Part 3

If you had three weeks’ holiday in the year, three whole weeks in which to amuse yourself as you liked, how would you spend it? Algy Traill went to Brighton in August; you should have seen him on the pier. The Fossett Brothers adorned Weymouth, the Naples of England. They did good, if slightly obvious, work on the esplanade in fairly white flannels. This during the day; eight-thirty in the evening found them in the Alexandra Gardens—dressed. It is doubtful if the Weymouth boarding-house would have stood it at dinner, so they went up directly afterwards and changed. Mr. Ransom spent August at Folkestone, where he was understood to have a doubtful wife. She was really his widowed mother. You would never have suspected him of a mother, but there she was in Folkestone, thinking of him always, and only living for the next August. It was she who knitted him the M.C.C. tie; he had noticed the colours in a Piccadilly window.

Miss Gertie went to Cliftonville—not Margate.

And where did George go? The conversation at dinner that evening would have given us a clue; or perhaps it wouldn’t.

“So you’re off to-morrow,” Mrs. Morrison had said. “Well, I’m sure I hope you’ll have a nice time. A little sea air will do you good.”

“Where are you going, Crosby?” asked Ransom, with the air of a man who means to know.

George looked uncomfortable.

“I’m not quite sure,” he said awkwardly. “I’m going a sort of walking-tour, you know; stopping at inns and things. I expect it—er—will depend a bit, you know.”

“Well, if you _should_ happen to stop at Sandringham,” said Algy, “give them all my love, old man, won’t you?”

“Then you won’t have your letters sent on?” asked Mrs. Morrison.

“Oh no, thanks. I don’t suppose I shall have any, anyhow.”

“If you going on a walking-tour,” said Owen-Jones, “why don’t you try the Welsh mountains?”

“I always wonder you don’t run across to Paris,” said the dome-shaped gentleman suddenly. “It only takes——” He knew all the facts, and was prepared to give them, but Algy interrupted him with a knowing whistle.

“Paris, George, aha! Place me among the demoiselles, what ho! I don’t think. Naughty boy!”

Crosby’s first impulse (he had had it before) was to throw his glass of beer at Algy’s face. The impulse died down, and his resolve hardened to write about the Finsbury Park boarding-house at once. He had made that resolution before, too. Then his heart jumped as he remembered that he was going away on the morrow. He forgot Traill and Finsbury Park, and went off into his dreams. The other boarders discussed walking-tours and holiday resorts with animation.

Gertie Morrison was silent. She was often silent when Crosby was there, and always when Crosby’s affairs were being discussed. She knew he hated her, and she hated him for it. I don’t think she knew why he hated her. It was because she lowered his opinion of women.

He had known very few women in his life, and he dreamed dreams about them. They were wonderful creatures, a little higher than the angels, and beauty and mystery and holiness hung over them. Some day he would meet the long-desired one, and (miracle) she would love him, and they would live happy ever afterwards at—— He wondered sometimes whether an angel _would_ live happy ever afterwards at Bedford Park. Bedford Park seemed to strip the mystery and the holiness and the wonder from his dream. And yet he had seen just the silly little house at Bedford Park that would suit them; and even angels, if they come to earth, must live somewhere. She would walk to the gate every morning, and wave him good-bye from under the flowering laburnum—for I need not say that it was always spring in his dream. That was why he had his holiday in April, for it must be spring when he found her, and he would only find her in the country.... Another reason was that in August Miss Morrison went to Cliftonville (not Margate), and so he had a fortnight in Muswell Hill without Miss Morrison.

For it was difficult to believe in the dreams when Gertie Morrison was daily before his eyes. There was a sort of hard prettiness there, which might have been beauty, but where were the mystery and the wonder and the holiness? None of that about the Gertie who was treated so familiarly by the Fossetts and the Traills and their kind, and answered them back so smartly. “You can’t get any change out of Gertie,” Traill often said on these occasions. Almost Crosby wished you could. He would have had her awkward, bewildered, indignant, overcome with shame; it distressed him that she was so lamentably well-equipped for the battle. At first he pitied her, then he hated her. She was betraying her sex. What he really meant was that she was trying to topple over the beautiful image he had built.

