Part 11

On mother’s birthday Pomona met him at the station. She kissed him shyly and explained that mother was going to have a half holiday to celebrate the double occasion and would be home with them at dinner time.

“Pomony, did you get them worms?”

Pomona was inclined to evade the topic of worms for the garden, but fortunately her brother’s enthusiasm for another gardening project tempered the wind of his indignation. When they reached home he unwrapped two parcels he had brought with him; he explained his scheme to his sister; he led her into the garden. The Flynns’ backyard, mostly paved with bricks, was small and so the enclosing walls, truculently capped by chips of glass, although too low for privacy were yet too high for the growth of any cherishable plant. Johnny had certainly once reared a magnificent exhibit of two cowslips, but these had been mysteriously destroyed by the Knatchbole cat. The dank little enclosure was charged with sterility; nothing flourished there except a lot of beetles and a dauntless evergreen bush, as tall as Johnny, displaying a profusion of thick shiny leaves that you could split on your tongue and make squeakers with. Pomona showed him how to do this and they then busied themselves in the garden until the dinner siren warned them that Mother would be coming home. They hurried into the kitchen and Pomona quickly spread the cloth and the plates of food upon the table, while Johnny placed conspicuously in the centre, after laboriously extracting the stopper with a fork and a hair-pin, a bottle of stout brought from London. He had been much impressed by numberless advertisements upon the hoardings respecting this attractive beverage. The children then ran off to meet their mother and they all came home together with great hilarity. Mrs. Flynn’s attention having been immediately drawn to the sinister decoration of her dining table, Pomona was requested to pour out a glass of the nectar. Johnny handed this gravely to his parent, saying:

“Many happy returns of the day, Mrs. Flynn!”

“O, dear, dear!” gasped his mother merrily, “you drink first!”

“Excuse me, no, Mrs. Flynn,” rejoined her son, “many happy returns of the day!”

When the toast had been honoured Pomona and Johnny looked tremendously at each other.

“Shall we?” exclaimed Pomona.

“O yes,” decided Johnny; “come on, mum, in the garden, something marvellous!”

She followed her children into that dull little den, and fortuitously the sun shone there for the occasion. Behold, the dauntless evergreen bush had been stripped of its leaves and upon its blossomless twigs the children had hung numerous couples of ripe cherries, white and red and black.

“What do you think of it, mum?” cried the children, snatching some of the fruit and pressing it into her hands, “what do you think of it?”

“Beautiful!” said the poor woman in a tremulous voice. They stared silently at their mother until she could bear it no longer. She turned and went sobbing into the kitchen.

* * * * *

CLORINDA WALKS IN HEAVEN

* * * * *

CLORINDA WALKS IN HEAVEN

Miss Smith, Clorinda Smith, desired not to die on a wet day. Her speculations upon the possibilities of one’s demise were quite ingenuous and had their mirth, but she shrunk from that figure of her dim little soul--and it was only dimly that she could figure it at all--approaching the pathways of the Boundless in a damp, bedraggled condition.

“But the rain couldn’t harm your spirit,” declared her comforting friends.

“Why not?” asked Clorinda, “if there is a ghost of me, why not a ghost of the rain?”

There were other aspects, delectable and illusive, of this imagined apotheosis, but Clorinda always hoped--against hope be it said--that it wouldn’t be wet. On three evenings there had been a bow in the sky, and on the day she died rain poured in fury. With a golden key she unlocked the life out of her bosom and moved away without fear, as if a great light had sprung suddenly under her feet in a little dark place, into a region where things became starkly real and one seemed to live like the beams rolling on the tasselled corn in windy acres. There was calmness in those translucent leagues and the undulation amid a vast implacable light until she drifted, like a feather fallen from an unguessed star, into a place which was extraordinarily like the noon-day world, so green and warm was its valley.

