IV
Between the sisters there grew a feud; Ianthe behaved evilly when she discovered their mutual infatuation for their one lover. The echoes of that feud, at first dim, but soon crashingly clear, reached him, touched him and moved him on Kate’s behalf: all his loyalty belonged to her. What did it matter if he could not fathom his own desire, that Ianthe was still his for a word, that Kate’s implacable virtue still offered its deprecatory hand, when Kate herself came back to him?
They were to spend a picnic day together and she went to him for breakfast. Her tremors of propriety were fully exercised as she cycled along to his home; she was too fond of him and he was more than fond of her; but all her qualms were lulled. He did not appear in any of the half-expected negligee, he was beautifully and amusingly at home.
“My dear!” he exclaimed in the enjoyment of her presence; she stood staring at him as she removed her wrap, the morn though bright being fresh and cool: “Why do I never do you justice! Why do I half forget! You are marvellously, irresistibly lovely. How do you do it—or how do I fail so?”
She could only answer him with blushes. His bungalow had but two rooms, both on the ground floor, one a studio and the other his living and sleeping room. It was new, built of bricks and unpainted boards. The interior walls were unplastered and undecorated except for three small saucepans hung on hooks, a shelf of dusty volumes, and nails, large rusty nails, projecting everywhere, one holding a discarded collar and a clothes brush. A tall flat cupboard contained a narrow bed to be lowered for sleeping, huge portmanteaus and holdalls reposed in a corner beside a bureau, there was a big brass candle-pan on a chair beside the round stove. While he prepared breakfast the girl walked about the room, making shy replies to his hilarious questions. It was warm in there but to her tidy comfort-loving heart the room was disordered and bare. She stood looking out of the window:the April air was bright but chilly, the grass in thin tufts fluttered and shivered.
“It is very nice,” she said to him once, “but it’s strange and I feel that I ought not to be here.”
“O, never mind where you ought to be,” he cried, pouring out her coffee, “that’s where you are, you suit the place, you brighten and adorn it, it’s your native setting, Kate. No—I know exactly what is running in your mind, you are going to ask if I suffer loneliness here. Well, I don’t. A great art in life is the capacity to extract a flavour from something not obviously flavoured, but here it is all flavour. Come and look at things.”
He rose and led her from egg and toast to the world outside. Long fields of pasture and thicket followed a stream that followed other meadows, soon hidden by the ambulating many folding valleys, and so on to the sea, a hundred miles away. Into his open door were blown, in their season, balls of thistledown, crisp leaves, twigs and dried grass, the reminder, the faint brush, of decay. The airs of wandering winds came in, odours of herb, the fragrance of viewless flowers. The land in some directions was now being furrowed where corn was greenly to thrive, to wave in glimmering gold, to lie in the stook, to pile on giant stack. Horses were trailing a harrow across an upland below the park, the wind was flapping the coats of the drivers, the tails and manes of the horses, and heaving gladly in trees. A boy fired the heaps of squitch whose smoke wore across the land in dense deliberatewreaths. Sportsmen’s guns were sounding from the hollow park.
Kate followed Masterman around his cottage; he seemed to be fascinated by the smoke, the wind, the horses and men.
“Breakfast will be cold.”
How queerly he looked at her before he said: “Yes, of course, breakfast will be getting cold,” and then added, inconsequently: “Flowers are like men and women, they either stare brazenly at the sun or they bend humbly before it, but even the most modest desire the sun.”
When he spoke like that she always felt that the words held a half-hidden, perhaps libidinous, meaning, which she could not understand but only guess at; and she was afraid of her guesses. Full of curious, not to say absurd superstitions about herself and about him, his strange oblique emotions startled her virginal understanding; her desire was to be good, very very good, but to be that she could not but suspect the impulses of most other people, especially the impulses of men. Well, perhaps she was right: the woman who hasn’t any doubts must have many illusions.
He carried a bag of lunch and they walked out into the day. Soon the wind ceased, the brightness grew warm, the warmth was coloured; clouds lolled in the air like tufts of lilac. At the edge of a spinney they sat down under a tree. Boughs of wood blown down by the winter gales were now being hidden by the spring grass. A rabbit, twenty yards away, sat up and watched the couple, a fat grey creature. “Hoi,” criedKate, and the rabbit hopped away. It could not run very fast, it did not seem much afraid.
