in mule carts to discover the sources of the Nile, or
the volubility of fiction.
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like
sentences that don't budge though armies cross them. I like words to be
hard--such were Bonamy's views, and they won him the hostility of those
whose taste is all for the fresh growths of the morning, who throw up
the window, and find the poppies spread in the sun, and can't forbear a
shout of jubilation at the astonishing fertility of English literature.
That was not Bonamy's way at all. That his taste in literature affected
his friendships, and made him silent, secretive, fastidious, and only
quite at his ease with one or two young men of his own way of thinking,
was the charge against him.
But then Jacob Flanders was not at all of his own way of thinking--far
from it, Bonamy sighed, laying the thin sheets of notepaper on the table
and falling into thought about Jacob's character, not for the first
time.
The trouble was this romantic vein in him. "But mixed with the stupidity
which leads him into these absurd predicaments," thought Bonamy, "there
is something--something"--he sighed, for he was fonder of Jacob than of
any one in the world.
Jacob went to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets. There
he saw three Greeks in kilts; the masts of ships; idle or busy people of
the lower classes strolling or stepping out briskly, or falling into
groups and gesticulating with their hands. Their lack of concern for him
was not the cause of his gloom; but some more profound conviction--it
was not that he himself happened to be lonely, but that all people are.
Yet next day, as the train slowly rounded a hill on the way to Olympia,
the Greek peasant women were out among the vines; the old Greek men were
sitting at the stations, sipping sweet wine. And though Jacob remained
gloomy he had never suspected how tremendously pleasant it is to be
alone; out of England; on one's own; cut off from the whole thing. There
are very sharp bare hills on the way to Olympia; and between them blue
sea in triangular spaces. A little like the Cornish coast. Well now, to
go walking by oneself all day--to get on to that track and follow it up
between the bushes--or are they small trees?--to the top of that
mountain from which one can see half the nations of antiquity--
"Yes," said Jacob, for his carriage was empty, "let's look at the map."
Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us. To
gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth
spin; to have--positively--a rush of friendship for stones and grasses,
as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go
hang--there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us
pretty often.
The evening air slightly moved the dirty curtains in the hotel window at
Olympia.
"I am full of love for every one," thought Mrs. Wentworth Williams,
"--for the poor most of all--for the peasants coming back in the evening
with their burdens. And everything is soft and vague and very sad. It is
sad, it is sad. But everything has meaning," thought Sandra Wentworth
Williams, raising her head a little and looking very beautiful, tragic,
and exalted. "One must love everything."
She held in her hand a little book convenient for travelling--stories by
Tchekov--as she stood, veiled, in white, in the window of the hotel at
Olympia. How beautiful the evening was! and her beauty was its beauty.
The tragedy of Greece was the tragedy of all high souls. The inevitable
compromise. She seemed to have grasped something. She would write it
down. And moving to the table where her husband sat reading she leant
her chin in her hands and thought of the peasants, of suffering, of her
own beauty, of the inevitable compromise, and of how she would write it
down. Nor did Evan Williams say anything brutal, banal, or foolish when
he shut his book and put it away to make room for the plates of soup
which were now being placed before them. Only his drooping bloodhound
eyes and his heavy sallow cheeks expressed his melancholy tolerance, his
conviction that though forced to live with circumspection and
deliberation he could never possibly achieve any of those objects which,
as he knew, are the only ones worth pursuing. His consideration was
flawless; his silence unbroken.
"Everything seems to mean so much," said Sandra. But with the sound of
her own voice the spell was broken. She forgot the peasants. Only there
remained with her a sense of her own beauty, and in front, luckily,
there was a looking-glass.
"I am very beautiful," she thought.
She shifted her hat slightly. Her husband saw her looking in the glass;
and agreed that beauty is important; it is an inheritance; one cannot
ignore it. But it is a barrier; it is in fact rather a bore. So he drank
his soup; and kept his eyes fixed upon the window.
"Quails," said Mrs. Wentworth Williams languidly. "And then goat, I
suppose; and then..."
"Caramel custard presumably," said her husband in the same cadence, with
his toothpick out already.
She laid her spoon upon her plate, and her soup was taken away half
finished. Never did she do anything without dignity; for hers was the
English type which is so Greek, save that villagers have touched their
hats to it, the vicarage reveres it; and upper-gardeners and
under-gardeners respectfully straighten their backs as she comes down
the broad terrace on Sunday morning, dallying at the stone urns with the
Prime Minister to pick a rose--which, perhaps, she was trying to forget,
as her eye wandered round the dining-room of the inn at Olympia, seeking
the window where her book lay, where a few minutes ago she had
discovered something--something very profound it had been, about love
and sadness and the peasants.
But it was Evan who sighed; not in despair nor indeed in rebellion. But,
being the most ambitious of men and temperamentally the most sluggish,
he had accomplished nothing; had the political history of England at his
finger-ends, and living much in company with Chatham, Pitt, Burke, and
Charles James Fox could not help contrasting himself and his age with
them and theirs. "Yet there never was a time when great men are more
needed," he was in the habit of saying to himself, with a sigh. Here he
was picking his teeth in an inn at Olympia. He had done. But Sandra's
eyes wandered.
"Those pink melons are sure to be dangerous," he said gloomily. And as
he spoke the door opened and in came a young man in a grey check suit.
"Beautiful but dangerous," said Sandra, immediately talking to her
husband in the presence of a third person. ("Ah, an English boy on
tour," she thought to herself.)
And Evan knew all that too.
Yes, he knew all that; and he admired her. Very pleasant, he thought, to
have affairs. But for himself, what with his height (Napoleon was five
feet four, he remembered), his bulk, his inability to impose his own
personality (and yet great men are needed more than ever now, he
sighed), it was useless. He threw away his cigar, went up to Jacob and
asked him, with a simple sort of sincerity which Jacob liked, whether he
had come straight out from England.
"How very English!" Sandra laughed when the waiter told them next
morning that the young gentleman had left at five to climb the mountain.
"I am sure he asked you for a bath?" at which the waiter shook his head,
and said that he would ask the manager.
"You do not understand," laughed Sandra. "Never mind."
Stretched on the top of the mountain, quite alone, Jacob enjoyed himself
immensely. Probably he had never been so happy in the whole of his life.
But at dinner that night Mr. Williams asked him whether he would like to
see the paper; then Mrs. Williams asked him (as they strolled on the
terrace smoking--and how could he refuse that man's cigar?) whether he'd
seen the theatre by moonlight; whether he knew Everard Sherborn; whether
he read Greek and whether (Evan rose silently and went in) if he had to
sacrifice one it would be the French literature or the Russian?
"And now," wrote Jacob in his letter to Bonamy, "I shall have to read
her cursed book"--her Tchekov, he meant, for she had lent it him.
Though the opinion is unpopular it seems likely enough that bare places,
fields too thick with stones to be ploughed, tossing sea-meadows
half-way between England and America, suit us better than cities.
There is something absolute in us which despises qualification. It is
this which is teased and twisted in society. People come together in a
room. "So delighted," says somebody, "to meet you," and that is a lie.
And then: "I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I
think, as one gets older." For women are always, always, always talking
about what one feels, and if they say "as one gets older," they mean you
to reply with something quite off the point.
Jacob sat himself down in the quarry where the Greeks had cut marble for
the theatre. It is hot work walking up Greek hills at midday. The wild
red cyclamen was out; he had seen the little tortoises hobbling from
clump to clump; the air smelt strong and suddenly sweet, and the sun,
striking on jagged splinters of marble, was very dazzling to the eyes.
