THE windows were all wide open, and a hot breeze of July, strong enough almost to be called a wind, and laden with the scents of summer and the hum of bees, poured boisterously into the room, stirring the papers on the table and ruffling the grayish wiry hair of the writer. But this invasion of the wind was clearly a thing often experienced, and, though apparently welcomed, suitably guarded against, for the copious papers that fluttered and rustled so busily to its touch were made secure from disarrangement by stones and various small fragments that were placed on top of their orderly heaps in order to prevent their taking flight. Thus, at the right hand of the writer, on a little shelf of these flutterers bound together by an elastic band and neatly docketed “Parish Accounts,” there stood a small piece of basaltic rock, with a paper label gummed to it, lettered in minute old English type, “Ye Sea of Galilee, 1902.” “Ye Dead Sea, 1902,” a softer piece of pumice-stone, prevented “Household Accounts (Stables)” from sowing themselves over the room; while a larger slab of white marble—lay-brother, so to speak, to the first two, and labelled “Acropolis, 1902” in Greek characters—kept the very small packet of “Letters unanswered” in place; and a fragment, with its ticket “St. Peter’s, Rome,” not stating, however, from what part of the church it had been pilfered, kept Barr’s last list of “Seeds for the Flower Garden” from going there. Bits of Jerusalem and Nazareth were similarly useful.
The room was large, square, and commodious; livedin, as was evident from a first glance, by some one who knew what he wanted in his study, and put all things in their places; while a glance at his rather keen and severe face might suggest that he had a slight tendency to put people in their places also. There was nothing fortuitous or haphazard about his arrangements; one felt instinctively that the owner kept about him only such things as were in constant use, as, for instance, Barr’s catalogue of seeds or that formed part of the constant background of his mind, under which head we may class a terra-cotta reproduction of Michael Angelo’s Moses, that stood on the top of a revolving bookcase in the window, and a framed map of the Roman Forum (1904), with the latest excavations outlined in red. Bookshelves took up the bulk of the wall-space, which was otherwise decorated with prints of a Biblical character. The floor was covered with red carpet, cut up by black lines into lozenge-shaped squares, in the centre of each of which was a fleur-de-lis, and it, like the prints and the weights that kept papers in their places, had a serious and slightly ecclesiastical suggestion about it. But just as nobody in this world is entirely cut out of one piece, but is, to some extent, at any rate, of the nature of patchwork, so too this room reflected a few slightly lighter characteristics. A couple of golf balls, for instance, stood on the chimney-piece just below the Sistine Madonna, bearing the marks of strenuous if slightly misdirected usage, and in the centre of it was a pipe-rack, with half a dozen well-coloured companions of the mouth in it. Here again ecclesiasticism a little reasserted itself, for the rack was of fumed oak, carved in a debased Gothic manner to represent a church window. A very bulky and much-wadded sofa, of the type inexplicably known as “Chesterfield,” denoted thatthere were moments in which the flesh might be tired if not weak, while even there the eye—unless closed—would, wherever it looked, be braced by the contemplation of mottoes printed in large and very legible type. They were all most suitable, and a baby in arms could have seen their applicability. Thus on the jamb of each of the bookcases was a printed scroll, “Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,” while on the pipe-rack, humorously enough, though perhaps slightly incongruously, since it crossed the sill of the Gothic church window, was written the quaintly altered quotation, “The earliest pipe of half-awakened birdseye”; a calendar on the table was somewhat more prosaically inscribed “Pereunt et imputantur,” and also “Days and moments quickly flying”; and across the gold frame of the Sistine Madonna—again making up in suitability what it lacked in ingenuity—was printed “Gloria in Excelsis.” A slightly wider flight of fancy, however, was exhibited on the varnished wooden rim of the writing-table itself, for here, in three-inch letters, was carved, “My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.”
At this moment the truth and literal applicability of the text was not quite being fulfilled. Leaving his tongue out of the question, the writer was ready and his pen was ready, but the pen was poised, and the writer was not writing. He had, in fact, got to the last paragraph of the address he was going to give at the Mannington Literary and Scientific Club, or, as Canon Alington playfully called it, “The Literific,” on Tuesday evening next, on the very suggestive and interesting subject “The True Test of Literary and Artistic Immortality.” And the last paragraph he always held was the most important of all, for it was like the last well-directed hammer-blow that drives a nail-head flush with theboard into which it has been tapped. In fact, several minutes before he had written on his blotting-paper in dotted lines, “C’est le dernier pas qui coûte,” and had determined to have it put more permanently on to the inside margin of his blotting-book, so that it should always be before him when he was engaged in literary composition. He wanted a sounding conclusion, a last well-directed blow, and he sat there some five minutes without writing. Then he gave a little shake to his stylographic pen, and wrote:
“We may, then, consider it proved—though such a conclusion does not really need proof, since it is its own evidence—that the immortal in art and letters is always and for everyone identical with the religious. Insofar”—he wrote it thus—“as art, be it poetry, or fiction even, or painting, or sculpture, arouses religious feelings in the observer, that work is, as we have shown—and, indeed, as it shows itself—immortal in proportion to the depth and reality of the religious feeling it arouses.”
“We may, then, consider it proved—though such a conclusion does not really need proof, since it is its own evidence—that the immortal in art and letters is always and for everyone identical with the religious. Insofar”—he wrote it thus—“as art, be it poetry, or fiction even, or painting, or sculpture, arouses religious feelings in the observer, that work is, as we have shown—and, indeed, as it shows itself—immortal in proportion to the depth and reality of the religious feeling it arouses.”
Canon Alington paused a moment, wondering whether, strictly speaking, a thing could be proportionately immortal. But since the whole phrase expressed what he meant, he let it stand.
“That is why we are right in agreeing that theParadise Lostis indescribably nobler and finer than even the ‘mighty-mouthed music’ of Shakespeare; that is why we unhesitatingly can affirm that the glorious Sir Galahad and St. Agnes of the late Poet Laureate, why even the terrible ‘Rake’s Progress’ of Hogarth, since it rouses our religious sense by the horror with which we contemplate the result of sin, will continue to be fixed stars in the heaven of human achievement and aspiration for æons and æons after the corrupt sentimentality of Mr. Swinburne and the degraded ideals of Wagner’sGotterdammerung——”
“That is why we are right in agreeing that theParadise Lostis indescribably nobler and finer than even the ‘mighty-mouthed music’ of Shakespeare; that is why we unhesitatingly can affirm that the glorious Sir Galahad and St. Agnes of the late Poet Laureate, why even the terrible ‘Rake’s Progress’ of Hogarth, since it rouses our religious sense by the horror with which we contemplate the result of sin, will continue to be fixed stars in the heaven of human achievement and aspiration for æons and æons after the corrupt sentimentality of Mr. Swinburne and the degraded ideals of Wagner’sGotterdammerung——”
Canon Alington paused for a moment again, for he was not quite certain how this last very difficult word was spelled, being, though a scholar of dead languages, notso perfectly acquainted with the living. But a brief visit to the realms of gold, where he at once put his hand on a small German dictionary, relieved him from any anxiety on this score; there were two “m’s,” as he had thought. The fact that he had never seen the “Ring” did not prevent him from making this trenchant pronouncement on its ideals, for he had glanced not so long ago at a translation of it, which his brother-in-law, Hugh Grainger, had left in the house, which was more than enough to make him certain that he was not overstating the case, since, most unfortunately, he had opened it at that passage in the Valkyrie where Wotan, father of gods and men, enunciates such remarkable views on the subject of marriage.
