Part 8

And he went into the drawing-room, and there at a table in a corner by the fire, with the remains on it of what seemed to have been an extraordinarily good and varied tea, she was sitting.

§

Carruthers--he recognised him at once as the man with the dog called Sally--was worshipping her. Decently, for Carruthers was plainly a decent chap, but worshipping her all right; it was written in every line and twist of him, as he leaned forward eagerly, telling her stories, apparently, for he was talking a great deal and she was only listening,--amusing stories, for she was smiling.

She never smiled with him, thought Jocelyn; not like that, not a real smile of just enjoyment. From the very first day, that day at tea in the Pinner parlour, she had seemed frightened of him. But she couldn’t be much frightened, for here she was openly disregarding his injunctions, and somehow got out of her locked room. That seemed to Jocelyn anything but being frightened; it seemed to him to the last degree fearless and resourceful. And how strangely at variance with her apparent shyness and retiringness that twice in one day she should have allowed strange men to feed her.

He approached their corner, pale and grim. He was tired to death after the vexatious day he had had, and very hungry after not having had anything to eat since breakfast. Carruthers had watched his opportunity, of course--waited somewhere till he had seen him go, and then taken the luggage in and asked for Sally. And Sally, somehow getting out of that room, had defied his orders and come down. Well, he couldn’t do anything with her at that moment. He was too tired to flare up. Besides--scenes; he couldn’t for ever make scenes. What a revolting form of activity to have thrust upon him! But the amount of ideas that would, he perceived, have to be got into her head if life was to be even approaching tolerable was so great that his mind, in his fatigued state, refused to consider it.

She saw him first, and, much pleased with everything, with the beautiful tea, with Mr. Carruthers’ funny stories and with her pleasant afternoon altogether, continued to smile, but at him now, and said to Carruthers, ‘’Ere comes Mr. Luke.’

And on Carruthers getting up and Jocelyn arriving at the table, introduced them.

‘My ’usband,’ introduced Sally; explaining Carruthers to Jocelyn by saying, ‘The gentleman as brought our traps.’

Jocelyn couldn’t be angry with Carruthers; he looked at him so friendlily, and shook his hand with what surely was a perfectly sincere heartiness. And though he was obviously bowled over by Sally--naturally, thought Jocelyn, seeing that he had none of the responsibility and only the fun--there was something curiously sympathetic in his attitude to Jocelyn himself, something that seemed, oddly, to understand.

Sally, his wife, said, for instance, ‘’Ad yer tea?’--just that, and made no attempt to give him any. But what Carruthers said, quickly going across and ringing the bell, was, ‘I bet you haven’t. You’ve had the sort of rotten day there’s no time for anything in but swearing. They’ll bring some fresh stuff in a moment. It’s a jolly good tea they give one in this place,--don’t they, Mrs. Luke.’

‘’_Eav_enly,’ said Sally. And turning to Jocelyn she said, more timidly, ‘’Ad to come out of the bedroom. The servant----’

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ interrupted Jocelyn hastily, earnestly desiring to keep from Carruthers the knowledge that he had locked her in. Things look so different, especially domestic actions, in the eyes of a third person unaware of the attendant circumstances, thought Jocelyn.

He dropped into a chair. What a comfort it was, after a fortnight of being dog alone with Sally, to hear that decent voice. It really was like music. He hadn’t, at Cambridge, cared much for the Oxford way of speaking, but how beautiful it seemed after the Pinner way. He wanted to shut his eyes and just listen to it. ‘Go on, go on,’ he wanted to say, when Carruthers paused for a moment in his pleasant talk; and he sat there, listening and eating and drinking in silence, and Carruthers looked after him, and fed him, and talked pleasantly to him, and talked pleasantly to Sally as well, and did, in fact, all the talking. There was something about Jocelyn that made Carruthers feel maternal. He was so thin. His shoulder blades stuck out so, and his lean, nervous face twitched. Carruthers thought, as he had thought on that first occasion, only this time, knowing who he was and aware of Sally’s class, with ten times more conviction, ‘Poor devil’; but he also thought, his eyes resting on the lovely thing in the corner--he had established her in the farthermost corner of the Thistle and Goat’s drawing-room, for he too had instantly begun to hide her, and she lit up its gloom as a white flower lights up the dusk--he also thought, ‘Poor angel.’