Composed, commanding, contemptuous, a little melancholy, and bored with
an august kind of boredom, there he sat smoking his pipe.
Bonamy would have said that this was the sort of thing that made him
uneasy--when Jacob got into the doldrums, looked like a Margate
fisherman out of a job, or a British Admiral. You couldn't make him
understand a thing when he was in a mood like that. One had better leave
him alone. He was dull. He was apt to be grumpy.
He was up very early, looking at the statues with his Baedeker.
Sandra Wentworth Williams, ranging the world before breakfast in quest
of adventure or a point of view, all in white, not so very tall perhaps,
but uncommonly upright--Sandra Williams got Jacob's head exactly on a
level with the head of the Hermes of Praxiteles. The comparison was all
in his favour. But before she could say a single word he had gone out of
the Museum and left her.
Still, a lady of fashion travels with more than one dress, and if white
suits the morning hour, perhaps sandy yellow with purple spots on it, a
black hat, and a volume of Balzac, suit the evening. Thus she was
arranged on the terrace when Jacob came in. Very beautiful she looked.
With her hands folded she mused, seemed to listen to her husband, seemed
to watch the peasants coming down with brushwood on their backs, seemed
to notice how the hill changed from blue to black, seemed to
discriminate between truth and falsehood, Jacob thought, and crossed his
legs suddenly, observing the extreme shabbiness of his trousers.
"But he is very distinguished looking," Sandra decided.
And Evan Williams, lying back in his chair with the paper on his knees,
envied them. The best thing he could do would be to publish, with
Macmillans, his monograph upon the foreign policy of Chatham. But
confound this tumid, queasy feeling--this restlessness, swelling, and
heat--it was jealousy! jealousy! jealousy! which he had sworn never to
feel again.
"Come with us to Corinth, Flanders," he said with more than his usual
energy, stopping by Jacob's chair. He was relieved by Jacob's reply, or
rather by the solid, direct, if shy manner in which he said that he
would like very much to come with them to Corinth.
"Here is a fellow," thought Evan Williams, "who might do very well in
politics."
"I intend to come to Greece every year so long as I live," Jacob wrote
to Bonamy. "It is the only chance I can see of protecting oneself from
civilization."
"Goodness knows what he means by that," Bonamy sighed. For as he never
said a clumsy thing himself, these dark sayings of Jacob's made him feel
apprehensive, yet somehow impressed, his own turn being all for the
definite, the concrete, and the rational.
Nothing could be much simpler than what Sandra said as she descended the
Acro-Corinth, keeping to the little path, while Jacob strode over
rougher ground by her side. She had been left motherless at the age of
four; and the Park was vast.
"One never seemed able to get out of it," she laughed. Of course there
was the library, and dear Mr. Jones, and notions about things. "I used
to stray into the kitchen and sit upon the butler's knees," she laughed,
sadly though.
Jacob thought that if he had been there he would have saved her; for she
had been exposed to great dangers, he felt, and, he thought to himself,
"People wouldn't understand a woman talking as she talks."
She made little of the roughness of the hill; and wore breeches, he saw,
under her short skirts.
"Women like Fanny Elmer don't," he thought. "What's-her-name Carslake
didn't; yet they pretend..."
Mrs. Williams said things straight out. He was surprised by his own
knowledge of the rules of behaviour; how much more can be said than one
thought; how open one can be with a woman; and how little he had known
himself before.
Evan joined them on the road; and as they drove along up hill and down
hill (for Greece is in a state of effervescence, yet astonishingly
clean-cut, a treeless land, where you see the ground between the blades,
each hill cut and shaped and outlined as often as not against sparkling
deep blue waters, islands white as sand floating on the horizon,
occasional groves of palm trees standing in the valleys, which are
scattered with black goats, spotted with little olive trees and
sometimes have white hollows, rayed and criss-crossed, in their flanks),
as they drove up hill and down he scowled in the corner of the carriage,
with his paw so tightly closed that the skin was stretched between the
knuckles and the little hairs stood upright. Sandra rode opposite,
dominant, like a Victory prepared to fling into the air.
"Heartless!" thought Evan (which was untrue).
"Brainless!" he suspected (and that was not true either). "Still...!" He
envied her.
When bedtime came the difficulty was to write to Bonamy, Jacob found.
Yet he had seen Salamis, and Marathon in the distance. Poor old Bonamy!
No; there was something queer about it. He could not write to Bonamy.
"I shall go to Athens all the same," he resolved, looking very set, with
this hook dragging in his side.
The Williamses had already been to Athens.
Athens is still quite capable of striking a young man as the oddest
combination, the most incongruous assortment. Now it is suburban; now
immortal. Now cheap continental jewellery is laid upon plush trays. Now
the stately woman stands naked, save for a wave of drapery above the
knee. No form can he set on his sensations as he strolls, one blazing
afternoon, along the Parisian boulevard and skips out of the way of the
royal landau which, looking indescribably ramshackle, rattles along the
pitted roadway, saluted by citizens of both sexes cheaply dressed in
bowler hats and continental costumes; though a shepherd in kilt, cap,
and gaiters very nearly drives his herd of goats between the royal
wheels; and all the time the Acropolis surges into the air, raises
itself above the town, like a large immobile wave with the yellow
columns of the Parthenon firmly planted upon it.
The yellow columns of the Parthenon are to be seen at all hours of the
day firmly planted upon the Acropolis; though at sunset, when the ships
in the Piraeus fire their guns, a bell rings, a man in uniform (the
waistcoat unbuttoned) appears; and the women roll up the black stockings
which they are knitting in the shadow of the columns, call to the
children, and troop off down the hill back to their houses.
There they are again, the pillars, the pediment, the Temple of Victory
and the Erechtheum, set on a tawny rock cleft with shadows, directly you
unlatch your shutters in the morning and, leaning out, hear the clatter,
the clamour, the whip cracking in the street below. There they are.
The extreme definiteness with which they stand, now a brilliant white,
again yellow, and in some lights red, imposes ideas of durability, of
the emergence through the earth of some spiritual energy elsewhere
dissipated in elegant trifles. But this durability exists quite
independently of our admiration. Although the beauty is sufficiently
humane to weaken us, to stir the deep deposit of mud--memories,
abandonments, regrets, sentimental devotions--the Parthenon is separate
from all that; and if you consider how it has stood out all night, for
centuries, you begin to connect the blaze (at midday the glare is
dazzling and the frieze almost invisible) with the idea that perhaps it
is beauty alone that is immortal.
Added to this, compared with the blistered stucco, the new love songs
rasped out to the strum of guitar and gramophone, and the mobile yet
insignificant faces of the street, the Parthenon is really astonishing
in its silent composure; which is so vigorous that, far from being
decayed, the Parthenon appears, on the contrary, likely to outlast the
entire world.
"And the Greeks, like sensible men, never bothered to finish the backs
of their statues," said Jacob, shading his eyes and observing that the
side of the figure which is turned away from view is left in the rough.
He noted the slight irregularity in the line of the steps which "the
artistic sense of the Greeks preferred to mathematical accuracy," he
read in his guide-book.
He stood on the exact spot where the great statue of Athena used to
stand, and identified the more famous landmarks of the scene beneath.
In short he was accurate and diligent; but profoundly morose. Moreover
he was pestered by guides. This was on Monday.
But on Wednesday he wrote a telegram to Bonamy, telling him to come at
once. And then he crumpled it in his hand and threw it in the gutter.
