IVBURNHAM BEECHESFORGreta Morrison as for Mendel, London life had been opened up through Mitchell. He had been friendly and kind to her when everybody else had been harsh, fault-finding, and indifferent. Her first year and a half at the hostel had been a period of misery, for the girls and women there regarded her as odd, vague, and careless, and thought it their duty to impose on her the discipline she seemed to need, for they knew nothing of her suffering through her ambition and her work.Like Mendel, she had been overwhelmed by her inability to adapt herself easily to the Detmold standard of drawing, for it was against her temperament and her habit of mind to be precise, and drawing had always been to her rather a trivial thing, though extremely pleasant for the purposes of the caricatures in which her teasing humour found an outlet. All her girlhood had been thrillingly happy in the execution of large allegorical designs, through which she sought to express her delight in the earth—the immense serene power of which she became profoundly aware as she lay in the bracken at home and gazed out over the rich valley or up into the marvellous, quivering blue sky, through which she felt that she was being borne without a sound, without a tremor, irresistibly. Nothing could shake that loving knowledge in her, and it hurt her that her mother’s cold, self-centred religion, which made her demanda fussy, sentimental attention from her children, forbade all expression of it in her daily life. Her brothers, revolting against the sentimentality exacted of them, treated all tenderness as ignoble rubbish, and in her rough-and-tumble with them Greta was hardened and forced into independence. She had to play their games with them and to suffer the same tortures of knuckle-drill, brush, dry-shave, and wrist-screw. But all their swagger seemed to her rather fraudulent; and because they laughed at her allegorical designs she decided that men were inferior beings. When they laughed at her designs it was to her as though they laughed at the beauty she had tried to express in them, and the sacrilege enraged her more than her mother’s petulance, for they were young and strong and full of life, and they should not have been blind. It was against them that she first found relief in caricature, and as they went through their Public Schools and were more and more compressed into type, she pilloried them, and, as a consequence, even when she was a young woman, big and fine, with the tender, delicate bloom of seventeen upon her, she had to submit to the indignity of knuckle-drill, brush, dry-shave, and wrist-screw.She was filled with a horror of men, and especially Public School men, for they seemed to her entirely lacking in decency, humility, and honesty. They pretended to be so fine and ignored everything that was finer than themselves. Her brothers’ foolish love-affairs disgusted her and made her suppress in herself every emotion that tried to find its way to a good-looking boy or young man. She was not shy of them or afraid of them, but she would not encourage in them what she so detested in her brothers.During her first year in London she devoted herself heart and soul to her work. There were two or three families who were kind to her asher mother’s daughter, but their ways were her mother’s, and she only visited them as a duty, and to break the monotony of the school and the hostel.Her encounter with Mitchell took place at the time when Mendel’s influence on him had set him in revolt against his Public School training. On the other hand, the sight of the abyss of poverty into which Mendel descended so easily had set him reeling. He was shrewd enough to know that Hetty Finch was using him as a ladder to get out of it, and that there was a real danger of her kicking him down into it. In a state of horrible confusion he plunged at the most obvious outlet, the “pure girl” of the tradition of his upbringing.He made no concealment of it, but turned to Morrison with a childlike confidence that touched her. She was feeling lonely, disappointed, and dissatisfied with herself and was glad of his company. It was a change from the woman-ridden atmosphere of the hostel.By way of making their relationship seemly he introduced her to his family, where as the pure young girl who was to save their hope from wild courses she was a great success.“First sensible thing you’ve done, my boy,” said Mr. Mitchell, that great man, a journalist who had been a correspondent in a dozen wars. “A pure friendship between a boy and a girl has a most ennobling influence—most ennobling.”“She is truly spiritual,” sighed Mrs. Mitchell, “the type who justifies the independence of the modern girl, whatever the Prime Minister may say.”“That scoundrel!” cried Mr. Mitchell. “That infamous buffoon who has not a grain of Liberalism left in his toadying mind!”“My dear,” said Mrs. Mitchell, “we were talking about little Miss Morrison.”“Well,” answered Mr. Mitchell, “we took ourrisk when we let the boy be an artist and we can be thankful it is no worse. Did I tell you, my love, that I am going off to the Cocos Islands to-morrow?”“Indeed, my dear? Then you will not be able to come to my meeting.”“No, I hear it is worse than the Congo.”“Oh dear! oh dear! I don’t know what the world is coming to. The more civilized we get in one part of the world, the worse things are in another part. I declare such horrible things seem to me to make it quite unimportant whether we get the vote or not.”