A little combe lay between some low hills of turf, and on a green bank beside a few large rocks was a man mending a ladder of white new-shaven willow studded with large brass nails, mending it with hard knocks that sounded clearly. The horizon was terraced only just beyond and above him, for the hills rolled steeply up. Thin pads of wool hung in the arch of the ultimate heavens, but towards the end of the valley the horizon was crowded with clouds torn and disbattled. Two cows, a cow of white and a cow of tan, squatted where one low hill held up, as it were, the sunken limits of the sky. There were larks--in such places the lark sings for ever--and thrushes--the wind vaguely active--seven white ducks--a farm. Each nook was a flounce of blooms and a bower for birds. Passing close to the man--he was sad and preoccupied, dressed in a little blue tunic--she touched his arm as if to enquire a direction, saying “Jacob!”

She did not know what she would have asked of him, but he gave her no heed and she again called to him “Jacob!” He did not seem even to see her, so she went to the large white gates at the end of the valley and approached a railway crossing. She had to wait a long time for trains of a vastness and grandeur were passing, passing without sound. Strange advertisements on the hoardings and curious direction posts gathered some of her attention. She observed that in every possible situation, on any available post or stone, people had carved initials, sometimes a whole name, often with a date, and Clorinda experienced a doubt of the genuineness of some of these so remote was the antiquity implied. At last, the trains were all gone by, and as the barriers swung back she crossed the permanent way.

There was neither ambiguity in her movements nor surprise in her apprehensions. She just crossed over to a group of twenty or thirty men who moved to welcome her. They were barelegged, sandal-footed, lightly clad in beautiful loose tunics of peacock and cinnamon, which bore not so much the significance of colour as the quality of light; one of them rushed eagerly forward, crying “Clorinda!” offering to her a long coloured scarf. Strangely, as he came closer, he grew less perceivable; Clorinda was aware in a flash that she was viewing him by some other mechanism than that of her two eyes. In a moment he utterly disappeared and she felt herself wrapt into his being, caressed with faint caresses, and troubled with dim faded ecstasies and recognitions not wholly agreeable. The other men stood grouped around them, glancing with half-closed cynical eyes. Those who stood farthest away were more clearly seen: in contiguity a presence could only be divined, resting only--but how admirably!--in the nurture of one’s mind.

“What is it?” Clorinda asked: and all the voices replied, “Yes, we know you!”

She felt herself released, and the figure of the man rejoined the waiting group. “I was your husband Reuben,” said the first man slowly, and Clorinda, who had been a virgin throughout her short life, exclaimed “Yes, yes, dear Reuben!” with momentary tremors and a queer fugitive drift of doubt. She stood there, a spook of comprehending being, and all the uncharted reefs in the map of her mind were anxiously engaging her. For a time she was absorbed by this new knowledge.

Then another voice spoke:

“I was your husband Raphael!”

“I know, I know,” said Clorinda, turning to the speaker, “we lived in Judea.”

“And we dwelt in the valley of the Nile,” said another, “in the years that are gone.”

“And I too ... and I too ... and I too,” they all clamoured, turning angrily upon themselves.

Clorinda pulled the strange scarf from her shoulders where Reuben had left it, and, handling it so, she became aware of her many fugitive sojournings upon the earth. It seemed that all of her past had become knit in the scarf into a compact pattern of beauty and ugliness of which she was entirely aware; all its multiplexity being immediately resolved ... the habitations with cave men, and the lesser human unit of the lesser later day. Patagonian, Indian, Cossack, Polynesian, Jew ... of such stuff the pattern was intimately woven, and there were little plangent perfect moments of the past that fell into order in the web. Clorinda watching the great seabird with pink feet louting above the billows that roared upon Iceland, or Clorinda hanging her girdle upon the ebony hooks of the image of Tanteelee. She had taken voyaging drafts upon the whole world, cataract jungle and desert, ingle and pool and strand, ringing the changes upon a whole gamut of masculine endeavour ... from a prophet to a haberdasher. She could feel each little life lying now as in a sarsnet of cameos upon her visible breasts: thereby for these ... these _men_ ... she was draped in an eternal wonder. But she could not recall any image of her past life in _these_ realms, save only that her scarf was given back to her on every return by a man of these men.

