Part 6

In the course of time she was forced to go away on business of state and travelled for many months; on her return the face of the Lord Chancellor was gloomy with misery. The golden ark had been stolen. Alarm and chagrin filled the princess. She went to the grave. It too had now grown weedy and looked forlorn. It was as if her own heart had been stolen away from her. “Oh,” she moaned, “what does it matter!” and, turning away, went home to her bower. There, among that sad sight, she saw a strange new tree almost in bloom. She gave orders for the pool to be cleansed and the bower restored to its former beauty. This was done, and on a bright day when the blazon of the sun was kind she went into the bower again, flung her black robes from her, and slipped like a rod of ivory into the velvet water. There were no blooms to gather now, though she searched with her silver net, but as she walked from the pool her long hair caught in the boughs of the strange tall squinancy tree, and in the disentangling it showered upon her beautiful crimson blooms that as they fell lingered upon her hips, her sweet shoulders, and kissed her shining knees.

* * * * *

COMMUNION

* * * * *

COMMUNION

He was of years calendared in unreflecting minds as tender years, and he was clothed in tough corduroy knickerbockers, once the habiliments of a huger being, reaching to the tops of some boots shod with tremendous nails and fastened by bits of fugitive string. His jacket was certainly the jacket of a child--possibly some dead one, for it was not his own--and in lieu of a collar behold a twist of uncoloured, unclean flannel. Pink face, pink hands, yellow hair, a quite unredeemable dampness about his small nose--altogether he was a country boy.

“What are you doing there, Tom Prowse?” asked Grainger, the sexton, entering to him suddenly one Saturday afternoon. The boy was sitting on a bench in the empty nave, hands on knees, looking towards the altar. He rose to his feet and went timidly through the doorway under the stern glance of that tall tall man, whose height enabled him to look around out of a grave when it was completely dug. “You pop on out of ’ere,” said Grainger, threateningly, but to himself, when the boy had gone.

Walking into the vestry Grainger emptied his pockets of a number of small discarded bottles and pots of various shapes and uses--ink bottles, bottles for gum and meat extract, fish-paste pots, and tins which had contained candy. He left them there. The boy, after he had watched him go away, came back and resumed his seat behind one of the round piers.

A lady dressed in black entered and, walking to the front stall under the pulpit, knelt down. The boy stared at the motionless figure for a long time until his eyes ached and the intense silence made him cough a little. He was surprised at the booming hollow echo and coughed again. The lady continued bowed in her place; he could hear her lips whispering sibilantly: the wind came into the porch with sudden gust and lifted the arras at the door. Turning he knocked his clumsy boots against the bench. After that the intense silence came back again, humming in his ears and almost stopping his breath, until he heard footsteps on the gravel path. The vicar’s maid entered and went towards the vestry. She wished to walk softly when she observed the kneeling lady but her left shoe squeaked stubbornly as she moved, and both heels and soles echoed in sharp tones along the tiles of the chancel. The boy heard the rattle of a bucket handle and saw the maid place the bucket beside the altar and fetch flowers and bottles and pots from the vestry. Some she stood upon the table of the altar; others, tied by pieces of string, she hung in unique positions upon the front and sides, filling them with water from the pail as she did so; and because the string was white, and the altar was white, and the ugly bottles were hidden in nooks of moss, it looked as if the very cloth of the altar sprouted with casual bloom.

Not until the maid had departed did the lady who had been bowed so long lift up her head adoringly towards the brass cross; the boy overheard her deep sigh; then she, too, went away, and in a few moments more the boy followed and walked clumsily, thoughtfully, to his home.

