Friends at the moment were scarce. Samarez had a week’s leave on his hands, and he was almost at a loss as to how to employ it. He had had in mind dinner at the Junior Rag, possibly an encounter with an acquaintance, and a seat at a musical comedy afterwards. But he had done that for several evenings already, previous to his course at Greenwich, and the prospect bored him, nearly unborable as he was. On the China Station, stifling under the awnings, the most delectable spot on earth had appeared to be the dining-room of the Junior Army and Navy Club, but now it did not seem half so attractive.
And, above all, Agatha Brown was a woman, well fleshed and desirable to the eye of 1893. Women did not count for much in Samarez’s life; marriage, of course, was unthinkable to a man of his sturdy devotion to the profession, and his contact with other women had been slight and nearly forgotten. But—but the urge was there, unadmitted but overwhelming. Samarez at present had nothing more in his mind than companionship. He wanted to talk to a woman—to this woman, now that he had made the first impossible plunge. He wanted neither men’s talk nor solitude. He would have been scared by his intensity of emotion had he had a moment in which to realize it—but he had not. They had rattled through Waterloo Junction, and were rumbling on to Charing Cross railway bridge. Through the window he could see the wide, grey river, and the lights of Charing Cross Station were close at hand. Agatha glanced up at her suitcase in the rack, in evident mental preparation for departure. Samarez stood up in the swaying carriage; his hands flapped with embarrassment.
“L-look here,” he said, “we don’t want to say goodbye yet. Oh, we don’t. Let’s—let’s come and have dinner somewhere.”
He stood holding to the luggage rack, appalled by his realization that he had definitely committed himself, that he was guilty (if the lady chose to find him so) of an ungentlemanly action. His innocent eyes pleaded for him. And Agatha’s eyes softened; for he was so like an artless little boy begging for more cake. She felt motherly and not a bit daring as she said yes.
Once out of the train Samarez, despite his stupefied elation, displayed all the orderly logic of deed of the disciplined man of action. Agatha’s suitcase and his own leather kit-bag were ticketed-in at the cloakroom, a cab was summoned, and with a flash of brilliance he recalled the name of the one restaurant which in those bleak days was suitable for ladies and at the same time was tolerant of morning dress. The cab-horse’s hoofs clattered across the station courtyard and out into the Strand, and they sat side by side as the lamps went by.
Pleasant it was, and each was conscious of a comforting warmth from the other. Each felt supremely befriended and most deliciously expectant—of what, they could not say. The drive passed all too quickly; to Agatha it hardly seemed moment before she found herself being helped from the cab by the whiskered and uniformed restaurant porter.
From opposite sides of the table each regarded the other, seemingly with some slight misgiving regarding their good fortune. It was too good to be true, for the one that he should be sitting with and talking dazzlingly to a woman of good sense and irreproachable morals (to a sailor such an encounter is all too rare an occurrence), and for the other that she should be in a restaurant at all (this was nearly Agatha’s first experience of restaurants) let alone with a clean-bred, good-looking young man opposite her. Samarez ordered a good dinner—trust him for that—and summoned the wine waiter. The very mention of the word ‘wine’ caused Agatha to start a little in her chair, for the worthy Mr. Brown was a staunch, true-blue, even violent, abstainer, who would not allow villainous alcohol even the shelter of his roof. But here of course, amid the gilding and the gay people and the supple-backed waiters, it was all different.
“Choose for yourself,” said Agatha, as Samarez looked across at her from the wine list.