She could remember with humility her transient passions for them all. None, not one, had ever given her the measure of her own desire, a strong harsh flame that fashioned and tempered its own body; nothing but a nebulous glow that was riven into embers before its beam had sweetened into pride. She had gone from them childless always and much as a little child.

From the crowd of quarrelling ghosts a new figure detached itself, and in its approach it subdued that vague vanishing which had been so perplexing to Clorinda. Out of the crowd it slipped, and loomed lovingly beside her, took up her thought and the interrogation that came into her mind.

“No,” it said gravely, “there is none greater than these. The ultimate reaches of man’s mind produce nothing but images of men.”

“But,” said Clorinda, “do you mean that our ideals, previsions of a vita-nuova....”

“Just so,” it continued, “a mere intoxication. Even here you cannot escape the singular dower of dreams ... you can be drunk with dreams more easily and more permanently than with drugs.”

The group of husbands had ceased their quarrelling to listen; Clorinda swept them with her glances thoughtfully and doubtfully.

“Could mankind be so poor,” the angel resumed, “as poor as these, if it housed something greater than itself?”

With a groan the group of outworn husbands drew away. Clorinda turned to her companion with disappointment and some dismay.... “I hardly understand yet ... is this all then just....”

“Yes,” it replies, “just the ghost of the world.”

She turned unhappily and looked back across the gateway into the fair combe with its cattle, its fine grass, and the man working diligently therein. A sense of bleak loneliness began to possess her; here, then, was no difference save that there were no correlations, no consequences; nothing had any effect except to produce the ghost of a ghost. There was already in the hinterland of her apprehensions a ghost, a ghost of her new ghostship: she was to be followed by herself, pursued by figures of her own ceaseless being!

She looked at the one by her side: “Who are you?” she asked, and at the question the group of men drew again very close to them.

“I am your unrealized desires,” it said: “Did you think that the dignity of virginhood, rarely and deliberately chosen, could be so brief and barren? Why, that pure idea was my own immaculate birth, and I was born, the living mate of you.”

The hungry-eyed men shouted with laughter.

“Go away!” screamed Clorinda to them; “I do not want you.”

Although they went she could hear the echoes of their sneering as she took the arm of her new lover “Let us go,” she said, pointing to the man in the combe, “and speak to him.” As they approached the man he lifted his ladder hugely in the air and dashed it to the ground so passionately that it broke.

“Angry man! angry man!” mocked Clorinda. He turned towards her fiercely. Clorinda began to fear him; the muscles and knots of his limbs were uncouth like the gnarl of old trees; she made a little pretence of no more observing him.

“Now what is it like,” said she jocularly to the angel at her side, and speaking of her old home, “what is it like now at Weston-super-Mare?”

At that foolish question the man with the ladder reached forth an ugly hand and twitched the scarf from her shoulders.

It cannot now be told to what remoteness she had come, or on what roads her undirected feet had travelled there, but certain it is that in that moment she was gone.... Why, where, or how cannot be established: whether she was swung in a blast of annihilation into the uttermost gulfs, or withdrawn for her beauty into that mysterious Nox, into some passionate communion with the eternal husbands, or into some eternal combat with their passionate other wives ... from our scrutiny at least she passed for ever.

It is true there was a beautiful woman of this name who lay for a month in a deep trance in the West of England. On her recovery she was balladed about in the newspapers and upon the halls for quite a time, and indeed her notoriety brought requests for her autograph from all parts of the world, and an offer of marriage from a Quaker potato merchant. But she tenderly refused him and became one of those faded grey old maids who wear their virginity like antiquated armour.

* * * * *

CRAVEN ARMS

* * * * *

CRAVEN ARMS

I

The teacher of the sketching class at the evening school was a man who had no great capacity for enduring affection, but his handsome appearance often inspired in women those emotions which if not enduring are deep and disturbing. His own passions may have been deep but they were undeniably fickle.

