“My mother is delighted. I heard from her yesterday.”
“And I sold another hundred copies of February Fill-dyke up to the end of March this year. People bought them out of vulgar curiosity, I suppose, but perhaps they read them.”
“Losing both vulgarity and curiosity in the process.… Isn’t Nelly Bly a ridiculous name for a girl like that?”
“There’s another named Veronica Stout.”
“And a hill called Popocatapetl. I should like some beer.”
“Come down to the bowling-green then. It’s too fine to stay indoors.”
They went down the stone staircase that led into the central courtyard—pink roses assailed the galleries and in enormous wooden pots sturdy shrubs grew, thickset and glossy-green; two walls were in shadow, warm, blue-veined shadow, and an old red roof in the sun looked as though it were on fire—and through a narrow doorway to the back of the inn where the bowling-green lay smooth and calm, dappled at one side under a high awning of leaves. Beyond the green, through old and lofty-spreading trees, shone the pale brick-colour of tennis courts.
Professor Benbow and Mr. van Buren were playing bowls, two massive figures in white who stooped and got up again with stately labour, slowly approaching the earth to kneel so heavily on it, slowlier rising under the burden of their ponderous years.
“A hit, a palpable hit,” said the professor as his last wood rolled shrewdly to the jack.
“It’s a game that I’ve never given much attention to,” remarked Mr. van Buren, “but I’m willing to admit its attractions. Not that it has the snap and glitter of golf of course.”
“Golf? Golf was a respectable game when only men of our age, or approaching it, played. Now when it’s fallen into the hands of professional footballers, androgynous pot-hunters, and American welter-weights, why, I have given it up until someone presents me with a course of my own.”
“Those are hard words for a game that’s highly thought of, professor. A game that’s done more than anything in the American constitution to bring my country into the comity of civilized nations. All I’ve got against it is that it takes you so darned far away from the club house.”
Saturday introduced Quentin to the professor and van Buren.
The latter immediately said, “Why, I’ve met your mother, Mr. Cotton. I heard her in Boston when she was lecturing on “Woman’s Place in the World To-day.” It was a remarkably fine lecture, and the place she assigned to woman was as elevated as her general sentiments.”
The lines on Mr. van Buren’s expressive face deepened to an equivocal significance, and his eyes twinkled as he continued to shake Quentin’s hand.
Beyond the trees, so that their voices came faint but clearly, were people playing tennis.
“Who are they?” asked the professor.
“Miss Benbow, Colonel Waterhouse, Jean Forbes and Telfer.”
“We’re a strenuous people. We write revues, do daring and ingenious gymnastics on quite un-parallel critical bars, explore Central Asia and take the trouble to say what we think about it, and work as hard as gladiators for relaxation. Joan is the one idler there. I’m inclined to like the human race… with the trees between us.”
“It’s a pity they specialize,” Saturday suggested. “Now, if Telfer would go to Central Asia for a change—”
“You mean that he doesn’t like your poetry?”
“He compared one of my poems to an Academy painting. He went so far as to shout ‘Leighton’ at it.”
“I’m glad,” said the professor. “It’s time that acrimony and bad taste came back to enliven our criticism. I could even wish that he had called some other verses Landseer. Robust vilification is the proper meat for poets—”
He was interrupted by a hesitating cough at his elbow.
“I saw you sitting here, professor, and I thought that I would take the opportunity to let you know what a ridiculous mistake I made last night.”
Mr. Wesson smiled benignly down through his curious eyeglasses. His face under the mid-day sun had the texture almost of wash-leather and was nearly featureless (but for such necessary adjuncts as nose, eyes, mouth and so on) except for two things: the look of gentle benignity and heavily wrinkled, unusually obvious upper eyelids. A brown suit hung loosely on him and he carried a book in one hand.
“Oh! What was that?” With a sudden boom in his voice Professor Benbow sat up and stared at Mr. Wesson, who smiled more kindly than ever.