“Is it wounded?” she asked.
“No, I think it is a tame one, escaped from a farm or a cottage near us, I expect.”
Kate crept after it on hands and knees and it let her approach. She offered it the core of an apple she had just eaten. The rabbit took it and bit her finger. Then Kate caught it by the ears. It squealed but Kate held it to her bosom with delight, and the rabbit soon rested there if not with delight at least with ease. It was warm against her breast, it was delicious to feel it there, to pull its ears and caress its fat flanks, but as she was doing this she suddenly saw that its coat was infested with fleas. She dropped the rabbit with a scream of disgust and it rushed into the thicket.
“Come here,” said Masterman to her, “let me search you, this is distressing.”
She knelt down before him and in spite of her wriggling he reassured her.
“It’s rather a nice blouse,” he said.
“I don’t care for it. I shall not wear it again. I shall sell it to someone or give it to them.”
“I would love to take it from you stitch by stitch.”
With an awkward movement of her arm she thrust at his face, crying loudly, “No, how dare you speak to me like that!”
“Is it very daring?” For a moment he saw her clenched hands, detestably bloodless, a symbol of roused virtue: but at once her anger was gone, Kate was contrite and tender. She touched his face withher white fingers softly as the settling of a moth. “O, why did we come here?”
He did not respond to her caresses, he was sullen, they left the spinney; but as they walked she took his arm murmuring: “Forgive me, I’ll make it all up to you some day.”
Coyness and cunning, passion and pride, were so much at odds that later on they quarrelled again. Kate knew that he would neither marry her nor let her go; she could neither let him go nor keep him. This figure of her distress amused him, he was callously provoking, and her resentment flowed out at the touch of his scorn. With Kate there seemed to be no intermediate stages between docility and fury, or even between love and hatred.
“Why are you like this?” she cried, beating her pallid hands together, “I have known you for so long.”
“Ah, we have known each other for so long, but as for really knowing you—no! I’m not a tame rabbit to be fondled any more.”
She stared for a moment, as if in recollection; then burst into ironical laughter. He caught her roughly in his arms but she beat him away.
“O, go to ... go to....”
“Hell?” he suggested.
“Yes,” she burst out tempestuously, “and stop there.”
He was stunned by her unexpected violence. She was coarse like Ianthe after all. But he said steadily:
“I’m willing to go there if you will only keep out of my way when I arrive.”
Then he left her standing in a lane, he hurried andran, clambering over stiles and brushing through hedges, anything to get away from the detestable creature. She did not follow him and they were soon out of sight of each other. Anger and commination swarmed to his lips, he branded her with frenzied opprobrium and all the beastliness that was in him. Nothing under heaven should ever persuade him to approach the filthy beast again, the damned intolerable pimp, never, never again, never.
But he came to a bridge. On it he rested. And in that bright air, that sylvan peace, his rancour fell away from him, like sand from a glass, leaving him dumb and blank at the meanness of his deed. He went back to the lane as fast as he could go. She was not there. Kate, Kate, my dove! But he could not find her.
He was lost in the fields until he came at last upon a road and a lonely tavern thereby. It had a painted sign; a very smudgy fox, in an inexplicable attitude, destroying a fowl that looked like a plum-pudding but was intended to depict a snipe. At the stable door the tiniest black kitten in the world was shaping with timid belligerency at a young and fluffy goose who, ignoring it, went on sipping ecstatically from a pan of water. On the door were nailed, in two semicircles of decoration, sixteen fox pads in various stages of decay, an entire spiral shaving from the hoof of a horse, and some chalk jottings:
2 pads3 cruppers1 Bellyband2 Set britchin
2 pads3 cruppers1 Bellyband2 Set britchin
The tavern was long and low and clean, its garden was bare but trim. There was comfort, he rested, had tea, and then in the bar his painful musings were broken by a ragged unfortunate old pedlar from Huddersfield.
“Born and bred in Slatterwick, it’s no lie ah’m speaking, ah were born and bred Slatterwick, close to Arthur Brinkley’s farm, his sister’s in Canady, John Orkroyd took farm, Arthur’s dead.”
