Part 3

They were married towards the end of July--to be exact, on the twenty-third day of the month. The wedding took place in Balham from the house of Griselda's aunt; the ceremony was performed by an enlightened vicar who had consented to omit the ignoble vow of obedience; and the church was thronged to its doors with comrades and ardent sympathizers. The advanced Press spread itself over the description of the ceremony and--in view of the fact that the bridesmaids, six in number, had all done time for assault--even the Press that was not advanced considered the event worth a paragraph. The pair were snapshotted on leaving the church with the customary direful results, and the modest residence of Griselda's aunt could hardly accommodate the flood of progressive guests. There was rice and slipper-throwing and a whirl of good wishes--and Griselda, flushed, looked pretty, and in William's eyes quite lovely.

They left by an afternoon train for Dover and crossed the next day to Ostend.

Their selection of the Belgian Ardennes for a honeymoon was due to Griselda's long-standing acquaintance with a cosmopolitan female revolutionist understood to be of Russian Polish extraction. Owing, it was further understood, to her pronounced opinions and pronounced manner of expressing them, she had long ceased to be welcome in the land that gave her birth; at any rate, she avoided it studiously and existed chiefly at a series of epoch-making revolutionary meetings which she addressed by turns in bad German, worse French, and worst English. She wrote vehement pamphlets in all these languages and prided herself on the fact that, on the Continent at least, they were frequently suppressed by the police; wore tartan blouses, a perennial smile, and a hat that was always askew. For some reason or another she was the possessor of a cottage in the heart of the Belgian Ardennes--which she visited on the rare occasions when she was not plying her epoch-making activities in London, Vienna, or New York. A week once a year was about all the use she made of it--reappearing after her seven days' seclusion with a brace of new pamphlets burning for the Press, and like a giant refreshed for the fight. This estimable woman was as good-natured as she was revolutionary, and hearing that Griselda was thinking of a rural honeymoon, she hastened to offer the happy couple the loan of her Belgian property, which was as secluded as heart could desire. Griselda, since her fortnight at Interlaken, had hankered for another stay abroad; she jumped at the offer, and William--whose acquaintance with foreign parts was limited to an International Socialist Congress in Holland---jumped gladly in unison with her. Madame Amberg beamed with joy at their delighted acceptance of her offer; she kissed Griselda, shook hands with William and promised to make all the necessary arrangements for their stay--to write to the old woman who looked after the cottage and tell her when to expect them. She babbled rhapsodically of honeymoons and the joys of the Forest of Arden--forgetting how bored she was in the Forest of Arden at the end of a seven-days' stay there--and further directed them how to reach it, looked out trains and suggested hotels.

Heaven smiled on the opening of their married life; Dover was a receding beauty in the distance and the Channel a good-natured lake. As their boat chunked between the long piers of Ostend they held and squeezed each other's hands ecstatically, the crowd collecting on the gangway side enabling them to do so unnoticed. The consciousness of their total ignorance of the language of the country gave them an agitated moment as they set foot on foreign soil--but, taken in tow by a polyglot porter, they were safely transferred from the quay to a second-class carriage, with instructions to change at Brussels; and, having changed obediently, were in due course set down at Namur. Madame Amberg had advised them to lodge with economy at the Hotel de Hollande near the station; but another specimen of the polyglot porter pounced down and annexed them firmly for his own more distant establishment, and after a feeble resistance they followed him meekly and were thrust with their bags into the omnibus lying in wait for them. They felt it their duty as the vehicle rattled them along to make a few depreciatory and high-principled remarks on the subject of the towering fortifications; but having thus satisfied their consciences they relapsed into mere enjoyment of rest, novelty, a good dinner, and a view of the lazy Meuse. After dinner, when the fortress above them was fading into the soft blackness of a warm summer night, they walked arm-in-arm by the river and were quite unutterably happy.

They rose early in the morning to catch the little river boat for Dinant; caught it with the aid of their guardian, the porter, and camped side by side on its deck to enjoy the sauntering trip. They enjoyed it so much and engrossingly that for the space of a morning they forgot their high principles, they forgot even Woman and Democracy; they were tourists only, agape and delighted, with their green Cook's tickets in their pockets. Yet, after all, they were something more than tourists; they were young man and woman who loved each other tenderly and whose happy lives were in tune with the happy landscape. Often they forgot to look at the happy landscape for the joy of gazing into each other's dear blue eyes.