Dinner passed by in a delicious dream. Agatha’s acquaintance with food so far had been of the roast beef and apple-tart order. When she consulted Mrs. Beeton, it had been for the purpose of designing substantial and unambitious meals for the hearty Browns, who one and all, following in Mr. Brown’s footsteps, lost no opportunity of expressing their contempt for what they termed ‘made dishes’. So far the subtleties of sauces and the refinements of foods had passed Agatha by, so that now each succeeding course lingering brilliantly upon the palate came as a new and delicious revelation. Not even the necessity of tactfully observing which implements Samarez employed and imitating his example could mar her enjoyment, and the wine, with its unaccustomed influence, warming and comforting and heartening, was the finishing touch. She leant forward towards Samarez and talked without a care, and he talked back with what seemed to him to be positively dazzling wit. They made a good pair; Agatha with her smooth cheeks and bright eyes and upright figure, Samarez bronzed and blond and clean-looking, with the far-seeing expression in his grey eyes which characterizes the majority of sailors. He was very young for his years; even though, as Agatha realized with a pang of regret, he was actually younger than she was. And once or twice his head went back and he chuckled deep down in his chest with wrinkles round his eyes in a manner which brought a great big pain into Agatha’s breast, and made her long to stretch out her barren arms and draw his rough head down to her bosom. She found herself imagining herself rubbing her cheek against his short rebellious hair, and the mere thought turned her faint with longing as she sat in her chair, strangely maternal.
“Well, I’m blest,” said the Commander suddenly. “Do you know, I’ve been talking to you all this time and I don’t even know what your name is?”
“It’s Agatha,” said Agatha—that much of her name was tolerable to her, although the ‘Brown’ always rankled—“and I don’t know yours either.”
Samarez hesitated for one regretted second; he was sure that it was unwise to tell one’s name to a strange woman, but this woman was so different.
“It’s a very long one,” he said, “but it begins with Richard.”
“Of course it would,” said Agatha bewilderingly, “and they call you Dickie, don’t they?”
“They used to,” admitted Samarez, “but they mostly call me Sammy nowadays, men do.”
“Then I shall call you Dickie,” said Agatha decidedly, and she finished her coffee as though to seal the bargain.
So dinner was Hnished, and the room was beginning to throng with more sensible people dining at a more reasonable hour. They had no possible excuse for lingering on, and yet they both of them were most desperately unwilling to part. Their eyes met again and again across the table, and conversation died a fevered death, and neither could voice what each had most in mind. Agatha simply did not know the usual gambits leading up to the making of a new appointment; Samarez with an odd touch of sensitiveness felt that it would be banal and discordant to speak about it—this was not an ordinary woman. The restaurant was growing crowded; the waiter brought his bill unasked, and hovered round the table with the unmistakable intention of showing them that the management would prefer to see them make way for fresh comers. Fate simply forced them, with sinking hearts, to rise from the table with the words unspoken. Samarez waited for her in the foyer in a really restless and unsettled state of mind.
And Agatha, adjusting her veil in the cloakroom, felt on the verge of tears. She had been mostly wildly unladylike; she had talked with strange men in the gilded halls of vice; it was past seven o’clock and she really must reach Ealing and the Burtons’ by nine at the latest; and she did not want to leave Dickie. Most emphatically she did not want to. But she had not the faintest idea of what she did want.
At the door circumstances forced them further towards separation.
“Cab, I suppose?” Said Samarez huskily.
They climbed into a four-wheeler, and Samarez, still retaining a grain of sanity, directed the driver to Charing Cross Station. Agatha had clean forgotten the luggage left there. The cab wormed its way through the clattering traffic and turned into Chandos Street dim-lighted and quiet. Restlessly Samarez took off his hat and wiped his fret
ted forehead. A passing street lamp showed up his boyish face and his rumpled hair.
“Oh,” said Agatha uncontrollably. One hand went to his shoulder, the other fumbled for his lean brown hand in the darkness. Samarez turned clumsily with his arms out to her, and all their unhappiness melted away under their wild kisses.
CHAPTER THREE
IT WAS THE lights of the Strand and of the courtyard entrance at Charing Cross which brought them back momentarily to reality. Agatha’s face was wet with tears, her hat hung by one hatpin, as their embrace came to an end. The cab halted outside the station and a porter tore open the door.
“I—I can’t get out,” stammered Agatha, shrinking away into a corner.
Samarez climbed out and shut the door.
