XII
RICHMOND PARK
Next morning, when he went to the reading-room, she was sitting in the old place. She still wore the long blue coat with all the buttons—the black fur, and the big plain French hat with a single parrot-green feather, but, seen a second time, custom tempered somewhat her formidable smartness. She had a big gauze veil, too, tied round her hat and falling in long ends over her shoulders. It subdued the hard childish brightness of her face, making it look both maturer and softer. She met his surprised look timidly, and, diving into her muff, held out a white card with a blue stripe down the centre. Her gesture was meekly disarming—hurriedly explanatory.
"I've joined," she said, anxiously. "I'm a member."
Ingram twirled the card between his fingers. It was early, the great room was half empty, and there was no need to whisper now.
"And what special line of research are you thinking of pursuing?" he asked, gravely.
Fenella made haste to disclaim any serious purpose. "But it's a useful place, isn't it?" she asked. "This morning I only looked in to thank you."
"To thank me——?"
"For sending my umbrella. I couldn't send a postcard; I didn't know your address."
"It was no trouble." He was still turning the little card round and round. "And so you're running away at once?"
Fenella cast her eyes down. "I can't stay," she said. "I've got a dog with me."
"A dog?"
"Tied to the rails outside near the little house. They'd only keep him 'cos I said I wouldn't be ten minutes. Do you like dogs? I'm taking him for a run."
Paul experienced a sudden zest for adventure. "Suppose we take him for a run together? It's such a glorious fall morning."
"Oh,top-hole!" said Nelly, joining her hands in the old baby fashion that had clung to her. "I mean, how nice! Where shall we ramble? The Gardens?"
"No. I hate the Gardens. Even the sparrows know they're a fraud. Let's go out to Richmond. We can walk across the Park, have lunch at Kingston, and be back in time for tea."
Outside the Museum lodge, a horrible old bull-terrier, chained to the railings, was keeping up a growling soliloquy, with occasional snaps at imaginary flies, suggested possibly by the late autumn sunshine. He was very thick and scarred and carried his head to one side.
"This is Rock," announced Fenella, as, with a bewildering smile at the liveried keeper, she began to drag the veteran to his feet and along the pavement. "He's an awful old dog; I don't know how old, but he was a puppy when I was a baby. Isn't it funny? Now he's all lumpy and stiff, and I'm still growing. Ma says it's because their hearts beat faster. Heckle—that's a medical boy I know—says he's the oldest bull-terrier he ever knew, and that what he's asking for when he growls is a dose of pussy's acid in a dog-biscuit. What's pussy's acid?[1]Rock is short for Roquelaure, but some of the girls say he smells, and call him Roquefort. He's not my dog: he's Lady Anne's. She's hunting somewhere, and I promised her I'd take him out regularly. Oh, I want to telephone from here. Will you hold him—please? He won't bite. No, don't shut the doors, I shall stifle....B-r-r-r!One!B-r-r-r!Two. Ihaveput the pennies in; didn't you hear them? 2309 Pad. Yes, I mean Paddington. You say Pad yourself. Hello! Are you there? Is this Miss Rigby? Oh, good morning, Jas. Jas, be an angel and tell mummy I shan't be home to lunch. I'm going to have it at Richmond, with a man. What d'you say? Oh, fie! Oh, tut!... Naughty puss! Six feet one, a long tawny, silky moustache, and cold, steel-blue eyes.... What?... I don't know ... I may. Good-bye, Jas. You're an angel."
In the train Ingram took the seat opposite her, and, while she kept up an incessant chatter, watched her with a kind of ache at his heart for her beauty. It was more than prettiness: he saw that now. Those long heavy lashed eyes, whose full lids she had a trick of pulling—the plaintive, tremulous mouth, too red; the two little tufts at her temples which even the draught from the closed window blew across her cheekbone, so fine and dry was her hair; the delicate and rather salient nose that bespoke impulsiveness. Like all visionaries, crusaders and other impractical persons, he had at the same time an intense perception of bodily beauty and an intense jealousy for the coarse uses to which life puts it. To have retained one's ideals and to have lost one's illusions—is not this to be subject to all the tortures that sex can inflict?
They left the station and walked through the defaced streets of the old Royal Borough, its noble Georgian houses half hidden by plate-glass shop fronts: they climbed the long ascent to the Park, and stood for a moment on the terrace to admire the river, an isle-set loop of silver, at the bottom of a steep glen filled with rusty verdure. Once inside the wide ciphered gates, they left the gravelled path and by a soft mouldy foot-track struck into the recesses of the old hunting pleasaunce. The air was mild and balmy; not a breeze stirred the crisp, sapless trees that stood waiting to surrender their ruined pomp of summer to the first wind that required it of them. Fenella gave her escort her muff and stole. She called Rock to her in a high, clear voice and, with shrill, chirping whistles, with cracks of her dog-whip, fluttering of her skirts, with endless enticements and provocations, lured that much-tried old pensioner on to efforts he had really outlived. Paul, as he watched her, ignorant no doubt of the exquisite old Mabinogion simile, thought that her motions resembled nothing so much as the swooping flight of the swallow before rain. Her limbs seemed to have the pliancy of whalebone.