“I told you that I had bought some letters written to Garrick by different people. What I meant of course—it was stupid of me—was letters written by him. I saw you were puzzled when I told you about them, and just before I went to sleep—while I was sipping my milk, as a matter of fact—I remembered the unthinking error which I had made. There’s quite a difference, isn’t there?”
“There is,” said the professor gravely. “But I’m afraid that we all make mistakes sometimes.”
“Yes,” replied Mr. Wesson mildly, “I think you made one too.”
“Eh?”
“You spoke of the first edition of Donne’s Poems as appearing in 1683. You meant 1633, didn’t you? I remembered that also while I was drinking my milk, and I almost came down to tell you about it.”
“Mea maxima culpa,” said the professor. “My wits, as well as my body, must be on holiday. You do well to rebuke me.”
“Just a slip of the tongue, professor, like my own silly mistake about the letters. But I thought I would tell you.”
Mr. Wesson smiled all round, an excusive, propitiating smile that seemed gently to bow him out of their circle. He turned to go, but after taking a few steps halted, came back, and showed to Professor Benbow the book which he carried.
“A first edition of Herrick’s Hesperides,” he said. “A pretty writer, don’t you think? I bought it at Sotheby’s last week.” And without waiting for a reply walked smoothly away.
“That sounded to me like a smack on the face,” said van Buren thoughtfully.
“It was,” said the professor, “and after I had been knocked down first.”
Quentin looked puzzled—though he had been watching the distant game of tennis rather than listening to such dull talk for a fine day—and the professor explained, “I have been punished for trying to be clever with a fool—for I still think the man’s a fool,” he added, as though it were an ultimatum, to van Buren.
Mr. van Buren grunted.
CHAPTER IV
Quentin Cotton, waiting to buy stamps at the Downish Post Office, saw an attractive young woman who had already bought one. Only one. He had an aunt who bought stamps one at a time; or three; or seven; once, while he was with her, she had bought eleven, having newly written eleven letters. Did all women deal on such strictly retail terms with the post office? This one in front of him, or half in front and half beside him, was charming so far as he could see. Her chin could scarcely be bettered, at least from that angle. And the tip of her tongue as it came out to moisten the little brown stamp was incredibly delightful. He felt sure that it was a witty, purposive tongue, a strong and yet delicate tongue that went swiftly about its business or lay mockingly in an equally alluring cheek. Idly, scarcely realizing what he did, his eyes followed the descent of the stamp—between a finger and thumb that were pleasant to look at and yet purposive too—to a long envelope addressed in the round assured hand of the confirmed letter-writer; a gossiping, sprightly hand that promised the happiest of indiscretions; and the inscription, so far as he could read—
“Well,” said a cool voice, “have you enjoyed that instalment?”
Quentin was deservedly put out of countenance and replied foolishly, “Oh, it’s you, is it?”
She had spoken at first without looking round, and recognizing Quentin caught a little, but only a little, of his embarrassment. “I could say the same with equal truth,” she murmured.
“I came to buy some stamps,” he explained.
“But being fond of reading—”
“Onl
y stories with a happy ending. I hate those Russians.”
“My first husband was a Cossack,” she replied in a tone of definite rebuke. And walked composedly out of the post office.
That subordinate part of the civilized mind which is trained to the routine of daily life dictated to Quentin (and to the post office clerk) his original mission, and guided his fingers in sticking the stamps on the conventional right-hand-upper-corners of the several envelopes which he carried. But Quentin’s higher thought centres, or at any rate those centres engaged in accepting, registering, and passing immediate judgment on incoming emotions and apprehensions, were thrown out of gear by something akin to atmospheric disturbances in the physical world. So charming a girl, and married. Young, and married to a Cossack. A Cossack. He had never known a Cossack personally. He had only read about them and seen them, or imitations of them, dancing in a singularly robust and agile manner; throwing knives and doing tricks with ropes—no, those were cowboys; but Cossacks also rode, generally under the belly of their horses rather than on the saddle, or if they used a saddle it was to stand on it; and they were fond of stooping just as their horses broke into a rousing gallop to pick handkerchiefs off the ground.…
Quentin stood on the pavement. They might be charming fellows, of course. Great, noisy children, now laughing full-heartedly, now piteously seeking comfort and dimly knowing in their wise Slav hearts—were they Slavs?—that no one on earth could comfort them. Children of the steppes who would never grow up. But they grew beards, damn them. Great sprouting bristle-patches of beards.…
And she had said first husband. Good God, how many had she had? And starting with a Russian what country had she gone to next? German waiters, Jewish tailors, French chefs, gondolieri, Swiss guides… but she might have been joking; though one doesn’t usually make jokes of that kind in a post office. She had looked so virginal, especially in that green and white uniform. Many women of course looked more virginal after they were married than they did before—just to make it more difficult.… But Saturday had said her name was Nelly Bly, and Quentin was damned if Bly was a Russian name.