“Humph!”
“And buried. That iron bridge at Jackamon’s belong to Daniel Cranmer. He’s dead.”
“Humph!”
“And buried. From th’ iron bridge it’s two miles and a quarter to Herbert Oddy’s, that’s the ‘Bay Horse,’ am ah right, at Shelmersdyke. Three miles and three-quarters from dyke to the ‘Cock and Goat’ at Shapley Fell, am ah right?”
Masterman, never having been within a hundred miles of Yorkshire, puffed at his cigarette and nodded moodily, “I suppose so” or “Yes, yes.”
“From Arthur Brinkley’s to th’ iron bridge is one mile and a half and a bit, and from Arthur Brinkley’s to Jury Cartright’s is just four mile. He’s dead, sir.”
“Yes.”
“And buried. Is that wrong? Am ah speaking wrong? No. It’s long step from yon, rough tramp for an old man.”
Masterman—after giving sixpence to the pedlar who, uttering a benediction, pressed upon him a card of shirt buttons—said “Good evening” and walked outto be alone upon the road with his once angry but now penitent mind. Kate, poor dear Kate!
The sun was low down lolling near the horizon but there was an astonishing light upon the land. Cottage windows were blocks of solid gold in this lateral brilliance, shafts of shapely shade lay across leagues of field, he could have counted every leaf among the rumpled boskage of the sycamores. A vast fan of indurated cloud, shell-like and pearly, was wavering over the western sky but in the east were snowy rounded masses like fabulous balloons. At a cross road he stood by an old sign post, its pillar plastered with the faded bill of a long-ago circus. He could read every word of it but when he turned away he found everything had grown dimmer. The wind arose, the forest began to roar like a heaving beast. All verdurous things leaned one way. A flock of starlings flew over him with one movement and settled in a rolling elm. How lonely it was. He took off his hat. His skull was fearfully tender—he had dabbed it too hard with his hair brush that morning. His hair was growing thin, like his youth and his desires.
What had become of Kate, where had she hidden? Whatwouldbecome of her? He would never see her again. He disliked everything about her, except her self. Her clothes, her speech, her walk, the way she carried her umbrella, her reticence that was nothing if not conspicuous, her melancholy, her angular concrete piety, her hands—in particular he disliked her pale hands. She had a mind that was cultivated as perfunctorilyas a kitchen garden, with ideas like roots or beans, hostilities like briars, and a fence of prudery that was as tough as hoops of galvanized iron. And yet he loved her—or almost. He was ready to love her, he wanted to, he wanted her; her deep but guarded devotion—it was limited but it was devotion—compelled this return from him. It was a passionate return. He had tried to mould that devotion into a form that could delight him—he had failed. He knew her now, he could peer into her craven soul as one peers into an empty bottle, with one eye. For her the opportunities afforded by freedom were but the preludes to misadventure. What a fool she was!
When he reached home Kate stood in darkness at the doorway of his house. He exclaimed with delight, her surprising presence was the very centre of his desire, he wanted to embrace her, loving her deeply, inexplicably again; just in a moment.
“I want my bike,” the girl said sullenly. “I left it inside this morning.
“Ah, your bicycle! Yes, you did.” He unlocked the door. “Wait, there should be a candle, there should be.”
She stood in the doorway until he had lit it.
“Come in, Kate,” he said, “let me give you something. I think there is some milk, certainly I have some cake, come in, Kate, or do you drink beer, I have beer, come in, I’ll make you something hot.”
But Kate only took her bicycle. “I ought to have been home hours ago,” she said darkly, wheeling it outside and lighting the lantern. He watched hersilently as she dabbed the wick, the pallor of her hands had never appeared so marked.
“Let’s be kind to each other,” he said, detaining her, “don’t go, dear Kate.”
She pushed the bicycle out into the road.
“Won’t you see me again?” he asked as she mounted it.
“I am always seeing you,” she called back, but her meaning was dark to him.
“Faugh! The devil! The fool!” He gurgled anathemas as he returned to his cottage. “And me too! What am I?”