"For one thing he wouldn't come," he thought. "And then I daresay this
sort of thing wears off." "This sort of thing" being that uneasy,
painful feeling, something like selfishness--one wishes almost that the
thing would stop--it is getting more and more beyond what is
possible--"If it goes on much longer I shan't be able to cope with
it--but if some one else were seeing it at the same time--Bonamy is
stuffed in his room in Lincoln's Inn--oh, I say, damn it all, I
say,"--the sight of Hymettus, Pentelicus, Lycabettus on one side, and
the sea on the other, as one stands in the Parthenon at sunset, the sky
pink feathered, the plain all colours, the marble tawny in one's eyes,
is thus oppressive. Luckily Jacob had little sense of personal
association; he seldom thought of Plato or Socrates in the flesh; on the
other hand his feeling for architecture was very strong; he preferred
statues to pictures; and he was beginning to think a great deal about
the problems of civilization, which were solved, of course, so very
remarkably by the ancient Greeks, though their solution is no help to
us. Then the hook gave a great tug in his side as he lay in bed on
Wednesday night; and he turned over with a desperate sort of tumble,
remembering Sandra Wentworth Williams with whom he was in love.
Next day he climbed Pentelicus.
The day after he went up to the Acropolis. The hour was early; the place
almost deserted; and possibly there was thunder in the air. But the sun
struck full upon the Acropolis.
Jacob's intention was to sit down and read, and, finding a drum of
marble conveniently placed, from which Marathon could be seen, and yet
it was in the shade, while the Erechtheum blazed white in front of him,
there he sat. And after reading a page he put his thumb in his book. Why
not rule countries in the way they should be ruled? And he read again.
No doubt his position there overlooking Marathon somehow raised his
spirits. Or it may have been that a slow capacious brain has these
moments of flowering. Or he had, insensibly, while he was abroad, got
into the way of thinking about politics.
And then looking up and seeing the sharp outline, his meditations were
given an extraordinary edge; Greece was over; the Parthenon in ruins;
yet there he was.
(Ladies with green and white umbrellas passed through the
courtyard--French ladies on their way to join their husbands in
Constantinople.)
Jacob read on again. And laying the book on the ground he began, as if
inspired by what he had read, to write a note upon the importance of
history--upon democracy--one of those scribbles upon which the work of a
lifetime may be based; or again, it falls out of a book twenty years
later, and one can't remember a word of it. It is a little painful. It
had better be burnt.
Jacob wrote; began to draw a straight nose; when all the French ladies
opening and shutting their umbrellas just beneath him exclaimed, looking
at the sky, that one did not know what to expect--rain or fine weather?
Jacob got up and strolled across to the Erechtheum. There are still
several women standing there holding the roof on their heads. Jacob
straightened himself slightly; for stability and balance affect the body
first. These statues annulled things so! He stared at them, then turned,
and there was Madame Lucien Grave perched on a block of marble with her
kodak pointed at his head. Of course she jumped down, in spite of her
age, her figure, and her tight boots--having, now that her daughter was
married, lapsed with a luxurious abandonment, grand enough in its way,
into the fleshy grotesque; she jumped down, but not before Jacob had
seen her.
"Damn these women--damn these women!" he thought. And he went to fetch
his book which he had left lying on the ground in the Parthenon.
"How they spoil things," he murmured, leaning against one of the
pillars, pressing his book tight between his arm and his side. (As for
the weather, no doubt the storm would break soon; Athens was under
cloud.)
"It is those damned women," said Jacob, without any trace of bitterness,
but rather with sadness and disappointment that what might have been
should never be.
(This violent disillusionment is generally to be expected in young men
in the prime of life, sound of wind and limb, who will soon become
fathers of families and directors of banks.)
Then, making sure that the Frenchwomen had gone, and looking cautiously
round him, Jacob strolled over to the Erechtheum and looked rather
furtively at the goddess on the left-hand side holding the roof on her
head. She reminded him of Sandra Wentworth Williams. He looked at her,
then looked away. He looked at her, then looked away. He was
extraordinarily moved, and with the battered Greek nose in his head,
with Sandra in his head, with all sorts of things in his head, off he
started to walk right up to the top of Mount Hymettus, alone, in the
heat.
That very afternoon Bonamy went expressly to talk about Jacob to tea
with Clara Durrant in the square behind Sloane Street where, on hot
spring days, there are striped blinds over the front windows, single
horses pawing the macadam outside the doors, and elderly gentlemen in
yellow waistcoats ringing bells and stepping in very politely when the
maid demurely replies that Mrs. Durrant is at home.
Bonamy sat with Clara in the sunny front room with the barrel organ
piping sweetly outside; the water-cart going slowly along spraying the
pavement; the carriages jingling, and all the silver and chintz, brown
and blue rugs and vases filled with green boughs, striped with trembling
yellow bars.
The insipidity of what was said needs no illustration--Bonamy kept on
gently returning quiet answers and accumulating amazement at an
existence squeezed and emasculated within a white satin shoe (Mrs.
Durrant meanwhile enunciating strident politics with Sir Somebody in the
back room) until the virginity of Clara's soul appeared to him candid;
the depths unknown; and he would have brought out Jacob's name had he
not begun to feel positively certain that Clara loved him--and could do
nothing whatever.
"Nothing whatever!" he exclaimed, as the door shut, and, for a man of
his temperament, got a very queer feeling, as he walked through the
park, of carriages irresistibly driven; of flower beds uncompromisingly
geometrical; of force rushing round geometrical patterns in the most
senseless way in the world. "Was Clara," he thought, pausing to watch
the boys bathing in the Serpentine, "the silent woman?--would Jacob
marry her?"
But in Athens in the sunshine, in Athens, where it is almost impossible
to get afternoon tea, and elderly gentlemen who talk politics talk them
all the other way round, in Athens sat Sandra Wentworth Williams,
veiled, in white, her legs stretched in front of her, one elbow on the
arm of the bamboo chair, blue clouds wavering and drifting from her
cigarette.
The orange trees which flourish in the Square of the Constitution, the
band, the dragging of feet, the sky, the houses, lemon and rose
coloured--all this became so significant to Mrs. Wentworth Williams
after her second cup of coffee that she began dramatizing the story of
the noble and impulsive Englishwoman who had offered a seat in her
carriage to the old American lady at Mycenae (Mrs. Duggan)--not
altogether a false story, though it said nothing of Evan, standing first
on one foot, then on the other, waiting for the women to stop
chattering.
"I am putting the life of Father Damien into verse," Mrs. Duggan had
said, for she had lost everything--everything in the world, husband and
child and everything, but faith remained.
Sandra, floating from the particular to the universal, lay back in a
trance.
The flight of time which hurries us so tragically along; the eternal
drudge and drone, now bursting into fiery flame like those brief balls
of yellow among green leaves (she was looking at orange trees); kisses
on lips that are to die; the world turning, turning in mazes of heat and
sound--though to be sure there is the quiet evening with its lovely
pallor, "For I am sensitive to every side of it," Sandra thought, "and
Mrs. Duggan will write to me for ever, and I shall answer her letters."
Now the royal band marching by with the national flag stirred wider
rings of emotion, and life became something that the courageous mount
and ride out to sea on--the hair blown back (so she envisaged it, and
the breeze stirred slightly among the orange trees) and she herself was
emerging from silver spray--when she saw Jacob. He was standing in the
Square with a book under his arm looking vacantly about him. That he was
heavily built and might become stout in time was a fact.