The boat puffed finally to Dinant, where they stayed the night as planned; where they stared at the cupola'd church and the cliffs, walked to the split rock on the road to Anseremme, and bought some of the gingerbread their guide-book had told them to buy. They ate it next day, with no particular approval, on the final stage of their journey, in a train that puffed and pottered between heights and orchards in the winding company of a stream. It puffed and pottered them at last to their wayside destination--where a smiling and loutish country boy slouched up to take possession of them and their modest baggage. They understood not a word of his thick-throated patois, but knew from information imparted beforehand by Madame Amberg that this was their housekeeper's grandson and deputed to serve as their guide. He gripped a bag easily in either hand, and led the way past the few small houses ranged neatly as a miniature village alongside the miniature station--and so by the white road that kept the river company. After a mile or thereabout they left the white road, turning sharply to the right at a cleft in the riverside cliff and striking a cart-track, scarcely more than a path, into a valley twisted back among the hills.

It was a valley the like of which they had never seen, which the world seemed to have forgotten; a cool green vision of summer and solitary peace. Water had cleft in the table-land above them a passage that time had made leafy and gracious and laid aside for their finding. Through the flat, lush pastures that divided the bold slopes there looped and tangled a tiny brook on its way to the Meuse and the sea, a winding ribbon of shadow, of shimmer and reflection. Up the slopes rising steeply from the pastures there clustered tree above tree--so thickly set that where the valley dwindled in the distance they might have been moss on the hill-side. There was no one in sight and no sound but their footsteps and the birds; it was all a green prettiness given over to birds and themselves.

"Isn't it wonderful?" Griselda said, not knowing that her voice had dropped and lost its shrillness. "I never thought there could be such a place."

She spoke the truth, if in hackneyed and unthinking phrase; in her busy and crowded little mind, the reflection of her busy little life, there had been no room for visions of a deep and solitary peace. Involuntarily, as they walked they drew nearer together and went closely side by side; the sweet aloofness of the valley not only amazed them, it awed them; they were dimly conscious of being in contact with something which in its silent, gracious way was disquieting as well as beautiful. Their theory and practice of life, so far, was the theory and practice of their purely urban environment, of crowds, committees and grievances and cocksure little people like themselves--and lo, out of an atmosphere of cocksureness and hustle they had stepped, as it seemed without warning, into one of mystery and the endless patience of the earth. Out here, in this strange overpowering peace, it was difficult to be conscious of grievances political or ethical; instead came a new, undefined and uneasy sense of personal inadequacy and shrinkage, a sense of the unknown and hitherto unallowed-for, a fear of something undreamed of in their rabid and second-hand philosophy.... Not that they reasoned after this fashion, or were capable of analysing the source of the tremor that mingled with their physical pleasure, their sheer delight of the eye; but before they had been in the valley many hours they sympathized in secret (they did not know why) with Madame Amberg's consistent avoidance of its loveliness, saw hazily and without comprehension why, for all her praise of its beauties, she was so loth to dwell there. The place, though they knew it not, was a New Idea to them--and therefore a shadow of terror to their patterned and settled convictions. As such their organized and regulated minds shrank from it at once and instinctively--cautiously apprehensive lest the New Idea should tamper with accepted beliefs, disturb established views and call generally for the exercise of faculties hitherto unused. They had an uneasy foreboding--never mentioned aloud by either, though troublous to both--that long contact with solitude and beauty might end by confusing issues that once were plain, and so unfitting them for the work of Progress and Humanity--for committees, agitations, the absorbing of pamphlets and the general duty of rearranging the universe.

There was something, probably, in the frame of mind in which they approached the valley; they came of a migratory, holiday race, and had seen green beauty before, if only fleetingly and at intervals. What they had lacked before was the insight into beauty born of their own hearts' content, the wonder created by their own most happy love.... They followed their guide for the most part in silence, relieved that he had ceased his well-meaning attempts to make them understand his jargon, and speaking, when they spoke at all, in voices lowered almost to a whisper.

"What's that?" Griselda queried, still under her breath. "That" was a flash of blue fire ahead of them darting slantwise over the stream. Later they learned to understand that a flash of blue fire meant kingfisher; but for the moment William shook his head, nonplussed, and hazarded only, "It's a bird."

