Part 2
Jocelyn didn’t mind him, for he forgot him the instant Sally reappeared, but he couldn’t go ahead. He sat dumb, gaping. The girl was too exquisite. She was beauty itself. From the top of her little head, with its flame-coloured hair and broad low brow and misty eyes like brown amber, down along the slender lines of her delicate body to where her small feet were thrust into shabby shoes, she was, surely, perfect. He could see no flaw. She seemed to light up the room. It was like, thought young Luke, for the first time in the presence of real beauty, suddenly being shown God. He wanted to cry. His mouth, usually so firmly shut, quivered. He sat dumb. So that it was Mr. Pinner who did what talking there was, for Sally, of the class whose womenfolk do not talk when the father brings in a friend to tea, said nothing.
Her part was to pour out the tea; and this she did gravely, her eyelashes, which just to see was to long to kiss, lying duskily on her serious face. She was serious because the visitor hadn’t yet smiled at her, so she hadn’t been able to smile back, and Jocelyn accordingly didn’t yet know about her smile; and Mr. Pinner, flushed with excitement, afraid it couldn’t be really true, sure at the same time that it was, entertained the suitor as best he could, making little jokes intended to put him at his ease and encourage him to go ahead, while at the same time trying to convey to Sally, by frowns and nods, that if she chose to make pleasant faces at this particular young gentleman she had his permission to do so.
The suitor, however, remained silent, and Sally obtuse. Her father had never behaved like this before, and she had no idea what it was all about. It was hard work for one, like Mr. Pinner, unaccustomed to social situations requiring tact and experience, and he perspired. He was relieved when his daughter cleared away the tea and went off with it into the scullery to wash up, leaving him alone with his young guest, who sat, his head sunk on his breast, following the girl with his eyes till the door was shut on her. Then, turning to her father, his thin face working with agitation, he began to pour out the whole tale of his terrible unworthiness and undesirability.
‘’Ere,’ said Mr. Pinner, pushing a tin of the best tobacco he stocked towards his upset visitor, ‘light up, won’t you, sir?’
The young man took no notice of the tobacco, and Mr. Pinner, listening attentively to all he was pouring out, couldn’t for the life of him see where the undesirability and unworthiness came in.
‘She’s a good girl,’ said Mr. Pinner, not filling his pipe either, from politeness, ‘as good a girl as ever trod this earth. And what I always say is that no good man is unworthy of the goodest girl. That’s right, ain’t it? Got to be good, of course. Beg pardon, sir, but might I ask--’ he sank his voice to a whisper, glancing at the scullery door--‘if you’re a _good_ man, sir? I should say, gentleman. It’s a ticklish question to ’ave to ask, I know, sir, but ’er mother would ’ave wished----’
‘I don’t drink, I don’t bet, and I’m not tangled up with any woman,’ said Jocelyn. ‘I suppose that’s what you mean?’
‘Then where’s all this ’ere undesirable come in?’ inquired Mr. Pinner, puzzled.
‘I’m poor,’ said the suitor briefly.
‘Poor. That’s bad,’ agreed Mr. Pinner, shaking his head and screwing up his mouth. He knew all about being poor. He had had, first and last, his bellyful of that.
And yet on being questioned, as Mr. Pinner felt bound in duty to question, it turned out that the young gentleman was very well off indeed. He had £500 a year certain, whatever he did or didn’t do, and to Mr. Pinner, used to counting in pennies, this not only seemed enough to keep a wife and family in comfort, but also in style.
§
Sally came back, and Mr. Pinner, inspired, lifted a finger, said ‘’Ark,’ gave them to understand he heard a customer, without actually saying he did, which would have been a lie, and went away into the shop.
Sally stood there, feeling awkward. Jocelyn had got up directly she came in, and she supposed he was going to wish her a good evening and go; but he didn’t. She therefore stood first on one foot and then on the other, and felt awkward.
‘Won’t you,’ Jocelyn breathed, stretching out a hand of trembling entreaty, for he was afraid she might disappear again, ‘won’t you sit down?’
‘Well,’ said Sally shyly, ‘I don’t mind if I do----’ And for the first time Jocelyn heard the phrase he was later on to hear so often, uttered in the accent he was to try so hard to purify.