But no mortal man could ever love a woman of that kind. She did not love him at all, had never loved him. Then what was it she did love? Not her virtue—you might as well be proud of the sole of your foot; it was some sort of pride, perhaps the test of her virtue that the conflict between them provoked, the contest itself alone alluring her, not its aim and end. She was never happier than when having led him on she thwarted him. But she would find that his metal was as tough as her own.
Before going to bed he spent an hour in writing very slowly a letter to Kate, telling her that he felt they would not meet again, that their notions of love were so unrelated, their standards so different. “My morals are at least as high as yours though likely enough you regard me as a rip. Let us recognize then,” he wrote concludingly, “that we have come to the end of the tether without once having put an ounce of strain upon its delightful but never tense cord. Butthe effort to keep the affair down to the level at which you seem satisfied has wearied me. The task of living down to that assured me that for you the effort of living up to mine would be consuming. I congratulate you, my dear, on coming through scatheless and that the only appropriate condolences are my own—for myself.”
It was rather pompous, he thought, but then she wouldn’t notice that, let alone understand it. She suffered not so much from an impediment of speech—how could she when she spoke so little?—as from an impediment of intellect, which was worse, much worse, but not so noticeable being so common a failing. She was, when all was said and done, just a fool. It was a pity, for bodily she must indeed be a treasure. What a pity! But she had never had any love for him at all, only compassion and pity for his bad thoughts about her; he had neither pity for her nor compunction—only love. Dear, dear, dear. Blow out the candle, lock the door, Good-night!
He did not see her again for a long time. He would have liked to have seen her, yes, just once more, but of course he was glad, quite glad, that she did not wish to risk it and drag from dim depths the old passion to break again in those idiotic bubbles of propriety. She did not answer his letter—he was amused. Then her long silence vexed him, until vexation was merged in alarm. She had gone away from Tutsan—of course—gone away on family affairs—oh, naturally!—she mightbe gone for ever. But a real grief came upon him. He had long mocked the girl, not only the girl but his own vision of her; now she was gone his mind elaborated her melancholy immobile figure into an image of beauty. Her absence, her silence, left him wretched. He heard of her from Ianthe who renewed her blandishments; he was not unwilling to receive them now—he hoped their intercourse might be reported to Kate.
After many months he did receive a letter from her. It was a tender letter though ill-expressed, not very wise or informative, but he could feel that the old affection for him was still there, and he wrote her a long reply in which penitence and passion and appeal were mingled.
“I know now, yes, I see it all now; solutions are so easy when the proof of them is passed. We were cold to each other, it was stupid, I should havemadeyou love me and it would have been well. I see it now. How stupid, how unlucky; it turned me to anger and you to sorrow. Now I can think only of you.”
She made no further sign, not immediately, and he grew dull again. His old disbelief in her returned. Bah! she loved him no more than a suicide loved the pond it dies in; she had used him for her senseless egoism, tempting him and fooling him, wantonly, he had not begun it, and she took a chaste pride in saving herself from him. What was it the old writer had said?
“Chastity, by nature the gentlest of all affections—give it but its head—’tis like a ramping and roaringlion.” Saving herself! Yes, she would save herself for marriage.
He even began to contemplate that outcome.
Her delayed letter, when it came, announced that she was coming home at once; he was to meet her train in the morning after the morrow.
It was a dull autumnal morning when he met her. Her appearance was not less charming than he had imagined it, though the charm was almost inarticulate and there were one or two crude touches that momentarily distressed him. But he met with a flush of emotion all her glances of gaiety and love that were somehow, vaguely, different—perhaps there was a shade less reserve. They went to lunch in the city and at the end of the meal he asked her:
“Well, why have you come back again?”
She looked at him intently: “Guess!”
“I—well, no—perhaps—tell me, Kate, yourself.”
“You are different now, you look different, David.”
“Am I changed? Better or worse?”
She did not reply and he continued:
“You too, are changed. I can’t tell how it is, or where, but you are.”
“O, I am changed, much changed,” murmured Kate.
“Have you been well?”
“Yes.”
“And happy?”
“Yes.”
“Then how unwise of you to come back.”
“I have come back,” said Kate, “to be happier. But somehow you are different.”
“You are different, too. Shall we ever be happy again?”
“Why—why not!” said Kate.