“When you have a Tory Government calling itself Liberal,” said Mr. Mitchell very angrily, “it means that neither reform at home nor justice abroad can receive any attention. The country has gone to the dogs, and I thank God I spend most of my time out of it.”“And poor Humphrey suffers. I’m sure I am a good mother to him, but I cannot be a father as well. I’m thankful to say he seems to be dropping that Jewish friend of his. He is a genius, of course, and quite remarkable, considering what he comes from; but with Jews it can never be the same, can it?”“No, my love,” said Mr. Mitchell; “one would never dream of drinking out of the same glass, would one? Still, I must say, the Jews in England are much better than they are anywhere else, which seems to show that they can respond to decent treatment and thrive in the air of liberty.”Both Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell had a platform manner of speaking, and as Morrison was not a subject that suited it, she was soon dropped; but in the end they came back to her, and agreed that she was a nice, shy little girl, and that she had no idea of marrying their only son, or anyone else, for that matter.She was much impressed with them, for she had never met important people before, and she was given to understand that they were very important. They seemed to have their fingers on innumerable reforms which were only suppressed by the stupidity of the Government. Directly the Government was removed, as of course such idiots soon would be, Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell would raise their fingers and, hey presto! women would have votes, the slums would be pulled down, maternity would be endowed, prostitutes would be saved, prisons would be reformed, capital punishment abolished, the working classes would be properly housed, every able-bodied man who wished it should have his small holding, the railways would be nationalized, site values would be taxed, divorce would be made easy and free from social taint, and education would be made scientific and thorough. In the meantime, as the Government did not budge, Mr. Mitchell went to the Cocos Islands and Constantinople to procure evidence of horrors abroad and Mrs. Mitchell addressed meetings on the subject of horrors at home.Morrison was impressed. The contrast between these people who thought of everything and everybody but themselves and her own home, where nothing was thought of but the family, the Church, and the Empire, shocked her into thinking and gave her a sense of liberation. It made human beings more interesting than she had thought, and she began to see that they did not, as she had heedlessly accepted that they did, fit infallibly into their places, and that vast numbers had no places to fit into. She herself, she saw, did not fit into any place, and that she had been squeezed, like paint out of a tube, out of her home for no other reason than that she was a woman, and there was only just enough money to establish the boys. However, she could not quite swallow Mrs. Mitchell’s view that men had deliberately, coldly,and of set purpose ousted women from their rightful share in the sweets of life.She had a period of despair as these revelations sank into her mind and she had to digest Mrs. Mitchell’s awful facts and statistics about the night-life of London. Life seemed too terrible for her powers, but, as she soon began to see how comic Mrs. Mitchell was, she pulled herself together and found that she was strengthened by the experience, and when Mitchell confessed the awful doings of his past, she felt immeasurably older than he, and was thankful she was a woman and did not expect such things of herself. For she could never quite take his word for all he said. She knew her brothers too well to accept his plea of passionate necessity.“Gawd!” he used to say. “When I think of my past I feel that I must go on my knees and worship your purity.”His absurdity made her blush, but she liked him. He was clever and had read much under his father’s guidance, poetry and modern English fiction mostly, and when she went to tea with him in his studio he used to read aloud to her, Keats and Shelley and Matthew Arnold.“I think I only like poetry,” she said once, “when it makes pictures. When it doesn’t do that it seems to me just words, and it doesn’t seem to matter how nice they sound.”“Gawd!” he said. “That’s like Kühler. He says nothing makes such pictures as the Bible, and he is always quoting that about: ‘At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: where he fell, there he lay down.’ And he says it must be the words, because his own Hebrew Bible never gave him anything like the same—er—vision of it.”Once he had begun to talk of Mendel she would not let him leave the subject.“Do you think he’s a genius?” she would ask.“Gawd! I don’t know. He says he is a genius,and I suppose time will show whether it is true or not. But why do you want to talk of him?”“I don’t know. I’m interested. Perhaps because he is different.”“Well, you’ve had tea with him. That is about as much as is good for you. If you were my sister I wouldn’t let you know him.”“Why not?”“My dear girl, there are certain things in life that a young girl ought never to know.”