But before returning to his table he took a pipe down from the Gothic window rack (it was by reason of its shape that he had chosen it from among twenty others), filled it, and lit it. Then he continued:
“have been consigned to the limbo of mere technical skill and mere jingle of metre and melody out of which they came.”
“have been consigned to the limbo of mere technical skill and mere jingle of metre and melody out of which they came.”
He inhaled a long breath of tobacco-smoke. Even if the sentence about Hogarth’s “Rake’s Progress” was a little “broad” for the Mannington “Literific,” this uncompromising condemnation of Wagner and Swinburne would show that, though he might be broad, he was also firm. The sentence was well-balanced too, the last hammer-taps were descending straight, and before proceeding he drew once or twice more at his pipe, for tobacco (he was afraid this was a weakness of the flesh, and meant to conquer it some day) always seemed to him to clarify his thought and aid his sense of literary composition. It was for this reason that, though he had tried giving up the use of it during last Lent, he had taken to it again after the third Sundayin that season, since he had thought, and his wife agreed with him, that his sermons suffered. This reason, though of the sort which the cynical tend to distrust, was indeed perfectly honest and genuine, and had not he thought that his sermons lost impressiveness, or had not Agnes shared his fear, he would have scorned to pamper the flesh in this manner; but since they did, it was a misdirected effort of asceticism to continue this particular form of abstinence. So instead he gave up for the remaining three weeks of Lent putting sugar in his tea, and in spite of the fact that he disliked this intensely—though, it is true, not quite so much as the abandonment of tobacco—he was quite firm about it, since nothing except a carnal appetite suffered.
Then, with the added inspiration of tobacco, he finished his peroration:
“Moreover, the sense of beauty is purely a function of the imagination, and it is therefore our duty so to train and vivify it that it perceives even through roughness and want of skill in the artist’s execution, nay, even through superficial plainness or ugliness that quality of high and true beauty which alone is worth our attention and reverent admiration, and is, as we have said, identical with religious feeling. So, just as in a plain face we ought to and can discern the beauty of the spirit within, so in literature and in all art it is in the moral significance of book or picture or statue that we must seek true beauty, which alone is the immortal element. Then to us the face of our fellow-men will be beautiful because we see there the love and faith of the spirit that animates them; a book will be beautiful because it tells us of Christian qualities and points Christian lessons, and with reverence and awe we shall close the volume or turn away from the picture, or even statue, that we have contemplated, feeling that dimly but surely we have caught a glimpse, a foreshadowing of the truly immortal, a ray from the dawn of the everlasting day.”
“Moreover, the sense of beauty is purely a function of the imagination, and it is therefore our duty so to train and vivify it that it perceives even through roughness and want of skill in the artist’s execution, nay, even through superficial plainness or ugliness that quality of high and true beauty which alone is worth our attention and reverent admiration, and is, as we have said, identical with religious feeling. So, just as in a plain face we ought to and can discern the beauty of the spirit within, so in literature and in all art it is in the moral significance of book or picture or statue that we must seek true beauty, which alone is the immortal element. Then to us the face of our fellow-men will be beautiful because we see there the love and faith of the spirit that animates them; a book will be beautiful because it tells us of Christian qualities and points Christian lessons, and with reverence and awe we shall close the volume or turn away from the picture, or even statue, that we have contemplated, feeling that dimly but surely we have caught a glimpse, a foreshadowing of the truly immortal, a ray from the dawn of the everlasting day.”
“Everlasting day,” said Canon Alington aloud, andrepeated it again rather more sonorously. That was the last hammer-tap, and he drew a line across the paper, and dated it.
Canon Alington’s handwriting was neat to the point of exquisiteness, and since he was already quite certain of the correctness of his premises and the justice of his conclusions, it was but a short work to run through the finished paper again with an eye for punctuation and a detective’s keenness for any possible slips of grammar, for his horror of closed windows was outrivalled by his dread of split infinitives. His brown, lean face, with its thick crop of hair just beginning to turn gray, that rose upright in wiry fashion from his forehead, pointed to great physical vigour, while the fact that on this broiling day he had sat down directly after lunch and worked for more than three hours without rising from his chair, except at the end of his business to get that “earliest pipe of half-awakened birdseye,” was sufficient indication that no mental weakness belied his appearance of strong vitality. He had written this paper, which would take him a full hour to read at the “Literific,” without notes of any kind, and without (as he found when he read it over) any of what he habitually called vain repetition, or (another critical term of his) “confused noises within.” All he had meant to say he had said, and, a rarer merit, he had said absolutely nothing that he did not mean to say. The whole paper gave as accurate a reflection of that which was in his mind as the best looking-glass.
He placed his sheets when he had finished their revision under a piece of labelled Sinaitic rock (1902), and then granted himself a few minutes’ leisure as he smoked the remainder of the pipe which had assisted him toward the composition of that uncompromising last paragraph.Though he had been busily engaged all day, first in parish business and then in this “literific” effort, he was not at all tired, and indeed the rest of the hours till bedtime were not without further duties. He had at present had no exercise all day, though he considered exercise to be as distinct a duty as any other, since the body reacts on the mind, and he purposed before dinner to do a little late seeding in the garden, and finish up very likely with half an hour with the heavy roller on the lawn. Then, too, he had long made it strictly incumbent upon himself to do an hour’s reading every day; not of the kind that was necessarily congenial to him, but reading which he felt it his duty to do in order to keep abreast of the times. Had he been a selfish, pleasure-loving person, he would certainly from preference have devoted this hour to some well-thumbed favourite, such as “Paradise Lost,” or Miss Corelli’s wonderful “Romance of Two Worlds.” But to be abreast with the times he always made a point of keeping on hand some novel dealing with affairs strictly of the present and its fashionable foibles and frailties. He learned from this how frivolous and unearnest London society was becoming, and could thus warn Mannington both by example and precept against the insidious infection. Mannington, indeed, especially in the summer months, he was afraid, was not altogether outside the danger-zone, and perhaps spent more time over garden-parties, strawberries, and scandal than was right. Not that Canon Alington was sour or Puritanical, or at all underrated the value of timely social gaieties; but to the unwary these things might tend to become an end in themselves, or, more dangerous yet, degenerate into that continuous and expensive round of pure pleasure, week in and week out, that seemed to characterisethe season in London. But the clergy generally, he thought, did not make the most of their opportunities of usefulness by not keeping abreast of the times, and warning their flocks of the dangers that lurked beneath too great an indulgence of innocent and, indeed, helpful socialites, and also by too sad an aspect at tea-parties, or total abstention from them, which gave the impression that they thought such things wrong. Canon Alington never fell into these mistakes, and his wife’s fortnightly little dinners, which were distinguished for their plain yet excellent cooking, the soundness of the wines (though he was himself a teetotaller), and the sober strenuousness of the conversation, from which indeed scarcely any topic was barred, were quite a feature in Mannington society. The range of his guests, too, was extremely broad; one was liable to meet there “the military,” for Mannington was a garrison town; the “Close,” for it was a cathedral one; the “county” (for his wife was a Grainger and quite distinctly of the county), and many of the inhabitants of the detached houses with gardens that stretched their feelers into the country, such as The Firs, The Cedars, Apsley House, The Engadine, Holyrood, Holland House, and heaps of manors and granges. Nor was there any hint of religious disability in these parties; dissenting town councillors were entertained there, and Canon Alington never showed a shade of abated cordiality in his welcome of them, despite the great gulf that divided him from them. Indeed, there was a reputed atheist among his regular guests, who never went to any sort of church at all, and though there was wonder in the Canon’s flock when first it was known that Mr. Frawley had dined there (this, by the way, was common knowledge long before lunch-time next day), this broadness perhaps set CanonAlington on a higher pinnacle than ever. The text “all things to all men” was felt to be at last rightly understood. He also dined at the Frawleys’s, and had been asked to say grace, and did so. So Mr. Frawley, in his groping, purblind way, was broad, too.