“Come on!” he cried hilariously, “let us make a day of it, come along!”
Out in the streets they wandered until rain began to fall.
“Come in here for a while.” They were passing a roomy dull building, the museum, and they went in together. It was a vast hollow-sounding flagstone place that had a central brightness fading into dim recesses and galleries of gloom. They examined a monster skeleton of something like an elephant, three stuffed apes, and a picture of the dodo. Kate stood before them without interest or amusement, she just contemplated them. What did she want with an elephant, an ape, or a dodo? The glass exhibit cases were leaned upon by them, the pieces of coal neatly arranged and labelled were stared at besides the pieces of granite or coloured rock with long names ending inorite doriteandsoriteand so on to the precious gems including an imitation, as big as a bun, of a noted diamond. They leaned over them, repeating the names on the labels with the quintessence of vacuity. They hated it. There were beetles and worms of horror, butterflies of beauty, and birds that had been stuffed so long that they seemed to be intoxicated; their beaks fitted them as loosely as a drunkard’s hat, their glassy eyes were pathetically vague. After ascending a flight of stone steps David and Kate stooped for a long time over a case of sea-anemones that had been reproduced ingelatine by a German with a fancy for such things. From the railed balcony they could peer down into the well of the fusty-smelling museum. No one else was visiting it, they were alone with all things dead, things that had died millions of years ago and were yet simulating life. A footfall sounded so harsh in the corridors, boomed with such clangour, that they took slow diffident steps, almost tiptoeing, while Kate scarcely spoke at all and he conversed in murmurs. Whenever he coughed the whole place seemed to shudder. In the recess, hidden from prying eyes, David clasped her willing body in his arms. For once she was unshrinking and returned his fervour. The vastness, the emptiness, the deadness, worked upon their feelings with intense magic.
“Love me, David,” she murmured, and when they moved away from the gelatinous sea-urchins she kept both her arms clasped around him as they walked the length of the empty corridors. He could not understand her, he could not perceive her intimations, their meaning was dark to him. She was so altered, this was another Kate.
“I have come home to make it all up to you,” she repeated, and he scarcely dared to understand her.
They approached a lecture-room; the door was open, the room was empty, they went in and stood near the platform. The place was arranged like a tiny theatre, tiers of desks rising in half-circles on three sides high up towards the ceiling. A small platform with a lecturer’s desk confronted the rising tiers; on the wall behind it a large white sheet; a magic lanternon a pedestal was near and a blackboard on an easel. A pencil of white chalk lay broken on the floor. Behind the easel was a piano, a new piano with a duster on its lid. The room smelled of spilled acids. The lovers’ steps upon the wooden floor echoed louder than ever after their peregrinations upon the flagstones; they were timid of the sound and stood still, close together, silent. He touched her bosom and pressed her to his heart, but all her surrender seemed strange and nerveless. She was almost violently different; he had liked her old rejections, they were fiery and passionate. He scarce knew what to do, he understood her less than ever now. Dressed as she was in thick winter clothes it was like embracing a tree, it tired him. She lay in his arms waiting, waiting, until he felt almost stifled. Something like the smell of the acids came from her fur necklet. He was glad when she stood up, but she was looking at him intently. To cover his uneasiness he went to the blackboard and picking up a piece of the chalk he wrote the first inconsequent words that came into his mind. Kate stood where he had left her, staring at the board as he traced the words upon it:
We are but little children weak
Laughing softly she strolled towards him.
“What do you write that for? I know what it is.”
“What it is! Well, what is it?”
She took the chalk from his fingers.
“It’s a hymn,” she went on, “it goes....”
“A hymn!” he cried, “I did not know that.”
Underneath the one he had written she was now writing another line on the board.
Nor born to any high estate.
“Of course,” he whispered, “I remember it now. I sang it as a child—at school—go on, go on.”
But she had thereupon suddenly turned away, silent, dropping her hands to her side. One of her old black moods had seized her. He let her go and picking up another fragment of chalk completed the verse.
What can we do for Jesu’s sakeWho is so high and good and great?
What can we do for Jesu’s sakeWho is so high and good and great?