“What things? Is there anything worse than what your mother talks about at her meetings? Girls know all about that nowadays, and it is no good pretending we don’t.”“Talking about them is one thing, coming in contact with them is another. Kühler is a Jew, and he comes from the East End, where they don’t have any decent pleasures. He’s infernally good-looking in a hurdy-gurdy sort of way. Gawd! Women look at him and off they go.”“But he cares for poetry and the Bible and he loves pictures. . . .”“It doesn’t seem to make any difference.”During this talk he had begun to find Morrison extraordinarily pretty and lovable, and he said tenderly:—“Won’t you take off your hat and let me see your beautiful hair?”She refused, and asked him more about Mendel, and in exasperation at the unintended snub he told her the true story of Hetty Finch, not concealing his own share in it, but implying that Mendel’s terrible immorality had corrupted him and led to his downfall.The story was received in silence.At last she said:—“And what is going to become of Hetty Finch?”“That’s the extraordinary part of it,” said Mitchell. “She has found someone to marry her.”He leaned against the mantelpiece and dropped his head in his hands and groaned.“Gawd!” he said. “If it weren’t for you I don’t know what would become of me.” And he was so moved by his own thoughts that tears trickled down his nose and made dark spots on the whitened hearth.“I can’t ask you to marry me,” he said mournfully. “I’m unworthy, but I want to be your friend.”She made no reply, and he was forced to ask rather lamely:—“Will you be my friend?”“Of course.”“Always?”“How can I promise that?” she said.It was then that he took her to the Paris Café, where, all in a turmoil through her new knowledge of men and women, she hardly knew what she was doing, and gave Mendel the curt nod which had so disgruntled him.Every summer the Detmold students went for a picnic, either up the river, or to a Surrey common, or to one of the forests in the vicinity of London. This year Burnham Beeches was chosen. Two charabancs met the party at Slough, and though Mendel tried very hard to sit next to Morrison, he was outmanœuvred by Mitchell, and had to put up with Clowes.“I wish you wouldn’t glare at Mitchell so. You make me quite uncomfortable,” said she.“He is telling her lies about me,” growled Mendel.“Don’t be absurd,” protested Clowes. “He is not talking about you at all.” She felt rather cross with him because he was spoiling her pleasure, and because she had wanted to sit next someone else, and she added: “People aren’t always talking about you, and if anybody does it’s the models, and that’s your own fault.”“How beastly!” he said.“I don’t blame them. They haven’t any other interest.”“I didn’t mean that. I meant this country. It is so flat and dull, regular railway scenery. What a place to choose for a picnic!”“Wait until you get to the woods! We’re going to a place called Egypt. Don’t you think that’s romantic? Though it reminds me more of Oberon and Titania than of Anthony and Cleopatra.”He looked blank, and she explained:—“Shakespeare, you know.”“I’ve never read Shakespeare.”“Oh! you should.”“I’ve tried, but I can’t understand him. I suppose it’s because I’m not English. It seems ridiculous to me, all those plots and murders.”“But the fairies in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’!”“I haven’t read it; but what do you want with fairies? A wood’s a wood, and there’s quite enough mystery in it for me without pretending to see things that aren’t there.”“But it’s nice to pretend,” said Clowes rather lamely, almost hating him because he seemed so wrong in the country. She knew people like that, people she was quite fond of in London, but in the country they were awful.The charabancs swung through Farnham Royal and they came in sight of the woods, brilliant under a vivid blue sky patched with huge, heavy white clouds. Birds hovered above the trees, and as they turned out of the street of seaside bungalows and along the sandy lane leading to Egypt, they put up rabbits and pheasants.The art students looked bizarre and almost theatrical in the woods, with the long-haired young men and the short-haired girls, many of them wearing the brightest colours. Mendel hated the lot of them, giggling girls and bouncing boys,and he recognized how inappropriate they all were and how he himself was the most inappropriate of them all. He felt ashamed, and wanted to go away and hide, to crawl away to some hole and gaze with his eyes at the beauty he could not feel. There were too many trees, as there were too many people. . . . What a poor thing is a man in a crowd which makes it impossible to share his thoughts and emotions with anyone! And how bitter it is when he is full of thoughts and emotions! It is all so bitter that the crowd must do foolish, inappropriate things not to feel it, not to be broken up by it. . . . Yet the others seemed happy enough. The old Professors were beaming and pretending to be young. Perhaps they enjoyed it more than anyone because they did not want to be alone, or to steal away with a coveted maid, as some of the young men were doing even now. . . . Had Mitchell stolen away with Morrison? Horrible idea! No. There he was, putting up stumps for cricket.Cricket! How Mendel loathed that fatuous game, the kind of inappropriate foolish thing the crowd always did! How he dreaded the swift hard ball that would hurt his hand or his shins! How humiliated he felt when he was out: and how he raged against the frantic excitement he could not help feeling when he hit the ball and made a run. One run seemed to him a larger score than anyone else could possibly make, and when he made a run and was on the winning side he always felt that he had won the match. In the field, no matter where he was placed, he went and stood by the umpire, because he had noticed that the ball rarely went that way.He had to field now, and he went and stood by the umpire. Mitchell came swaggering in. He hit a lovely four, a three, a two. The fielders changed at the over, but Mendel stayed where he was. The ball came near him. He picked itup and threw it as hard as he could at Mitchell’s head. Fortunately he missed, and there was a roar of laughter.