She sat down on the edge of the chair at the other side of the table. She wasn’t accustomed to sitting idle and didn’t know what to do with her hands, but she was sure it wouldn’t be manners to go on mending socks while a gentleman was in the room.
Jocelyn sat down too, the table between them, the light from the oil lamp hanging from the ceiling beating down on Sally’s head.
‘And Beauty was made flesh, and dwelt among us,’ he murmured, his eyes burning.
‘Pardon?’ said Sally, polite, but wishing her father would come back.
‘You lovely thing--you lovely, lovely thing,’ whispered Jocelyn hoarsely, his eyes like coals of fire.
At this Sally became thoroughly uneasy, and looked at him in real alarm.
‘Don’t be frightened. Your father knows. He says I may----’
‘Father?’ she repeated, much surprised.
‘Yes, yes--I asked him. He says I may. He says I may--may talk to you, make friends with you. That is,’ stammered Jocelyn, overcome by her loveliness, ‘if you’ll let me--oh, if you’ll let me....’
Sally was astonished at her father. ‘Well I never did,’ she murmured courteously. ‘Fancy father.’
‘Why? Why? Don’t you want to? Won’t you--don’t you want to?’
‘Wouldn’t say _that_,’ said Sally, shifting in her chair, and struggling to find the polite words. ‘Wouldn’t exactly say as ’ow I don’t _want_ to.’
‘Then you--you’ll let me take you out? You’ll let me take you somewhere to tea? You’ll let me fetch you in the car--you’ll let me, won’t you? To-morrow?’ asked Jocelyn, leaning further across the table, his arms stretched along it towards her, reaching out to her in entreaty.
‘Father----’
‘But he says I may. It’s with his permission----’
‘Tea too?’ asked Sally, more and more astonished. ‘It ain’t much _like_ ’im,’ she said, full of doubts.
Whereupon Jocelyn got up impetuously, and came round to her with the intention of flinging himself at her feet, and on his knees beseeching her to come out with him--he who in his life had never been on his knees to anybody.
‘Oh, Salvatia!’ he cried, coming round to her, holding out both his hands.
She hastily pushed back her chair and slipped out of it beyond his reach, sure this wasn’t proper. No gentleman had a right to call a girl by her Christian name without permission asked and granted; on that point she was quite clear. Salvatia, indeed. The gentle creature couldn’t but be affronted and hurt by this.
‘’Oo you gettin’ at, sir?’ she inquired, as in duty bound when faced by familiarity.
‘You--you!’ gasped Jocelyn, following her into the corner she had withdrawn into, and falling at her feet.
§
Mr. Pinner was of opinion that the sooner they were married the better. There was that in Mr. Luke’s eye, he told himself, which could only be got rid of by marriage; nothing but the Church could make the sentiments the young gentleman appeared to entertain for Sally right ones.
Whipt by fear, he hurried things on as eagerly as Jocelyn himself. Suppose something happened before there was time to get them married, and Mr. Luke, as he understood easily occurred with gentlemen in such circumstances, cooled off? He didn’t leave them a moment alone together after that first outing in the car when Jocelyn asked Sally to marry him, and she, obedient and wishful of pleasing everybody, besides having been talked to by her father the night before and told she had his full consent and blessing, and that it was her duty anyhow, heaven having sent Mr. Luke on purpose, had remarked amiably that she didn’t mind if she did.
After this, Mr. Pinner’s one aim was to keep them from being by themselves till they were safely man and wife. He lived in a fever of watchfulness. He was obsessed by terror on behalf of Sally’s virginity. His days were infinitely more wearing than in the worst period of Islington. Mrs. Pinner was missed and mourned quite desperately. It almost broke his back, the hurry, the anxiety, the constant gnawing fear, and the secrecy his future son-in-law insisted on.
‘What you want to be so secret for, Mr. Luke?’ he asked, black suspicion, always on the alert where Sally was concerned, clouding his naturally mild and trustful eyes.
‘You don’t want a howling mob of undergraduates round, do you?’ retorted Jocelyn.
‘Goodness gracious, I should think I didn’t, Mr. Luke,’ said Mr. Pinner, holding up both his little hands in horror. ‘She’s got a reg’lar gift, that Sally ‘as, for collecting crowds.’