His father was the village cobbler. He was a widower, and he was a freethinker too; no mere passive rejector of creeds, but an active opponent with a creed of his own, which if less violent was not less bigoted than those he so witheringly decried. The child Tom had never been allowed to attend church; until today, thus furtively, he had never even entered one, and in the day school religious instruction had been forbidden by his atheistic father. But while faith goes on working its miracles the whirligigs of unfaith bring on revenges. The boy now began to pay many secret visits to the church. He would walk under the western tower and slip his enclosing palms up and down the woolly rope handles, listen to the slow beat of the clock, and rub with his wristband the mouldings of the brass lectern with the ugly bird on a ball and the three singular chubby animals at the foot, half ox, half dog, displaying monstrous teeth. He scrutinized the florid Georgian memorial fixed up the wall, recording the virtues, which he could not read, of a departed Rodney Giles; made of marble, there were two naked fat little boys with wings; they pointed each with one hand towards the name, and with the other held a handkerchief each to one tearful eye. This was very agreeable to young Prowse, but most he loved to sit beside one of the pillars--the stone posties, he called them--and look at the window above the altar where for ever half a dozen angels postured rhythmically upon the ladder of Jacob.

One midsummer evening, after evensong, he entered for his usual meditation. He had no liking for any service or ritual; he had no apprehension of the spiritual symbols embodied in the building; he only liked to sit there in the quiet, gazing at things in a dumb sort of way, taking, as it were, a bath of holiness. He sat a long time; indeed, so still was he, he might have been dozing as the legions of dead parishioners had dozed during interminable dead sermons. When he went to the door--the light having grown dim--he found it was locked. He was not at all alarmed at his situation: he went and sat down again. In ten minutes or so he again approached the door ... it was still locked. Then he walked up the aisle to the chancel steps and crossed the choir for the first time. Choristers’ robes were in the vestry, and soon, arrayed in cassock and surplice, he was walking with a singular little dignity to his old seat by one of the pillars. He sat there with folded hands, the church growing gloomier now; he climbed into the pulpit and turned over the leaves of the holy book; he sat in the choir stalls, pretended to play the organ, and at last went before the altar and, kneeling at the rails, clasped his orthodox hands and murmured, as he had heard others murmuring there, a rigmarole of his scholastic hours:

_Thirty days hath September, April, June and November. All the rest have thirty-one, Excepting February alone, And leap year coming once in four, February then has one day more._

Re-entering the vestry, he observed on a shelf in a niche a small loaf wrapped in a piece of linen. He felt hungry and commenced to devour the bread, and from a goblet there he drank a little sip of sweet tasting wine. He liked the wine very much, and drank more and more of it.

There was nothing else to be done now in the darkness, so he went on to the soft carpet within the altar rails, and, piling up a few of the praying mats from the choir--little red cushions they were, stamped with black fleur-de-lys, which he admired much in the daylight--he fell asleep.

And he slept long and deeply until out of some wonderful place he began to hear the word “Ruffian, Ruffian,” shouted with anger and harshness. He was pulled roughly to his feet, and apprehension was shaken into his abominable little head.

The morning sunlight was coming through the altar window, and the vicar’s appearance was many-coloured as a wheelwright’s door; he had a green face, and his surplice was scaled with pink and purple gouts like a rash from some dreadful rainbow. And dreadful indeed was the vicar as he thrust the boy down the altar steps into the vestry, hissing as he did, “Take off those things!” and darting back to throw the cushions into proper places to support the knees of the expected devotees.

“Now, how did you get in here?” he demanded, angrily.

The boy hung up the cassock: “Someone locked me in last night, Sir.”

“Who was it?”

“I dunno, Sir, they locked me in all night.”

His interrogator glared at him for a moment in silence, and the boy could not forbear a yawn. Thereat the vicar seized him by the ear and, pulling it with such animation as to contort his own features as well as the child’s, dragged him to the vestry door, gurgling with uncontrolled vexation, “Get out of this. Get out ... you ... you beast!”

As the boy went blinking down the nave the tenor bell began to ring; the stone posties looked serene and imperturbable in new clean sunlight, and that old blackbird was chirping sweetly in the lilac at the porch.