“I say, I mean to say,” said one of the Professors, “we are not playing rounders or—or baseball.”And there was more laughter.Mitchell hit a three, a two, a lost ball (six), a four, and then he skied one. The ball went soaring up. With his keen sight Mendel could see it clearly shining red against the hot sky. With an awful sinking in his stomach he realized that it was coming down near him. It was coming straight to him. It would fall on him, hurt him, stun him. Then he thought that if he caught it Mitchell would be out. He never lost sight of the ball for a moment. If he caught it Mitchell would be out. He moved back two paces, opened his hands, and the ball fell into them.“Oh! well caught, indeed! Well caught!”Mitchell walked away from the wicket swinging his bat in a deprecating fashion. After all, one does not expect miracles even in cricket.“Beautiful, beautiful ball!” thought Mendel, fondling it with his still tingling hands. “You came to me like a lark to its nest, and you shone so red against the sky, you shone so red, so red!”His dissatisfaction vanished. The crowd was a nice beast after all. It was at his feet. At no one else had it shouted like that. . . . The woods were very beautiful, with the bracken nodding under the trees, and the branches swaying, and the soft winds murmuring through the leaves, through which the trees seemed to breathe and sigh and to envy the moving wind while they were condemned to stay and grow old in one spot. Very, very sweet were the green and yellow and blue lights hovering and swinging through the woods, dappling the trunks of the trees, weaving an ever-changing pattern on the carpet of moss and deadleaves, and the tufted bracken that sometimes almost looked like the sea, full of a life of its own. Surely, surely there were fish swimming in the bracken.Starting out of his dreams, he saw Morrison at the wicket, very intent, with a stern expression on her face. He knew she was desperately anxious to score.She was most palpably stumped with her second ball, but the umpire gave her “not out,” amid general applause, for she was a favourite.She lashed out awkwardly at the next ball, which came on the leg side. It came towards Mendel at an incredible speed. He put his foot on it, picked it up, pretended it had passed him, and tore towards the trees in simulated pursuit; and he remained looking for it in the bracken while Morrison ran four, five, six, seven, eight, and just as some one cried “Lost ball!” he stooped, pretended to pick it up, and threw it back to the bowler.He himself was bowled first ball, but, as it turned out, Morrison’s side won by three runs.She was bubbling over with happiness, and after tea she came over to him and said:—“I say, Kühler, thatwasa good catch.”He folded his arms and cocked his chin and looked down his nose as he said:—“Oh! yes. I can play cricket.”“You made a blob,” she said with a grin.“A catch like that,” he answered, “is enough for one day. I have seen many words written in the papers about a catch like that. Even Calthrop does not have so many words written about his pictures.”“I shall hate to go back to London after this,” she said. “I didn’t know there was anything so beautiful near London.”“There is Hampstead,” he said.“I’ve never been there,” she replied.“Will you let me take you to Hampstead? It has lilies and water.”“Oh yes,” she said eagerly. “Do let us go into the woods now before we start. I’m sure there must be lovely places.”He followed her, first looking round to see what had become of Mitchell, whom he saw standing with a scowl on his face, a foolish figure.“Don’t talk!” said Morrison. “I’m sure it is lovely through here.”She led the way through a grove of pines into a beech glade, at the end of which they found a dingle, where they stood and gazed back.“Oh, look!” she cried. “Look at the pine stems through the sea-green of the beeches. Purple they are, and don’t they swing?”“I like the wind in the trees,” said Mendel.He saw that there were tears in her eyes, and he caught some of her ecstasy. But he could not understand it at all and it hurt him horribly. She was wonderful and beautiful to him, the very heart of all that loveliness, the song of it, its music and its mystery.“She is only a little girl,” he said to himself very clearly, stamping out the words in his mind, so that it was as though someone else had spoken to him.The ecstasy grew in her, and with it the pain in him. She swayed towards him and fell against his breast and raised her lips to him. He stooped and almost in terror just touched them with his.He was a sorry prince for a sleeping beauty, for he was afraid lest she should awake.