To-night, too, the duties of the host would be his also, for his wife’s brother, Hugh Grainger, was coming to stop with them for a week-end of Friday till Tuesday, and though it cannot be said, without gross misuse of language, that he approved of Hugh, he could not help being somewhat stimulated by him, and occasionally in his quick, youthful way Hugh made remarks that the more mature and cultivated mind of Canon Alington found very suggestive. It was he, for instance, who had said that the “Rake’s Progress” was unsuitable to put up in a drawing-room because it was so intensely and violently moral; you might as well have gramophones shouting the Ten Commandments all day on a side-table; and though this remark was, of course, exaggerated and implied a certain flippancy that the Canon did not find at all to his taste, this had not prevented him from using the germ of truth which it contained in his recently-written paper for the “Literific.” Hugh also, in point of fact, had been the author of the little conceit about the earliest pipe, though it is only just to him to say that he had no idea this was to be or had been solemnly inscribed on the sill of the Gothic window of a pipe-rack. Yet Canon Alington had been more than half author of it, for he had quoted the original line of Tennyson to Hugh, who had merely said:
“Birdseye! Put it on your pipe-rack.”
Indeed, Hugh had not known where the original quotation came from, for with all his superficial quickness he seemed to his brother-in-law to have very littlereal knowledge, and the Canon often told him that what he needed was “deepening.”
His meditation over this half-pipe of tobacco lasted but a few minutes, for it was alien to his native activity of mind to indulge in vague reflections of any kind, and soon he took up the morning paper of the day, which, so busy had he been, he had not yet had time to look at. Outside he heard the crunch of the gravel of what is called the “carriage-sweep,” but it was probably not Hugh, who usually arrived only just before dinner-time; and if it was a caller, his wife was out, and he himself was never disturbed in his study for any chance visitor. Indeed, on the outside door of it he had playfully put up the motto, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” and the explanation of it often formed a pleasant little topic at his dinner-parties, when he and his men-guests crossed the hall to join the rest of the company in the drawing-room.
So he turned over the pages of his paper, secure from interruption. In the general way, there was not much to detain him, but in “London Day by Day” a short paragraph concerning the huge success of this new play, “Gambits,” arrested him, and he read it with some distress, remembering the original criticism of the drama that had appeared in the same paper, which had shown him so clearly that this play was typical of all those tendencies of the day which seemed to him so dangerous. For—such was the outline of the plot—a girl had been married young, far too young, in fact, to a man much older than herself, who, as Canon Alington easily saw, was a person of extreme feebleness and indecision of mind. Subsequently she fell in love with a young cousin of her husband who lived with them, and though there was no suggestion of infidelity on her part, yet itwas clear that the author’s intention (one Andrew Robb, from the solid sound of which something better might have been expected) was that pity and sympathy should be extended to them both. It was only by degrees that the indecisive husband saw and realised this miserable state of affairs, and, after wretched vacillations, committed suicide. That, to put it baldly (and Canon Alington always put baldly affairs with which he felt no sympathy), was the skeleton of the play of which theDaily Telegraphhad so warm and appreciative a critique. And now it appeared that London was going mad over the play, and pined to know who Andrew Robb was. But the Canon’s opinion of London had always been low. The very fact, too, that the play itself was said to be beautifully written, to be instinct with humanity and true pathos, made it all the more dangerous. In no single point were any of the tests of literary and artistic immortality, which he had laid down so convincingly in his paper of this afternoon, satisfied. A husband committed suicide because his wife had weakly allowed herself to fall in love with somebody else. There could not possibly be any germ of immortality in this hodge-podge of weakness and wickedness. Yet in the interval it looked as if it was going to live long and lustily. And it was called human! Frail and feeble as Canon Alington knew humanity, alas, to be, he did not think of it so badly as that!
At this point, however, his musings, set up again by that paragraph, were interrupted, for the carriage, the departing wheels of which had just again crunched the gravel, contained not callers, but Hugh, who had caught an earlier train. He crossed the grass to below the window of the study, put his hand on to the sill, and vaulted on to it, upsetting a small saucer ofseeds which had been put there to soak before being planted.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve upset something. How are you, Dick?”
Dick, it must be confessed, had constantly to make little efforts of self-control when Hugh was in the house. He made them quite willingly, and was ashamed to think that they were efforts. He made one now.
“Ah, there you are, Hugh!” he said cordially. “How are you? What burglarious entry! And what’s the damage?”
“I seem to have upset some little beans,” said Hugh. “I sat down on half the saucer, so the rest tipped up.”
“Better than that you should tip up,” said his brother-in-law. “It was only some of those new lupins I was going to sow. All gone on the lawn, have they? It is of no consequence. Luckily I have some more, and I will put them to soak and sow them to-morrow instead. ‘That shall be to-morrow, not to-night.’ Rather neat, eh? Browning.”
Hugh gingerly but successfully accomplished the task of getting through the window into the room. Somehow, if his brother-in-law had said, “You clumsy brute, how beastly careless you are!” he would have felt less blamed than being not blamed at all in this Christian manner.
“And how’s Agnes?” he said, shaking hands.
“Very well, and as busy as we all are down here. She said she would very likely be late for tea, and told us not to wait.”
“I hope I haven’t interrupted you at—at anything,” said Hugh, unable for the moment to remember the names of things that made the Canon so busy.
“Not in the least. I had finished my paper, andperhaps you have saved me from the fate of idle hands. Shall we go out and have tea in the garden? It is cooler, I think, out of doors.”
“And there seems to be less of a gale out of doors than in your study,” remarked Hugh. “But you always like living in a Temple of the Winds.”
The Canon smiled approvingly; anything suggestive of a classical allusion always pleased him, though exactly how he would have reconciled his love for the classics with the view he had so pointedly expressed to-day that all art to be immortal must be religious would perhaps have puzzled him. But he had arrived at an age and a dignity which put him generally beyond the risk of being asked awkward questions. Hugh, however, sometimes asked things which his brother-in-law felt sure he would understand when he was older, and they occasionally had what the Canon called “great arguments” together.
“Ha! Temple of the Winds!” he said. “Hall of Æolus! Æolian hall. I’ll call the study Æolian Hall. Capital! I’m naming—or, rather, Agnes and I are naming all the rooms. It gives a house so much more character.”