I know what you are going to say. What about the girl at the A B C shop who spilt his coffee over his poached egg every day at one thirty-five precisely? Hadn’t she given his image a little push too? I think not. He hardly saw her as a woman at all. She was a worker, like himself; sexless. In the evenings perhaps she became a woman ... wonderful, mysterious, holy ... I don’t know; at any rate he didn’t see her then. But Miss Morrison he saw at home; she was pretty and graceful and feminine; she might have been, not _the_ woman—that would have been presumption on his part—but a woman ... and then she went and called Algy Traill “a silly boy,” and smacked him playfully with a teaspoon! Traill, the cad-about-town, the ogler of women! No wonder the image rocked.

Well, he would be away from the Traills and the Morrisons and the Fossetts for three weeks. It was April, the best month of the year. He was right in saying that he was not quite sure where he was going, but he could have told Mrs. Morrison the direction. He would start down the line with his knapsack and his well-filled kit-bag. By-and-by he would get out—the name of the station might attract him, or the primroses on the banks—leave his bag, and, knapsack on shoulder, follow the road. Sooner or later he would come to a village; he would find an inn that could put him up; on the morrow the landlord could drive in for his bag.... And then three weeks in which to search for the woman.

III

A south wind was blowing little baby clouds along a blue sky; lower down, the rooks were talking busily to each other in the tall elms which lined the church; and, lower down still, the foxhound puppy sat himself outside the blacksmith’s and waited for company. If nothing happened in the next twenty seconds he would have to go and look for somebody.

But somebody was coming. From the door of “The Dog and Duck” opposite, a tall, lean, brown gentleman stepped briskly, in his hand a pair of shoes. The foxhound puppy got up and came across the road sideways to him. “Welcome, welcome,” he said effusively, and went round the tall, lean, brown gentleman several times.

“Hallo, Duster,” said the brown gentleman; “coming with me to-day?”

“Come along,” said the foxhound puppy excitedly. “Going with you? I should just think I am! Which way shall we go?”

“Wait a moment. I want to leave these shoes here.”

Duster followed him into the blacksmith’s shop. The blacksmith thought he could put some nails in; gentlemen’s shoes and horses’ shoes, he explained, weren’t quite the same thing. The brown gentleman admitted the difference, but felt sure that the blacksmith could make a job of anything he tried his hand at. He mentioned, which the blacksmith knew, that he was staying at “The Dog and Duck” opposite, and gave his name as Carfax.

“Come along,” said Duster impatiently.

“Good morning,” said the brown gentleman to the blacksmith. “Lovely day, isn’t it?... Come along, old boy.”

He strode out into the blue fresh morning, Duster all round him. But when they got to the church—fifty yards, no more—the foxhound puppy changed his mind. He had had an inspiration, the same inspiration which came to him every day at this spot. He stopped.

“Let’s go back,” he said.

“Not coming to-day?” laughed the brown gentleman. “Well, good-bye.”

“You see, I think I’d better wait here, after all,” said the foxhound puppy apologetically. “Something might happen. Are you really going on? Well—you’ll excuse me, won’t you?”

He ambled back to his place outside the blacksmith’s shop. The tall, lean, brown gentleman, who called himself Carfax, walked on briskly with spring in his heart. Above him the rooks talked and talked; the hedges were green; and there were little baby clouds in the blue sky.

Shall I try to deceive you for a page or two longer, or shall we have the truth out at once? Better have the truth. Well, then—the gentleman who called himself Carfax was really George Crosby. You guessed? Of course you did. But if you scent a mystery you are wrong.

It was five years ago that Crosby took his first holiday. He came to this very inn, “The Dog and Duck,” and when they asked him his name he replied “Geoffrey Carfax.” It had been an inspiration in the train. To be Geoffrey Carfax for three weeks seemed to cut him off more definitely from the Fenchurch Street office and the Islington boarding-house. George Crosby was in prison, working a life sentence; Geoffrey Carfax was a free man in search of the woman. Romance might come to Geoffrey, but it could never come to George. They were two different persons; then let them be two different persons. Besides, glamour hung over the mere act of giving a false name. George had delightful thrills when he remembered his deceit; and there was one heavenly moment of panic, on the last day of his first holiday, when (to avoid detection) he shaved off his moustache. He was not certain what the punishment was for calling yourself Geoffrey Carfax when your real name was George Crosby, but he felt that with a clean-shaven face he could laugh at Scotland Yard. The downward path, however, is notoriously an easy one. In subsequent years he let himself go still farther. Even the one false name wouldn’t satisfy him now; and if he only looked in at a neighbouring inn for a glass of beer, he would manage to let it fall into his conversation that he was Guy Colehurst or Gervase Crane or—he had a noble range of names to choose from, only limited by the fact that “G.C.” was on his cigarette-case and his kit-bag. (His linen was studiously unmarked, save with the hieroglyphic of his washerwoman—a foolish observation in red cotton which might mean anything.)