FORGreta Morrison as for Mendel, London life had been opened up through Mitchell. He had been friendly and kind to her when everybody else had been harsh, fault-finding, and indifferent. Her first year and a half at the hostel had been a period of misery, for the girls and women there regarded her as odd, vague, and careless, and thought it their duty to impose on her the discipline she seemed to need, for they knew nothing of her suffering through her ambition and her work.
Like Mendel, she had been overwhelmed by her inability to adapt herself easily to the Detmold standard of drawing, for it was against her temperament and her habit of mind to be precise, and drawing had always been to her rather a trivial thing, though extremely pleasant for the purposes of the caricatures in which her teasing humour found an outlet. All her girlhood had been thrillingly happy in the execution of large allegorical designs, through which she sought to express her delight in the earth—the immense serene power of which she became profoundly aware as she lay in the bracken at home and gazed out over the rich valley or up into the marvellous, quivering blue sky, through which she felt that she was being borne without a sound, without a tremor, irresistibly. Nothing could shake that loving knowledge in her, and it hurt her that her mother’s cold, self-centred religion, which made her demanda fussy, sentimental attention from her children, forbade all expression of it in her daily life. Her brothers, revolting against the sentimentality exacted of them, treated all tenderness as ignoble rubbish, and in her rough-and-tumble with them Greta was hardened and forced into independence. She had to play their games with them and to suffer the same tortures of knuckle-drill, brush, dry-shave, and wrist-screw. But all their swagger seemed to her rather fraudulent; and because they laughed at her allegorical designs she decided that men were inferior beings. When they laughed at her designs it was to her as though they laughed at the beauty she had tried to express in them, and the sacrilege enraged her more than her mother’s petulance, for they were young and strong and full of life, and they should not have been blind. It was against them that she first found relief in caricature, and as they went through their Public Schools and were more and more compressed into type, she pilloried them, and, as a consequence, even when she was a young woman, big and fine, with the tender, delicate bloom of seventeen upon her, she had to submit to the indignity of knuckle-drill, brush, dry-shave, and wrist-screw.
She was filled with a horror of men, and especially Public School men, for they seemed to her entirely lacking in decency, humility, and honesty. They pretended to be so fine and ignored everything that was finer than themselves. Her brothers’ foolish love-affairs disgusted her and made her suppress in herself every emotion that tried to find its way to a good-looking boy or young man. She was not shy of them or afraid of them, but she would not encourage in them what she so detested in her brothers.
During her first year in London she devoted herself heart and soul to her work. There were two or three families who were kind to her asher mother’s daughter, but their ways were her mother’s, and she only visited them as a duty, and to break the monotony of the school and the hostel.
Her encounter with Mitchell took place at the time when Mendel’s influence on him had set him in revolt against his Public School training. On the other hand, the sight of the abyss of poverty into which Mendel descended so easily had set him reeling. He was shrewd enough to know that Hetty Finch was using him as a ladder to get out of it, and that there was a real danger of her kicking him down into it. In a state of horrible confusion he plunged at the most obvious outlet, the “pure girl” of the tradition of his upbringing.
He made no concealment of it, but turned to Morrison with a childlike confidence that touched her. She was feeling lonely, disappointed, and dissatisfied with herself and was glad of his company. It was a change from the woman-ridden atmosphere of the hostel.
By way of making their relationship seemly he introduced her to his family, where as the pure young girl who was to save their hope from wild courses she was a great success.
“First sensible thing you’ve done, my boy,” said Mr. Mitchell, that great man, a journalist who had been a correspondent in a dozen wars. “A pure friendship between a boy and a girl has a most ennobling influence—most ennobling.”
“She is truly spiritual,” sighed Mrs. Mitchell, “the type who justifies the independence of the modern girl, whatever the Prime Minister may say.”
“That scoundrel!” cried Mr. Mitchell. “That infamous buffoon who has not a grain of Liberalism left in his toadying mind!”
“My dear,” said Mrs. Mitchell, “we were talking about little Miss Morrison.”
“Well,” answered Mr. Mitchell, “we took ourrisk when we let the boy be an artist and we can be thankful it is no worse. Did I tell you, my love, that I am going off to the Cocos Islands to-morrow?”
“Indeed, my dear? Then you will not be able to come to my meeting.”
“No, I hear it is worse than the Congo.”
“Oh dear! oh dear! I don’t know what the world is coming to. The more civilized we get in one part of the world, the worse things are in another part. I declare such horrible things seem to me to make it quite unimportant whether we get the vote or not.”
“When you have a Tory Government calling itself Liberal,” said Mr. Mitchell very angrily, “it means that neither reform at home nor justice abroad can receive any attention. The country has gone to the dogs, and I thank God I spend most of my time out of it.”