But she suspected him of being a mere bumpkin.
"There is that young man," she said, peevishly, throwing away her
cigarette, "that Mr. Flanders."
"Where?" said Evan. "I don't see him."
"Oh, walking away--behind the trees now. No, you can't see him. But we
are sure to run into him," which, of course, they did.
But how far was he a mere bumpkin? How far was Jacob Flanders at the age
of twenty-six a stupid fellow? It is no use trying to sum people up. One
must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is
done. Some, it is true, take ineffaceable impressions of character at
once. Others dally, loiter, and get blown this way and that. Kind old
ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat
will always go to a good man, they say; but then, Mrs. Whitehorn,
Jacob's landlady, loathed cats.
There is also the highly respectable opinion that character-mongering is
much overdone nowadays. After all, what does it matter--that Fanny Elmer
was all sentiment and sensation, and Mrs. Durrant hard as iron? that
Clara, owing (so the character-mongers said) largely to her mother's
influence, never yet had the chance to do anything off her own bat, and
only to very observant eyes displayed deeps of feeling which were
positively alarming; and would certainly throw herself away upon some
one unworthy of her one of these days unless, so the character-mongers
said, she had a spark of her mother's spirit in her--was somehow heroic.
But what a term to apply to Clara Durrant! Simple to a degree, others
thought her. And that is the very reason, so they said, why she attracts
Dick Bonamy--the young man with the Wellington nose. Now HE'S a dark
horse if you like. And there these gossips would suddenly pause.
Obviously they meant to hint at his peculiar disposition--long rumoured
among them.
"But sometimes it is precisely a woman like Clara that men of that
temperament need..." Miss Julia Eliot would hint.
"Well," Mr. Bowley would reply, "it may be so."
For however long these gossips sit, and however they stuff out their
victims' characters till they are swollen and tender as the livers of
geese exposed to a hot fire, they never come to a decision.
"That young man, Jacob Flanders," they would say, "so distinguished
looking--and yet so awkward." Then they would apply themselves to Jacob
and vacillate eternally between the two extremes. He rode to
hounds--after a fashion, for he hadn't a penny.
"Did you ever hear who his father was?" asked Julia Eliot.
"His mother, they say, is somehow connected with the Rocksbiers,"
replied Mr. Bowley.
"He doesn't overwork himself anyhow."
"His friends are very fond of him."
"Dick Bonamy, you mean?"
"No, I didn't mean that. It's evidently the other way with Jacob. He is
precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the
rest of his life."
"Oh, Mr. Bowley," said Mrs. Durrant, sweeping down upon them in her
imperious manner, "you remember Mrs. Adams? Well, that is her niece."
And Mr. Bowley, getting up, bowed politely and fetched strawberries.
So we are driven back to see what the other side means--the men in clubs
and Cabinets--when they say that character-drawing is a frivolous
fireside art, a matter of pins and needles, exquisite outlines enclosing
vacancy, flourishes, and mere scrawls.
The battleships ray out over the North Sea, keeping their stations
accurately apart. At a given signal all the guns are trained on a target
which (the master gunner counts the seconds, watch in hand--at the sixth
he looks up) flames into splinters. With equal nonchalance a dozen young
men in the prime of life descend with composed faces into the depths of
the sea; and there impassively (though with perfect mastery of
machinery) suffocate uncomplainingly together. Like blocks of tin
soldiers the army covers the cornfield, moves up the hillside, stops,
reels slightly this way and that, and falls flat, save that, through
field glasses, it can be seen that one or two pieces still agitate up
and down like fragments of broken match-stick.
These actions, together with the incessant commerce of banks,
laboratories, chancellories, and houses of business, are the strokes
which oar the world forward, they say. And they are dealt by men as
smoothly sculptured as the impassive policeman at Ludgate Circus. But
you will observe that far from being padded to rotundity his face is
stiff from force of will, and lean from the efforts of keeping it so.
When his right arm rises, all the force in his veins flows straight from
shoulder to finger-tips; not an ounce is diverted into sudden impulses,
sentimental regrets, wire-drawn distinctions. The buses punctually stop.
It is thus that we live, they say, driven by an unseizable force. They
say that the novelists never catch it; that it goes hurtling through
their nets and leaves them torn to ribbons. This, they say, is what we
live by--this unseizable force.
"Where are the men?" said old General Gibbons, looking round the
drawing-room, full as usual on Sunday afternoons of well-dressed people.
"Where are the guns?"
Mrs. Durrant looked too.
Clara, thinking that her mother wanted her, came in; then went out
again.
They were talking about Germany at the Durrants, and Jacob (driven by
this unseizable force) walked rapidly down Hermes Street and ran
straight into the Williamses.
"Oh!" cried Sandra, with a cordiality which she suddenly felt. And Evan
added, "What luck!"
The dinner which they gave him in the hotel which looks on to the Square
of the Constitution was excellent. Plated baskets contained fresh rolls.
There was real butter. And the meat scarcely needed the disguise of
innumerable little red and green vegetables glazed in sauce.
It was strange, though. There were the little tables set out at
intervals on the scarlet floor with the Greek King's monogram wrought in
yellow. Sandra dined in her hat, veiled as usual. Evan looked this way
and that over his shoulder; imperturbable yet supple; and sometimes
sighed. It was strange. For they were English people come together in
Athens on a May evening. Jacob, helping himself to this and that,
answered intelligently, yet with a ring in his voice.
The Williamses were going to Constantinople early next morning, they
said.
"Before you are up," said Sandra.
They would leave Jacob alone, then. Turning very slightly, Evan ordered
something--a bottle of wine--from which he helped Jacob, with a kind of
solicitude, with a kind of paternal solicitude, if that were possible.
To be left alone--that was good for a young fellow. Never was there a
time when the country had more need of men. He sighed.
"And you have been to the Acropolis?" asked Sandra.
"Yes," said Jacob. And they moved off to the window together, while Evan
spoke to the head waiter about calling them early.
"It is astonishing," said Jacob, in a gruff voice.
Sandra opened her eyes very slightly. Possibly her nostrils expanded a
little too.
"At half-past six then," said Evan, coming towards them, looking as if
he faced something in facing his wife and Jacob standing with their
backs to the window.
Sandra smiled at him.
And, as he went to the window and had nothing to say she added, in
broken half-sentences:
"Well, but how lovely--wouldn't it be? The Acropolis, Evan--or are you
too tired?"
At that Evan looked at them, or, since Jacob was staring ahead of him,
at his wife, surlily, sullenly, yet with a kind of distress--not that
she would pity him. Nor would the implacable spirit of love, for
anything he could do, cease its tortures.
They left him and he sat in the smoking-room, which looks out on to the
Square of the Constitution.
"Evan is happier alone," said Sandra. "We have been separated from the
newspapers. Well, it is better that people should have what they
want.... You have seen all these wonderful things since we met.... What
impression ... I think that you are changed."
"You want to go to the Acropolis," said Jacob. "Up here then."
"One will remember it all one's life," said Sandra.
"Yes," said Jacob. "I wish you could have come in the day-time."
"This is more wonderful," said Sandra, waving her hand.
Jacob looked vaguely.
"But you should see the Parthenon in the day-time," he said. "You
couldn't come to-morrow--it would be too early?"
"You have sat there for hours and hours by yourself?"
"There were some awful women this morning," said Jacob.
"Awful women?" Sandra echoed.
"Frenchwomen."
"But something very wonderful has happened," said Sandra. Ten minutes,
fifteen minutes, half an hour--that was all the time before her.