The townspeople were proud of their new school for in addition to the daily curriculum evening instruction of an advanced modern kind was given. Of course all schools since the beginning of time have been modern at some period of their existence but this one was modern, so the vicar declared, because it was so blessedly hygienic. It was built upon a high tree-arboured slope overlooking the snug small town and on its western side stared ambiguously at a free upland country that was neither small nor snug. The seventeen young women and the nine young men were definitely, indeed articulately, inartistic, they were as unæsthetic as pork pies, all except Julia Tern, a golden-haired fine-complexioned fawn of a girl whose talent was already beyond the reach of any instruction the teacher could give. He could not understand why she continued to attend his classes.

One evening she brought for his criticism a portrait sketch of himself.

“This is extraordinarily beautiful,” he murmured.

“Yes?” said Julia.

“I mean the execution, the presentation and so on.”

Julia did not reply. He stared at her picture of him, a delicately modelled face with a suggestion of nobility, an air that was kind as it was grave. The gravity and nobility which so pleased him were perhaps the effect of a high brow from which the long brown hair flowed thinly back to curve in a tidy cluster at his neck. Kindness beamed in the eyes and played around the thin mouth, sharp nose, and positive chin. What could have inspired her to make this idealization of himself, for it was idealization in spite of its fidelity and likeness? He knew he had little enough nobility of character--too little to show so finely--and as for that calm gravity of aspect, why gravity simply was not in him. But there it was on paper, deliberate and authentic, inscribed with his name--_David Masterman 1910_.

“When, how did you come to do it?”

“I just wanted it, you were a nice piece, I watched you a good deal, and there you are!” She said it jauntily but there was a pink flush in her cheeks.

“It’s delicious,” he mused, “I envy you. I can’t touch a decent head--not even yours. But why have you idealized me so?” He twitted her lightly about the gravity and nobility.

“But you are like that, you are. That’s how I see you, at this moment.”

She did not give him the drawing as he hoped she would. He did not care to ask her for it--there was delicious flattery in the thought that she treasured it so much. Masterman was a rather solitary man of about thirty, with a modest income which he supplemented with the fees from these classes. He lived alone in a wooden bungalow away out of the town and painted numbers of landscapes, rather lifeless imitations, as he knew, of other men’s masterpieces. They were frequently sold.

Sometimes on summer afternoons he would go into woods or fields with a few of his pupils to sketch or paint farmhouses, trees, clouds, stacks, and other rural furniture. He was always hoping to sit alone with Julia Tern but there were other loyal pupils who never missed these occasions, among them the two Forrest girls, Ianthe the younger, and Katharine, daughters of a thriving contractor. Julia remained inscrutable, she gave him no opportunities at all; he could never divine her feelings or gather any response to his own, but there could be no doubt of the feelings of the Forrest girls--they quite certainly liked him enormously. Except for that, they too, could have no reason for continuing in his classes for both were as devoid of artistic grace as an inkstand. They brought fruit or chocolate to the classes and shared them with him. Their attentions, their mutual attentions, were manifested in many ways, small but significant and kind. On these occasions Julia’s eyes seemed to rest upon him with an ironical gaze. It was absurd. He liked them well enough and sometimes from his shy wooing of the adorable but enigmatic Julia he would turn for solace to Ianthe. Yet strangely enough it was Kate, the least alluring to him of the three girls, who took him to her melancholy heart.

Ianthe was a little bud of womanhood, dark-haired but light-headed, dressed in cream coloured clothes. She was small and right and tight, without angularities or rhythms, just one dumpy solid roundness. But she had an astonishing vulgarity of speech, if not of mind, that exacerbated him and in the dim corridors of his imagination she did not linger, she scurried as it were into doorways or upon twisting staircases or stood briefly where a loop of light fell upon her hair, her dusky face, her creamy clothes, and her delightful rotundities. She had eyes of indiscretion and a mind like a hive of bees, it had such a tiny opening and was so full of a cloying content.

One day he suddenly found himself alone with Ianthe in a glade of larch trees which they had all been sketching. They had loitered. He had been naming wild flowers which Ianthe had picked for the purpose and then thrown wantonly away. She spied a single plant of hellebore growing in the dimness under the closely planted saplings.