“And poor Humphrey suffers. I’m sure I am a good mother to him, but I cannot be a father as well. I’m thankful to say he seems to be dropping that Jewish friend of his. He is a genius, of course, and quite remarkable, considering what he comes from; but with Jews it can never be the same, can it?”
“No, my love,” said Mr. Mitchell; “one would never dream of drinking out of the same glass, would one? Still, I must say, the Jews in England are much better than they are anywhere else, which seems to show that they can respond to decent treatment and thrive in the air of liberty.”
Both Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell had a platform manner of speaking, and as Morrison was not a subject that suited it, she was soon dropped; but in the end they came back to her, and agreed that she was a nice, shy little girl, and that she had no idea of marrying their only son, or anyone else, for that matter.
She was much impressed with them, for she had never met important people before, and she was given to understand that they were very important. They seemed to have their fingers on innumerable reforms which were only suppressed by the stupidity of the Government. Directly the Government was removed, as of course such idiots soon would be, Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell would raise their fingers and, hey presto! women would have votes, the slums would be pulled down, maternity would be endowed, prostitutes would be saved, prisons would be reformed, capital punishment abolished, the working classes would be properly housed, every able-bodied man who wished it should have his small holding, the railways would be nationalized, site values would be taxed, divorce would be made easy and free from social taint, and education would be made scientific and thorough. In the meantime, as the Government did not budge, Mr. Mitchell went to the Cocos Islands and Constantinople to procure evidence of horrors abroad and Mrs. Mitchell addressed meetings on the subject of horrors at home.
Morrison was impressed. The contrast between these people who thought of everything and everybody but themselves and her own home, where nothing was thought of but the family, the Church, and the Empire, shocked her into thinking and gave her a sense of liberation. It made human beings more interesting than she had thought, and she began to see that they did not, as she had heedlessly accepted that they did, fit infallibly into their places, and that vast numbers had no places to fit into. She herself, she saw, did not fit into any place, and that she had been squeezed, like paint out of a tube, out of her home for no other reason than that she was a woman, and there was only just enough money to establish the boys. However, she could not quite swallow Mrs. Mitchell’s view that men had deliberately, coldly,and of set purpose ousted women from their rightful share in the sweets of life.
She had a period of despair as these revelations sank into her mind and she had to digest Mrs. Mitchell’s awful facts and statistics about the night-life of London. Life seemed too terrible for her powers, but, as she soon began to see how comic Mrs. Mitchell was, she pulled herself together and found that she was strengthened by the experience, and when Mitchell confessed the awful doings of his past, she felt immeasurably older than he, and was thankful she was a woman and did not expect such things of herself. For she could never quite take his word for all he said. She knew her brothers too well to accept his plea of passionate necessity.
“Gawd!” he used to say. “When I think of my past I feel that I must go on my knees and worship your purity.”
His absurdity made her blush, but she liked him. He was clever and had read much under his father’s guidance, poetry and modern English fiction mostly, and when she went to tea with him in his studio he used to read aloud to her, Keats and Shelley and Matthew Arnold.
“I think I only like poetry,” she said once, “when it makes pictures. When it doesn’t do that it seems to me just words, and it doesn’t seem to matter how nice they sound.”
“Gawd!” he said. “That’s like Kühler. He says nothing makes such pictures as the Bible, and he is always quoting that about: ‘At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: where he fell, there he lay down.’ And he says it must be the words, because his own Hebrew Bible never gave him anything like the same—er—vision of it.”
Once he had begun to talk of Mendel she would not let him leave the subject.
“Do you think he’s a genius?” she would ask.
“Gawd! I don’t know. He says he is a genius,and I suppose time will show whether it is true or not. But why do you want to talk of him?”
“I don’t know. I’m interested. Perhaps because he is different.”
“Well, you’ve had tea with him. That is about as much as is good for you. If you were my sister I wouldn’t let you know him.”
“Why not?”
“My dear girl, there are certain things in life that a young girl ought never to know.”
“What things? Is there anything worse than what your mother talks about at her meetings? Girls know all about that nowadays, and it is no good pretending we don’t.”
“Talking about them is one thing, coming in contact with them is another. Kühler is a Jew, and he comes from the East End, where they don’t have any decent pleasures. He’s infernally good-looking in a hurdy-gurdy sort of way. Gawd! Women look at him and off they go.”
“But he cares for poetry and the Bible and he loves pictures. . . .”
“It doesn’t seem to make any difference.”