“Wait!” he flung at the driver, and pelted into the station, dragging out the luggage receipt from his pocket as he hastened to the cloakroom with fantastic strides, blinded by the lights. By the grace of Providence there was no one there awaiting attention; it was only a matter of seconds before he came back, suitcase and kit-bag in hand. He opened the door of the cab, and Agatha came to life again out of her mazed dream..
“Where to, sir?” asked the cab driver.
“Where to?” echoed Samarez stupidly.
“I don’t know—Ealing, I suppose,” said a little voice from the depths of the cab.
“Ealing,” said Samarez to the cab driver.
“Ealing, sir? Ealing Broadway, sir? Right, sir,” said the cab driver, and round came the horse and the door slammed to, with Samarez and Agatha in blessed solitude once more, happily ignorant of the meaning wink of the cab driver and the broad grins of the porters. It was quite several seconds before hand met hand and lip met lip again in the velvet darkness of the cab, while the horse’s hoofs clip-clopped solidly onwards towards Ealing.
Passion had them greatly in thrall. Agatha’s hat was off by now, and the tears flowed freely from her eyes as she pressed against Samarez with all the abandon her corseted waist permitted. Agatha had forgotten she was twenty-nine, of strict Wesleyan upbringing. Twenty-nine years of bottled-up emotion were tearing her to pieces; some faint, unknown cause had obscurely begun the explosion—perhaps even before she had met Samarez—and there was no power on earth that could check it now before it had run its course. She gave herself up to him in an ecstasy of giving.
As for Samarez there is less to be said. He at least had known kisses before, and the encirclement of a woman’s arms was not quite new to him. Even purchased caresses ought to have given him sufficient experience to have told him whither they were straying, but reaction from loneliness and the fierce insistent urge of his sex had swept him away. Agatha’s sweet flesh in his arms and the touch of her unpractised lips on his mouth were all the facts of which he was conscious at the moment. He never dreamed of discretion while he let his instincts carry him away in the darkness, and he pressed her hotly.
Somehow or other Agatha found herself speaking, her hands on his breast and her face lifted to his.
“Of course, I’ve got to go to Ealing,” she said. It was a statement doomed to extinction at birth, made automatically in an automatic hope of contradiction.
“What are you going to do there?” asked Samarez.
“I’m going to stay with friends. They’re expecting me.”
The little voice whispering in the darkness added fresh fuel to the flames of Samarez’s passion. Into the back of his mind leapt the sudden realization that in the cab with them, beside them on the other seat lay her luggage and his, all their necessaries for days.
“Can’t you put them off?” he asked, hardly realizing what he was saying. “Send them a wire. Don’t go.”
“Oh, my dear,” came the answering whisper.
Let it not be imagined that Agatha acted in ignorance. At twenty-nine, when one is an old maid and busy with Chapel work, one hears things. Married women say things just as if one were married oneself, and Chapel work sometimes brings one into contact with illegitimate motherhood and even sometimes undisguised adultery. Agatha knew quite well what happened when a man ‘stayed with’ a woman—at least, she had a general idea of it even if she were hazy as to detail. So that her wordless consent to Samarez’s fierce suggestion, and her acquiescence when Samarez leaned out of the window and redirected the cabman, were absolutely inexcusable, so her fellow-workers would think. But her fellow-workers had never known, perhaps would never know, the careless, happy stupefaction of sudden passion.
The hotel porter was discreet; the hotel reception clerk was friendly; in fact, no one in the hotel thought twice about them, because Agatha looked the last person in the world to share a bedroom with a man who was not her husband, and her glove concealed the absence of a wedding ring. In the dignified seclusion of the hotel bedroom Samarez’s enforced calm fell away from him like a discarded garment. He opened his arms to her and she came gladly to them, giving herself with a delicious, cool relaxation. She felt fantastically motherly towards this tousle-headed boy even during his greediest caresses, and when he sighed out his content with his face upon her bosom she clasped him against it with the same gesture as she would have used to a child.
