Part 6

‘I’m sorry,’ said Jocelyn, carefully coming down the remaining stairs and depositing the trunk sideways in the narrow passage, for though the trunk, as a trunk, was small, the passage, as a passage, was smaller; and in his turn as he looked at her he grew red, for he had just remembered that he never said damn in the presence of his mother or of the other ladies of South Winch, which was a place one didn’t swear in, however much and unexpectedly he chanced to hurt himself. Was this _laissez aller_ in Sally’s presence due to his consciousness that she wasn’t a lady, or due to the fact that she was his wife? Jocelyn disliked both these explanations, and accordingly, in his turn, grew red.

‘Forgive me, Sally,’ he said for the second time within half an hour.

This time she had no doubt as to what had to be forgiven.

‘Promise not to do it no more,’ she begged. ‘Promise now--do.’

‘Oh Sally, I’ll promise anything, anything,’ said Jocelyn staring at her, caught again into emotion by the extraordinary beauty of her troubled face.

‘Father says,’ said Sally, still looking at him through tears, ‘that if somebody swears, then they drinks. An’ if they drinks, then they swears. An’ it goes ‘and in ‘and, and they don’t stop ever, once they starts, till they gets to----.’

She broke off, and stood looking at him in silence. The picture was too awful a one. She couldn’t go on.

‘What do they get to, my angel, my beautiful angel?’ asked Jocelyn, kissing her softly, not listening any more.

‘’Ell,’ whispered Sally.

‘Now _you’re_ swearing,’ murmured Jocelyn dreamily, no longer fully conscious, shutting her eyes with kisses. ‘Your sweet, sweet eyes,’ he murmured, kissing them over and over again.

No, Sally couldn’t make head or tail of Mr. Luke. Better not try. Better give it up. _She_ swearing?

§

She longed very much for the company of Mr. Pinner.

‘Father,’ she thought, while Jocelyn was fetching the car, and she was standing alone in the passage watching the luggage, for she had been bred carefully never to leave luggage an instant by itself, ‘Father--_’e_ could tell me.’

What she wanted Mr. Pinner to tell her wasn’t at all clear in her mind, but she was quite clear that he would tell her if he could, whereas Jocelyn, who certainly could, wouldn’t. Mr. Luke, she felt in her bones, even if she had the courage to ask him anything would only be angry with her because she didn’t already know it; yet how could she know it if nobody had ever told her? At home they usedn’t to jump down one’s throat if one asked a question. ‘Snug,’ thought Sally, her head drooping in wistful recollection, while with the point of her umbrella she affectionately stroked the sides of the tin trunk, ‘snug at ’ome in the shop--snug at ’ome in the lil’ shop--’ and whatever else being married to a gentleman was, it wasn’t snug.

Marriage to a gentleman--why, you never knew where you were from one moment to another; nothing settled about it; no cut and come again feeling; all ups and downs, without, as one might say, any middles; all either cross looks or, without warning, red ears, kisses, and oh-Sallyings. It was as if words weren’t the same when a gentleman got hold of them. They seemed somehow to separate. Queer, thought Sally, wistfully stroking the tin trunk.

She groped round in her hazy thoughts. She was in a strange country, and there was a fog, and yet she had somehow to get somewhere. _She_ swearing?

§

The car came round, and Jocelyn came in.

‘Hasn’t Cupp turned up yet?’ he asked.

Sally shook her head.

‘I want him to help me cord the luggage on,’ said Jocelyn, squeezing past between her and the trunk.

‘I can,’ said Sally.

‘No you can’t,’ snapped Jocelyn, striding to the kitchen door and opening it.

‘Is Mr. Cupp anywhere about?’ he haughtily asked the figure bent over the saucepan. He needed his help, or nothing would have induced him to speak to Mrs. Cupp again.

‘No,’ said Mrs. Cupp, without ceasing to stir; but being a good woman, who tried always to speak the truth, she amplified this into accuracy. ‘’E’s somewhere, but he ain’t about,’ said Mrs. Cupp.

For, having, a short way with her when it came to husbands, she had turned the key that morning on Cupp while he was still asleep, well knowing that he wouldn’t dare get banging and shouting lest the neighbours should find out his wife had locked him in, and his shame become public. Besides, he was aware of the reason, and would keep quiet all right, she having had a straight talk with him the night before.