§

Yes, she was an angel, and a poor one; he was sure of that. Carruthers, so romantic inside, so square and unemotional outside, told himself she was a forlorn child-angel torn out of her natural heaven, which obviously was completely h--less and obscure, but comfortable and unexacting, and pitched into a world of strangers, the very ABC of whose speech and behaviour she didn’t understand.

After two hours _tête à tête_ with Sally, two hours which seemed like ten minutes, so deeply was he interested, this was his conclusion. She hadn’t been very shy, not after he left off being shy, which he was for a moment or two, confused by the sheer shock of her beauty seen close; but he had soon recovered and got into his stride, which was an easy one for her to keep up with, his one idea being to please her and make her happy.

It wasn’t difficult to please Sally and make her happy; you had only to avoid frightening her. Mr. Soper hadn’t frightened her, he had fed her,--always a good beginning with a woman. Carruthers knew this, and immediately ordered tea, in spite of its still being only three o’clock; and, since the Thistle and Goat specialised in teas, the one which was presently brought was of such a conspicuous goodness, with so many strange Cornish cakes and exciting little sandwiches, besides a bowl of the Cornish cream Sally liked altogether best of anything she had learned to know on her honeymoon, that she soon felt as comfortable and friendly with Carruthers as she had with Mr. Soper.

She was at the age of jam. Cream was still enough to make her happy. And she wasn’t used to quantities. In her frugal life there had never been quantities of anything, and they excited her. Quantities combined with kindness--what could be more delightful? She didn’t suppose she had enjoyed anything so much ever as that tea. And it was sheer enjoyment, nothing to do with hunger at all, for hunger had been done away with by Mr. Soper’s stew, and this was a deliberate choosing, a splendid unnecessariness, a sense of wide margin, of freedom, of power, and no need to think of putting away what was left over for next day.

So by the time that Carruthers said, with that simplicity which made his mother sure there was no one in the world like her Gerry, ‘I’ve never seen any one as beautiful as you, and I didn’t know there could be anybody,’ Sally, unstiffened and lubricated by all the cream, was quite ready to discuss her appearance or anything else with him as far as she, restricted of speech as she was, could discuss at all, and he discovered to his deep surprise that she regarded her beauty as a thing to be apologised for, as a pity, as the same thing really as a deformity, forcing her to be conspicuous and nothing but a worry to those she loved and who loved her, and she not able to help it or alter it, or do anything at all except be sorry.

‘Father,’ she said, ‘was in a state--you’ve no idea. If any one just looked my way. And they was always lookin’.’

Carruthers nodded. Just what he had been thinking when first he saw her on the hill behind St. Mawes, with Luke trying to cover her up, to extinguish her quickly in her hat,--the responsibility, the anxiety.... But that she herself should regard it like that astonished him. Surely any woman....

‘And Mr. Luke--_’e’s_ frightened too. ‘Ides me, same as Father and Mother used.’

‘You’re really imprisoned, then,’ said Carruthers, staring at her. ‘Imprisoned in your beauty.’

But seeing a puzzled expression come into her eyes he began to talk of other things, to tell her stories, to amuse her; for after all it wasn’t very fair to Luke, somehow, whose back happened to be turned, much against his will Carruthers was sure, to let her tell him about herself and her life. She was too defenceless. She was a child, who would talk to any stranger who was kind; and he could guess all he was entitled to know, he could see for himself the gift she held in her hands, the supreme gift for a woman, the gift beyond all others in power for the brief time it lasted, and he could see she was entirely unconscious of its value, of what might be done with it if only she knew how. And every time she opened her touchingly beautiful mouth of quick smiles and painstaking response, her h’s dropped about him in showers.