* * * * *

THE QUIET WOMAN

* * * * *

THE QUIET WOMAN

It was the loneliest place in the world, Hardross said. A little cogitation and much experience had given him the fancy that the ark of the kingdom of solitude was lodged in a lift, any lift, carrying a charter of mute passengers from the pavement to any sort of Parnassus. Nothing ever disturbs its velveteen progression; no one ever speaks to the lift man (unless it happens to be a lift girl). At Hardross’s place of abode it happened to be a lift boy, sharp and white-faced, whose tough hair was swept backwards in a stiff lock from his brow, while his pert nose seemed inclined to pursue it. His name was Brown. His absences from duty were often coincident with the arrivals and departures of Mr. Hardross. His hands were brown enough if the beholder carried some charity in his bosom, but the aspect of his collar or his shoes engendered a deal of vulgar suspicion, and his conduct was at once inscrutable and unscrupulous. It may have been for this reason that Hardross had lately begun walking the whole downward journey from his high chamber, but it must have been something less capricious that caused him always to essay the corresponding upward flight. A fancy for exercise perhaps, for he was a robust musician, unmarried, and of course, at thirty-three or thirty-four, had come to the years of those indiscretions which he could with impunity and without reprobation indulge.

On the second floor, outside the principal door of one set of chambers, there always stood a small console table; it was just off the landing, in an alcove that covered two other doors, a little dark angular-limbed piece of furniture bearing a green lacquer dish of void visiting cards, a heap that seemed neither to increase nor dwindle but lay there as if soliciting, so naïvely, some further contributions. Two maiden ladies, the Misses Pilcher, who kept these rooms, had gone to France for a summer holiday, but though the flat had for the time being some new occupants the console table still kept its place, the dish of cards of course languishing rather unhopefully. The new tenants were also two ladies, but they were clearly not sisters and just as clearly not Pilcherly old maids. One of them, Hardross declared, was the loveliest creature he had ever seen. She was dark, almost tall, about as tall as Hardross though a little less robust and rather more graceful. Her mature scarlet lips and charming mature eyes seemed always to be wanting to speak to him. But she did not speak to him, even when he modestly tried to overcome, well, not her reserve--no one with such sparkling eyes could possibly be reserved--but her silence. He often passed her on the landing but he did not hear her voice, or music, or speech, or any kind of intercourse within the room. He called her The Quiet Woman. The other lady, much older, was seldom seen; she was of great dignity. The younger one walked like a woman conscious and proud of the beauty underneath her beautiful clothes; the soft slippers she wore seemed charged with that silent atmosphere. Even the charwoman who visited them daily and rattled and swept about was sealed of the conspiracy of silence; at least he never caught--though it must be confessed that he guiltily tried--the passage of a single word. What was the mystery of the obstinately silent ménage? Did the elder lady suffer from sorrow or nerves; was she under a vow; was she a genius writing a sublime book?

The voiceless character of the intercourse did not prevent Hardross becoming deeply enamoured and at the same time deeply baffled. Morning and evening as he went to the great city church of which he was organist he would often catch a glimpse of his quiet woman on the stairs. At favourable junctures he had lifted his hat and said Good-morning or Good-evening, but she had turned away as if overcome by confusion or an excess of propriety.

“I am a coward,” he would think; “shyness and diffidence rule me, they curse me, they ruin my life; but she, good heavens! is extraordinarily retiring. Why, I am just a satyr, a rampant raging satyr, a satyr!” And he would liken her to Diana, always darting with such fawnlike modesty from the alcove whenever he approached. He did not even know her name. He wanted to enquire of the lift boy Brown or the porter, but there again he lacked the casual touch to bring off the information. The boy was too young, too cute, too vulgar, and the porter too taciturn, as difficult for Hardross to approach as an archbishop would have been. But Miss Barker now, that milliner, down below on the ground floor! She would know; she knew everybody and everything about the chambers including, quite familiarly, Hardross himself--she would be sure to know. But even she would have to be approached with discrimination.

“Evening, Miss Barker!” he cried. The good-looking spinster peered up from a half-trimmed bonnet. “When do _you_ go for a holiday, then?”