They strolled out into the hall.
“Agnes thought of an excellent name to put on the baize door of the passage to the servants’ room,” he continued. “She suggested—in fact, she invented—the word ‘Abigailia,’ the country of the maid-servants, you see. Abigaildom was her first suggestion, but I proposed Abigailia on the analogy of Philistia. The whole idea, though, was hers. Come through the dining-room; we shall go out without being seen from the front if anybody calls. And they will truthfully say that we are all out.”
They passed accordingly through the dining-room,where the blinds were down to keep out the afternoon sun, and the table-cloth already laid for dinner glimmered whitely in the dusk. It was not, however, so dark that Hugh could not read over the chimney-piece, in Roman characters, “They sat down to eat and drink,” while over the door into the garden was the appropriate conclusion, “And rose up to play.”
“And you have been in London all these last three months, have you not?” he went on. “Busy, I suppose, or at any rate occupied? Agnes was very neat on the subject the other day. She said, ‘In town they seem to make a business of pleasure, whereas here I am sure we make a pleasure of business.’ Like all true wit, too, it contains a profound truth.”
This true wit, however, did not inspire Hugh with any fresh thoughts on the subject, and he changed the subject with some abruptness.
“Oh, yes, one is always occupied in London!” he said. “By the way, do you know if Mrs. Allbutt is down here? You know her, don’t you? Which is her house? I have not been down since she moved here.”
Dick Alington’s face grew slightly reserved.
“Yes, she has taken Friars Grange,” he said; “the house by the river. She has, however, called it Chalkpits, which she tells me is its real name on the old leases. A pity, I think, rather. Of course, I should be the last to decry the spirit of antiquarian exactitude, but it is possible to lose the sense of romance in what is after all mere pedantry.”
“Oh, I think I feel with her!” said Hugh. “Every retired grocer lives in a grange.”
But the slight reserve that had come over the Canon at the mention of Mrs. Allbutt was not due to pedantry. The real reason appeared now.
“She was here, anyhow, last Sunday,” he said, “because she asked Agnes and me to dine with her in the evening. We both thought it a very odd thing to do. We declined, of course.”
“Why?” asked Hugh rather thoughtlessly. Then, so he flattered himself, he remembered. “Oh, I see, evening church!” he said.
His brother-in-law again stiffened slightly, but replied with the most scrupulous honesty.
“No, we should have had time to go after church,” he said, “had we wished. Indeed, Agnes guessed that the dinner was at the unusually late hour of half-past eight to enable us to do so. But it is against our principles to dine out Sunday.”
Canon Alington, who seldom moved about his garden without a spud in his hand, neatly extracted a dandelion from the short velvet of the lawn, and relaxed a little.
“Of course, I do not say that it is morally wrong to dine out on Sunday,” he said, “because that would be a narrow view of which, I trust, I should not be guilty. It is, of course, also quite possible that as Mrs. Allbutt has only been here so short a time she did not know our views on the subject, for I am aware that many of the clergy do not agree with me in my idea of the observance of Sunday. But let that pass. I hope Mrs. Allbutt will be an acquisition to the parish.”
“She would be an acquisition to any parish,” said Hugh. “She is quite entirely charming. During the last fortnight I have often met her at Lady Rye’s.”
Canon Alington warmed to this.
“Ah, there is an admirable woman!” he said. “She has a truly serious sense of the responsibility which wealth and position give. If Mrs. Allbutt is like her, we are indeed fortunate. And certainly Agnes isfavourably impressed with her, and Agnes’s impressions are not often erroneous. She has been very handsome in the way of subscriptions already.”
“She is also very handsome in the way of features,” said Hugh, with a touch of flippancy.
The planting of the lupin-seeds which Hugh had upset was to have been part of what Canon Alington called the horticultural curriculum for the evening, and since that was no longer possible, gardening operations were deferredin tototill the morrow, and the two walked over to the adjoining golf links to play a short round before dinner. As he had often done before, Canon Alington, having spun a coin to decide who should drive first, asked Hugh if he would have “capita aut caudæ,” and Hugh, having won, had the bright thought of replying “Habeo honorem.” Dick, however, demurred to this as being an improper use of the Latin word “honor,” which meant not “honour,” but “public office.”
Agnes Alington was older than Hugh by several years. She had married young, at the age of eighteen, when a girl’s character, so to speak, is in the state of an ingot of red-hot iron, fresh taken from the furnace, and easily and glowingly to be fashioned into any shape that her blacksmith desires. The blacksmith in this case being Canon Alington, it was not difficult to forecast that in a very short space of time she would be hammered into a shape on which the author had stamped his own very distinct and efficient personality, and be, so to speak, hall-marked with him. This formation of his wife’s mind, a task which Dick had definitely set himself and earnestly carried out, was very soon accomplished, with the result, as might have been expected, that Agnes became extraordinarily like him. This too had happened, that as she became more like him he beganto admire her more and more for all those qualities which under his tuition sprang up like rather stiff flowers in her character. He had exactly the same qualities himself, but in his busy and strenuous life he had no time to admire them in himself, nor sufficient self-consciousness to think about them at all except in as far as the deeds they dictated were his duty. But somehow when he saw them so brilliant and vigorous in his wife, the ordinary human love, under direction of which he had wooed and won her, became a very steadfast and solid thing, founded (though the foundation had been added afterward) on the granite of imperishable esteem and respect. In all points, indeed, the welding bore the trace of the hammerer’s characteristics, and in a quality so personal and essential, one would have said, as that of humour Agnes now completely resembled her husband, though at the time of her marriage she was quite capable, like her brother, of telling fairy-tales to children out of her own head. But to-day the light side of things was sufficiently represented in her life if from time to time she could strike out some idea akin to that under inspiration of which she had suggested “Abigaildom” for the baize door of the passage leading to the maidservants’ rooms. She had become an ideal helpmeet for him and she truly and without exaggeration expressed what he was to her in a pet name for him, which was Galahad, again often abbreviated into thenom de foyerof Laddie. Rarely, indeed does it happen that two people are so thoroughly and essentially suited to each other as these were, and in all the difficulties and perplexities no less than in all the happiness and joys of their excellent and admirable lives they were truly one. And the seed of this thoroughly happy marriage was set in their two children,who had neither of them ever given their parents a single moment of anxiety, except as regards their eyesight, which necessitated their both wearing spectacles. These were a boy and girl, now aged nine and eight respectively. Their names were Ambrose and Perpetua, the calendar saints of the days on which they had been born.
Perpetua on the occasion of Hugh’s visit happened to be away from home, staying with an aunt by the seaside for a week, but when the two men came back from their golf they found Ambrose walking by himself up and down the gravel path of the kitchen garden, and he ran to meet them. Hugh, though in general fond of children, was terrified of Ambrose because of his stainless character and his consciousness of virtue.
“How are you, Uncle Hugh?” said Ambrose very properly. “Mamma told me you were coming to-day, and I was so pleased!”
“Why, that’s awfully jolly of you,” said Hugh. “And where’s Perpetua?”
“She is staying with Aunt Susan. I made a calendar of the days when she would be away, and I cross one off every evening. Don’t I, papa?”
“Yes, my son. Is your mother in?”