‘Well, then,’ said Jocelyn irritably, whose nerves were in shreds. And added, ‘Isn’t it our job to keep them off her?’
‘Your job now, sir--or will be soon,’ said Mr. Pinner, unable to refrain from rubbing his hands at the thought of his near release from responsibility.
‘I wish you wouldn’t keep on calling me sir,’ snapped Jocelyn. ‘I’ve _asked_ you not to. I keep _on_ asking you not to.’
He was nearly in tears with strain and fatigue. Incredibly, he hadn’t once been able to kiss Sally,--not properly, not as a lover should. Always in the presence of that damned Pinner--such was the way he thought of his future father-in-law--what could he do? He couldn’t even talk to her; not really talk, not pour out the molten streams of adoration that were scalding him to death while that image of alertness sat unblinking by. What was the fellow afraid of? He had asked him at first straight out, on finding how he stuck, to leave them alone, and the answer he got was that courting should be fair and above board, and that he was obliged to be both father and mother to the poor girl.
‘Fair and above board! Good God,’ thought Jocelyn, driving himself back at a furious pace to Cambridge and throwing back his head in a fit of wild, nervous laughter. His father-in-law--that little man with trousers so much too long for him that they corkscrewed round his legs. His father-in-law....
But what was that in the way of grotesqueness compared to his being her father? There, indeed, was mystery: that loveliness beyond dreams should have sprung from Mr. Pinner’s little loins.
§
The widows of Woodles, and also the virgins, were extremely curious about Jocelyn’s daily visits, and tried to find out his name, and which college he belonged to. They were in no doubt as to the object of his visits, having by that time all seen Sally, and wished to warn Mr. Pinner to be careful.
They went to his shop and warned him.
Mr. Pinner, looking smaller and more sunk into his trousers than ever, thanked them profusely, and said he was being it.
‘One has to be on one’s guard with a motherless daughter,’ they said.
Mr. Pinner said he was on it.
‘And as your daughter promises to grow up some day into rather a good-looking girl----’
‘There ain’t much promise about Sally, mum--it’s been performance, performance, _and_ nothing but performance since she was so ’igh.’
‘Oh, well--perhaps it’s not quite as bad as that,’ said the lady addressed, smiling indulgently. ‘Still, I do think she may grow into a good-looking girl, and so near Cambridge you will have to be careful. Your visitor is an undergraduate, of course?’
And Mr. Pinner, afraid of Jocelyn, afraid of his threats of hordes of young men descending on the shop if the engagement were known, said, slipping on the edge of an untruth, but just managing to clear it, ‘Couldn’t say, mum.’
She forced him, however--the woman forced him. ‘What?’ she exclaimed. ‘You can’t say? You don’t know?’
So then he told it without blinking. ‘No, mum,’ he said, his harassed blue eyes on her face. ‘I don’t think the young gentleman _did_ ’appen to mention ’is name.’
And in his heart he cried out to his conscience, ‘If they forces me to, ’ow, ’ow can I ’elp it?’
§
Between these two men, both in a state of extreme nervous tension, Sally passed her last days under her father’s roof, amiably quiescent, completely good. She did as she was told; always she had done as she was told, and it was now a habit. She liked the look of the young man who so unexpectedly was to become her husband, and was pleased that he should be a gentleman. She knew nothing about gentlemen, but she liked the sort of sound their voices made when they talked. At Islington she had preferred the visits to the shop of the clergy for just that reason--the sound their voices made when they talked. She would have been perfectly happy during the fortnight between her first setting eyes on Jocelyn and her marriage to him, if there had been a few more smiles about.