"Yes," he said.
"When one is your age--when one is young. What will you do? You will
fall in love--oh yes! But don't be in too great a hurry. I am so much
older."
She was brushed off the pavement by parading men.
"Shall we go on?" Jacob asked.
"Let us go on," she insisted.
For she could not stop until she had told him--or heard him say--or was
it some action on his part that she required? Far away on the horizon
she discerned it and could not rest.
"You'd never get English people to sit out like this," he said.
"Never--no. When you get back to England you won't forget this--or come
with us to Constantinople!" she cried suddenly.
"But then..."
Sandra sighed.
"You must go to Delphi, of course," she said. "But," she asked herself,
"what do I want from him? Perhaps it is something that I have
missed...."
"You will get there about six in the evening," she said. "You will see
the eagles."
Jacob looked set and even desperate by the light at the street corner
and yet composed. He was suffering, perhaps. He was credulous. Yet there
was something caustic about him. He had in him the seeds of extreme
disillusionment, which would come to him from women in middle life.
Perhaps if one strove hard enough to reach the top of the hill it need
not come to him--this disillusionment from women in middle life.
"The hotel is awful," she said. "The last visitors had left their basins
full of dirty water. There is always that," she laughed.
"The people one meets ARE beastly," Jacob said.
His excitement was clear enough.
"Write and tell me about it," she said. "And tell me what you feel and
what you think. Tell me everything."
The night was dark. The Acropolis was a jagged mound.
"I should like to, awfully," he said.
"When we get back to London, we shall meet..."
"Yes."
"I suppose they leave the gates open?" he asked.
"We could climb them!" she answered wildly.
Obscuring the moon and altogether darkening the Acropolis the clouds
passed from east to west. The clouds solidified; the vapours thickened;
the trailing veils stayed and accumulated.
It was dark now over Athens, except for gauzy red streaks where the
streets ran; and the front of the Palace was cadaverous from electric
light. At sea the piers stood out, marked by separate dots; the waves
being invisible, and promontories and islands were dark humps with a few
lights.
"I'd love to bring my brother, if I may," Jacob murmured.
"And then when your mother comes to London--," said Sandra.
The mainland of Greece was dark; and somewhere off Euboea a cloud must
have touched the waves and spattered them--the dolphins circling deeper
and deeper into the sea. Violent was the wind now rushing down the Sea
of Marmara between Greece and the plains of Troy.
In Greece and the uplands of Albania and Turkey, the wind scours the
sand and the dust, and sows itself thick with dry particles. And then it
pelts the smooth domes of the mosques, and makes the cypresses, standing
stiff by the turbaned tombstones of Mohammedans, creak and bristle.
Sandra's veils were swirled about her.
"I will give you my copy," said Jacob. "Here. Will you keep it?"
(The book was the poems of Donne.)
Now the agitation of the air uncovered a racing star. Now it was dark.
Now one after another lights were extinguished. Now great
towns--Paris--Constantinople--London--were black as strewn rocks.
Waterways might be distinguished. In England the trees were heavy in
leaf. Here perhaps in some southern wood an old man lit dry ferns and
the birds were startled. The sheep coughed; one flower bent slightly
towards another. The English sky is softer, milkier than the Eastern.
Something gentle has passed into it from the grass-rounded hills,
something damp. The salt gale blew in at Betty Flanders's bedroom
window, and the widow lady, raising herself slightly on her elbow,
sighed like one who realizes, but would fain ward off a little
longer--oh, a little longer!--the oppression of eternity.
But to return to Jacob and Sandra.
They had vanished. There was the Acropolis; but had they reached it? The
columns and the Temple remain; the emotion of the living breaks fresh on
them year after year; and of that what remains?
As for reaching the Acropolis who shall say that we ever do it, or that
when Jacob woke next morning he found anything hard and durable to keep
for ever? Still, he went with them to Constantinople.
Sandra Wentworth Williams certainly woke to find a copy of Donne's poems
upon her dressing-table. And the book would be stood on the shelf in the
English country house where Sally Duggan's Life of Father Damien in
verse would join it one of these days. There were ten or twelve little
volumes already. Strolling in at dusk, Sandra would open the books and
her eyes would brighten (but not at the print), and subsiding into the
arm-chair she would suck back again the soul of the moment; or, for
sometimes she was restless, would pull out book after book and swing
across the whole space of her life like an acrobat from bar to bar. She
had had her moments. Meanwhile, the great clock on the landing ticked
and Sandra would hear time accumulating, and ask herself, "What for?
What for?"
"What for? What for?" Sandra would say, putting the book back, and
strolling to the looking-glass and pressing her hair. And Miss Edwards
would be startled at dinner, as she opened her mouth to admit roast
mutton, by Sandra's sudden solicitude: "Are you happy, Miss Edwards?"--a
thing Cissy Edwards hadn't thought of for years.
"What for? What for?" Jacob never asked himself any such questions, to
judge by the way he laced his boots; shaved himself; to judge by the
depth of his sleep that night, with the wind fidgeting at the shutters,
and half-a-dozen mosquitoes singing in his ears. He was young--a man.
And then Sandra was right when she judged him to be credulous as yet. At
forty it might be a different matter. Already he had marked the things
he liked in Donne, and they were savage enough. However, you might place
beside them passages of the purest poetry in Shakespeare.
But the wind was rolling the darkness through the streets of Athens,
rolling it, one might suppose, with a sort of trampling energy of mood
which forbids too close an analysis of the feelings of any single
person, or inspection of features. All faces--Greek, Levantine, Turkish,
English--would have looked much the same in that darkness. At length the
columns and the Temples whiten, yellow, turn rose; and the Pyramids and
St. Peter's arise, and at last sluggish St. Paul's looms up.
The Christians have the right to rouse most cities with their
interpretation of the day's meaning. Then, less melodiously, dissenters
of different sects issue a cantankerous emendation. The steamers,
resounding like gigantic tuning-forks, state the old old fact--how there
is a sea coldly, greenly, swaying outside. But nowadays it is the thin
voice of duty, piping in a white thread from the top of a funnel, that
collects the largest multitudes, and night is nothing but a long-drawn
sigh between hammer-strokes, a deep breath--you can hear it from an open
window even in the heart of London.
But who, save the nerve-worn and sleepless, or thinkers standing with
hands to the eyes on some crag above the multitude, see things thus in
skeleton outline, bare of flesh? In Surbiton the skeleton is wrapped in
flesh.
"The kettle never boils so well on a sunny morning," says Mrs. Grandage,
glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece. Then the grey Persian cat
stretches itself on the window-seat, and buffets a moth with soft round
paws. And before breakfast is half over (they were late today), a baby
is deposited in her lap, and she must guard the sugar basin while Tom
Grandage reads the golfing article in the "Times," sips his coffee,
wipes his moustaches, and is off to the office, where he is the greatest
authority upon the foreign exchanges and marked for promotion. The
skeleton is well wrapped in flesh. Even this dark night when the wind
rolls the darkness through Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford
Square it stirs (since it is summer-time and the height of the season),
plane trees spangled with electric light, and curtains still preserving
the room from the dawn. People still murmur over the last word said on
the staircase, or strain, all through their dreams, for the voice of the
alarum clock. So when the wind roams through a forest innumerable twigs
stir; hives are brushed; insects sway on grass blades; the spider runs
rapidly up a crease in the bark; and the whole air is tremulous with
breathing; elastic with filaments.