During this talk he had begun to find Morrison extraordinarily pretty and lovable, and he said tenderly:—
“Won’t you take off your hat and let me see your beautiful hair?”
She refused, and asked him more about Mendel, and in exasperation at the unintended snub he told her the true story of Hetty Finch, not concealing his own share in it, but implying that Mendel’s terrible immorality had corrupted him and led to his downfall.
The story was received in silence.
At last she said:—
“And what is going to become of Hetty Finch?”
“That’s the extraordinary part of it,” said Mitchell. “She has found someone to marry her.”
He leaned against the mantelpiece and dropped his head in his hands and groaned.
“Gawd!” he said. “If it weren’t for you I don’t know what would become of me.” And he was so moved by his own thoughts that tears trickled down his nose and made dark spots on the whitened hearth.
“I can’t ask you to marry me,” he said mournfully. “I’m unworthy, but I want to be your friend.”
She made no reply, and he was forced to ask rather lamely:—
“Will you be my friend?”
“Of course.”
“Always?”
“How can I promise that?” she said.
It was then that he took her to the Paris Café, where, all in a turmoil through her new knowledge of men and women, she hardly knew what she was doing, and gave Mendel the curt nod which had so disgruntled him.
Every summer the Detmold students went for a picnic, either up the river, or to a Surrey common, or to one of the forests in the vicinity of London. This year Burnham Beeches was chosen. Two charabancs met the party at Slough, and though Mendel tried very hard to sit next to Morrison, he was outmanœuvred by Mitchell, and had to put up with Clowes.
“I wish you wouldn’t glare at Mitchell so. You make me quite uncomfortable,” said she.
“He is telling her lies about me,” growled Mendel.
“Don’t be absurd,” protested Clowes. “He is not talking about you at all.” She felt rather cross with him because he was spoiling her pleasure, and because she had wanted to sit next someone else, and she added: “People aren’t always talking about you, and if anybody does it’s the models, and that’s your own fault.”
“How beastly!” he said.
“I don’t blame them. They haven’t any other interest.”
“I didn’t mean that. I meant this country. It is so flat and dull, regular railway scenery. What a place to choose for a picnic!”
“Wait until you get to the woods! We’re going to a place called Egypt. Don’t you think that’s romantic? Though it reminds me more of Oberon and Titania than of Anthony and Cleopatra.”
He looked blank, and she explained:—
“Shakespeare, you know.”
“I’ve never read Shakespeare.”
“Oh! you should.”
“I’ve tried, but I can’t understand him. I suppose it’s because I’m not English. It seems ridiculous to me, all those plots and murders.”
“But the fairies in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’!”
“I haven’t read it; but what do you want with fairies? A wood’s a wood, and there’s quite enough mystery in it for me without pretending to see things that aren’t there.”
“But it’s nice to pretend,” said Clowes rather lamely, almost hating him because he seemed so wrong in the country. She knew people like that, people she was quite fond of in London, but in the country they were awful.
The charabancs swung through Farnham Royal and they came in sight of the woods, brilliant under a vivid blue sky patched with huge, heavy white clouds. Birds hovered above the trees, and as they turned out of the street of seaside bungalows and along the sandy lane leading to Egypt, they put up rabbits and pheasants.
The art students looked bizarre and almost theatrical in the woods, with the long-haired young men and the short-haired girls, many of them wearing the brightest colours. Mendel hated the lot of them, giggling girls and bouncing boys,and he recognized how inappropriate they all were and how he himself was the most inappropriate of them all. He felt ashamed, and wanted to go away and hide, to crawl away to some hole and gaze with his eyes at the beauty he could not feel. There were too many trees, as there were too many people. . . . What a poor thing is a man in a crowd which makes it impossible to share his thoughts and emotions with anyone! And how bitter it is when he is full of thoughts and emotions! It is all so bitter that the crowd must do foolish, inappropriate things not to feel it, not to be broken up by it. . . . Yet the others seemed happy enough. The old Professors were beaming and pretending to be young. Perhaps they enjoyed it more than anyone because they did not want to be alone, or to steal away with a coveted maid, as some of the young men were doing even now. . . . Had Mitchell stolen away with Morrison? Horrible idea! No. There he was, putting up stumps for cricket.
Cricket! How Mendel loathed that fatuous game, the kind of inappropriate foolish thing the crowd always did! How he dreaded the swift hard ball that would hurt his hand or his shins! How humiliated he felt when he was out: and how he raged against the frantic excitement he could not help feeling when he hit the ball and made a run. One run seemed to him a larger score than anyone else could possibly make, and when he made a run and was on the winning side he always felt that he had won the match. In the field, no matter where he was placed, he went and stood by the umpire, because he had noticed that the ball rarely went that way.