Rock wheezed and panted gallantly after his mistress, his paws drumming stiffly on the ground—his poor old scarred neck held more on one side than ever. But his heart was not in the chase. He was forever slinking back to heel. He looked up wistfully at this new, sober-paced friend. "Here are we," his dim old eyes, with their hardened cornea, seemed to be saying, "old fellows, both of us, who've taken sharp bites and hard knocks enough, and it's a bit late in the day to be asking us to show off our paces, isn't it? Can't we sneak away somewhere together? This girl will play the very devil with us both if we let her."
"Rock! Rock! Rock!" the clear voice would ring out. "Come here, sir! Come herethissminnit! Lazy—lazydog!"
And with a despairing throe of his knotted tail, off poor Rock must pump again.
When they had nearly crossed the Park, they sat down on a worn seat, hacked nearly away with amorous knife blades, close to a pond into which some long-legged wading birds were digging their bills. Around them and behind them the noble demesne outstretched itself, in long tree vistas and seemingly illimitable glades, with nothing to scale them to insignificance. Now and then a motor car rolled softly along the road to White Lodge, only accentuating their loneliness by its speed and detachment, or a ghostly little troop of fallow deer passed slowly and securely to some favored feeding ground. Rock sniffed the air at them, growled and wrinkled his nose. "We both remember a time we couldn't have stood this—don't we?" the decayed old sportsman was no doubt grumbling to himself.
Seeing the girl quiet at his side, Paul began to try and tell her something of his life, working back, as is the manner of men, from the things that are nearest their experience and yet are slipping from their memory, into the never forgotten far past.... The night marches across the silent desert, spellbound by the silver witchery of the moon, and throughmehallahs, that are like a fruitful land smitten by an evil charm—its houses turned into boulders and brushwood made of its standing corn: the caravans one may meet with a grave bearded sheikh riding in front, and the bubbling dromedaries behind him, laden with great wicker "D-raths" full of squalling, naked children and silk-swathed women, who peep through the osiers and crook their fingers at the dusty legionaries tramping by in a cloud of their own dust: the sand pillars that march upon your flank, step and step, like jealous genii shepherding doomed strangers into their desert: the joy of the camp at the well, with the day's march done: the incredible lightness of the sweat-soaked body when the knapsack is lifted off.
... Or that other camp—so far away it is hard to believe it all one life. Crackling cedar wood and the good smell of coffee on the sharp light mountain air, and the jinglers riding in the squealing cavvy with a pother of dust about their unshod feet, all rosy and glorious like a halo in the cherry-red morning sun: and the long lariats held wedgewise, and the scamper and scurry as the bronchos are trapped: and the peering through a fog of sweat and dust for your own brand on shoulder or buttock, and the whirling ropes, and the laughter and horseplay as the ponies are blanketed and bitted for the dawn-to-dusk round-up.
I don't know whether Paul made a poor Othello, but I do know he had a very indifferent Desdemona. Fenella was forever interrupting the narrative on one frivolous pretext or another: to throw stick or stone for poor sleepy Rock to retrieve ("Guffetchit-Rock! Guffetchit—lazy dog!"); to gather a bunch of scarlet berries afar off, whose color had taken her eye and which were hardly redder than her lips; to run down for a minute to the pond to see what "those rummy birds" were digging for so industriously. She had all thenil admirariof the modern mind: its heedlessness of anything that lies outside its own experience; its sedulous curiosity for all that lies within. It was better when they got to Ingram's early life. She could imagine a country road along which burdocks and hemlock and other green fleshy things grow as high as young trees, and little gray frame houses tucked away behind silver birches. She was genuinely and even tenderly interested in the crippled mother, and at the story of the sister who died, blew her nose and said she had caught cold in the train. She clapped her hands at the quilting bees and candy-pulls and sleigh rides and sugar boiling camps and wished plaintively that she had been born a little American girl, to have had her share in so rapturous an adolescence. But even this part of the story was checked with immaterial, trivial questions such as on children's lips weary the maternal patience. "What happened the gray mare in the end that wouldn't pass the new letter-box? How many boys went to the sugar camp? And how many girls? Did they ever flirt?"