Only here--in Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford Square--each
insect carries a globe of the world in his head, and the webs of the
forest are schemes evolved for the smooth conduct of business; and honey
is treasure of one sort and another; and the stir in the air is the
indescribable agitation of life.
But colour returns; runs up the stalks of the grass; blows out into
tulips and crocuses; solidly stripes the tree trunks; and fills the
gauze of the air and the grasses and pools.
The Bank of England emerges; and the Monument with its bristling head of
golden hair; the dray horses crossing London Bridge show grey and
strawberry and iron-coloured. There is a whir of wings as the suburban
trains rush into the terminus. And the light mounts over the faces of
all the tall blind houses, slides through a chink and paints the
lustrous bellying crimson curtains; the green wine-glasses; the
coffee-cups; and the chairs standing askew.
Sunlight strikes in upon shaving-glasses; and gleaming brass cans; upon
all the jolly trappings of the day; the bright, inquisitive, armoured,
resplendent, summer's day, which has long since vanquished chaos; which
has dried the melancholy mediaeval mists; drained the swamp and stood
glass and stone upon it; and equipped our brains and bodies with such an
armoury of weapons that merely to see the flash and thrust of limbs
engaged in the conduct of daily life is better than the old pageant of
armies drawn out in battle array upon the plain.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"The Height of the season," said Bonamy.
The sun had already blistered the paint on the backs of the green chairs
in Hyde Park; peeled the bark off the plane trees; and turned the earth
to powder and to smooth yellow pebbles. Hyde Park was circled,
incessantly, by turning wheels.
"The height of the season," said Bonamy sarcastically.
He was sarcastic because of Clara Durrant; because Jacob had come back
from Greece very brown and lean, with his pockets full of Greek notes,
which he pulled out when the chair man came for pence; because Jacob was
silent.
"He has not said a word to show that he is glad to see me," thought
Bonamy bitterly.
The motor cars passed incessantly over the bridge of the Serpentine; the
upper classes walked upright, or bent themselves gracefully over the
palings; the lower classes lay with their knees cocked up, flat on their
backs; the sheep grazed on pointed wooden legs; small children ran down
the sloping grass, stretched their arms, and fell.
"Very urbane," Jacob brought out.
"Urbane" on the lips of Jacob had mysteriously all the shapeliness of a
character which Bonamy thought daily more sublime, devastating, terrific
than ever, though he was still, and perhaps would be for ever, barbaric,
obscure.
What superlatives! What adjectives! How acquit Bonamy of sentimentality
of the grossest sort; of being tossed like a cork on the waves; of
having no steady insight into character; of being unsupported by reason,
and of drawing no comfort whatever from the works of the classics?
"The height of civilization," said Jacob.
He was fond of using Latin words.
Magnanimity, virtue--such words when Jacob used them in talk with Bonamy
meant that he took control of the situation; that Bonamy would play
round him like an affectionate spaniel; and that (as likely as not) they
would end by rolling on the floor.
"And Greece?" said Bonamy. "The Parthenon and all that?"
"There's none of this European mysticism," said Jacob.
"It's the atmosphere. I suppose," said Bonamy. "And you went to
Constantinople?"
"Yes," said Jacob.
Bonamy paused, moved a pebble; then darted in with the rapidity and
certainty of a lizard's tongue.
"You are in love!" he exclaimed.
Jacob blushed.
The sharpest of knives never cut so deep.
As for responding, or taking the least account of it, Jacob stared
straight ahead of him, fixed, monolithic--oh, very beautiful!--like a
British Admiral, exclaimed Bonamy in a rage, rising from his seat and
walking off; waiting for some sound; none came; too proud to look back;
walking quicker and quicker until he found himself gazing into motor
cars and cursing women. Where was the pretty woman's face?
Clara's--Fanny's--Florinda's? Who was the pretty little creature?
Not Clara Durrant.
The Aberdeen terrier must be exercised, and as Mr. Bowley was going that
very moment--would like nothing better than a walk--they went together,
Clara and kind little Bowley--Bowley who had rooms in the Albany, Bowley
who wrote letters to the "Times" in a jocular vein about foreign hotels
and the Aurora Borealis--Bowley who liked young people and walked down
Piccadilly with his right arm resting on the boss of his back.
"Little demon!" cried Clara, and attached Troy to his chain.
Bowley anticipated--hoped for--a confidence. Devoted to her mother,
Clara sometimes felt her a little, well, her mother was so sure of
herself that she could not understand other people being--being--"as
ludicrous as I am," Clara jerked out (the dog tugging her forwards). And
Bowley thought she looked like a huntress and turned over in his mind
which it should be--some pale virgin with a slip of the moon in her
hair, which was a flight for Bowley.
The colour was in her cheeks. To have spoken outright about her
mother--still, it was only to Mr. Bowley, who loved her, as everybody
must; but to speak was unnatural to her, yet it was awful to feel, as
she had done all day, that she MUST tell some one.
"Wait till we cross the road," she said to the dog, bending down.
Happily she had recovered by that time.
"She thinks so much about England," she said. "She is so anxious---"
Bowley was defrauded as usual. Clara never confided in any one.
"Why don't the young people settle it, eh?" he wanted to ask. "What's
all this about England?"--a question poor Clara could not have answered,
since, as Mrs. Durrant discussed with Sir Edgar the policy of Sir Edward
Grey, Clara only wondered why the cabinet looked dusty, and Jacob had
never come. Oh, here was Mrs. Cowley Johnson...
And Clara would hand the pretty china teacups, and smile at the
compliment--that no one in London made tea so well as she did.
"We get it at Brocklebank's," she said, "in Cursitor Street."
Ought she not to be grateful? Ought she not to be happy?
Especially since her mother looked so well and enjoyed so much talking
to Sir Edgar about Morocco, Venezuela, or some such place.
"Jacob! Jacob!" thought Clara; and kind Mr. Bowley, who was ever so good
with old ladies, looked; stopped; wondered whether Elizabeth wasn't too
harsh with her daughter; wondered about Bonamy, Jacob--which young
fellow was it?--and jumped up directly Clara said she must exercise
Troy.
They had reached the site of the old Exhibition. They looked at the
tulips. Stiff and curled, the little rods of waxy smoothness rose from
the earth, nourished yet contained, suffused with scarlet and coral
pink. Each had its shadow; each grew trimly in the diamond-shaped wedge
as the gardener had planned it.
"Barnes never gets them to grow like that," Clara mused; she sighed.
"You are neglecting your friends," said Bowley, as some one, going the
other way, lifted his hat. She started; acknowledged Mr. Lionel Parry's
bow; wasted on him what had sprung for Jacob.
("Jacob! Jacob!" she thought.)
"But you'll get run over if I let you go," she said to the dog.
"England seems all right," said Mr. Bowley.
The loop of the railing beneath the statue of Achilles was full of
parasols and waistcoats; chains and bangles; of ladies and gentlemen,
lounging elegantly, lightly observant.
"'This statue was erected by the women of England...'" Clara read out
with a foolish little laugh. "Oh, Mr. Bowley! Oh!" Gallop--gallop--gallop--a
horse galloped past without a rider. The stirrups swung; the pebbles
spurted.
"Oh, stop! Stop it, Mr. Bowley!" she cried, white, trembling, gripping
his arm, utterly unconscious, the tears coming.
"Tut-tut!" said Mr. Bowley in his dressing-room an hour later.
"Tut-tut!"--a comment that was profound enough, though inarticulately
expressed, since his valet was handing his shirt studs.
