Part 7

Sally took it that he was addressing the horn, and observed sympathetically that it didn’t seem to want to.

‘If only I had a small screwdriver!’ cried Jocelyn, frantically throwing out the contents of his tool-box in search of what wasn’t there. ‘I don’t seem to have a small screwdriver--a _small_ screwdriver--has anybody got a _small_ screwdriver?’

The ferryman had no screwdriver, big or small, and the driver of the charabanc, descended from his place to come and look on, had none small enough; while as for the passengers, now all standing on their seats and craning their necks, nothing was to be expected of them except absorption in Sally.

‘Scissors would do--scissors, scissors!’ cried Jocelyn, who felt that if the horn didn’t stop he would go mad.

Nobody had any scissors except Sally, who got on her feet quickly and delightedly, because now she could help--the heads craned more than ever--and said she had a pair at the bottom of her trunk.

‘No, no,’ said Jocelyn, unable even for the sake of perhaps stopping the horn to face uncording and unpacking before the whole ferry that terrible tin trunk of hers. ‘Sit still, Sally----’

And he began to hit whatever part seemed nearest to the noise with his clenched fist.

‘_That_ won’t do no good,’ said the driver of the charabanc, grinning.

The grin spread to the face of the ferryman, and began to appear on the faces piled up over the top of the charabanc.

Jocelyn saw it, and suddenly froze into icy impassiveness. Whatever the damned horn chose to do he wasn’t going to provide entertainment for a lot of blasted trippers. Besides--was he losing his temper? He, who had supposed for years that he hadn’t got one?

He slammed the bonnet to, flung the tools back into their box, got into his seat again, and sat waiting to drive off the ferry with a completely expressionless face, just as if nothing at all were happening; and Sally, deluded by his calm into supposing that he thought the horn was now all right, after waiting a moment anxiously and seeing that he didn’t do anything more, nudged him gently and told him it was still blowing.

‘Is it?’ said Jocelyn; and there was something in the look he gave her that made her more sure than ever that speech with Usband was a mistake.

It blew all the way to Truro. That was the nearest place where the thing could be taken to a garage, and kicked to pieces if nothing else would stop it. For ten miles it blew steadily. They streamed, shrieking, along the lanes and out on to the main road. The drive was a nightmare of astonished faces, of people rushing out of cottages, of children shouting, of laughter flashing and gone, to be succeeded by more and more, till the whole of every mile seemed one huge exclamation.

Sally squeezed terror-stricken into her corner. Such speed as this she had never dreamed of, nor had it ever yet been got out of the Morris-Cowley. She could only cling and hope. The noise was deafening. The little car leapt into the air at every bump in the road. Jocelyn’s face was like a marble mask. The charabanc, being bound for Falmouth, turned off to the left at the main road, and the passengers rose as one man in their seats and waved handkerchiefs of farewell; while Sally, even at such a moment unable not to be polite, let go the side of the car an instant to search with trembling fingers for her handkerchief and wave it back.

§

At Truro he stopped at the first garage he saw, a small one in the outlying part of the town, where there were few passers-by. The few there were, however, immediately collected round the car that swooped down the hill on them hooting, and still went on hooting in spite of having stopped.

How simple, if it had been his mother who was with him, to have asked her to walk on to an hotel or a confectioner’s, and wait for him while he had the horn seen to. She would have proceeded through the town unobserved and unmolested, and the hotel or confectioner would have received her without curiosity, and attended respectfully to her wants. Or she might have waited in the car, and there too she would have aroused neither interest nor comment. A lady, you see. A lady, turning, like a decent Italian house, her plain and expressionless side to the public of the street, and keeping her other side, her strictly private and delightful other side, for her family and friends.