And the next day, and the day after, and the day after that this maternal attitude became more and more marked. She was so many years older than he, she felt. The sheer physical longing she had felt for him had given way to a stranger, calmer affection. She seemed to have grown suddenly used to him. It was odd, but true. No twinge of conscience came to ruffle the serenity of her soul; she was flooded with a sense of well-being that was not diminished by the necessity for practical arrangements, such as writing to Adeline Burton a careful letter explaining that an unforeseen domestic crisis had compelled her reluctantly to postpone her visit at such brief notice as to prevent her even from letting her know. Agatha would come some other time, as soon as she could, if Adeline did not mind. The lies which Agatha wrote flowed so naturally from her pen that she did not give them a thought—to Agatha’s mind the aged aunt suddenly stricken with mortal illness and demanding immediate nursing seemed to be an actual living character. She did not even feel relieved that Greenwich and Ealing should be so far apart as to render it quite impossible for Adeline to discover by a casual call that no such lady existed.
Samarez, on the other hand, was very puzzled and almost uncomfortable of conscience on those occasions when it occurred to him to think what he was doing, and to make deductions from the somewhat meagre data presented to him. Agatha had never ‘been there before’; he was sure of that for more reasons than one. No one could have been, anyway, and still retained the blossoming innocence which she displayed at every moment. She clearly had not even toyed with the idea of dallying with men. Her underclothing proved that, if nothing else did. It was exquisitely neat, with a myriad tucks and gatherings, but it was not to be called frivolous. It was even pathetic in its lack of sex appeal. Just the sort of white, longcloth underclothing a nun would wear, if (Samarez had no information on the point) nuns wore underclothing. Samarez’s knowledge of underclothing was limited; but in those days it was only daughters of joy who wore garments other than virgin white and strove after ornament as well as utility. And Agatha’s pathetically severe nightgown, high-buttoned and severe and undecorated, settled that matter to Samarez’s mind. So that Agatha was a respectable member of a respectable family, who had bestowed her virginity on him just as she might have given half a crown to a beggar. It made Sarnarez queerly uncomfortable. And yet, after three days’ intimacy, she was far less attainable than ever before. Samarez could feel no thrill of pride of possession while he was with her, not even in the most triumphant moments of intimacy. Something was still out of reach, beyond attainment, and he was piqued in consequence. He tried to buy presents for her, to lavish money on her for clothes and jewellery, but whenever he tried she put the suggestion aside with a smiling irresistible negative. Poor Samarez was not to know that Agatha’s main reason for refusal was the impossibility of subs
equently explaining away these gifts to her family.
So it was with a queer mixture of pique and gentlemanly feeling that, after three days, Samarez proposed marriage to her. He did not want to; he held the strongest possible opinion regarding the unsuitability of marriage for naval officers, and he did not believe in marriage much, anyway. But he proposed, and as he did so he regarded her anxiously with expectant eyes, at the same moment annoyed with himself for throwing away his future and comforted by the knowledge that he was doing the ‘right thing’. And Agatha, her hands on his shoulders, looked deep into those anxious eyes before she slowly shook her head.
“No, Dickie,” she said, “it would be better if we didn’t. But it was awfully nice of you to ask me.”
Then she strained him impulsively to her, and kissed him hotly. She saw the unwisdom of marrying a man whom one only loved as one might love a pet St. Bernard, and who would never be able to claim that entire devotion and subservience which Agatha, in accordance with the ideas of the time, thought she ought to give to her husband. But she was keenly alive to the extent of the sacrifice Samarez had proposed making, and appreciative of it.
So that after five days the affair came to an end. Five days during which Agatha had had a glimpse of the sort of life led by women who are not greengrocers’ daughters; five days of theatres (an annual pantomime and an annual circus was the nearest Agatha had ever come to a theatre until then), of good food, of leisure, of ample spendings. Truth to tell, the waste of money and time, by the end of the five days, had so worked upon Agatha’s mind that she was quite glad of the prospect of returning home to economical housekeeping and domestic industry. And Samarez had begun to cease to interest her—he was not a tremendously interesting fellow, as a matter of fact.
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