Cupp had been discomfited.

‘Don’t you go thinkin’ you’re goin’ to get adulteratin’ at your age and after ’avin’ been a decent ’usband these fifteen years,’ said Mrs. Cupp.

’Oo’s been adulteratin’?’ growled Cupp, strong in the knowledge that he hadn’t, but weak in the consciousness that he would have liked to have.

‘In your ’eart you ’ave, Cupp,’ said Mrs. Cupp, who had her Bible at her fingers’ ends, ‘and Scripture says it’s the same thing.’

Cupp at this sighed deeply, for he knew it wasn’t.

‘Scripture says,’ said Mrs. Cupp, sitting up very straight in bed and addressing Cupp’s back as he lay speechless beside her, ‘that ’ooso looks at a woman an’ lusts after ’er ’as committed adultery with ’er in ’is ’eart. Ain’t you been lookin’ at that there girl and lustin’ after ’er in your ’eart, Cupp? Ain’t you? Why, I _seen_ you. Seen you doin’ it round doors, seen you doin’ it out of winders. You been adulteratin’ all over the place. _I’ll_ learn you to get lustin’----’

And when she went downstairs in the morning she locked him in.

So Jocelyn had to carry out the luggage himself, bidding Sally stay where she was and wait quietly till he called her, and cording it on without the assistance, curtly refused, of the loungers against the sea-wall.

His mother’s luggage on their little holiday jaunts had been so neat, so easily handled, fixed on in two minutes; but the tin trunk was a difficult, slippery shape, and anyhow an ignoble object. Every aspect of it annoyed him. It was like going about with a servant’s luggage, he thought, wrestling with the thing, which was too high and not long enough, and refused to fit in with his suitcase.

‘Off?’ inquired one of the loungers affably.

‘Looks like it,’ said Jocelyn, tugging at the cord.

What a question. Silly ass. ‘Do you mind standing a little further back?’ he said with icy anger. ‘You see, if you come so close I can’t get----’ he tugged--‘any----’ he tugged, setting his teeth--‘_purchase_----’

Nobody moved; neither the particular lounger he was speaking to, nor the others.

‘Upon my word, sir,’ said Jocelyn, jerking round furiously, ready to fight the lot of them.

But they were not attending to him. Their eyes were all fixed on the parlour window, to which Sally, so anxious not to keep Jocelyn waiting a minute when he called as to risk disobeying him, had stolen to see how near ready he was.

There she stood, almost full length, the blind, now that they were leaving, drawn up, and the sun shining straight on her. St. Mawes had not had such a chance before. Its other glimpses of her had been flashes. Nor had the place in all its history ever till now been visited by beauty. Pretty girls had passed through it and disappeared, or stayed in it and disappeared equally completely because of growing old, and there was a tradition that in the last century the doctor had had a wife who for a brief time was very pretty, and during that brief time caused considerable uproar; but no one living had seen her, it was all hearsay from the last generation. This at the window wasn’t hearsay. This was the thing itself, the rare, heavenly thing at its most exquisite moment. Naturally the loungers took no further heed of Jocelyn; naturally with one accord they lifted up their eyes, and greedily drank in.

Jocelyn gave the cord one final and very vicious tug, knotted it somehow, and ran indoors.

‘What on earth you must go and stand at the window for----’ he exclaimed, hurrying into the room and catching her by the arm. ‘I was going to fetch you in a minute. Come along, then--let’s start, let’s get out of this confounded place. Ready? Got everything? I don’t want any delays once we’re outside----’

Hastily he looked round the room; there was nothing there. Hastily he looked over Sally; she seemed complete. Then he rushed her out to the car exactly as if, head downwards, they were both plunging into something most unpleasant which had to be gone through before they could escape to freedom.

‘Monstrous, monstrous,’ said Jocelyn to himself. ‘The whole thing is incredible and fantastic. I might be the impresario of a prima donna or a cinema star’--and he remembered, though at the time, like so many other things, it had drifted past his ears unnoticed, that that grotesque creature his father-in-law had said Sally had a gift for collecting crowds.