He hurried Sally into the garage, into the furthermost depths of the garage. Not for her, he felt, were quiet walks alone through streets and unquestioning acceptance at hotels; not for him the convenience, the comfort, of a companion who in a crisis needn’t be bothered about, who automatically became effaced. Nothing effaced Sally. Her deplorable conspicuousness made it impossible for her to go anywhere without him. She had to be accompanied and protected as watchfully as if she were the Crown Jewels. Yes, or a perambulator with a baby in it that could never be left alone for an instant, and was always having to be pushed about by somebody. That somebody was himself, Jocelyn Luke; Jocelyn Luke, who as recently as a month ago was working away, hopeful and absorbed, immersed in profoundly interesting and important studies, independent, with nothing at all to trammel him or hinder him--with, on the contrary, everything and everybody conspiring to leave him as untrammelled and unhindered as possible. What was he now? Why, the perambulator’s nursemaid. Just that: the perambulator’s attendant nursemaid.

This seemed to Jocelyn fantastic.

‘Wait here, will you?’ he said, hurrying her into the garage and depositing her like a parcel in the remotest corner. ‘Don’t move, will you, till I fetch you----’

And he left her there, safe as far as he could see, and went back to the shrieking car.

She sat down thankfully on a pile of empty petrol cans. If only she could be left there for a good long while, if only she could spend the rest of the day there.... ‘Don’t move,’ Usband had said; as though she wanted to! Except that she was very hungry, really hungry now that her fears were over, for she had had no dinner yet, and it was two o’clock, how happy would she have been to stay there without moving for the rest of the afternoon. The quiet corner, away from danger, away from having to guess what she ought to say to Usband, and away from the look he gave her when she had said it, seemed almost perfect. It would have been quite perfect if there had been anything to eat.

And as if in answer to her wish, the little door into a shed at the back opened, and in walked a youth, smudged and pasty-looking as those look who work much in garages, bearing in his hand a basin tied up in a crimson handkerchief.

This was young Mr. Soper, the most promising of the mechanics employed at the garage, who daily ate his dinner in that corner. There he could sit on the pile of empty petrol cans, out of sight and yet within earshot should his services suddenly be called for; and on this particular day, his firm having been by chance extra busy all the morning, he had gone later than usual into the private shed at the back to fetch the basin of food left there for him by his landlady’s little son, so that when Jocelyn took Sally into the corner it was empty, because Mr. Soper, instead of being in the middle of his dinner as he would have been on other days, was in the act of collecting it in the shed.

‘Beg pardon, Miss,’ he said, staring at Sally, his mouth dropping open. ‘Beg pardon, I’m sure, Miss----’

And he put his arm quickly back round the door he had just come through and whipped out a chair. ‘Won’t you--won’t you sit more comfortable, Miss?’

‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said Sally, getting up and smiling politely.

Mr. Soper’s pasty face became bright red at that smile. He proceeded to dust the seat of the chair by rubbing the bottom of his handkerchiefed basin up and down it, and then stood staring at the young lady, the basin dangling sideways in his hand, held carelessly by the knotted corners of its handkerchief, and some of its gravy accordingly dribbling out.

‘It do smell nice, don’t it,’ remarked Sally as she sat down, unable to refrain from sniffing.

‘What do, Miss?’ asked Mr. Soper, recognising with almost incredulous pleasure a manner of speech with which he was at his ease.

‘Wot you got in that there basin,’ said Sally, also recognising, and also with pleasure, accents since her marriage become very dear to her because reminiscent of home.

She smiled with the utmost friendliness at him. Mr. Soper found it difficult to believe his eyes.

‘It’s my dinner,’ said Mr. Soper, gazing at the vision.

‘Well, I didn’t suppose it was your Sunday ’at,’ said Sally, pleased to find that she too, given a chance, could say clever things. ‘Tell by the smell it ain’t a nat.’

Mr. Soper also seemed to think this clever, for he laughed, as Sally put it to herself, like anything.

‘Stew?’ she asked, her delicate nose describing little half circles of appreciative inquiry.

‘That’s right,’ said Mr. Soper. ‘Irish.’

‘Thought so,’ said Sally; and added with a sigh, ‘the best of the lot.’