For half-an-hour or so it was only the birds and themselves; then at a turn in the narrowing valley they came in sight of cows nuzzling the pastures. Several cows, parti-coloured black and white like the cows of a Noah's Ark; and, further on, a tiny farm house standing close up to the trees in its patch of vegetable garden. They knew from Madame Amberg of the existence of the tiny farmhouse; it was an old woman living there who would "do" for them during their stay at the neighbouring cottage--cook and clean and make tidy in return for a moderate wage. The barking of a kennelled nondescript brought the old woman shuffling to the door--to welcome them (presumably) in her native tongue and to take their measure from head to heel with a pair of shrewd, sunken eyes. Of her verbal greetings they understood nothing but the mention of Madame Amberg; but, having looked them up and down enough, the old lady shuffled back into her kitchen for the key of the revolutionist's property. She reappeared with the key in one hand and a copper stewpan in the other--wherewith she waved the signal to advance, and shuffled off in guidance, ahead of her grandson and the visitors. A quarter of an hour's more walking on a dwindling path brought them in sight of their sylvan honeymoon abode; it had originally been built for the use of a woodman, and was a four-roomed cottage on the edge of the wood overlooking the stream and the pasture of the black-and-white cows. Madame Peys (they knew at least her name) unlocked the door and ushered them into the kitchen, where the boy deposited their bags.

*CHAPTER IV*

The cottage was what any one who know Madame Amberg might have expected her cottage to be. It was sparsely furnished, except with explosive literature; there were very few chairs, and those few verging on decrepitude, but numerous tracts and pamphlets in divers civilized languages. Kitchen utensils were conspicuous chiefly by their absence, and presumably the owner relied consistently on the loan of the copper stewpan which had accompanied her guests from the farm. On the other hand, the kitchen walls were adorned by photographs, more or less fly-blown, of various political extremists, and a signed presentment of Rosa Luxemburg adorned a bedroom mantelpiece.

While Madame Peys made play with the stew-pan and a kettle, the honeymoon couple unpacked their bags and examined their new domain: still, to a certain extent, overawed by the silence and loneliness around it; still, unknown to themselves, speaking more gently and with more hesitation than usual. It was the familiar tang of the books and pamphlets, with which the shelves were crammed and the floor was heaped, that first revived their quieted spirits and created a sense of home. Woman and Democracy, even on the backs of books, had power to act as a tonic and trumpet-call, to reflect the atmosphere of noise and controversy where alone they could breathe with comfort. With unconscious relief they turned from the window and the prospect of the valley, green and untenanted, to entrench themselves against the assaults of the unknown behind the friendly and familiar volumes that had overflowed from Madame Amberg's deal book-shelves to Madame Amberg's uncarpeted floor. Conning them, handling them and turning their pages, they were again on the solid ground of impatient intolerance; they were back amongst their own, their cherished certainties. William in the presence of Belfort Bax felt his feet once more beneath him; Griselda, recognizing a pamphlet by Christabel Pankhurst, ceased to be troubled by the loneliness around her, grew animated and raised her voice.... And the savoury mess which Madame produced from her stewpan, combined with the no less excellent coffee that followed, dispelled for the moment the sense of mystery and the shadow of the New Idea.

The shadow obtruded itself more than once during the next three weeks or so; but on the whole they managed with fair success to be in the country and not of it--to create in the heart of their immemorial valley a little refuge and atmosphere of truly advanced suburbia. Their existence in the Ardennes valley was one of mutual affection and study--by which latter term they understood principally the reading of books they agreed with. From the cares and worries of housekeeping they were blissfully and entirely free; Madame Peys did their catering, taking toll, no doubt, of their simplicity and ignorance of French, but taking it with tact and discretion. Her bills were a weekly trouble to Griselda but not on account of their length; what she disliked was the embarrassing moment when she strove to conceal her complete ignorance of the items and difficulty in grasping the total as set forth in un-English-looking ciphers. Their tidying was also done daily and adequately, their cooking more than adequately; Madame Peys called them in the morning, set the house to rights and their various meals going, and looked in at intervals during the day, departing for the last time when supper was cooked and laid. Their daily doings fell naturally into routine; they rose of a morning to coffee steaming on the stove; and, having digested their breakfast, they usually proceeded to walk a little, concluding the exercise by sitting under the trees with a book which William read aloud to Griselda. They lunched sometimes in picnic fashion, sometimes at home; in the afternoon took another stroll or sat at home reading, with happy little interludes of talk. On two or three days they made small excursions to one of the neighbouring villages; on others William, with a pen and a frown of importance, would establish himself at the table after lunch was cleared away; he had a tract in hand on the Woman Question, and Griselda gently but firmly insisted that even in the first ecstasy of their honeymoon he should not lay it aside. Having a due sense of the value of his epoch-making work, he did not require much pressing; and while he frowned and scribbled and frowned and paused, she would sit by reading, and now and again glance up that she might meet his eye and smile. Long afterwards, months afterwards, when he had forgotten the epoch-making work and all he had meant to prove by it, he would remember how she had risen and come behind him, smoothing and fondling his ruffled hair and bending over to kiss him. He would drop his pen and lift his face to hers, sometimes in silence and sometimes murmuring foolishness.