She turned when he had finished and without a word walked loudly to the piano, fetched the duster and rubbed out the words they had written on the blackboard. She was glaring angrily at him.
“How absurd you are,”—he was annoyed—“let us go out and get some tea.” He wandered off to the door, but she did not follow. He stood just outside gazing vacantly at a stuffed jay that had an indigo eye. He looked into the room again. She was there still, just as he had left her; her head bent, her hands hanging clasped before her, the dimness covering and caressing her—a figure full of sad thoughts. He ran to her and crushed her in his arms again.
“Kate, my lovely.”
She was saying brokenly: “You know what I said.I’ve come to make it all up to you. I promised, didn’t I?”
Something shuddered in his very soul—too late, too late, this was no love for him. The magic lantern looked a stupid childish toy, the smell of the acid was repulsive. Of all they had written upon the blackboard one word dimly remained:Jesu.
She stirred in his arms. “You are changed, David.”
“Changed, yes, everything is changed.”
“This is just like a theatre, like a play, as if we were acting.”
“Yes, as if we were acting. But we are not acting. Let us go up and sit in the gallery.”
They ascended the steps to the top ring of desks and looked down to the tiny platform and the white curtain. She sat fondling his hands, leaning against him.
“Have you ever acted—you would do it so well?”
“Why do you say that? Am I at all histrionic?”
“Does that mean insincere? O no. But you are the person one expects to be able to do anything.”
“Nonsense! I’ve never acted. I suppose I could. It isn’t difficult, you haven’t to be clever, only courageous. I should think it very easy to be only an ordinary actor, but I’m wrong, no doubt. I thought it was easy to write—to write a play—until I tried. I once engaged myself to write a little play for some students to act. I had never done such a thing before and like other idiots I thought I hadn’t ever done it simply because I hadn’t ever wanted to. Heavens, how harassed I was and how ashamed! I could not do it, I got no further than the author’s speech.”
“Well that was something. Tell me it.”
“It’s nothing to do with the play. It’s what the author says to the audience when the play is finished.”
She insisted on hearing it whatever it was. “O well,” he said at last, “let’s do that properly, at least. I’ll go down there and deliver it from the stage. You must pretend that you are the enthusiastic audience. Come and sit in the stalls.”
They went down together.
“Now imagine that this curtain goes up and I suddenly appear.”
Kate faintly clapped her hands. He stood upon the platform facing her and taking off his hat, began:
“Ladies and Gentlemen,
“I am so deeply touched by the warmth of this reception, this utterly undeserved appreciation, that—forgive me—I have forgotten the speech I had carefully prepared in anticipation of it. Let me meet my obligation by telling you a story; I think it is true, I made it up myself. Once upon a time there was a poor playwright—something like me—who wrote a play—something like this—and at the end of the performance the audience, a remarkably handsome well-fed intellectual audience—something like this—called him before the curtain and demanded a speech. He protested that he was unprepared and asked them to allow him to tell them a story—something like this. Well, that, too, was a remarkably handsome well-fed intellectual audience, so they didn’t mind and he began again.—Once upon a time a poor playwright—and was just about to repeat the story I have already twice told you whensuddenly, without a word of warning, without a sound, without a compunction, the curtain swooped down and chopped him clean in half.”
Masterman made an elaborate obeisance and stepped off the platform.
“Is that all?” asked Kate.
“That’s all.”
At that moment a loud bell clanged throughout the building signifying that the museum was about to close.
“Come along!” he cried, but Kate did not move, she still sat in the stalls.
“Don’t leave me, David, I want to hear the play?” she said archly.
“Therewasno play. Thereisno play. Come, or we shall be locked in for the night.”
She still sat on. He went to her and seized her hands.
“What does it matter!” she whispered, embracing him. “I want to make it all up to you.”
He was astoundingly moved. She was marvellously changed. If she hadn’t the beauty of perfection she had some of the perfection of beauty. He adored her.
“But, no,” he said, “it won’t do, it really won’t. Come, I have got to buy you something at once, a ring with a diamond in it, as big as a bun, an engagement ring, quickly, or the shops will be shut.”
He dragged the stammering bewildered girl away, down the stairs and into the street. The rain had ceased, the sunset sky was bright and Masterman was intensely happy.
COTTON