The tall, lean, brown gentleman, then, taking the morning air was George Crosby. Between ourselves we may continue to call him George. It is not a name I like; he hated it too; but George he was undoubtedly. Yet already he was a different George from the one you met at Muswell Hill. He had had two weeks of life, and they had made him brown and clear-eyed and confident. I think I said he blushed readily in Mrs. Morrison’s boarding-house; the fact was he felt always uneasy in London, awkward, uncomfortable. In the open air he was at home, ready for he knew not what dashing adventure.

It was a day of spring to stir the heart with longings and memories. Memories, half-forgotten, of all the Aprils of the past touched him for a moment, and then, as he tried to grasp them, fluttered out of reach, so that he wondered whether he was recalling real adventures which had happened, or whether he was but dreaming over again the dreams which were always with him. One memory remained. It was on such a day as this, five years ago, and almost in this very place, that he had met the woman.

Yes, I shall have to go back again to tell you of her. Five years ago he had been staying at this same inn; it was his first holiday after his sentence to prison. He was not so resigned to his lot five years ago; he thought of it as a bitter injustice; and the wonderful woman for whom he came into the country to search was to be his deliverer. So that, I am afraid, she would have to have been, not only wonderful, mysterious, and holy, but also rich. For it was to the contented ease of his early days that he was looking for release; the little haven in Bedford Park had not come into his dreams. Indeed, I don’t suppose he had even heard of Bedford Park at that time. It was Islington or The Manor House; anything in between was Islington. But, of course, he never confessed to himself that she would need to be rich.

And he found her. He came over the hills on a gentle April morning and saw her beneath him. She was caught, it seemed, in a hedge. How gallantly George bore down to the rescue!

“Can I be of any assistance?” he said in his best manner, and that, I think, is always the pleasantest way to begin. Between “Can I be of any assistance?” and “With all my worldly goods I thee endow” one has not far to travel.

“I’m caught,” she said. “If you could——” Observe George spiking himself fearlessly.

“I say, you really _are_! Wait a moment.”

“It’s very kind of you.”

There—he has done it.

“Thank you so much,” she said, with a pretty smile. “Oh, you’ve hurt yourself!”

The sweet look of pain on her face!

“It’s nothing,” said George nobly. And it really was nothing. One can get a delightful amount of blood and sympathy from the most insignificant scratch.

They hesitated a moment. She looked on the ground; he looked at her. Then his eyes wandered round the beautiful day, and came back to her just as she looked up.

“It is a wonderful day, isn’t it?” he said suddenly.

“Yes,” she breathed.

It seemed absurd to separate on such a day when they were both wandering, and Heaven had brought them together.

“I say, dash it,” said George suddenly: “what are you going to do? Are you going anywhere particular?”

“Not very particular.”

“Neither am I. Can’t we go there together?”

“I was just going to have lunch.”

“So was I. Well, there you are. It would be silly if you sat here and ate—what _are_ yours, by the way?”

“Only mutton, I’m afraid.”

“Ah, mine are beef. Well, if you sat here and ate mutton sandwiches and I sat a hundred yards farther on and ate beef ones, we _should_ look ridiculous, shouldn’t we?”

“It _would_ be rather silly,” she smiled.

So they sat down and had their sandwiches together.

“My name is Carfax,” he said, “Geoffrey Carfax.” Oh, George! And to a woman! However, she wouldn’t tell him hers.

They spent an hour over lunch. They wandered together for another hour. Need I tell you all the things they said? But they didn’t talk of London.

“Oh, I must be going,” she said suddenly. “I didn’t know it was so late. No, I know my way. Don’t come with me. Good-bye.”