Mr. Soper being intelligent, though handicapped at the moment by not quite believing his eyes, thought he here perceived encouragement to untie the handkerchief. He put the basin on the floor at the young lady’s feet, and untied it. She gazed at the lovely contents, at potatoes showing their sleek sides through the brimming gravy, at little ends of slender cutlets, at glimpses of bright carrots, at pearly-shouldered onions gleaming from luscious depths, with such evident longing that he was emboldened to ask her if she wouldn’t oblige him by tasting it, and telling him her opinion of it as a stew.

‘There’s stews and stews, you know, Miss,’ he said, hastily arranging it on an empty packing-case convenient for her, ‘but my old woman’s who looks after me is ’ard to beat----’

And he ran into the little shed he had come out of, and after a minute’s rummaging brought her a spoon and plate. His own spoon was in his pocket. He didn’t use a plate.

Sally tasted; and, having tasted, went on tasting. Soon there was danger that Mr. Soper’s dinner would be so much tasted that there wouldn’t be any left, but he cared nothing for that. If he had had a hundred stews, and he starving, they should all have been the young lady’s.

Sally tried not to taste too much, but she was so hungry, and the stew was so lovely. Besides, the young man kept urging her to go on. He was more like a friend than any one she had yet met. That he should never take his eyes off her didn’t disturb her in the least, for she had been used to that all her life; and his language was her language, and he didn’t make her feel nervous, and she knew instinctively that she could do nothing wrong in his sight, and she talked more to him during the half hour they ate the stew together--for she presently insisted on his getting another plate and joining in--than she had talked to Jocelyn the whole time they had known each other; talked more to him, indeed, than she had ever talked to anybody, except, when she was little, to those girl friends who had later fallen away.

How surprising, how delightful, the ease with which she said things to Mr. Soper, and the things that came into her head to say! Quite clever, she was; quite sharp, and quick at the take-up. And laugh--why, the young fellow made her laugh so that she could hardly keep from choking. Not in all her life had she laughed as Mr. Soper made her laugh. Bright, he was, and no mistake. While as for Mr. Soper himself, who could be much, much brighter, he was fortunately kept damped down to his simpler jokes by the effect the strange young lady’s loveliness had on him; so that he who in Truro was known as the life of his set, as the boldest of its wits as well as the most daring of its ladies’ men, was as mild and timid in his preliminary frisks with Sally as a lately born lamb exploring, for the first time, the beautiful strange world it had suddenly discovered.

§

Jocelyn found them there, the empty basin on the floor between them, and, sticking up in it, two spoons.

‘My ’usband,’ introduced Sally, starting a little, for she had forgotten Jocelyn; and Mr. Soper had what he afterwards described as the turn of his life.

She with a husband? She who was hardly old enough, if you asked him, to have a father even? Got a husband all the time, and eaten his stew. He didn’t grudge her the stew, but he did think she ought to have told him she had a husband. Fancy eating his stew, and knowing she had a husband the whole time. It seemed to make it unfair. It seemed to make it somehow false pretences. And one of these blinking gentlemen, too; one of your haw-haw chaps with the brains of a rabbit, thought Mr. Soper, looking Jocelyn up and down, who took no notice of him whatever. See that written all over him, thought Mr. Soper, seeking comfort in derision,--a silly fool who couldn’t even mend his own horn. Wicked, he called it, wicked, to thieve this girl away from her own lot, filch her, before she knew what she was about, from her natural mates, go-ahead chaps like, for instance, himself, when there were thousands of female rabbits in his own class who would have fitted him like so many blooming gloves.

‘Class should stick to class,’ said Mr. Soper to himself, who belonged to at least four societies for violently welding all classes into one, the one being Mr. Soper’s.

Jocelyn ignored him. (‘Haw, haw,’ thought Mr. Soper derisively, hurt by this, and sticking out a chin that no one noticed.) Shutting his eyes to the hideous evidence of the two spoons in the basin, to which he would refer, he decided, later, he took Sally’s arm and hurried her out to the now silent Morris-Cowley. This had not been his intention when he came in. He had intended to tell her that he had just discovered the loss of the luggage, that he was going back at once to look for it, and leave her there, where she was safe and private, till he came back.