In time, as the peaceful days crept by, they were sorry that, yielding to a romantic impulse, they had directed that neither paper nor letter should be forwarded during their absence. As a result of this prohibition their entire correspondence while they stayed in the valley consisted of one picture-postcard despatched by Madame Amberg from Liverpool at the moment of her embarkation for an extended lecture tour in the States. It was sent three days after their wedding, and expressed exuberant affection, but was singularly lacking in news of the outside world. To remove the prohibition would be to confess failure and suggest boredom, therefore neither ventured to hint at it; all the same, they knew in their secret hearts that they had overrated their resourcefulness. It was not that they palled on each other--far from it; but part at least of their mutual attraction was their mutual interest in certain subjects and limited phases of activity. Madame Amberg's revolutionary library, valuable as it was in distracting their thoughts from the silence and beauty around them and defending them against the unknown, could not entirely supply the place of daily whirl and unceasing snarl and argument; William pined unconsciously for the din and dust of the platform and Griselda missed the weekly temper into which she worked herself in sympathy with her weekly _Suffragette_. She missed it so much that at last she was moved to utterance--late on a still, heavy evening in August, when once or twice there had come up the valley a distant mutter as of thunder.

"Dear," she said gently, as they sat by the window after supper, "I don't know how you feel about it, but I am beginning to think that our life here is almost too peaceful. It is beautiful to sit here together and dream and forget the world--but is it a preparation for the life we are to lead? Is it a preparation for our work?"

William sighed a gentle sigh of relief, and his hand went out to his wife's in a squeeze of agreement and gratitude. As usual, their minds had jumped together and the thought of twain had been uttered by the lips of one.

"I've been thinking the same thing myself," he said. "It has struck me more than once. As you say, it's beautiful here in the heart of the country--nothing could be more beautiful. But I have wondered, especially lately, if it isn't enervating. It is good for some people, perhaps; but when you have an aim in life and the fighting spirit in you----"

"Yes," Griselda flared responsively, "it's the fighting spirit--and the Cause calling to us. I've been hearing the call getting louder and louder; we can't stand aside any longer, we haven't the right to stand aside. How can I--how dare I--rest and enjoy myself when, there are noble women struggling for freedom, suffering for freedom, keeping the flag flying----?"

And the unconscious little humbug clasped her hands and, from force of habit, rose to her feet, addressing an imaginary audience. William, an equally unconscious humbug, also rose to his feet and kissed her. It was one of those happy and right-minded moments in which inclination agrees with duty, and they were able to admire themselves and each other for a sacrifice which had cost them nothing.

The decision taken, there remained only the details of their speedy departure to settle. Their first impatient impulse was to leave for Brussels on the morrow, but on consideration they decided that the morrow would be too soon. Investigation of a local time-table revealed the fact that the connection with Brussels--the only tolerable connection--meant a start in the very early morning; but an early start meant an overnight warning to the farm-boy, Philippe, that his services would be needful to carry their bags to the station--and the farm-people, all of them, went to bed soon after the sun and were certainly by now asleep. There was, further, the old lady to settle with where financial matters were concerned, and it always took time to make out her illegible bill. On reflection, therefore, they decided for the following day.

"I hope," Griselda meditated, "that I shall be able to make Madame Peys understand that we want the boy the first thing in the morning. I expect she will see what I mean if I show her the train in the time-table and say 'Philippe,' and point to the bags. That ought to make it clear. It rather detracts from the enjoyment of being abroad--not being able to make people understand what you say. Interlaken was much more convenient in that way; all the waiters spoke English quite nicely. And the understanding is even more difficult than the speaking. To-night Madame was talking away hard to me all the time she was cooking our supper, but I couldn't make out one word she said--only that she was very excited. I said, 'Oui, oui,' every now and then, because she seemed to expect it, and I was sorry to see her upset. I thought perhaps one of the people at the farm was ill, but I've seen her son and his wife and the boy since, so it can't be that. Of course, she may have other relations in some other part of the country--or perhaps something has happened to one of the cows. I could see she was worried."

They sat until late side by side by the open window and talked in snatches of the world they were going back to--the dear, familiar, self-important world of the agitated and advanced. Its dust was already in their nostrils, its clamour already in their ears; in three days more they would be in it once again with their own little turbulent folk. The mere thought increased their sense of their own value, and they grew gay and excited as they talked and planned, instinctively turning their backs on the window and shutting out sight and sound of the country peace, the oppressive peace in which they had no part.

"What shall we do to-morrow, darling?" Griselda asked at length. The question was prompted by her longing for to-morrow to be over and her mind was in search of some method for inducing it to pass with swiftness.