Julia Eliot, too, had seen the horse run away, and had risen from her
seat to watch the end of the incident, which, since she came of a
sporting family, seemed to her slightly ridiculous. Sure enough the
little man came pounding behind with his breeches dusty; looked
thoroughly annoyed; and was being helped to mount by a policeman when
Julia Eliot, with a sardonic smile, turned towards the Marble Arch on
her errand of mercy. It was only to visit a sick old lady who had known
her mother and perhaps the Duke of Wellington; for Julia shared the love
of her sex for the distressed; liked to visit death-beds; threw slippers
at weddings; received confidences by the dozen; knew more pedigrees than
a scholar knows dates, and was one of the kindliest, most generous,
least continent of women.
Yet five minutes after she had passed the statue of Achilles she had the
rapt look of one brushing through crowds on a summer's afternoon, when
the trees are rustling, the wheels churning yellow, and the tumult of
the present seems like an elegy for past youth and past summers, and
there rose in her mind a curious sadness, as if time and eternity showed
through skirts and waistcoasts, and she saw people passing tragically to
destruction. Yet, Heaven knows, Julia was no fool. A sharper woman at a
bargain did not exist. She was always punctual. The watch on her wrist
gave her twelve minutes and a half in which to reach Bruton Street. Lady
Congreve expected her at five.
The gilt clock at Verrey's was striking five.
Florinda looked at it with a dull expression, like an animal. She looked
at the clock; looked at the door; looked at the long glass opposite;
disposed her cloak; drew closer to the table, for she was pregnant--no
doubt about it, Mother Stuart said, recommending remedies, consulting
friends; sunk, caught by the heel, as she tripped so lightly over the
surface.
Her tumbler of pinkish sweet stuff was set down by the waiter; and she
sucked, through a straw, her eyes on the looking-glass, on the door, now
soothed by the sweet taste. When Nick Bramham came in it was plain, even
to the young Swiss waiter, that there was a bargain between them. Nick
hitched his clothes together clumsily; ran his fingers through his hair;
sat down, to an ordeal, nervously. She looked at him; and set off
laughing; laughed--laughed--laughed. The young Swiss waiter, standing
with crossed legs by the pillar, laughed too.
The door opened; in came the roar of Regent Street, the roar of traffic,
impersonal, unpitying; and sunshine grained with dirt. The Swiss waiter
must see to the newcomers. Bramham lifted his glass.
"He's like Jacob," said Florinda, looking at the newcomer.
"The way he stares." She stopped laughing.
Jacob, leaning forward, drew a plan of the Parthenon in the dust in Hyde
Park, a network of strokes at least, which may have been the Parthenon,
or again a mathematical diagram. And why was the pebble so emphatically
ground in at the corner? It was not to count his notes that he took out
a wad of papers and read a long flowing letter which Sandra had written
two days ago at Milton Dower House with his book before her and in her
mind the memory of something said or attempted, some moment in the dark
on the road to the Acropolis which (such was her creed) mattered for
ever.
"He is," she mused, "like that man in Moliere."
She meant Alceste. She meant that he was severe. She meant that she
could deceive him.
"Or could I not?" she thought, putting the poems of Donne back in the
bookcase. "Jacob," she went on, going to the window and looking over the
spotted flower-beds across the grass where the piebald cows grazed under
beech trees, "Jacob would be shocked."
The perambulator was going through the little gate in the railing. She
kissed her hand; directed by the nurse, Jimmy waved his.
"HE'S a small boy," she said, thinking of Jacob.
And yet--Alceste?
"What a nuisance you are!" Jacob grumbled, stretching out first one leg
and then the other and feeling in each trouser-pocket for his chair
ticket.
"I expect the sheep have eaten it," he said. "Why do you keep sheep?"
"Sorry to disturb you, sir," said the ticket-collector, his hand deep in
the enormous pouch of pence.
"Well, I hope they pay you for it," said Jacob. "There you are. No. You
can stick to it. Go and get drunk."
He had parted with half-a-crown, tolerantly, compassionately, with
considerable contempt for his species.
Even now poor Fanny Elmer was dealing, as she walked along the Strand,
in her incompetent way with this very careless, indifferent, sublime
manner he had of talking to railway guards or porters; or Mrs.
Whitehorn, when she consulted him about her little boy who was beaten by
the schoolmaster.
Sustained entirely upon picture post cards for the past two months,
Fanny's idea of Jacob was more statuesque, noble, and eyeless than ever.
To reinforce her vision she had taken to visiting the British Museum,
where, keeping her eyes downcast until she was alongside of the battered
Ulysses, she opened them and got a fresh shock of Jacob's presence,
enough to last her half a day. But this was wearing thin. And she wrote
now--poems, letters that were never posted, saw his face in
advertisements on hoardings, and would cross the road to let the
barrel-organ turn her musings to rhapsody. But at breakfast (she shared
rooms with a teacher), when the butter was smeared about the plate, and
the prongs of the forks were clotted with old egg yolk, she revised
these visions violently; was, in truth, very cross; was losing her
complexion, as Margery Jackson told her, bringing the whole thing down
(as she laced her stout boots) to a level of mother-wit, vulgarity, and
sentiment, for she had loved too; and been a fool.
"One's godmothers ought to have told one," said Fanny, looking in at the
window of Bacon, the mapseller, in the Strand--told one that it is no
use making a fuss; this is life, they should have said, as Fanny said it
now, looking at the large yellow globe marked with steamship lines.
"This is life. This is life," said Fanny.
"A very hard face," thought Miss Barrett, on the other side of the
glass, buying maps of the Syrian desert and waiting impatiently to be
served. "Girls look old so soon nowadays."
The equator swam behind tears.
"Piccadilly?" Fanny asked the conductor of the omnibus, and climbed to
the top. After all, he would, he must, come back to her.
But Jacob might have been thinking of Rome; of architecture; of
jurisprudence; as he sat under the plane tree in Hyde Park.
The omnibus stopped outside Charing Cross; and behind it were clogged
omnibuses, vans, motor-cars, for a procession with banners was passing
down Whitehall, and elderly people were stiffly descending from between
the paws of the slippery lions, where they had been testifying to their
faith, singing lustily, raising their eyes from their music to look into
the sky, and still their eyes were on the sky as they marched behind the
gold letters of their creed.
The traffic stopped, and the sun, no longer sprayed out by the breeze,
became almost too hot. But the procession passed; the banners glittered
--far away down Whitehall; the traffic was released; lurched on; spun to
a smooth continuous uproar; swerving round the curve of Cockspur Street;
and sweeping past Government offices and equestrian statues down
Whitehall to the prickly spires, the tethered grey fleet of masonry, and
the large white clock of Westminster.
Five strokes Big Ben intoned; Nelson received the salute. The wires of
the Admiralty shivered with some far-away communication. A voice kept
remarking that Prime Ministers and Viceroys spoke in the Reichstag;
entered Lahore; said that the Emperor travelled; in Milan they rioted;
said there were rumours in Vienna; said that the Ambassador at
Constantinople had audience with the Sultan; the fleet was at Gibraltar.
The voice continued, imprinting on the faces of the clerks in Whitehall
(Timothy Durrant was one of them) something of its own inexorable
gravity, as they listened, deciphered, wrote down. Papers accumulated,
inscribed with the utterances of Kaisers, the statistics of ricefields,
the growling of hundreds of work-people, plotting sedition in back
streets, or gathering in the Calcutta bazaars, or mustering their forces
in the uplands of Albania, where the hills are sand-coloured, and bones
lie unburied.