The sight of the basin and spoons forced him to other decisions. She was obviously neither safe nor private. He said nothing at all, but gripping her arm with, perhaps, unnecessary vigour seeing how unresistingly she went, hurried her out of the place and helped her, again with, perhaps, unnecessary vigour into her seat, slamming the door on her and hastening round to the other side to his own.

Mr. Soper, however, was hard on their heels. Nothing if not nippy, he was determined to see the last of her who not only was the first human being he had met to whom he could imagine going down on his knees, but also--thus did romance and reality mingle in his mind--who contained at that moment at least three-quarters of his Irish stew. It seemed to give him a claim on her. Inside himself was the remaining quarter, and it did seem to unite them. Mortified as he was, deceived as he felt himself to be, he yet couldn’t help, in his mind, making a joke about this union, which he thought so good that he decided to tell it to his friends that night at the whist-drive he was going to--it need not be repeated here,--and he was so excessively nippy, such a very smart, all-there, seize-your-opportunity young man, that he actually managed to say in Sally’s left ear during the brief moment Jocelyn was on his way round to the other side, bending down ostensibly to examine the near back tyre, ‘Whatever did you want to go and marry one of them haw-haw fellers for, when there was----’

But what there was Sally never heard, for at that instant the car leaped forward, leaving him on the kerb alone.

There he stood, looking after it; apparently merely a pale, contemptuous mechanic, full of the proper scorn for a shabby little four-year-old two-seater--he could of course date it exactly--but really a baffled young man who had just been pulled up and thwarted in the very act of falling, for the first time in his life, passionately and humbly in love.

§

The Thistle and Goat was where Jocelyn took her. It was the first hotel he saw. He had to deposit her somewhere; he couldn’t take her with him in search of the luggage, and have her hanging round while he picked it up and corded it on again, and making friends with anybody who came along. Would she obey him and stay in the bedroom, or would he be forced to the absurdity of locking her in? He was so seriously upset by the various misfortunes of the day that he was ready to behave with almost any absurdity. He was quite ready, for instance, to fight that spotted oaf at the garage; he had itched to knock him down, and had only been restrained by a vision of the crowd that would collect, and a consciousness of how it would advertise Sally. To lock her in her room was, he admitted, a violent sort of thing to do, and violence, he had been brought up to believe, was always vulgar and ridiculous, but it would anyhow be effective. Definite and strongly simple measures were, he perceived, needful with Sally, especially when one was in a hurry. He couldn’t, with the luggage lying somewhere on the road between Truro and St. Mawes, probably burst open and indecently scattered and exposed, start explaining to Sally all the things she was on no account to do while he was away collecting it. He certainly would explain; and fully; and clearly; for the spoon and basin business had been simply disgusting, and he was going to put a stop to that sort of thing once and forever, but not now,--not till there was plenty of time, so that he really might have a chance of getting into her head at least the beginning of a glimmer of what a lady simply couldn’t do. And he was so angry that he corrected this sentence, and instead of the word lady substituted the wife of a gentleman.

He locked her in.

‘If any one knocks,’ he told her before leaving her, ‘you will call out that you have locked the door, as you wish to be undisturbed. You understand me, Sally? That’s what you are to say--nothing else. Exactly and only that.’

‘Right O,’ said Sally, a little dejectedly, for his tone and expression discouraged cheerfulness, and preparing to lock the door behind him.

But it was he who locked it, much to her surprise, deftly pulling the key out of the inside of the door and slipping it into the outside before she realised what he was doing; and she heard him, having turned it, draw it out and go away.

Yes, she was locked in all right.

‘Whatever----’ began Sally in her thoughts; then gave it up, and sat down patiently on the edge of the wicker arm-chair to wait for the next thing that would happen to her.

‘Glad I ’ad that there stew,’ she reflected.

‘My wife,’ said Jocelyn to the lady in the office downstairs, as he went out still with the frown on his face caused by the realisation that he hadn’t given Sally any reason for his suddenly leaving her, and that she hadn’t asked for any--was that companionship?--‘wishes to be undisturbed till I come back.’

‘_I_ see,’ said the lady, with what seemed to him rather a curious emphasis, and she was about to inquire where his luggage was, for the Thistle and Goat liked to know where luggage was, when he strode away.