He had to field now, and he went and stood by the umpire. Mitchell came swaggering in. He hit a lovely four, a three, a two. The fielders changed at the over, but Mendel stayed where he was. The ball came near him. He picked itup and threw it as hard as he could at Mitchell’s head. Fortunately he missed, and there was a roar of laughter.
“I say, I mean to say,” said one of the Professors, “we are not playing rounders or—or baseball.”
And there was more laughter.
Mitchell hit a three, a two, a lost ball (six), a four, and then he skied one. The ball went soaring up. With his keen sight Mendel could see it clearly shining red against the hot sky. With an awful sinking in his stomach he realized that it was coming down near him. It was coming straight to him. It would fall on him, hurt him, stun him. Then he thought that if he caught it Mitchell would be out. He never lost sight of the ball for a moment. If he caught it Mitchell would be out. He moved back two paces, opened his hands, and the ball fell into them.
“Oh! well caught, indeed! Well caught!”
Mitchell walked away from the wicket swinging his bat in a deprecating fashion. After all, one does not expect miracles even in cricket.
“Beautiful, beautiful ball!” thought Mendel, fondling it with his still tingling hands. “You came to me like a lark to its nest, and you shone so red against the sky, you shone so red, so red!”
His dissatisfaction vanished. The crowd was a nice beast after all. It was at his feet. At no one else had it shouted like that. . . . The woods were very beautiful, with the bracken nodding under the trees, and the branches swaying, and the soft winds murmuring through the leaves, through which the trees seemed to breathe and sigh and to envy the moving wind while they were condemned to stay and grow old in one spot. Very, very sweet were the green and yellow and blue lights hovering and swinging through the woods, dappling the trunks of the trees, weaving an ever-changing pattern on the carpet of moss and deadleaves, and the tufted bracken that sometimes almost looked like the sea, full of a life of its own. Surely, surely there were fish swimming in the bracken.
Starting out of his dreams, he saw Morrison at the wicket, very intent, with a stern expression on her face. He knew she was desperately anxious to score.
She was most palpably stumped with her second ball, but the umpire gave her “not out,” amid general applause, for she was a favourite.
She lashed out awkwardly at the next ball, which came on the leg side. It came towards Mendel at an incredible speed. He put his foot on it, picked it up, pretended it had passed him, and tore towards the trees in simulated pursuit; and he remained looking for it in the bracken while Morrison ran four, five, six, seven, eight, and just as some one cried “Lost ball!” he stooped, pretended to pick it up, and threw it back to the bowler.
He himself was bowled first ball, but, as it turned out, Morrison’s side won by three runs.
She was bubbling over with happiness, and after tea she came over to him and said:—
“I say, Kühler, thatwasa good catch.”
He folded his arms and cocked his chin and looked down his nose as he said:—
“Oh! yes. I can play cricket.”
“You made a blob,” she said with a grin.
“A catch like that,” he answered, “is enough for one day. I have seen many words written in the papers about a catch like that. Even Calthrop does not have so many words written about his pictures.”
“I shall hate to go back to London after this,” she said. “I didn’t know there was anything so beautiful near London.”
“There is Hampstead,” he said.
“I’ve never been there,” she replied.
“Will you let me take you to Hampstead? It has lilies and water.”
“Oh yes,” she said eagerly. “Do let us go into the woods now before we start. I’m sure there must be lovely places.”
He followed her, first looking round to see what had become of Mitchell, whom he saw standing with a scowl on his face, a foolish figure.
“Don’t talk!” said Morrison. “I’m sure it is lovely through here.”
She led the way through a grove of pines into a beech glade, at the end of which they found a dingle, where they stood and gazed back.
“Oh, look!” she cried. “Look at the pine stems through the sea-green of the beeches. Purple they are, and don’t they swing?”
“I like the wind in the trees,” said Mendel.
He saw that there were tears in her eyes, and he caught some of her ecstasy. But he could not understand it at all and it hurt him horribly. She was wonderful and beautiful to him, the very heart of all that loveliness, the song of it, its music and its mystery.
“She is only a little girl,” he said to himself very clearly, stamping out the words in his mind, so that it was as though someone else had spoken to him.
The ecstasy grew in her, and with it the pain in him. She swayed towards him and fell against his breast and raised her lips to him. He stooped and almost in terror just touched them with his.
He was a sorry prince for a sleeping beauty, for he was afraid lest she should awake.