Well, who cared? She might say anything she liked, and it wouldn’t matter; in any voice, with any accent, and it wouldn’t matter. Not even if she said coy common things, or arch common things, as he half expected she would when first she spoke and startled him with the discovery of her class, would it matter, For one needn’t listen. One could always just sit and watch. Yes--who cared?

But the answer to that, he knew, wasn’t simply Nobody, it was Jocelyn Luke. Luke would care. He quite obviously did care already, though they couldn’t have been married more than two or three weeks; and she dumbly felt it, Carruthers was sure, for, after having been eager to get out of her imprisoning shell of illiteracy and say what she could while she was alone with him, directly Luke joined them she retired into a kind of anxious caution, looking at him before she said anything in answer to a question, and keeping as much as possible to Yes and No.

‘He’s been teaching her,’ thought Carruthers. ‘He’s been going for her h’s. She’s on his nerves, and she knows it--no, not knows it, but feels it. She doesn’t _know_ anything about anything yet, but she feels a jolly lot, I’ll swear.’

Deeply interesting Lukes. What would their fate be, he wondered.

§

After Carruthers had gone, pensively driving himself back to St. Mawes in the pale spring twilight, Jocelyn, soothed by his agreeable talk and manifest friendliness, and also by the good tea, felt quite different. He no longer wanted to admonish Sally. He didn’t even want to ask her why she had come out of the bedroom. He was ashamed of that; ashamed of having locked her in, degrading her to God knew what level of childishness, of slavery, of, indeed, some pet animal that might stray--in fact, a dog. He shuddered a little, and looked at her deprecatingly, and leaning over the table took her hand and kissed it.

‘Sally,’ he murmured, suddenly for the first time since he grew up, feeling very young,--and how painfully young to be married!

Marriage. It wasn’t just love-making, he thought as he kissed her hand; love-making, and then done with it and get on with your work. It was responsibility constant and lasting, not only for the other life so queerly and suddenly and permanently joined on to one, but also for oneself in a quite new way, a way one had never till then at all considered.

He kissed her hand again.

‘Tea done ’im good,’ thought Sally.

But it was the half hour with one of his own kind, and one who, while definitely charming to him, yet so obviously and with a kind of reverence admired Sally, that had done him good. It had restored him to a condition of tranquillity, and he felt more normal, more really happy--he didn’t count his moments of wild rapture as happiness, because they somehow weren’t--than he had done since the days, now so curiously far away, before he had met her. Carruthers had reassured him. His behaviour to Sally had immensely reassured him. The world was, after all, chiefly decent. It didn’t consist solely of foul-minded Cupps, nor of impudent young men in garages. Just as there were more people in it healthy than sick, so there were more people in it who were appreciative and kindly than there were people who weren’t. Carruthers had known all about him, too. Jocelyn hadn’t credited Oxford with so much intelligent awareness. It was infinitely pleasant, after a fortnight with Sally who, wonderful as she was, uniquely wonderful he freely admitted, yet hadn’t the remotest idea of what he had done and still hoped to do--yes, by God, still hoped to do. Why not? Why chuck Cambridge after all? Why not face it with Sally, and train her who was, he knew, most obedient and only needing showing, to behave in such a way that no one, if she lived there, would dare make himself a nuisance?--it was infinitely pleasant after this to have been with somebody who knew all about him. He hadn’t got very far, of course, in his work; nobody knew that better than himself. But it had been a good enough beginning for Carruthers and Oxford to have heard of him. And the desire to go on, to proceed along the glorious path, came back to him in a mighty flood as he sat in the Thistle and Goat’s drawing-room, with that other desire appeased and seeming to be getting ready to fall into its proper place.

If Sally too could be got into her proper place, mightn’t life even yet be a triumph?