“Oh, yes, we came in together about half an hour ago! We went to see a poor woman who is ill, and I took her some strawberries. They were my own, from my own garden. I carried them in a cabbage-leaf.”
“Strawberries?” said Hugh. “How delicious! Let’s go and eat some. I haven’t had any strawberries since—since lunch.”
Ambrose’s face gleamed with pleasure.
“That would be nice,” he said, “but those were mystrawberry ration for to-day. My ration is a baker’s dozen of strawberries, which is thirteen, you know.”
Hugh’s face fell.
“I see,” he said, “I suppose I’ve had my ration, too. Besides, I expect it’s time for me to dress for dinner.”
“Then I shall come in, too. I come down to dinner now, Uncle Hugh. At least, I sit with papa and mamma while they have theirs, until it strikes eight.”
The boy ran on in front of them, leaving his father and Hugh behind.
“The two children are devoted to each other,” said their father. “And they vie with each other in kindly deeds. The boy gave all his strawberries for the day to the sick woman. It was entirely his own idea, too; he asked me if he might.”
“I should have told him not to jaw, but eat them himself,” said Hugh, in a sudden access of internal revolt.
Canon Alington looked at him a moment in silence.
“I fancy it is time for us to dress,” he said tactfully.
MANNINGTON, like most old-fashioned English towns, is built in a wood-sheltered hollow, and screened from the inclemencies of northern and easterly winds by the big chalk towns of Wiltshire. Before the days of railways and the decentralisation of local centres that followed, it had been a county town of some importance, but situated as it was only on a branch line of the Great Western, the mercantile and manufacturing life, never very vigorous, was sucked out of it into Swindon, and for the last fifty years or more it had been a place of singular sedateness and most leisurely life. In olden times the “county” and local gentry used to foregather there in considerable numbers for Christmas festivities, such as county and hunt balls, and the town is full of charming old red-brick residences, now for the most part let to wealthy and retired tradesfolk, or less wealthy but equally retired colonels and captains of the services, who, surrounded by their wives and families, live a very quiet and pleasant existence, warding off the gout which port and advancing years threaten them with by golf or gentle horse exercise on the downs. To the south and west the country is flat and open, the line of downs holding the town itself as if the base of the fingers of some huge grass-clad hand, while across the palm of it below, following, so to speak, the “line of heart,” the Kennet makes a loitering half-circle before wandering on again through its low-lying water-meadows, starred with red ragged-robin and the burnished gold of the marsh marigolds, to join the Thames at Reading. Butthough the vigour and stress of competitive manufacturing, as has been said, had left it, it still grew slowly, not in the way of small houses inhabited by the lower trading class, but of villas for those who had finished their trading, and it was now nearly joined by means of such an artery of gentility with the little village of St. Olaf’s, some miles distant from the streets of Mannington itself, of which Canon Alington was so assiduous a vicar. The church, gray, Norman, and of wonderful quiet dignity, stood with the vicarage and its acre or two of garden on the furthest edge of the village itself, and from there the Swindon road, which had curved downwards from the hills behind Mannington to collect the traffic of the town, began to climb the downs again, shaking off the houses from its margin, and, after passing a couple more larger residences, screened behind trees of fine growth from the dust and passage of carts, started on its lonely journey to the next village.
It was in the last of these, standing on a plateau, just above the water-meadows of the Kennet, that Mrs. Allbutt had just settled. It had been built in Jacobean times, and the trees which surrounded it, planted probably at the same date, were towers of leaf and spreading bough; but southward, toward the river, the view was open, and here lay the lawns and flower garden. The kitchen garden was at the back of the house, separated from the livelier and more ornamental part by a huge boxhedge, and beyond that again was the disused chalk quarry, now a place of grassy hollow and luxuriances of straggling bramble bushes, from which no doubt the old name of Chalkpits, so unromantically revived again by Mrs. Allbutt, was derived. Beyond again came an acre or two of beech-wood that even in this hot midsummer of the year retained something of the freshnessand milky green of spring, and a wooden fence that shut off the little estate from the down and the road.
Edith’s determination to settle in the country had, though Peggy had tried to dissuade her from it, been made with perfect deliberation and foresight. She alone knew how deeply the past years had seared and burned her, and though, as she had told Peggy, she did not in the least cease to expect much pleasure from life and many agreeable days, she did not even now, though three years had passed since her torture had ended, feel up to making those incessant efforts, to racing with the rest, that were so essential a feature in the lives of those she would have lived among had she chosen to go to London. But she no longer felt those vital and exquisite anticipations of desires for happiness that are the distinguishing characteristics of youth. Youth for her in that sense, she believed, when she put into effect her determination to live quietly here, away from the boil and froth of life, to be definitely over. Nor had she even those memories and recollections of life and love which are sufficient to keep a woman alive and alert till the end of her days. She had missed that and the opportunity of those days would not come to her again.
But there were other ways apart from the love of husband and the love of children by which she could keep her soul alive, and keep also in touch with things that lived. Nature, the wonder of growing things, the miracle of running water, the flame of sunset and the white splendour of moon-rise were all things that spoke to her with that intimacy known only to the real lover of Nature. She realised how big a part in her healing had the silent, mystical touch of the great mother contributed: birds and beasts and trees and flowers hadall had their hand in it, and it was they who still kept her power of living alive. It seemed to her now as she superintended and took active part in the making of the garden, which had been allowed to run riot in the unoccupied year before she had taken this house, a matchless miracle that when she dabbed seeds into the ground, a little rain that fell, a little sun that shone, a little darkness of night should cause the slender weak spikes of the plant to pierce the earth. A thrush built a nest in the box-hedge that separated the flower garden from the other, and it was with almost incredulous delight that one day in late spring, when she was down here superintending the arrangement of her furniture, she had seen in the wattled dome of the nest the unfledged birds, all gaping mouths that would make music on her lawns in another year. All this, the flaming of the Oriental poppies, the incense of the mignonette, the carpets of wild flowers, cistus and thyme and harebell on the downs above, she knew to be a voice that spoke to her. Humbly, reverently she listened to it, to its words of healing; but, oh, how much more passionately could she have loved it had it been the accompaniment, the setting of the human love which so few missed, but which in her case had been blurred and marred and could never come back again in splendour of banners!