“It can’t be good-bye,” said George in dismay. “I’ve only just found you. Where do you live? Who are you?”

“Don’t let’s spoil it,” she smiled. “It’s been a wonderful day—a wonderful little piece of a day. We’ll always remember it. I don’t think it’s meant to go on; it stops just here.”

“I _must_ see you again,” said George firmly. “Will you be there to-morrow, at the same time—at the place where we met?”

“I might.” She sighed. “And I mightn’t.”

But George knew she would.

“Then good-bye,” he said, holding out his hand.

“My name is Rosamund,” she whispered, and fled.

He watched her out of sight, marvelling how bravely she walked. Then he started for home, his head full of strange fancies....

He found a road an hour later; the road went on and on, it turned and branched and doubled—he scarcely noticed it. The church clock was striking seven as he came into the village.

It was a wonderful lunch he took with him next day. Chicken and tongue and cake and chocolate and hard-boiled eggs. He ate it alone (by the corner of a wood, five miles from the hedge which captured her) at half-past three. That day was a nightmare. He never found the place again, though he tried all through the week remaining to him. He had no hopes after that day of seeing her, but only to have found the hedge would have been some satisfaction. At least he could sit there and sigh—and curse himself for a fool.

He went back to Islington knowing that he had had his chance and missed it. By next April he had forgotten her. He was convinced that she was not the woman. _The_ woman had still to be found. He went to another part of the country and looked for her.

And now he was back at “The Dog and Duck” again. Surely he would find her to-day. It was the time; it must be almost the place. Would the loved one be there? He was not sure whether he wanted her to be the woman of five years ago or not. Whoever she was, she would be the one he sought. He had walked some miles; funny if he stumbled upon the very place suddenly.

Memories of five years ago were flooding his mind. Had he really been here, or had he only dreamed of it? Surely that was the hill down which he had come; surely that clump of trees on the right had been there before. And—could that be the very hedge?

It was.

And there was a woman caught in it.

IV

George ran down the hill, his heart thumping heavily at his ribs.... She had her back towards him.

“Can I be of any assistance?” he said in his best manner. But she didn’t need to be rich now; there was that little house at Bedford Park.

She turned round.

It was Gertie Morrison!

Silly of him; of course, it wasn’t Miss Morrison; but it was extraordinarily like her. Prettier, though.

“Why, Mr. Crosby!” she said.

It _was_ Gertie Morrison.

“You!” he said angrily.

He was furious that such a trick should have been played upon him at this moment; furious to be reminded suddenly that he was George Crosby of Muswell Hill. Muswell Hill, the boarding-house—Good Lord! Gertie Morrison! Algy Traill’s Gertie.

“Yes, it’s me,” she said, shrinking from him. She saw he was angry with her; she vaguely understood why.

Then George laughed. After all, she hadn’t deliberately put herself in his way. She could hardly be expected to avoid the whole of England (outside Muswell Hill) until she knew exactly where George Crosby proposed to take his walk. What a child he was to be angry with her.

When he laughed, she laughed too—a little nervously.

“Let me help,” he said. He scratched his fingers fearlessly on her behalf. What should he do afterwards? he wondered. His day was spoilt anyhow. He could hardly leave her.

“Oh, you’ve hurt yourself!” she said. She said it very sweetly, in a voice that only faintly reminded him of the Gertie of Muswell Hill.

“It’s nothing,” he answered, as he had answered five years ago.

They stood looking at each other. George was puzzled.

“You are Miss Morrison, aren’t you?” he said. “Somehow you seem different.”

“You’re different from the Mr. Crosby I know.”

“Am I? How?”

“It’s dreadful to see you at the boarding-house.” She looked at him timidly. “You don’t mind my mentioning the boarding-house, do you?”

“Mind? Why should I?” (After all, he still had another week.)

“Well, you want to forget about it when you’re on your holiday.”

Fancy her knowing that.

“And are you on your holiday too?”

She gave a long deep sigh of content.

“Yes,” she said.

He looked at her with more interest. There was colour in her face; her eyes were bright; in her tweed skirt she looked more of a country girl than he would have expected.

“Let’s sit down,” he said. “I thought you always went to Mar—to Cliftonville for your holiday?”