§

He wrote to his mother that night, after Sally had gone to bed. He sent her there early, and with a return of irritability, because of the way the people in the dining-room at dinner, and afterwards in the drawing-room where he and she sat in a remote corner while he had his coffee, behaved. It was really outrageous. This was his first experience of dining with her in a public place. And it was no good his glaring at the creatures, because they never gave him so much as a glance.

So he sent her to bed, and then he wrote to his mother. Better go home. Better now go home to South Winch, and not wander about in expensive hotels, with hateful old men in dinner jackets and fat women in beads staring their eyes out. Hotels were impossible with Sally; and so were lodgings, with the risk of another suspicious and insulting landlady. Besides, a fortnight was enough for a honeymoon, and for this particular honeymoon, with all its difficulties, quite enough. Home was the place. Almond Tree Cottage, and its quiet. He wanted to go home. He wanted to go home to his mother, and get her meeting with Sally over, and sit in that little study of his at the top of the house where not a soul could see him, and think out what was best to do next.

His mother would help him. She had always understood and helped. Never yet had she failed him. And she would help him, too, in the business of looking after Sally,--take her off his hands sometimes, and perhaps succeed in getting her quite soon to talk like a civilised being.

It had been the last thing he had originally intended, to go with Sally to stay at his mother’s. Introduce her, of course; take her down for a day; but not stay there, for well did he know his marriage would fall like a sword on his mother, cleaving her heart. Things, however, had changed since then. He had in his haste, in his blind passion, written to her that he was going to chuck Cambridge, and now that his passion was no longer blind and he wasn’t going to chuck it--no, he’d be damned if he would; not anyhow till he had tried what it was like there with Sally--he was anxious to go to his mother and heal up at least one of the wounds he knew his letter must have made. He would ask her what she thought, having seen Sally, of the idea of her living in Cambridge. Perhaps--it flashed into his mind like light--his mother would live there too; give up Almond Tree Cottage, and live with them in Cambridge. What a solution. Then she could look after Sally, and be such a comfort, such a blessed comfort, to him as well. What a splendid, simple solution.

He threw down his pen, and stared straight in front of him. They would all be happy then--he going on with his work, Sally being taught by his mother, and his mother not separated from him.

When he went to bed, and Sally stirred in her sleep as if she were waking up, he took her in his arms and asked her if she would like to live in Cambridge.

‘Yes,’ murmured Sally, even though half asleep remembering to stick to monosyllables.

‘It’ll be better than London,’ said Jocelyn, holding her close. ‘Won’t it, my love? Won’t it, my _beautiful_ love?’ he added in a whisper, for there was something about Sally’s hair, against which his face was, a softness, a sweetness....

‘And perhaps my mother will come and live with us too there. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, darling?’

There was a brief pause. Then, ‘Yes,’ murmured Sally.

He kissed her delicious hair. ‘Darling,’ he said tenderly, pleased by this absence of all difficulty. ‘You’re half asleep,’ he added in her ear, pushing aside the hair that lay over it with his mouth.

But was she? For, after another pause, she said, her face still turned away from him, something that sounded like Father.

‘Yes, darling?’ said Jocelyn, as she didn’t go on.

‘’E might come too, p’raps,’ murmured Sally.

‘What?’ said Jocelyn, not sure he could have heard right, bending his face nearer. ‘Your father?’

‘Yes,’ murmured Sally.

‘Your _father_?’ said Jocelyn again.

‘Yes,’ murmured Sally. ‘Then--we’d be tidy like--you’d ’ave ’er, and I’d ’ave ’im.’

‘Go to sleep Sally,’ said Jocelyn with sudden authority. ‘Do you know what time it is? Nearly eleven.’

VIII

§

Meanwhile, at Almond Tree Cottage, Jocelyn’s mother had become Margery to Mr. Thorpe, and he to her was Edgar.

The idea she had played with, the possibility she had smiled at, was now fact. She had reacted to Jocelyn’s marriage by getting involved, immediately and profoundly, in Mr. Thorpe. Without quite knowing how, with hardly a recollection of when, she had become engaged to him. He had caught her at the one moment in which, blind with shock, she would have clung to anything that offered support.