Then again—and this, too, was so much more attainable in the country than in London—there was still intellectual achievement possible to her, by which she could speak intimately with others, and perhaps be a living and moving force in the world. For that, and for the long patient concentration of thought that it demanded, London seemed to her an impossible home; she was still too much in love with life not to be continually distracted by the bewildering fury of it there.The spectacle of that to her, as to Peggy, was absorbing; it was impossible to live one’s own life in town; all the hours belonged, as if in small allotments, to others, and there it was impossible to lead that detached life which to her at any rate seemed to be an essential condition of creative work. For she was no quick and nimble worker for whom the briskness of town life seems somehow congenial and natural; it was rather in solitude, in quiet, solitary evenings, in rambles alone over that open and exhilarating down that her thought matured and ripened best. It had been thus, though not here, that “Gambits” had been evolved; it would be here in this green, pleasant home of hers that she would work out and elaborate the new play which was already beginning to take form in her mind. As she had said to Hugh before on that night at Cookham, she marvelled at his not caring to set his mark on the world, to make people listen to him, for this to her was something of a passion which she could not imagine unshared by others, and the fact that she had done it, had tasted the intoxication of brilliant success, made her but more eager to drink of it again. But she had no intention of living a hermit’s existence, and, just as she wished to avoid the riot and rush of the world, so she had no idea of being a recluse. Solitary hours and many of them she wished for, but she filled up much of the day in the quiet, unexciting life of the place, for it was part of her plan to be busy, though not at the break-neck, runaway pace of Peggy. For she still had to keep her head turned in the direction of the future and averted from the past, and when she was not at work it was just in these cheerful little local employments that she could pass the time pleasantly but unemotionally. Then, too, there was the garden, which like some hungry animal swallowedat a gulp all the time she could give to it, though that time was considerable. For here the two main strands of her life as she had planned it were interwoven; Nature, grateful for and eagerly responding to her ministrations, spoke to her from the garden-beds, while some separate compartment of her brain, so it seemed, was brooding and busy, unconsciously for the most part, turning over in the cool darkness of it the scenes, the combinations, the characters of the next play. Sometimes out of that darkness would leap a sudden flash that she was wholly conscious of, and showed her how that subconscious self had been busy sorting, turning over, accepting and rejecting till a definite point, a clenched situation was struck out.
On this Saturday morning, the day following that on which Hugh had come down to St. Olaf’s, there was grim and deadly work before her, and with much misgiving and an almost fanatical honesty she had determined that she had to do it herself, since the kitchen garden was still much behindhand, and the heavy digging to be done there was a work that would employ the efforts of both her gardeners. So this morning she sallied out, with thick gloves on, and armed with a jar of brine and a small wooden peg, for even with gloves she could not bring herself to touch the slugs that she hoped and yet feared she would find on the traps she had put for them. For the evening before she had laid down at small and hospitable intervals a whole bushel of thinly-sliced potato: then came in the little wooden peg to transfer them to the jar of brine. When she looked at her nibbled seedlings she hardened her heart, but when she looked at the spread feast of sliced potato she dreaded to find the guests for whom she had spread it. Of course, she might have ordered a gardener awayfrom the kitchen garden to do it for her, but it was only the weakness of the flesh that suggested that. She wanted to do things herself, and not be lily-handed. But she sincerely hoped there would not be many slugs.
She turned over the first piece of potato and found to her inexpressible relief that the purpose for which she had put it there was quite unfulfilled. But at the second there was a huge one, tortoise-shell coloured.
She put the brine-pot down on the garden path and, suppressing a shudder, tried to steel herself by thinking of the pansies whose faces had been eaten, of thePhlox drummondiiwhich she had sown in such profusion, but which had never arrived at greater maturity than small spikes of leafless stem. She told herself, on the other side, that it was far better and wiser to spend the morning in work, to answer all the letters that certainly did want answering. Did she not pay two iron-nerved gardeners to do that sort of thing? At this moment she positively loathed Canon Alington, who had recommended to her this most deadly plan of entrapping slugs, simply because it was so brilliantly successful. Yet how mean and treacherous an operation! She spread the bounteous table on her garden-beds, and when her guests came, even while the flesh was yet in their mouths, their host arrived with death in the brine-pot! And all the time she knew this was false sentimentality, and not the least real even to herself. She was pumping it up in order to find some excuse for not putting that dreadful tortoise-shell slug in the brine, not because she loved or respected his life in the smallest degree or felt really any duties of a host towards him, but because the operation was so disgusting. And “Oh, this is not kindness, my poor Edith,” she said to herself; “it is sheer cowardice!”
For the moment, however, she was given a respite,for from the open French window of the drawing-room her butler appeared carrying a salver on which was a card. She tried to think to herself that it was very tiresome being interrupted in the morning, and knew that it was not. Then she took the card.
“Oh, yes, ask Mr. Grainger to come out into the garden!” she said.
Hugh came out, hatless, from the house, and she advanced to meet him, pulling off one of her heavy leather gloves.
“Ah, this is delightful, Mr. Hugh!” she said. “Canon Alington told me last week that you would be down here some day soon, though he did not then know the exact date. And you have remembered your promise to come to see me. You’ll stop for lunch, won’t you?”
“Why, yes, please,” said Hugh, “if you are sure you can bear me till then.”
He looked at his watch.
“I am bound to tell you it is only just half-past eleven,” he said.
“Yes, I really can bear you till then. This dear place is like a new toy to me still, and I have to show everything to everybody who comes, down to the wood-shed where a very fierce cat with kittens will fly at you if you go too close, and a half-built hen-yard where at present five mournful hens are putting dust on their heads in the manner of Oriental widows because their husband is no more.”
“Did you have a funeral?” asked Hugh. “Daisy and I had a beautiful funeral yesterday over a dead mouse.”
“No; you weren’t here to help, and, like Peggy, I’m not good at playing. Besides, the corpse was missing. It had been eaten.”
She, too, was hatless, and the breeze and the sun of summer seemed to shine in her face. Young as she always looked in this superb noon of her beauty, this fortnight of open-air life seemed to have flushed and flooded her with its freshness. Quickly and easily as they had made friends, it seemed to Hugh that in this moment and over their trivial words a great step toward further intimacy had been taken. Though this impression was as instantaneous a result as some drowsy flash of summer lightning, it had been there; far away in those clouds the authentic fire of the heavens had gleamed.
“Ah, I am sure you could play beautifully,” he said, “because you said that so seriously! And were you playing all by yourself here when I came out? What are you playing with?” he added, looking at the brine-pot.
Edith groaned.
“You wouldn’t call it play if you knew,” she said. “Oh, Mr. Hugh, be a true friend and help a woman in distress! Just this once, and then we’ll go and walk round the place.”
“What am I to do?” he asked. “And are you the distressed woman?”
“Yes. Take this small wooden peg, and look at the second piece of potato there. You will find an immense slug. Gather it somehow on to the peg and drop it into that pot, which contains salt and water, and kills them, I am told, quite instantaneously and even pleasantly.”
“Why, certainly,” said Hugh cheerfully. “And do we have to examine all these bits of potato? My gracious, what an elephant! Do you know, I really don’t think I can do it.”
Edith heaved a sigh of relief.
“Oh, I’m so glad you can’t!” she said. “Because I was afraid I was being a coward.”
“Oh, we’re both cowards!” said Hugh.
“And aren’t you ashamed of us?”
“Not in the least. It would disgust you and me in a disproportionate manner to do it, and it wouldn’t disgust a gardener at all. So it is clearly a case for coöperative labour.”
“You exhibit a mind full of true grasp, Mr. Hugh,” said she. “Let us go and find a gardener. The slug has dined; he will not go away.”
“When he dines he sleeps,” remarked Hugh.
“And you are staying at St. Olaf’s?” she asked, as they walked off down the border, leaving the unused apparatus of death behind. “Now, to be candid: am I a little in disgrace with Canon Alington?”
“Yes,” said Hugh promptly.
“And is it because I asked them to dine on Sunday evening? Ah, I knew it was! How stupid and unadaptable one is! I put dinner at half-past eight on purpose so that it would be quite free of church, and it never occurred to me at the time that very likely he did not dine out on Sunday. When will one learn to put oneself in the position and environment of other people?”
“Are you very lacking in that?” asked he.