“I always go to my aunt’s there in the summer. It isn’t really a holiday; it’s more to help her; she has a boarding-house too. And it really is Cliftonville—only, of course, it’s silly of mother to mind having it called Margate. Cliftonville’s much worse than Margate really. I hate it.”

(This can’t be Gertie Morrison, thought George. It’s a dream.)

“When did you come here?”

“I’ve been here about ten days. A girl friend of mine lives near here. She asked me suddenly just after you’d gone—I mean about a fortnight ago. Mother thought I wasn’t looking well and ought to go. I’ve been before once or twice. I love it.”

“And do you have to wander about the country by yourself? I mean, doesn’t your friend—I say, I’m asking you an awful lot of questions. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right. But, of course, I love to go about alone, particularly at this time of year. _You_ understand that.”

Of course he understood it. That was not the amazing thing. The amazing thing was that she understood it.

He took his sandwiches from his pocket.

“Let’s have lunch,” he said. “I’m afraid mine are only beef.”

“Mine are worse,” she smiled. “They’re only mutton.”

A sudden longing to tell her of his great adventure of five years ago came to George. (If you had suggested it to him in March!)

“It’s rather funny,” he said, as he untied his sandwiches—“I was down here five years ago——”

“I know,” she said quietly.

George sat up suddenly and stared at her.

“It was you!” he cried.

“Yes.”

“You. Good Lord!... But your name—you said your name was—wait a moment—that’s it! Rosamund!”

“It is. Gertrude Rosamund. I call myself Rosamund in the country. I like to pretend I’m not the”—she twisted a piece of grass in her hands, and looked away from him over the hill—“the horrible girl of the boarding-house.”

George got on to his knees and leant excitedly over her.

“Tell me, do you hate and loathe and detest Traill and the Fossetts and Ransom as much as I do?”

She hesitated.

“Mr. Ransom has a mother in Folkestone he’s very good to. He’s not really bad, you know.”

“Sorry. Wash out Ransom. Traill and the Fossetts?”

“Yes. Oh yes. Oh yes, yes, yes.” Her cheeks flamed as she cried it, and she clenched her hands.

George was on his knees already, and he had no hat to take off, but he was very humble.

“Will you forgive me?” he said. “I think I’ve misjudged you. I mean,” he stammered—“I mean, I don’t mean—of course, it’s none of my business to judge you—I’m speaking like a prig, I—oh, you know what I mean. I’ve been a brute to you. Will you forgive me?”

She held out her hand, and he shook it. This had struck him, when he had seen it on the stage, as an absurdly dramatic way of making friends, but it seemed quite natural now.

“Let’s have lunch,” she said.

They began to eat in great content.

“Same old sandwiches,” smiled George. “I say, I suppose I needn’t explain why I called myself Geoffrey Carfax.” He blushed a little as he said the name. “I mean, you seem to understand.”

She nodded. “You wanted to get away from George Crosby; _I_ know.”

And then he had a sudden horrible recollection.

“I say, you must have thought me a beast. I brought a terrific lunch out with me the next day, and then I went and lost the place. Did you wait for me?”

Gertie would have pretended she hadn’t turned up herself, but Rosamund said, “Yes, I waited for you. I thought perhaps you had lost the place.”

“I say,” said George, “what lots I’ve got to say to you. When did you recognise me again? Fancy my not knowing you.”

“It was three years, and you’d shaved your moustache.”

“So I had. But I could recognise people just as easily without it.”

She laughed happily. It was the first joke she had heard him make since that day five years ago.

“Besides, we’re both different in the country. I knew you as soon as I heard your voice just now. Never at all at Muswell Hill.”

“By Jove!” said George, “just fancy.” He grinned at her happily.

After lunch they wandered. It was a golden afternoon, the very afternoon they had had five years ago. Once when she was crossing a little stream in front of him, and her foot slipped on a stone, he called out, “Take care, Rosamund,” and thrilled at the words. She let them pass unnoticed; but later on, when they crossed the stream again lower down, he took her hand and she said, “Thank you, Geoffrey.”

They came to an inn for tea. How pretty she looked pouring out the tea for him—not for him, for them; the two of them. She and he! His thoughts became absurd....