How could she face South Winch without support? For there was not only her inward humiliation to be dealt with, the ruin of her love and pride and the wreck of those bright ambitious dreams--surely of all ambitious dreams the most natural and creditable, the dreams of a mother for the future greatness of her son,--there was the pity of South Winch. No, she couldn’t stand pity; and pity because of Jocelyn, of all people! Of him who had been her second, more glorious self, of him who was to have been all she would have been if she could have been. South Winch couldn’t pity her if she married its richest man. There was something about wealth, when present in sufficient quantities, that silenced even culture; and everybody knew about Mr. Thorpe’s house, and grounds, and cars, and conservatories. She therefore dropped like a fruit that no longer has enough life to hold on, into the outstretched hands of Mr. Thorpe.

Jocelyn didn’t want her; Mr. Thorpe did. It was a deplorable thing, she thought, for she could still at intervals, in spite of her confusion and distress, think intelligently, that a woman couldn’t be happy, couldn’t be at peace, unless there existed somebody who wanted her, and wanted her exclusively; but there it was. Deplorable indeed, for it now flung her into Mr. Thorpe’s arms prematurely, without her having had time properly to think it out. No doubt she would have got into them in the end, but not yet, not for years and years. Now she tumbled in from a sheer instinct of self-preservation. She had to hold on to some one. She was giddy and staggering from the blow that had cut through her life. Jocelyn, her boy, her wonderful, darling boy, in whose career she had so passionately merged herself, doing everything, even the smallest thing, only with reference to him, wanted her so little that he could throw her aside, thrust her away without an instant’s hesitation, and with her his whole future, the future he and she had been working at with utter concentration for years, for the sake of a girl he had only known a fortnight. He said so in the letter. He said it was only a fortnight. One single fortnight, as against those twenty-two consecrated years.

Who was this girl, who was this person for whom he gave up everything at a moment’s notice? Mrs. Luke, shuddering, hid in Mr. Thorpe’s arms; for the things that Jocelyn hadn’t said in that letter on the eve of his marriage were more terrible almost to her than those he had said,--the ominous non-reference to the girl’s family, to her upbringing, to her circumstances. Hardly had he mentioned her name. At the end, in a postcript, as if in his heart he were ashamed, he had said it was Salvatia--Salvatia!--and her father’s name was Pinner, but that he really didn’t know that it mattered, and he wouldn’t have cared, and neither would anybody else who saw her care, if she hadn’t had fifty names. And then he had added the strange words, ominously defiant, unnecessarily coarse, that he would have taken her, and so would any one else who saw her, in her shift; and then still further, and still more strangely and coarsely, he had scribbled in a shaky hand, as though he had torn open the letter again and stuck it in in a kind of frenzy of passion, ‘My God--her shift!’

Mrs. Luke hid in Mr. Thorpe’s arms. Coarseness had never yet got into Almond Tree Cottage, except the coarseness consecrated by time, which it was a sign of intelligence not to mind, the coarseness, for instance, of those marvellous Elizabethans. But coarseness from Jocelyn? Oh, blind and mad, blind and mad. Where had her boy got it from, this capacity for sudden, violent, ruinous behaviour? Not from her, very certainly. It must be some of the thick, sinister blood filtered down into him from the Spanish woman her husband’s great-grandfather--Mrs. Luke had been pleased with this great-grandfather up to then, because in her own family, where there should have been four, there hadn’t been any--had married against his parents’ wishes. She hid in Mr. Thorpe’s arms. But--‘This in exchange for Jocelyn?’ she couldn’t help repeating to herself that first day, trying to shut her eyes, spiritually as well as physically, trying to withdraw her attention, as even in this crisis she remembered Dr. Johnson had done in unpleasant circumstances, from Mr. Thorpe’s betrothal caresses.