Now what did she see, Jocelyn asked himself. Nobody had ever said _I_ see like that to any orders given when he was travelling with his mother. The emphasis was marked. It sounded, he thought, both suspicious and pert. He went out to the car, strangling a desire to go back and ask her what she saw. Did she too think he wasn’t really married? No, no--nonsense. Probably she saw and meant nothing. Really he was becoming sensitive beyond all dignity, he thought as he drove off on his unpleasant and difficult quest.

But the lady in the office had merely expressed herself badly. What was worrying her was not what she saw but what she didn’t see, and what she didn’t see was luggage. The Thistle and Goat, in common with other hotels, liked luggage. It preferred luggage to be left rather than ladies. Now the gentleman had gone off without saying a word about it, and she tried to reassure herself by hoping, what was indeed true, that he had gone to fetch it, and that she need do nothing about it, anyhow for the present. And hardly had she settled down to a cup of after-luncheon tea in the back office when the luggage arrived, brought in by a different gentleman, and one, to her great relief, whom she knew--young Mr. Carruthers, of Trevinion Manor.

Great was the confidence the Thistle and Goat had in the family of Carruthers, whom it had known all its life. No orders given by a passing tourist could have any weight when balanced against a Carruthers request. So that when young Mr. Carruthers, learning that Mr. Luke had lately left in his car, asked to see Mrs. Luke in order to hand over her luggage personally and desired his card to be sent up, regardless of the orders given by Mr. Luke the card was sent up and the message given; and Sally received both it and the message, for the chambermaid, finding the door locked and getting no answer, because Sally thought that by saying nothing she wouldn’t be telling any lies, unlocked it with her pass-key; and Sally, having heard the message and received the card, issued forth obediently. Naturally she did. Usband had said nothing about not leaving the room. She wanted her tin box, and to get unpacked. Besides, when anybody sent for her she always went.

What had happened was that young Carruthers, strolling down as usual just before lunch across the fields to the sea-front, had found the window of the Cupp parlour flung wide open, and Mrs. Cupp vigorously shaking the hearth-rug out of it. Evidently her lodgers had left; and he went in and began asking her about them, and very soon discovered that the lean chap was Jocelyn Luke--Luke of Ananias, as Carruthers, himself at Oxford, instantly identified him, for there couldn’t well be two Jocelyn Lukes, and his reputation had ebbed across to Oxford, where he was known not unfavourably, and perhaps as on the whole the least hopelessly unpromising of the Cambridge crowd. And just as Mrs. Cupp was proceeding to tell him her opinion of the alleged Mrs. Luke, and how Cupp had only now been able to come out of his bedroom and have his dinner, there came news of the dropped luggage on the hill.

Carruthers felt that he was the very man to deal with that. He rushed off, thrust everybody aside, collected it reverently, for the tin trunk had indeed burst open, and its modest contents, of a touching propriety he thought, as he carefully put back things that felt like flannel, were scattered on the road, and then, fetching his car, took it into Truro.

It was easy, at the turn to Falmouth, to discover which way the Lukes had gone. It was also easy, on arriving in Truro, to discover which hotel they were in. He only had to describe them. Everybody had noticed them. Everybody on the road had heard their horn, and everybody had seen the beautiful young lady. And because he went into the town by the direct road, and as Jocelyn coming out of it, and sure the luggage hadn’t anyhow been dropped nearer than the top of the hill beyond the garage, took a round-about way, joining the main road only on the other side of the garage so as not again to have to set eyes on the loathsome oaf employed in it and risk being unable to resist going in and knocking him down, they missed each other precisely there; and accordingly when Jocelyn, having been all the way to St. Mawes, where he heard what had been done, got back about five, tired, very hungry, and wondering how on earth he was now going to find the officious person they said was trying to restore his belongings to him, he was told by the boots that young Mr. Carruthers had arrived just after he left, and was waiting to see him upstairs in the drawing-room.

‘Thank heaven,’ thought Jocelyn, feeling the key in his pocket, ‘that I locked her in.’