The voice spoke plainly in the square quiet room with heavy tables,
where one elderly man made notes on the margin of typewritten sheets,
his silver-topped umbrella leaning against the bookcase.
His head--bald, red-veined, hollow-looking--represented all the heads in
the building. His head, with the amiable pale eyes, carried the burden
of knowledge across the street; laid it before his colleagues, who came
equally burdened; and then the sixteen gentlemen, lifting their pens or
turning perhaps rather wearily in their chairs, decreed that the course
of history should shape itself this way or that way, being manfully
determined, as their faces showed, to impose some coherency upon Rajahs
and Kaisers and the muttering in bazaars, the secret gatherings, plainly
visible in Whitehall, of kilted peasants in Albanian uplands; to control
the course of events.
Pitt and Chatham, Burke and Gladstone looked from side to side with
fixed marble eyes and an air of immortal quiescence which perhaps the
living may have envied, the air being full of whistling and concussions,
as the procession with its banners passed down Whitehall. Moreover, some
were troubled with dyspepsia; one had at that very moment cracked the
glass of his spectacles; another spoke in Glasgow to-morrow; altogether
they looked too red, fat, pale or lean, to be dealing, as the marble
heads had dealt, with the course of history.
Timmy Durrant in his little room in the Admiralty, going to consult a
Blue book, stopped for a moment by the window and observed the placard
tied round the lamp-post.
Miss Thomas, one of the typists, said to her friend that if the Cabinet
was going to sit much longer she should miss her boy outside the Gaiety.
Timmy Durrant, returning with his Blue book under his arm, noticed a
little knot of people at the street corner; conglomerated as though one
of them knew something; and the others, pressing round him, looked up,
looked down, looked along the street. What was it that he knew?
Timothy, placing the Blue book before him, studied a paper sent round by
the Treasury for information. Mr. Crawley, his fellow-clerk, impaled a
letter on a skewer.
Jacob rose from his chair in Hyde Park, tore his ticket to pieces, and
walked away.
"Such a sunset," wrote Mrs. Flanders in her letter to Archer at
Singapore. "One couldn't make up one's mind to come indoors," she wrote.
"It seemed wicked to waste even a moment."
The long windows of Kensington Palace flushed fiery rose as Jacob walked
away; a flock of wild duck flew over the Serpentine; and the trees were
stood against the sky, blackly, magnificently.
"Jacob," wrote Mrs. Flanders, with the red light on her page, "is hard
at work after his delightful journey..."
"The Kaiser," the far-away voice remarked in Whitehall, "received me in
audience."
"Now I know that face--" said the Reverend Andrew Floyd, coming out of
Carter's shop in Piccadilly, "but who the dickens--?" and he watched
Jacob, turned round to look at him, but could not be sure--
"Oh, Jacob Flanders!" he remembered in a flash.
But he was so tall; so unconscious; such a fine young fellow.
"I gave him Byron's works," Andrew Floyd mused, and started forward, as
Jacob crossed the road; but hesitated, and let the moment pass, and lost
the opportunity.
Another procession, without banners, was blocking Long Acre. Carriages,
with dowagers in amethyst and gentlemen spotted with carnations,
intercepted cabs and motor-cars turned in the opposite direction, in
which jaded men in white waistcoats lolled, on their way home to
shrubberies and billiard-rooms in Putney and Wimbledon.
Two barrel-organs played by the kerb, and horses coming out of
Aldridge's with white labels on their buttocks straddled across the road
and were smartly jerked back.
Mrs. Durrant, sitting with Mr. Wortley in a motor-car, was impatient
lest they should miss the overture.
But Mr. Wortley, always urbane, always in time for the overture,
buttoned his gloves, and admired Miss Clara.
"A shame to spend such a night in the theatre!" said Mrs. Durrant,
seeing all the windows of the coachmakers in Long Acre ablaze.
"Think of your moors!" said Mr. Wortley to Clara.
"Ah! but Clara likes this better," Mrs. Durrant laughed.
"I don't know--really," said Clara, looking at the blazing windows. She
started.
She saw Jacob.
"Who?" asked Mrs. Durrant sharply, leaning forward.
But she saw no one.
Under the arch of the Opera House large faces and lean ones, the
powdered and the hairy, all alike were red in the sunset; and, quickened
by the great hanging lamps with their repressed primrose lights, by the
tramp, and the scarlet, and the pompous ceremony, some ladies looked for
a moment into steaming bedrooms near by, where women with loose hair
leaned out of windows, where girls--where children--(the long mirrors
held the ladies suspended) but one must follow; one must not block the
way.
Clara's moors were fine enough. The Phoenicians slept under their piled
grey rocks; the chimneys of the old mines pointed starkly; early moths
blurred the heather-bells; cartwheels could be heard grinding on the
road far beneath; and the suck and sighing of the waves sounded gently,
persistently, for ever.
Shading her eyes with her hand Mrs. Pascoe stood in her cabbage-garden
looking out to sea. Two steamers and a sailing-ship crossed each other;
passed each other; and in the bay the gulls kept alighting on a log,
rising high, returning again to the log, while some rode in upon the
waves and stood on the rim of the water until the moon blanched all to
whiteness.
Mrs. Pascoe had gone indoors long ago.
But the red light was on the columns of the Parthenon, and the Greek
women who were knitting their stockings and sometimes crying to a child
to come and have the insects picked from its head were as jolly as
sand-martins in the heat, quarrelling, scolding, suckling their babies,
until the ships in the Piraeus fired their guns.
The sound spread itself flat, and then went tunnelling its way with
fitful explosions among the channels of the islands.
Darkness drops like a knife over Greece.
"The guns?" said Betty Flanders, half asleep, getting out of bed and
going to the window, which was decorated with a fringe of dark leaves.
"Not at this distance," she thought. "It is the sea."
Again, far away, she heard the dull sound, as if nocturnal women were
beating great carpets. There was Morty lost, and Seabrook dead; her sons
fighting for their country. But were the chickens safe? Was that some
one moving downstairs? Rebecca with the toothache? No. The nocturnal
women were beating great carpets. Her hens shifted slightly on their
perches.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
"He left everything just as it was," Bonamy marvelled. "Nothing
arranged. All his letters strewn about for any one to read. What did he
expect? Did he think he would come back?" he mused, standing in the
middle of Jacob's room.
The eighteenth century has its distinction. These houses were built,
say, a hundred and fifty years ago. The rooms are shapely, the ceilings
high; over the doorways a rose or a ram's skull is carved in the wood.
Even the panels, painted in raspberry-coloured paint, have their
distinction.
Bonamy took up a bill for a hunting-crop.
"That seems to be paid," he said.
There were Sandra's letters.
Mrs. Durrant was taking a party to Greenwich.
Lady Rocksbier hoped for the pleasure....
Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the
flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker arm-chair creaks,
though no one sits there.
Bonamy crossed to the window. Pickford's van swung down the street. The
omnibuses were locked together at Mudie's corner. Engines throbbed, and
carters, jamming the brakes down, pulled their horses sharp up. A harsh
and unhappy voice cried something unintelligible. And then suddenly all
the leaves seemed to raise themselves.
"Jacob! Jacob!" cried Bonamy, standing by the window. The leaves sank
down again.
"Such confusion everywhere!" exclaimed Betty Flanders, bursting open the
bedroom door.
Bonamy turned away from the window.
"What am I to do with these, Mr. Bonamy?"
She held out a pair of Jacob's old shoes.
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