There were none. Her father was tying her up with trembling haste, as if she were a parcel to be got rid of in a hurry. Her lover’s face was haggard, and drawn in the opposite directions to those that lead to smiles. Dumbly he would gaze at her from under his overhanging brows, and every now and then burst into a brief explosion of talk she didn’t understand and hadn’t an idea how to deal with; or he would steal a shaking hand along the edge of the tablecloth, where her father couldn’t see it, and touch her dress. He looked just like somebody in a picture, thought Sally, with his thin dark face, and eyes right far back in his head,--quite blue eyes, in spite of his dark skin and hair. She liked him very much. She liked everybody very much. If only somebody had sometimes smiled, how nice it all would have been; for then she would have known for certain they were happy, and were getting what they wanted. Sally liked to be certain people were happy, and getting what they wanted. As it was, nobody could tell from their faces that these two were pleased. Sometimes in the evening, after her lover had gone and the door was locked and bolted and barred behind him, and all the windows had been examined and fastened securely, her father would calm down and cheer up; but her lover never calmed down or cheered up.
Sally, who hardly had what could be called thoughts but only feelings, was conscious of this without putting it into words. Perhaps when he had got what he wanted, which was, she was thoroughly aware, herself, he would be different. There were no doubts whatever in her mind as to what he wanted. She was too much used to the sort of thing. Not, it is true, in quite such a violent form, but then none of the others who had admired her--that is, every single male she had ever come across--had been allowed to be what her father called her fiancy, which was, Sally understood, the name of the person one was going to marry, and who might say things and behave in a way no one else might, as distinguished from the name of the person one went to the pictures with and didn’t marry, and who was a fancy. She knew that, because, though she herself had only gone to the pictures wedged between her father and mother, she had heard the girls at school talk of going with their fancies,--those girls who had all been her friends till they began to grow up, and then all, after saying horrid things to her and crying violently, had got out of her way.
As though she could help it; as though she could help having the sort of face that made them angry.
‘_I_ ain’t made my silly face,’ she said tearfully--her delicious mouth pronounced it fice--to the last of her girl friends, to the one she was fondest of, who had hung on longest, but who couldn’t, after all, stand the look that came into the eyes of him she spoke of as her boy one day that he chanced to come across Sally.
‘No. No more you didn’t, Sally Pinner,’ furiously retorted the friend. ‘But you would ’ave if you could ’ave, so you’re nothin’ but a nypocrite--see?’
And the friend forgot herself still further, and added that Sally was a blinkin’ nypocrite; which was, as Mr. Pinner would have said had he heard it, language.
§
So that Sally in her short life had already caused trouble and uneasiness, in spite of having been so carefully kept out of the way.
Wherever there were human beings, those human beings stared at Sally and began to follow her; or, if they couldn’t follow her with their feet, did so with astonished, eager eyes as long as she was in sight. Holy Communion was the only one of the Sunday services Mr. Pinner let her go to in Woodles, because it was sparsely attended, and the few worshippers were women. But even at that solemn service the Vicar, who was seventy-eight, found it difficult altogether to shut out from his consciousness the lovely figure of grace shining like morning light in the shadows of his dark little church. He was as instantly aware of Sally the first Sunday she came to the service as every one else always was the moment she appeared anywhere, and she had the same effect on the old man as she had had on the young Jocelyn when first he saw her--he caught his breath, and for a moment was near tears. Because here, the old man perceived, at the end of his life he was at last beholding beauty,--fresh from God, still dewy from its heavenly birth; and the Vicar, who had long been a recluse, and lived entirely among his memories, which all were sentimental and poetic, bowed down in spirit before the young radiance come into his church, as before the Real Presence.
§
Such was Sally when young Jocelyn married her--mild inside, and only desiring to give satisfaction, and outside a thing that seemed made up of light. As Mr. Pinner had wished to hide her, so did Jocelyn wish to hide her, and wanted to be married in London, the least conspicuous of spots; but technical difficulties prevented this, seeing that he wanted to be married quickly, so he took the Vicar into his confidence, and got a special licence, and thus avoiding banns and publicity was married early one bright March morning, while Woodles, unaware of what was happening, was still washing up its breakfast things.
By this time Jocelyn was acquainted with Sally’s inability to give a plain answer to a question, and half expected her to reply ‘I don’t mind if I do’ to the Vicar when he asked if she would take him, Jocelyn, to be her wedded husband. She didn’t; but if she had he wouldn’t have cared, nor would the Vicar have cared. Whatever she did, whatever she said, was to these two dazzled men the one perfect gesture, the one perfect word.