“I beg your pardon,” he said to a woman who was pushing a perambulator against him, and got into his car. He drove slowly along and saw Nelly Bly walking a little way in front of him. He remembered that he had not long ago boasted to Saturday of being democratic, and decided that he could be cosmopolitan as well. Any Englishman, indeed, who sympathized with the plebs of his own country had gone half-way to thinking kindly of foreigners. He stopped a yard in front of her and leaning out said, “I’m going to Shelton and back. Would you care to come with me?”
“Thank you,” she answered, “it’s kind of you to invite me.”
There seemed to be a new quietness about her; the mantle of her widowhood, perhaps—if she was a widow.
“Bly isn’t a Russian name, is it?” Quentin asked.
“I took my maiden name again after Boris—that is, after I left my husband.”
“Oh,” said Quentin.
They exchanged a few cheerless but amiable remarks as they passed the celebrated ruins of the Roman Baths and drove through the long poplar avenue that goes all the way to Little Needham. Quentin felt his mind uncomfortably dull beneath its weight of curiosity, and Nelly Bly stared straight in front, looking even lovelier than Quentin had first thought in her grave serenity.
“You said your first husband was a Cossack,” he ventured.
“Yes,” she answered softly. Then, after a moment or two’s thought, added, “I might have said my only husband—”
Quentin’s spirits rose considerably.
“—because I gave Boris all I had, youth, faith, everything, and after him no one really counted.”
Quentin felt depressed, and for some time drove at a beggarly fifteen miles an hour.
“You won’t say anything of this to Mr. Keith, will you?” she asked in a little while. “I have nothing to be ashamed of but he might not understand so fully as you do, and I have my living to make now. And that isn’t easy, for a French convent—I was educated in a convent, Mr. Cotton—doesn’t contemplate the immediate future; at least not my kind of future.”
Quentin pressed his foot hard on the accelerator and their speed increased with a leap and a swoop forward—the gale sang valiantly and the sun dashed itself to pieces on the wind-screen—to fifty-five miles an hour. She had appealed to his chivalry, and Quentin’s chivalry, as that of so many unromantic Englishmen, lay like a glacier ready for the warm fingers of Spring to release it. Chivalry vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly; for indeed it is so seldom taken off the ice. But once it is in the sun it passeth all understanding, for it is content to act without understanding.
“You can trust me,” said Quentin, and overtook magnificently a family Daimler that almost filled the narrow road. The world was beneath him. He saw the white road like a tape running round the enormous sphere of the earth that careered hugely through cosmos, and he, Quentin, trod the earth as a superb acrobat lonely on a gigantic ball, for he felt both chivalrous and sophisticated—two proud things—in that he could count as nothing the dubious way-faring of a girl lost in a forest of men.
“Perhaps I ought to,” she answered a little strangely.
“I knew at once, of course, that you weren’t an ordinary maid.”
“I have read A Nettle Against May. I got it out of a Free Library.”
“Did you like it?”
“Some books exhaust you; others nourish you.”
“First novels are generally indigestible, like a soul-and-kidney pie that has been baking ever since adolescence.”
“Yours wasn’t because it omitted the pie altogether and went straight from cocktail to savoury.”
“Then it left you hungry for more?”
“But not necessarily from the same shop.”