How painfully true, thought Jocelyn, plunging into the one waiting outside. What a regrettable gift. Of all gifts this was the one he could best have done without in anybody he was obliged to be with; for he hated crowds, he hated public attention, he was thin-skinned and sensitive directly anything pulled him out of the happy oblivion of his work. As far as he had got in life, and it seemed to him a long way, he judged that quite the best of all conditions was to sit in an eye-proof shell, invisible to and unconscious of what is usually called the world. And speculate; and discover; and verify.

Well, no use thinking of that now.

‘Get in, get in,’ he urged under his breath, helping Sally with such energy that she was clumsier at it than usual. ‘Never mind the rug--you can arrange that afterwards. Here--I’ll hold the umbrella----’

They got off. He could drive perfectly well, yet they got off only after a series of forward bounds and the stopping of his engine. But they did get off--through the loungers, past the windows with heads at them, round the sharp corner beyond the houses, up the extraordinarily steep hill.

Sally held her breath. This hill terrified her. Suppose the car, which each time seemed very nearly to stop on it, stopped quite, couldn’t go on at all, and they rolled down backwards, down, down, straight into the sea?

But they reached the top safely. It wasn’t the car that rolled down backwards that day; it was the tin trunk, and with it Jocelyn’s suitcase.

Unconscious, they drove on towards Truro.

VII

§

They drove in total silence. Jocelyn had much to think of, and not for anything would Sally have opened her mouth when Mr. Luke’s was shut in that particular tight line. He had see-sawed back again, she knew, and was at the opposite end to what she called his oh-Sally condition. Besides, she never did say anything when she was in the car, however much he tried to make her, for from the beginning, even before there were hills, it had frightened her. Cars hadn’t come Mr. Pinner’s way, and, except for the one drive with Jocelyn that first day of his courting, she had had no experience of them till now.

This one gave her little joy. It went so fast; it had hairsbreadth escapes at corners; it had twice run over chickens, causing words with other angry gentlemen, and it was full inside, where she had to sit, of important and dangerous-looking handles and pedals that had to have the rug and her dress and her feet and her umbrella carefully kept clear of them, or there would be that which she called to herself, catching her breath with fear, an accident.

Jocelyn had said once, very peremptorily and making hurried movements with his left hand, ‘For goodness sake don’t let that rug get mixed up with the gears----’ for the car was a Morris-Cowley, and what Sally thought of with anxiety as them ’andles were between her and Jocelyn, and it had been enough. The tone of his voice on that occasion had revealed to her that a combination of rug and gears, and therefore of anything else and gears, such as dress, feet or umbrella, would be instantly disastrous, and he never had to say it again.

For the rest of the honeymoon she sat squeezed together as far away from the alarming things as she could, the rug tucked with anxious care tightly round her legs, and her feet cramped up in the corner. She was very uncomfortable, but that mattered nothing to Sally. Even if she hadn’t been afraid of what might happen, her own comfort, when the wishes of her elders and betters were in question, wouldn’t have been given a thought. The Pinners were like that. Their humility and patience would have been remarkable even in a saint, and as for their bumps of veneration, they were so big that that country would indeed be easy to govern which should be populated by many Pinners.

The late Mrs. Pinner, not of course herself a Pinner proper, but of the more turbulent blood of a race from Tottenham called Skew, had disliked these virtues in Mr. Pinner, and thought and frequently told him that a shopkeeper shouldn’t have them at all. A shopkeeper’s job, she often explained, was to leave off being poor as soon as possible, and Mr. Pinner never at any time left off being that--all because, Mrs. Pinner asserted, he had no go; and having no go was her way of describing patience and humility. But in Sally, when these qualities began to appear, she encouraged them, for they made for the child’s safety, they kept her obedient and unquestioning, they sent her cheerfully to bed when other girls were going to the pictures, and caused her to be happy for hours on end by herself in the back parlour performing simple duties. Besides, though Mrs. Pinner would have been hard put to it to give it a name, in Sally patience and humility were somehow different from what they were in Pinner. They held their heads up more. They didn’t get their tails between their legs. They were in fact in Sally, though Mrs. Pinner could only feel this dumbly, never getting anywhere near thinking it, not abject things that quivered in corners, but gracious things that came to meet one with a smile.