“Yes. Oh, I can see other points of view to a certain extent when I am taken by the scruff of the neck, and held down to them, but I never anticipate or imagine them. And how is one to learn that sort of thing? And what of Peggy and town generally?”
“I dined with her two nights ago, and we went to ‘Gambits’ again. It is still crammed.”
“Ah, one wondered whether the enthusiasm of thefirst night was likely to last. It seems as if it would now. And have you been more than that twice?”
Hugh made a short, silent calculation.
“I’ve been either seven or eight times,” he said. “Oh, do let’s go again together! I don’t believe you really appreciated it. Of course you liked it, but I don’t think you saw, in fact nobody can the first time, how heavenly it is, how fine! There is no play like it; it has a peculiar quality quite different from anything else. What a mind Andrew’s—I call him Andrew now because I feel I know him so well—must be. How I’ve intrigued to find out who he is. Perhaps, after all, he is some gray wise old Scotchman, like the people in the kail-yard school, who really has thought out the truth of things all alone up in Inverness or somewhere dreadful. And yet I don’t know; there are things in it that must have been written by a woman. But, on the other hand, there are things that must have been written by a man. Also Andrew Robb must be quite young, or he couldn’t have seen into the girl’s heart like that, and he must be quite old, or he couldn’t tell you what he saw.”
For one moment, Edith felt as if she had been overhearing remarks about herself, and was in honour bound to make her presence known. But she simply could not; she felt herself unable to stop Hugh, so irresistible was the desire to hear him talk to her so candidly with such huge appreciation, while she, listening, drinking it in, decking herself, as it were, in his phrases and praise, sat all the time secret.
“Oh, you should have heard my brother-in-law on the subject last night!” he continued. “His upper lip grew longer and longer, like Alice when she ate the mushrooms, as he talked about it. And he hadn’t seenthe play, I may tell you, he had read a review of it. But——”
Hugh stopped, with amusement breaking from his eyes and the corners of his mouth. The impulse grew irresistible, and he threw back his head and gave a great crack of laughter.
“I know I can say these things to you,” he said, “because you will understand. If I didn’t tell somebody about it and laugh over it, I should get angry, which would be a pity. I nearly got angry last night, but then I promised myself to tell you this morning, and so instead I treasured it all up, occasionally drawing him on, though he didn’t need much of that.”
The infection of Hugh’s merriment could not but capture her, too, for Hugh’s description of the upper lip was gloriously apt.
“But you haven’t told me what he said yet,” she remarked.
“I know I haven’t. Oh, I wish laughing did not hurt so! Well, down came the upper lip, and he kindly sketched the outline of the play to me, tome, so that I should see, when the trappings and embellishments of scenery and character were removed, what the spirit of it really was. You may not believe he used that phrase, but he did. Trappings and embellishments of character! Just think it over. To proceed; it was quite unnecessary, and in this case it would be harmful to see the play, because he could read what it was about, and could also read between the lines. The moral of the play was that wives should fall in love with other men than their husbands, and that their husbands should commit suicide in order to allow them to gratify their passions. He said it in those very words, because I have an extraordinary memory when I attend.”
Mrs. Allbutt frowned.
“But it’s ludicrous,” she said. “I never heard anything so unfair and malicious.”
“No, he’s not that,” said Hugh. “He is only very, very much in character. You see he is a clergyman, and, whereas a judge isn’t judging all the time, but can get off the bench and commit, if he likes, the crimes for which he sentences other people, and Parliament rises for the M. P., and everybody else has their Saturday afternoons out and their Sundays off, the clergyman goes on all the time. And, do you know, I think being any one thing quite all the time tends to make people a little narrow.”
“You don’t really mean that?” asked Edith, with immense gravity.
“I do, indeed! Up to this point I hadn’t been able to get a word in edgeways, but here I plunged and told him I went several times a week. Oh, and I haven’t told you what Andrew Robb has done for me!”
“No; what except make you spend a good deal of time at the theatre?”
“Well, he’s made me determine to spend more,” said Hugh. “Can’t you guess?”
Edith’s face flushed, and she stood quite still.
“The opera, do you mean?” she asked.
“Yes. He, and the sight of the theatre crammed every night with silent, eager people made me feel what I hadn’t ever really felt when you spoke to me once about it at Cookham, namely, what a big and wonderful thing it must be to impress yourself on other people. Also, in my small way, I began to see what Reuss meant by its not being fair on him. For suppose Andrew, capable of writing that play, had not done so, how rightly indignant we should have been. So, perhapsin our own little ways, we all have to do our tricks. I wrote to Reuss three days ago, and heard from him this morning, and so I have to go to Frankfort early in October, and study there all winter, unless I can induce Reuss to come to London. I wish to heaven I had a voice like a crow. I shan’t have time for anything all winter except singing and singing and never satisfying Reuss. And what does it all come to, compared to the fact that months and months will have gone, and I shall have nothing, nothing out of them except a slightly better pronunciation of German, and a rather more finished way of leaving off loud on a top-note. All in order to sing to a lot of people who are merely waiting till the end of the act in order to see who it is in the box opposite with the diamonds. Mrs. Allbutt, do you really think it is worth while?”
She shook her head at him.
“But what a foolish question!” she said. “As if it wasn’t worth while spending all one’s life to do anything well. Most people can’t! They are incapable of excellence. But, Mr. Hugh, I assure you there are masses of people who adore excellence, only they can’t attain it themselves. Of course there are heaps of foolish and flippant creatures who, as you say, only wonder who is wearing those diamonds, but what do they matter? You don’t mind because the cab-horses in the street don’t know what an artist you are.”
Hugh sighed, and pulled down his upper lip with a ludicrous resemblance to his brother-in-law.
“London is a very wicked place,” he said, “and makes a business of its pleasures, whereas we here in Mannington make a pleasure of our business. Oh, I forgot, it was my sister who said that! Let’s talk about something else. I should like Andrew Robb to knowwhat a difference he has made to me, and how, just because of him, I am going to make a fool of myself at Covent Garden.”
“You haven’t done that yet,” remarked Edith.
“No, but I shall. I told Dick and my sister, by the way, about it, but they rather disapproved. They don’t think that it is a serious career. Dick urged me very strongly to send in my name as a candidate for the Education Department, in addition to taking this engagement. Education Department—me! There is quiet humour about that, don’t you think? The hours, as he pointed out, were only from eleven till five, so that I should have plenty of time to keep up my singing. Also, as he justly observed, I should not be singing more than a couple of nights a week, and that only while Wagner opera was being given. We are going to have a talk about it all this evening. He strongly advises the Education Department, and dissuades me from the opera, but he doesn’t see why they shouldn’t be worked together. Lord, how I jaw about myself! I apologise. Only I am so dreadfully interested in it all this minute. Where’s the cat and the woodshed?”
Edith sat down firmly on a garden bench.
“The woodshed will wait,” she said, “and the cat will fly at you just the same in ten minutes from now. I want to tell you how delighted I am with your decision, and, indeed, that is not wholly selfish on my part, though I anticipate the most enormous pleasure from hearing you sing in opera. But for other reasons also; you see I am Peggy’s sister, and I think we are very much alike in some ways. We both want people to screw the utmost ounce out of themselves, and it seemed to us both that you had masses of ounces that were not being screwed out. You sang to us divinely: yousang that shepherd’s lullaby just as divinely to Daisy——”
“How did you know I sang it?” asked Hugh quickly.