“Holidays,” she sighed, though the corner of her mouth was packed with pins, “I cannot afford holidays.”

“Ho-ho, you can’t afford!”

Their common fund of repartee lay in his confident assumption that she was rolling in surplus income and her counter assertion that she was stricken in poverty; that people--the pigs--would not pay her prices, or that those who did not flinch at her prices would not pay her bills.

“Astonishing, deplorable, this Mammon-worship!” he declared, leaning genially upon her table; “you know, it breaks my heart to see you a slave to it, a woman of a thousand, ten thousand in fact. Give it up, O,”--he beat the table with his hand--“give it up before it is too late!”

“Too late for what?” she asked.

“Why, all the delightful things a woman like you could do.”

“As what?”

“O ... travel, glories of nature, you know, friendship, men ... love itself.”

“Give me all the money I want,”--she was brusque about it, and began to dab the unwanted pins back into their cushion--“and I’ll buy, yes _buy_, a sweetheart for each day in the week.”

“Heavens now!” He was chilled by this implication of an experience that may have been dull, that must have been bitter, but he floundered on: “What now would you give for me?”

“For you!” She contemplated him with gravity: “To be sure I had not thought of you, not in that way.”

“O but please _do_ think of me, dear lady, put me in your deepest regard.”

The ghost of a knowing grin brushed her features. Really a charming woman, in parts. A little stout, perhaps, and she had fat red hands, but her heart was a good substantial organ, it was in the right place, and her features seemed the best for wear.

“You are one of those surprising ladies”--he plunged gaily--“who’ve a long stocking somewhere, with trunks full of shares and scrip, stocks at the bank and mortgages at your solicitor’s. O yes, yes,” he cried out against her protestation, “and you will make a strange will leaving it all to me!”

She shook her head hopelessly, bending again over the bonnet whose desperate skeleton she had clothed with a flounce of crimson velvet. She was very quiet.

“Have I been rude?” he hazarded. “Forgive me.”

“Well, it’s not true,” she insisted.

“Forgive me--I have hurt you--of course it’s not true.”

Apparently she forgave him; he was soon asking if there were any rooms to let in the building. “Furnished, I mean.” He gave rein to his naïve strategy: “I have friends who want to come here and stay with me for a short holiday. I thought you might know of some.”

“In these flats?” She shook her head, but he persisted and played his artful card:

“The Miss Pilchers, on the second floor, haven’t they gone away?”

She did not know--why not ask the porter.

“Yes, I must ask the porter, but I can never catch the porter, he is so fugitive, he is always cutting his lucky. I hate that man, don’t you?”

And there, temporarily, he had to leave it.

So many days passed now without a glimpse of his lovely one that he had almost brought himself to the point of tapping at the door and enquiring after her welfare, only the mysterious air of the apartment--how strange, how soundless it was--forbade any such crudeness. One morning he recklessly took a cigarette from his case and laid it upon the console table as he passed. When he returned later the cigarette was gone; it had been replaced by a chocolate cream, just one, a big one. He snatched it away and rapturously ate it. Later in the day he was blessed by a deep friendly gaze, as she flitted into her room. Hardross rejoiced; in the morning he left another cigarette and was again rewarded.

“But O God help me,” he thought, “I can’t go on like this!”

So he bought a whole box of bonbons, but his courage deserted him as he approached their door; he left the package upon the console table and slunk guiltily away. The next morning he observed a whole box of cigarettes, a well-known exquisite brand, laid temptingly there. He stretched his eager hand towards it, but paused. Could that be a gift for him? Heavens above! What were the miraculous gods about to shower upon him? Was this their delicate symbol? He could not believe it, no, he could not, he left the box lying there. And it lay there for hours indeed until he crept down and seized it. Afterwards he walked trembling into the brighter air and went for a long ride on the top of an omnibus. There had been no letter, but he fancied that he had got hold of a clue. “Be very careful, Hardross my boy, this is too too splendid to spoil.”