But Sally, young and shy, said very little. Hardly had she spoken during the brief courtship. To the Vicar, full of awe of his office and his age, she scarcely dared raise her eyes, much less lift up her voice. It was enough, however; the old man was enthralled. Far from being surprised at Jocelyn’s determination to take his name off the books of his college and chuck his promising career and marry Sally and go up to London to pick up his living as a journalist, a profession for which he hadn’t the slightest aptitude, the Vicar understood perfectly. The college authorities, on the other hand, unaware of his reason for ruining himself, were amazed at such deliberate suicide. They had not seen Sally. The Vicar, who had, was convinced the young man was doing the one thing worth doing,--giving up everything to follow after Truth.
‘For is not Truth Beauty, and Beauty Truth?’ asked the Vicar, too old to bother any longer with material considerations.
Jocelyn and he were unanimous that it was.
§
The Vicar, indeed, was an immense comfort to Jocelyn the second and last week of his engagement, for Mr. Pinner was no comfort at all. Not that Jocelyn needed comfort at this marvellous moment; but he needed understanding, some one to talk to, some one who could and would listen intelligently. Mr. Pinner didn’t listen intelligently; he didn’t listen at all. All he did was to say heartily, ‘That’s right,’ to everything Jocelyn said, and such indiscrimination was annoying. It was a deep refreshment to get away from him and go up to the Vicarage, and there, slowly pacing up and down with the old man on the sunny path where the first daffodils were, talk with some one who so completely understood.
The Vicar concluded, from the frequency with which his young friend came to take counsel of him, that he was an orphan, but he asked no questions because he was long past the age of questions. The age of silence was his, of quiet resting on his oars, of a last warming of himself in the light of the sun, before departing hence and being no more seen. By this time, his mind being faintly bleared, he connected Sally with the _Nunc Dimittis_, and thanked God aloud, greatly to her confusion, for she couldn’t make out what the old gentleman was talking about, for being allowed to see, before departing in peace, the perfect loveliness of her whom he called the Lord’s Salvatia. Fitting and right was the young man’s attitude in the Vicar’s eyes; fitting and right to leave all things, and follow after this child of grace.
His unpractical attitude was immensely grateful to Jocelyn, who knew, though during this strange fortnight of thwarted love-making and arm’s-length worship he managed to forget, that one of the things he was leaving was his mother.
He hadn’t mentioned it, but he had got one.
III
§
Not a father, for he had long been dead, but a mother, whose single joy and pride he was. There she sat at home by the fire on his wedding night, thinking of him. No complete half-hour of the day could pass without the thought of Jocelyn getting into it. Her only child; so brilliant, so serious, so hard-working, so good. She loved brains. She loved diligence. She loved the man of the house to be absorbed in his work. What a halo he was about her head! Everybody round where she lived knew about him. Everybody had heard of his successes,--‘My son, who is a scholar of Ananias.... My son, who is a Prizeman of his University.... My son, who won this year’s Rutherford Prize....’ Great was her reward for having devoted her life to him and his education, and for having turned a deaf ear to those suitors who had tried to marry her when she was a young widow. She wasn’t even now, twenty years later, an old widow, but she was a widow who was less young.
She lived in one of those suburbs where much is done for the mind. She was popular in it, and looked up to. She was, in fact, one of its leading lights,--cultivated, lady-like, well-read, artistic, interested in each new movement that came along. And of a most pleasing appearance, too, being slender at an age when the mothers of the grown-up are sometimes so no longer, dark haired among the grey, smooth among the puckered, and her eyes had no crow’s feet, and were calm and beautifully clear.
She was serenely happy. The _milieu_ suited her exactly. She had come to South Winch twenty years before from Kensington--real Kensington, not West or North, but the part that clusters round the Albert Hall--on her husband’s death, because of having to be frugal, but soon discovered it was the very place for her. Far better, she intelligently recognised, to be a leading light in a suburb, and know and be known by everybody, than extinguished and invisible in London. Besides, spring came to the suburbs in a way it never did to London, and it was the custom in South Winch, where people were determined to think highly, to think particularly highly of spring. At the bottom of her half acre there was only an iron railing separating her from a real meadow belonging to the big villa of a prosperous City man, and spring, she told the Rector, who was also a Canon, did things in that meadow it would never dream of doing near the Albert Hall.