Edith was honest; that was as essential a characteristic of her as was the absence of self-consciousness in Hugh.
“Because I listened,” she said. “Also I spied through the chink of the nursery door. You left it open. I also apologise—no, I don’t. I didn’t do any harm. I’m not ashamed.”
Once again intimacy, like the flash of summer lightning, broke the cloud. It had moved nearer.
“Yes, I listened to you singing that bad child to sleep,” she continued; “and I saw you through the chink of the door. I thought it very nice of you. I liked you for it.”
Hugh had sat down on the edge of the grass when she took the garden-seat. And at that he looked up at her quickly, and met those dark kind eyes.
“Thank you,” he said.
At that moment she also knew that the flash of summer lightning was there. She knew that there was attraction and fire in the atmosphere. And she behaved as one who wished to get home, out of range of these elements, before the storm came nearer. Alone, in the house, with the blinds drawn down, she would be secure, with the security that she had sought in coming down to this peaceful, meadow-encompassed house, where the nearest and loudest sounds of life were the drowsy drone of the folk in Mannington who were so unabsorbingly busy over provincial interests. Here she could be busy herself over her garden and her writing, wanting no more, and quite content with this calm sunrise on her wreck. Yet even at the moment when she saidto herself that she wished just to pull the blinds down and sit by her solitary fireside, she knew that she wanted to pull them up, and look, nothing more, into the open night. In any case she did not show her desire to him.
“Yes, that is what Peggy and I both felt,” she said. “We both wanted you to use your time. Of course people like to see you, and ask you to dinner and to Saturdays till Mondays, and it is all so pleasant, and there is amusing talk, and plans, and another party next Tuesday week. But I do feel that anybody who can do something, ought to do it, and not make the mere distraction and froth of life into life. Most people can’t do anything particular. Well?”
Hugh had looked up again, clearly with words on his tongue.
“But you,” he said. “Of course you could do something; one feels that every moment that one is with you. You have just as much force as Peggy—she told me to call her Peggy, by the way; don’t you hate people who allude to others by their Christian names, when they don’t use them to them?”
“Yes, I loathe them. About me?”
“You, you have force; you understand, which is force. If we have all got to do something, why not set us an example. You don’t even kill slugs.”
“Nor do you,” said she.
“Because gardening isn’t my plan. Hang it all, I’ve had a plan now for twenty-four hours. I am in the first head of missionary enterprise.”
The blinds were not quite drawn down yet; once again she had to peer into the night.
“That is a fair question,” she said. “I answer that you don’t yet know, and I hope you may never know, how great a task it is to forget. There are years of my lifewhich need to be forgotten before I could begin to live again. That has occupied me very completely. Forgiveness, I think, is included in that; to forget implies it.”
Hugh stared a moment.
“Why, in ‘Gambits’——” he began.
“Yes, I remember it was phrased like that in the play. Amherst said that death would mean forgetting, and therefore forgiving. It seemed to me very true. But I have not the slightest intention of committing suicide.”
She got up as she spoke, but Hugh from the ground was standing before she had risen from her seat.
“I am sorry,” he said. “I did not mean——”
“Ah, no, I know that! But even if you had meant it, why not? For a great point of forgetting is that any allusion—though you did not allude—cannot hurt one. Besides——”
She paused a moment; then looked at him with those level kindly eyes. Then she checked what was in her mind before it came to the tongue.
“Besides, we have to see the woodshed,” she added instead.
Thereafter the time till lunch was very fully occupied. A vixen of a cat flew at Hugh, who, in spite of warning, had entered the dangerous woodshed, and he retreated with cries of dismay, leaving a globe of spitting, scowling motherhood in possession of the doorway. Then the unhusbanded hen-yard gave rise to philosophic reflection arising from the fact that if a man practises polygamy his death, if he is loved, is polygamously painful, and in any case must result in widows’ disputation of the property. On the other hand, in the case of hens, it was easy—in fact, it was going to be done this afternoon—to substitute another husband for the lately deceased, and nobody would know the difference. Then the kitchengarden was visited, and from thence a gardener, even in the very act of nailing up a peach-tree, was sent to look for a tortoise-shell slug on the second slice of potato counting from the far end, and for any other slugs. The pot of brine, Mrs. Allbutt told him, was in the middle of the gravel walk and could not be missed. Then they skirted the bramble-grown chalk-pit, passed through the beech-wood, and went out of the gate in the wooden fence to walk a little way up the steep down-side from where they could get a comprehensive view of house, garden, and wood. All the myriad wild flowers of downland were in bloom and fragrance—cistus, hairbell, thyme, and dwarf meadow-sweet, and the company of low-growing clovers. From where they paused they could see over the pale green beech-wood through which they had just come to where the red house, with just a thin coil of blue smoke going up from one chimney and soon vanishing in the gold-suffused blue of the noon, stood sunning itself, and looking from under the sun-blinds of its windows, as if from half-shut eyes, on to the jewelled flower-garden and the level sea of vivid green that bordered the chalk-stream. The white riband of the road, dusty and sun-grilled, that passed by its fence was quite cut off from it by the belt of trees that grew within, and it stood embowered in boughs and green, alone with its enchanting company of quiet living things.
She stopped when they had climbed this hundred feet or so of down.
“There,” she said, “that is my favourite view of my dear home, for though I have been here so few weeks, it has become wonderfully homey to me. I come up here every day, and really envy the fortunate person who lives there. Though she is so cut off, I feel sureshe cannot be lonely. She ought indeed to be very busy, and find every day much too short, if she takes the least pleasure in or care for all her trees and flowers.”
Hugh moved a step nearer.
“Ah, go on,” he said; “I like hearing about her! Tell me more about her.”
“Well, she has been very busy all the time she has been here, out of doors most of the day, and leaving a quantity of letters unanswered in consequence. And sometimes her friends come and see her, and she finds that very pleasant also. And sometimes she goes up to town and flies about as if she were quite young still, but it rather tires and confuses her, and finds she is glad to get back. And when autumn comes she will see her trees flame in the sunset of their year, and she will still be busy, putting her flowers to bed for the winter, and tucking them up, and seeing that all is comfortable. Indoors, too, she has another garden of books, and when winter comes and days are short and dark, with weeping skies overhead and fretful angry rain flung against her window-panes, she will be busy with her indoor garden, and again find the days too short. There will be fine days as well, and she hopes to walk over these downs that will be all gray and flowerless in those crystal winter suns, and often too she will have things to do in Mannington, for she really is a friendly person, and no doubt will find friends there; and perhaps some day, out of the years that have passed and out of what she has learned and is still learning, her mind will put out a little flower of its own. And often too in the winter she hopes her friends will still come and see her, and consent to bury themselves for a day or two now and then in the country.”
Again she paused and smiled at Hugh, who was lookingat her with his eager boyish gaze. And since he, with all the rest of the world, would soon know what she had in her mind, it did not matter whether he knew it a little earlier than the rest or not. Besides, the impulse to tell him somehow was irresistible—and in a way, since what she had written had indirectly anyhow decided his career, he had a certain right to know.