An afternoon or so later he met her coming into the hall, a delicious figure with gay parasol and wide white hat. He delayed her:

“Let me thank you, may I, for those perfect cigarettes?”

The lovely creature did not reply. She just smiled her recognition of him; she did not speak nor move away, she stood there quite silent and timid.

“I wonder,” he began again, “if I might”--it sounded dreadfully silly to him, but having begun he went on--“if I might invite you to my church this evening, a rather special choral service, very jolly, you know. I’m the organist; would you come?”

No answer.

“Would you care to come?”

She lifted both her hands and touching her lips and ears with significant gestures shook her head ever so hopelessly at him.

“Deaf and dumb!” he exclaimed. Perhaps the shock of the revelation showed too painfully in his face for she turned now sadly away. But the hall was divinely empty. He caught one of the exquisite hands and pressed it to his lips.

Thereafter Hardross walked about as if he too were deaf and dumb, except for a vast effusion of sighs. He could praise that delicacy of the rarest whereby she had forborne to lure him, as she could so easily have done, into a relation so shrouded and so vague. But that did not solve his problem, it only solidified it. He wanted and awaited the inspiration of a gesture she could admire, something that would propitiate her delicacy and alarms. He did not want to destroy by clumsy persistencies the frail net of her regard for him; he was quite clear about that, the visible fineness of her quality so quelled him. Applying himself to the task he took lessons in the alphabet language, that inductile response of fingers and thumbs.

Meanwhile she had marked her sense of the complication by hiding like a hurt bird, and although the mystery of the quiet rooms was now exposed she herself remained unseen. He composed a graceful note and left it upon the console table. The note disappeared but no reply came: she made no sign and he regretted his ardour.

Such a deadlock of course could not exist for ever, and one evening he met her walking up the stairs. She stopped mutually with him. He was carrying his music. He made a vain attempt to communicate with her by means of his finger alphabet, but she did not understand him although she delightedly made a reply on her fingers which he was too recently initiated to interpret. They were again at a standstill: he could think of nothing to do except to open his book of organ music and show her the title page. She looked it over very intelligently as he tried by signs to convey his desire to her, but he was certain she was blank about it all. He searched his pockets for a pencil--and swore at his non-success. There he stood like a fool, staring at her smiling face until to his amazement she took his arm and they descended the stairs, they were in the street together. He walked to the church on something vastly less substantial than air, and vastly superior.

Hardross’s church was square and ugly, with large round-headed windows. Its entrance was up some steps between four Corinthian pillars upon the bases of which cabmen snoozed when it was warm or coughed and puffed in the winter cold. There was a pump on the kerb and a stand for hackney cabs. A jungle of evergreens squatted in a railed corner under the tower, with a file of iris plants that never flowered. Upon the plinth of the columns a ribald boy had chalked:

REMOVE THIS OBSTACLE

Eternally at the porch tired cabhorses drooped and meditated, while the drivers cut hunches of bread and meat or cheese or onion and swallowed from their tin bottles the cold tea or other aliment associated with tin bottles. There was always a smell of dung at the entrance, and an aroma of shag tobacco from the cabmen’s pipes curled into the nave whenever the door opened for worshippers. Inside the church Hardross ushered his friend to a seat that he could watch from his organ loft. There were few people present. He borrowed a lead pencil from a choir boy, and while the lesson was being perfunctorily intoned, sounding like some great voice baffled by its infinitely little mind, he scribbled on a sheet of paper the questions he was so eager to ask; what was her name and things like that:

_How can we communicate? May I write to you? Will you to me? Excuse the catechism and scribble but I want so much to know you and grab at this opportunity._

_Yours devotedly John Hardross_

When he looked up her place was empty; she had gone away in the middle of the service. He hurried home at last very perturbed and much abashed, for it was not so much the perplexities of intercourse, the torment of his dilemma, that possessed him now as a sense of felicities forbidden and amenities declined.