They had luncheon in an upper room of an old inn at Kingston, that had a curved iron balcony looking down upon the market place. The panelling was hidden by paper of an iridescent red, covered with a sprawling pattern of tarnished leaves and flowers. To right and left of the fireplace two dark pictures of bottle-necked ladies with untidy hair, brought here from God knows what household dispersion, looked disdainfully out of the canvas in opposite directions. Some fair or market was going on in the square below; the misty afternoon air was full of the bleat of sheep, the lowing of cattle, raucous cries of costermongers, and the crack of saloon rifles. They were waited on by a depressed Teuton, upon whose broad white face Paul raised a wintry smile by addressing him in his own guttural tongue. Fenella, the palms of her long kid gloves twisted round her bangles, fared delicately. She gave most of her meat to Rock—eschewed watery sprouts and fluffily mashed potatoes—and "filled up," as she would and even did express it, upon plum tart with unlimited cream and sugar. She would not drink wine or coffee, but ate all the dessert and sent out for more cob-nuts. She had all sorts of pretty, restless, bad manners: crumbled bread while she chattered—scored the cloth with a pink nail while she listened—counted her plum stones three times and made it "never"—dabbled in her tumbler for lack of a finger bowl—and upon its rim made, with one wet finger-tip, the hum of innumerable blue bottles, at which poor Rock barked and snapped under her chair.
It was late when they sat down to lunch, and they had dawdled besides. The sun was gone and twilight closing in as they recrossed the Park toward Richmond. She was so silent that Paul asked her, half peering into the veiled face, whether she had felt the afternoon dull. She said not; but her negative went no further than a little shake of the head. She had a trick of looking back every now and then and of measuring the way they had come, as if to insure a clear recollection of it, and she allowed Rock—who, rested, fed, and with his head pointed, though obliquely, for home, was in spirits that contrasted with his depressed morning mood—to roam at his will. They had just reached the avenue of trees that looks over Ham House when a furious barking made them turn their heads. The dog, bristling, and with sidelong leaps that left his nose in the one direction, was pointing at something in the long grass. Fenella cracked the whip she had been trailing along the path.
"Rock!Rock!Come here, sir! Oh, Mr. Ingram, go quick and stop him!" She covered her eyes. "He's got some poor little rabbit or bird."
Paul ran and collared the animal. A brown mottled bird with a wide yellow beak was fluttering away clumsily, with wings half spread. Fenella caught it from him as his hand was closing on it.
"Give it to me! Oh,darling! are you hurt?" She looked on her gloves for blood. "Had he bitten it, Mr. Ingram?... There,there—you're quite safe now. I tink oor more f'itened dan hurt, dear! Isheone of the birds that fly away in the winter, Mr. Ingram? I'm going to take him home and put him in the conservatory till spring.... Ah! youwicked—bad—cruel—fiercedog! It's a good job I gave him so much meat, isn't it Mr. Ingram?—or you'd be gobbled up, dee-ar!... That's right; put him on the chain. Oh, yes he does, Mr. Ingram; he eats birds, at least hescrunchesthem," stroking the smooth brown back with her lips. "Can we get a cage in Richmond, do you think?"
Paul looked at his watch. "I think we'd better get a train in Richmond," he said. "We've been out quite a while, and you only said 'luncheon' over the 'phone. Are you going to bring the bird along?"
"Why—of course I am."
"Well, put him in your muff and let us hustle."
Fenella quickened her pace resolutely, but every now and then would stop to be sure the creature was alive, breaking into a run afterward to overtake her escort.
"I'm sorry," she said at last, penitently, as she saw him waiting for her. "I tell you what I'll do. I'll put my finger in every now and then and, if he pecks, I'll know he's alive. Why does he peck me when I saved him? Birds have no brain. Cookie had a canary once that flew into a fly-paper; it took ever so long to unstick his wings. I hope this isn't one of the sort that won't sing unless its eyes are put out."
In the train the bird still absorbed her. They had a compartment to themselves, and Paul watched her curiously through his cigar smoke. He was wondering whether he had been bored or amused. A little of both he concluded. She was a good girl, but quite immature, and utterly—oh! utterly trivial. There was probably some babbling old mother at home whom she took after, for a warning and example. She was lovely, oh, yes—lovely enough to make the most careless heart ache—the rashest "gazer wipe his eye." But for a man like himself that was not an entire explanation. Wherein lay her charm? For charm there was; one, too, that survived the long day spent in her company. There was no use denying it; walks in Richmond Park, alone, would be sad affairs from now on. Alone, because, of course, this one must never be repeated. Butterflies are pretty things to watch, once in a way; but, since to clutch remains a human instinct, and since no man who thinks in his heart ever wants to see that sort of down upon his clumsy fingers, it would be better if—be better if——What were the clanging, ringing wheels saying now? Hark!
"Be its beauty its sole duty:Be its beauty its sole duty...."
"Be its beauty its sole duty:Be its beauty its sole duty...."
"Be its beauty its sole duty:Be its beauty its sole duty...."
"Be its beauty its sole duty:
Be its beauty its sole duty...."
Ah! yes. That was what he has been trying to think of all day. And yet people could be found to called Browning "obscure."
"Be its beauty its sole duty!"
"Be its beauty its sole duty!"
"Be its beauty its sole duty!"
"Be its beauty its sole duty!"
"Oh, Mr. Ingram! Look! It's stopped pecking and is beginning to look round."
He leaned across the carriage. He may have meant to do no more than touch the enfolding hands that lay so near his lips. But her own mouth was nearer still, and he kissed that.