Filled, then, as ever, with these meek virtues, Sally, squeezed into as little space as possible, and bracing herself, having got safely to the top of the hill, to meet the next terror, which was the twisty, slippery, narrow steep road down to the ferry, and the twisty, slippery, narrow steep road up from it on the other side, and after that the terror of every corner, round each of which she was sure would lurk a broad-beamed charabanc,--was carried in the Morris-Cowley in the direction of Truro. Here, Jocelyn supposed, they had better stay the night. Here there were hotels, and he would be able to consider what he would do next.

He urged the little car along as fast as it would go, for he was possessed by the feeling that if he only got away fast enough he would get away altogether. But get away altogether from what? Certainly from St. Mawes, and Mrs. Cupp, and the loungers who all of course also supposed he and Sally weren’t married. That was the first, the immediate necessity. He had not only been turned out, but turned out, he said to himself, with contumely,--no use saying it to Sally, because she wouldn’t know what contumely was, and it did seem to him really rather absurd to be going about with somebody who had never heard even of such an ordinary thing as contumely.

It wasn’t her fault, of course, but the turning out and the contumely were obviously because of her; there was no denying that. His mother would have been sitting in those rooms at this moment, the most prized and cherished of lodgers. Obviously the whole thing was Sally’s fault, though he quite admitted she couldn’t help it. But it merely made it worse that she couldn’t, for it took away one’s confidence in the future, besides making it unfair to say anything unkind.

Feeling that if he did say anything it might easily be unkind, he kept his mouth tight shut, and drove in total silence; and Sally, whenever the road was fairly straight and could be left for a moment unwatched, looked at him out of the corners of her eyelashes, and was very sorry for Usband, who seemed upset again.

‘Stomach,’ concluded Sally, who could find no other explanation for Jocelyn’s ups and downs; and wondered whether she would ever dare bring to his notice a simple remedy her father, who sometimes suffered too but with less reserve, always had by him.

Well, there was one thing to be said for all this, thought Jocelyn, his stern eye fixed straight ahead, his brow severe, as he hurried the car along the road to the ferry--he was now awake. At last. High time too. Till then, from the day he first saw Sally, in spite of moments of grave spiritual disturbance and annoyance, he had been in a feverish dream. Out of this dream Mrs. Cupp’s conduct had shaken him, and he believed he might now be regarded as through with the phase in which he thought of nothing but the present and let the future go hang. Now he had to think. Decisions were being forced on him. Holidays end, but life goes on; honeymoons finish, but wives don’t. Here he was with a wife, and upon his soul, thought Jocelyn, precious little else,--no career, no plans, no lodgings.

What a position. The lodgings, of course, were a small thing, but how being turned out of them rankled! His life had been so dignified. He and his mother had never once come across a member of the lower classes who was rude. At South Winch all was order, decency, esteem in their own set and respectfulness from everybody else. At Ananias what order, what decency, what esteem, what respectfulness. Impossible at Ananias, however modest one might be, not to know that one was looked upon as a present pride and a future adornment, with the Master at the top of the scale invariably remembering who one was and graciously smiling, and at the bottom the almost affectionate attentions of one’s warm and panting bedmaker. Impossible, too, not to know, though this, except for the pleasure it gave his mother, was of no sort of consequence, that South Winch regarded him with interest. These attitudes hadn’t at all disarranged Jocelyn’s grave balance, hadn’t at all turned his head, because of his real and complete absorption in his work; but they had been there--a fitting and seemly background, a sunny, sheltering wall against which he could expand, in quiet security, the flowers of his ambitions.

Now here he was, kicked out into the street--it amounted to that--by a person of the utmost obscurity called Cupp. Conceive it. Conceive having got into a position in which anybody called Cupp could humiliate him.

He banged his fist down on the electric horn as an outlet to his feelings. It gave a brief squeak, and was silent.

‘Horn’s gone wrong,’ he said, pressing it hard but getting nothing more out of it.