“My next one is going to be robust.”
“Not too robust for a Free Library, I hope. Because I can’t afford to buy novels.”
The reminder of her precarious social position fell like a cloud on Quentin’s spirit, and Nelly Bly tactfully changed her direction. She changed it indeed more than once, for she talked as a hound runs, by scent; though the fox that she followed changed into a bird and a water-beast and a dining-room table at will. Some of the most entertaining talkers are like that, and as they seldom kill, so they are seldom shocked by the sight of reality. Nelly Bly began her chase by saying that Mr. Sigismund Telfer apparently wore a hair-net in bed, for she had seen one in his room and Mrs. Telfer’s hair was quite obviously too short to need it. The lure of such personal gossip grew strong and both she and Quentin showed their teeth happily; but by-and-by it led, through unseen country, to some mention of music, and Nelly’s confession that she liked negro spirituals best when one felt that if the singer went sharp by a hair’s breadth he would be in hysterics; and thence over other lightly sown fields and a fence or two of argument to a beaten track on which she remarked, “Well, I’m glad that I’m not in love at present. Love makes a woman dull.”
“Do you mean sleepy?” Quentin asked.
“No, silent. She’s frightened of saying something that might shock her lover, or anticipated lover. Men in love are sometimes horrified by things that a woman never notices. So the girl in love grows dull in self-defence.”
“Or it may be protective mimicry. So many men are as dull as women.”
“And then the poor girl’s compromised as well as bored.”
“Compromised?”
“A clever girl can have only one reason for going about with a stupid man.”
“Wit, then, has supplanted the duenna.”
“It always did,” said Nelly Bly.
Quentin sighed. He felt that she was getting the better of the rallies and he wished that he could remember some of the excellent things he had said in A Nettle Against May. There was spirited stuff in his mind when he wrote that. Perhaps a memory of Congreve or Vanbrugh had
sometimes helped out invention; but then the gleaner has always shared with the sower. Anyway it wasn’t likely that she, brought up in a convent, would be familiar with Restoration epigrams… if he could only think of one. But, like stammerers trying to pronounce “sforzando,” he utterly failed; both memory and invention stuck.
“Well?” she said, breaking the unusual silence.
“I’m trying to compromise you by an appearance of stupidity,” said Quentin with an effort.
They bumped over the stony streets of Shelton. Nelly refused tea. She was an employee on parole, she said, and it was time to turn. Quentin found matter to speak of on the return journey, for he talked about himself. And Nelly Bly listened to him.
CHAPTER V
Between half-past six and half-past seven—when they went to bathe and change out of light clothes into dark clothes, or from light to bright, according to their sex—Professor Benbow talked with Jean Forbes and Mr. van Buren with her mother, Tommy Mandeville; Saturday talked with Joan; Sir Philip Betts, the racing motorist, talked with Jacquetta Telfer; Sigismund Telfer talked with Diana Waterhouse; Colonel Waterhouse talked with Angela Scrabster while Mrs. Waterhouse listened to them; Lady Wesson sat alone, apparently reading, and Lady Porlet, somewhat surprisingly, talked with Holly the barman.
There were other people staying at “The Pelican” they, according to their minds and inclinations, found yet others with whom they talked.
At first Jean Forbes and Professor Benbow talked about Jean Forbes; then they talked about Professor Benbow.
“I did six months in the chorus of Red Cabbage,” said Jean Forbes, “and I’ll never put a foot on the stage again. I went away and hid myself in the Highlands afterwards. I got so tired of bodies. All the bodies were made in the same way. Has that ever struck you?”
“The discovery has struck—‘struck’ is the word—every wise man from Solomon onward,” replied the professor, “though there are still many people who think that mass production is a modern idea.”
“But it’s funny, don’t you think? There are so many different kinds of flowers. But we were all alike—and showing everybody that we were all alike as though it was something to be proud of—and we dressed alike, and sang the same things every night, and did the same steps together, and came on together and ran off together—I nearly went mad. And then mother and I wrote Peace in Our Time and all the critics said the same things about it.”
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