“Don’t! don’t!” he cried. He kept her from plucking it and they knelt down together to admire the white virginal flower.

His arm fell round Ianthe’s waist in a light casual way. He scarcely realized its presumption. He had not intended to do it; as far as that went he did not particularly want to do it, but there his arm was. Ianthe took no notice of the embrace and he felt foolish, he could not retreat until they rose to walk on; then Ianthe pressed close to his side until his arm once more stole round her and they kissed.

“Heavens above!” she said, “you do get away with it quick.”

“Life’s short, there’s no time to lose, I do as I’d be done by.”

“And there are so many of us! But glory,” said the jolly girl, taking him to her bosom, “in for a penny, in for a pound.”

She did not pick any more flowers and soon they were out of the wood decorously joining the others. He imagined that Julia’s gaze was full of irony, and the timid wonder in Kate’s eyes moved him uncomfortably. There was something idiotic in the whole affair.

Until the end of the summer he met Ianthe often enough in the little town or the city three miles off. Her uncouthness still repelled him; sometimes he disliked her completely, but she was always happy to be with him, charmingly fond and gay with all the endearing alertness of a pert bird.

Her sister Kate was not just the mere female that Ianthe was; at once sterner and softer her passions were more strong but their defences stood solid as a rock. In spite of her reserve she was always on the brink of her emotions and they, unhappily for her, were often not transient, but enduring. She was nearly thirty, still unwed. Her dark beauty, for she, too, was fine, seemed to brood in melancholy over his attentions to the other two women. She was quiet, she had little to say, she seemed to stand and wait.

One autumn night at the school after the pupils had gone home he walked into the dim lobby for his hat and coat. Kate Forrest was there. She stood with her back to him adjusting her hat. She did not say a word nor did he address her. They were almost touching each other, there was a pleasant scent about her. In the classroom behind the caretaker was walking about the hollow-sounding floor, humming loudly as he clapped down windows and mounted the six chairs to turn out the six gas lamps. When the last light through the glazed door was gone and the lobby was completely dark Kate all at once turned to him, folded him in her arms and held him to her breast for one startling moment, then let him go, murmuring O ... O.... It made him strangely happy. He pulled her back in the gloom, whispering tender words. They walked out of the hall into the dark road and stopped to confront each other. The road was empty and dark except for a line of gas lamps that gleamed piercingly bright in the sharp air and on the polished surface of the road that led back from the hill down past her father’s villa. There were no lamps in the opposite direction and the road groped its way out into the dark country where he lived, a mile beyond the town. It was windy and some unseen trees behind a wall near them swung and tossed with many pleasant sounds.

“I will come a little way with you,” Kate said.

“Yes, come a little way,” he whispered, pressing her arm, “I’ll come back with you.”

She took his arm and they turned towards the country. He could think of nothing to say, he was utterly subdued by his surprise; Kate was sad, even moody; but at last she said slowly: “I am unlucky, I always fall in love with men who can’t love me.”

“O but I can and do, dear Kate,” he cried lightly. “Love me, Kate, go on loving me, I’m not, well, I’m not very wicked.”

“No, no, you do not.” She shook her head mournfully: after a few moments she added: “It’s Julia Tern.”

He was astounded. How could she have known this, how could any one have known--even Julia herself? It was queer that she did not refer to his friendship with Ianthe; he thought that was much more obvious than his love for Julia. In a mood that he only half understood he began to deny her reproachful charge.

“Why, you must think me very fickle indeed. I really love you, dear Kate, really you.” His arm was around her neck, he smoothed her cheek fondly against his own. She returned his caresses but he could glimpse the melancholy doubt in her averted eyes.

“We often talk of you, we often talk of you at night, in bed, often.”

“What do you say about me--in bed? Who?”

“Ianthe and me. She likes you.”

“She likes me! What do you say about me--in bed?”

He hoped Ianthe had not been indiscreet but Kate only said: “She doesn’t like you as I do--not like this.”