Sally’s heart gave a thump. To have anything go wrong at such a moment! For they were on that road cut in the hillside, narrow, twisty, slippery and steep, which leads on the St. Mawes side down through a wood, charming that late March afternoon with the mild sun slanting through the pale, grey-green branches of naked trees across flocks of primroses, to the King Harry Ferry. Far down on Sally’s side she could have seen, if she had dared look, the placid waters of the Fal, unruffled in their deep shelter by the wind that was blowing along the open country at the top. Her anxious eyes, however, were not in search of scenery--at no time was she anything of a hand at scenery,--they were strained towards each fresh corner as it came in sight; for one day they had met a charabanc round one of those very corners, a great wide horror taking up nearly all the road. But luckily that day they were coming up the hill, not going down it, and so they had the inside, and not the unprotected, terrifying outside edge. Now they were outside, and suppose....

‘Horn’s gone wrong,’ said Jocelyn, just as she was thinking that.

But did it matter? she asked herself, seeking comfort. She tried to hope it didn’t. Horns weren’t like wheels. One didn’t depend on them for getting along. They just made noises. Useful, as one’s voice was useful, but not essential, like one’s legs.

No, it didn’t matter much, evidently, for Usband was saying he would put it right while they were on the ferry,--and then her heart gave a much bigger thump, and seemed to leap into her mouth and crouch there trembling, for there, round the very next corner, a few yards in front of them, was another charabanc.

‘My gracious goodness,’ thought Sally, the colour ebbing out of her face as she stiffened in her seat and held on tighter. ‘My gracious _goodness_----’

But it was going down too; thank heaven it was going down too--making, even as they were making, for the ferry.

Jocelyn banged again on his horn, which gave another weak squeak and then was silent.

‘Oh, ’e ain’t goin’ to try and pass it? ’E ain’t goin’ to try and pass it?’ Sally asked herself, clutching the side of the car.

The charabanc, however, was unaware that anything had come down the hill behind it, and continued in the middle of the narrow road; and to Sally’s relief Jocelyn stole quietly along close up to its back, for he thought that if he kept right up against it and made no noise the people in it wouldn’t be able to see Sally, and he wouldn’t have to sit there impotently watching the look spreading over their faces when they caught sight of her that by now he knew only too well.

All went smoothly till they were on the ferry. The charabanc drove straight to the farther end of it, and Jocelyn slipped along close behind, and then, getting out, still unobserved, opened his bonnet and began to deal with the horn.

He had no side-horn with him. It had been removed by an idiot who lived on his staircase at Ananias, and who constantly saw fun where no one else did. He saw fun in removing Jocelyn’s horn; and though on serious representations being made he restored it, it hadn’t been fixed on again, because Jocelyn soon after that met Sally, and everything else was blotted from his mind. Now he remembered it, and cursed the silly idiot through whose fault it wasn’t at that moment on the car. Still, he would soon set the electric one right; there couldn’t be much the matter with it.

He proceeded, his head inside the bonnet, to set it right, and Sally, feeling safe for a bit with Jocelyn outside the car, looked on sympathetically. She wanted to help, if only by holding something, but knew she mustn’t move. The back of the great charabanc towered above their little two-seater as the stern of a liner towers above a tug. All was quiet up there. The tops of the heads of the last row of passengers were motionless, their owners no doubt being engaged in contemplating the scenery of the Fal.

Then suddenly under Jocelyn’s manipulations the horn began to blow, and the row of heads, startled into attentiveness by this unexpected shrieking immediately underneath them, turned and peered down over the edge of the charabanc’s back. Then they saw Sally, and their peering became fixed.

But Jocelyn had no time for that now; what was of importance at the moment was that the horn wouldn’t stop. It shrieked steadily; and though he leapt backwards and forwards from the part of it that was in the bonnet to the part of it that was on the steering-wheel and did things rapidly and violently in both places, it went on shrieking.

Here was a nice thing, he thought, to happen to a man whose one aim was to be unnoticed. It was fortunate that the noise drowned what he was saying, for so Sally hadn’t the shock of hearing him break his recent promise; and, much surprised at the conduct of the horn, she was shaken out of her usual prudent silence and was moved to draw Jocelyn’s attention to its behaviour by remarking, on one of his flying visits to the steering wheel, that it wasn’t half hollering.

‘Oh, shut _up_!’ cried Jocelyn, beside himself; and who knows whether he meant Sally or the horn?