Flowering Wilderness eotc-2

by John Galsworthy

  “To-morrow is Thursday, Wilfrid. Will you mind if we drop in on Uncle Adrian on the way home? He’s on our side. And about our engagement, we can say we aren’t engaged, and BE all the same. Good-bye, my love!”

  Down in the vestibule by the front door as she was opening it, Stack’s voice said:

  “Excuse me, miss.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve been with Mr. Desert a long time, and I was thinking. You’re engaged to him, if I don’t mistake, miss?”

  “Yes and no, Stack. I hope to marry him, however.”

  “Quite, miss. And a good thing, too, if you’ll excuse me. Mr. Desert is a sudden gentleman, and I was thinking if we were in leeaison, as you might say, it’d be for his good.”

  “I quite agree; that’s why I rang you up this morning.”

  “I’ve seen many young ladies in my time, but never one I’d rather he married, miss, which is why I’ve taken the liberty.”

  Dinny held out her hand. “I’m terribly glad you did; it’s just what I wanted; because things are difficult, and going to be more so, I’m afraid.”

  Having polished his hand, Stack took hers, and they exchanged a rather convulsive squeeze.

  “I know there’s something on his mind,” he said. “That’s not my business. But I have known him to take very sudden decisions. And if you were to give me your telephone numbers, miss, I might be of service to you both.”

  Dinny wrote them down. “This is the town one at my uncle, Sir Lawrence Mont’s, in Mount Street; and this is my country one at Condaford Grange in Oxfordshire. One or the other is almost sure to find me. And thank you ever so. It takes a load off my mind.”

  “And off mine, miss. Mr. Desert has every call on me. And I want the best for him. He’s not everybody’s money, but he’s mine.”

  “And mine, Stack.”

  “I won’t bandy compliments, miss, but he’ll be a lucky one, if you’ll excuse me.”

  Dinny smiled. “No, I shall be the lucky one. Good-bye, and thank you again.”

  She went away, treading, so to speak, on Cork Street. She had an ally in the lion’s mouth; a spy in the friend’s camp; a faithful traitor! Thus mixing her metaphors, she scurried back to her aunt’s house. Her father would almost certainly go there before returning to Condaford.

  Seeing his unmistakable old bowler in the hall, she took the precaution of removing her own hat before going to the drawing-room. He was talking to her aunt, and they stopped as she came in. Everyone would always stop now as she came in! Looking at them with quiet directness, she sat down.

  The General’s eyes met hers.

  “I’ve been to see Mr. Desert, Dinny.”

  “I know, dear. He is thinking it over. We shall wait till everyone knows, anyway.”

  The General moved uneasily.

  “And if it is any satisfaction to you, we are not formally engaged.”

  The General gave her a slight bow, and Dinny turned to her aunt, who was fanning a pink face with a piece of lilac-coloured blotting-paper.

  There was a silence, then the General said:

  “When are you going to Lippinghall, Em?”

  “Next week,” replied Lady Mont, “or is it the week after? Lawrence knows. I’m showing two gardeners at the Chelsea Flower Show. Boswell and Johnson, Dinny.”

  “Oh! Are they still with you?”

  “More so. Con, you ought to grow pestifera—no, that’s not the name—that hairy anemone thing.”

  “Pulsatilla, Auntie.”

  “Charmin’ flowers. They want lime.”

  “We’re short of lime at Condaford,” said the General, “as you ought to know, Em.”

  “Our azaleas were a dream this year, Aunt Em.”

  Lady Mont put down the blotting-paper.

  “I’ve been tellin’ your father, Dinny, that it’s no good fussin’ you.”

  Dinny, watching her father’s glum face, said: “Do you know that nice shop in Bond Street, Auntie, where they make animals? I got a lovely little vixen and her cubs there to make Dad like foxes better.”

  “Huntin’,” said Lady Mont, and sighed. “When they get up chimneys, it’s rather touchin’.”

  “Even Dad doesn’t like digging out, or stopping earths, do you, Dad?”

  “N-no!” said the General, “on the whole, no!”

  “Bloodin’ children, too,” said Lady Mont. “I saw you blooded, Con.”

  “Messy job, and quite unnecessary! Only the old raw-hide school go in for it now.”

  “He looked so nasty, Dinny.”

  “Yes, you haven’t got the face for it, Dad. It wants one of those snub-nosed, red-haired, freckled boys, that like killing for the sake of killing.”

  The General rose.

  “I must be going back to the Club. Jean picks me up there. When shall we see you, Dinny? Your mother—” and he stopped.

  “Aunt Em’s keeping me till Saturday.”

  The General nodded. He suffered his sister’s and daughter’s kiss with a face that seemed to say, ‘Yes—but—’

  From the window Dinny watched his figure moving down the street, and her heart twitched.

  “Your father!” said her aunt’s voice behind her. “All this is very wearin’, Dinny.”

  “I think it’s very dear of Dad not to have mentioned the fact that I’m dependent on him.”

  “Con IS a dear,” said Lady Mont; “he said the young man was respectful. Who was it said: ‘Goroo—goroo’?”

  “The old Jew in David Copperfield.”

  “Well, it’s what I feel.”

  Dinny turned from the window.

  “Auntie! I don’t feel the same being at all as I did two weeks ago. I’m utterly changed. Then I didn’t seem to have any desires; now I’m all one desire, and I don’t seem to care whether I’m decent or not. Don’t say Epsom salts!”

  Lady Mont patted her arm.

  “‘Honour thy father and thy mother,’” she said; “but then there was ‘Forsake all and follow me,’ so you can’t tell.”

  “I can,” said Dinny. “Do you know what I’m hoping now? That everything will come out tomorrow. If it did, we could be married at once.”

  “Let’s have some tea, Dinny. Blore, tea! Indian and rather strong!”

  CHAPTER 16

  Dinny took her lover to Adrian’s door at the museum the next day, and left him there. Looking round at his tall, hatless, girt-in figure, she saw him give a violent shiver. But he smiled, and even at that distance she felt warmed by his eyes.

  Adrian, already notified, received the young man with what he stigmatised to himself as ‘morbid curiosity,’ and placed him at once in mental apposition to Dinny. A curiously diverse couple they would make! Yet, with a perception not perhaps unconnected with the custody of skeletons, he had a feeling that his niece was not physically in error. This was a figure that could well stand or lie beside her. Its stringy grace and bony gallantry accorded with her style and slenderness; and the darkened face, with its drawn and bitter lines, had eyes which even Adrian, who had all the public-school-man’s impatience of male film stars, could see would be attractive to the feminine gender. Bones broke the ice to some degree; and over the identity of a supposed Hittite in moderate preservation they became almost cordial. Places and people whom they had both seen in strange conditions were a further incentive to human feeling. But not till he had taken up his hat to go did Wilfrid say suddenly:

  “Well, Mr. Cherrell, what would YOU do?”

  Adrian, who was looking up, halted and considered his questioner with narrowed eyes.

  “I’m a poor hand at advice, but Dinny is a precious baggage—”

  “She is.”

  Adrian bent and shut the door of a cabinet.

  “This morning,” he said, “I watched a solitary ant in my bathroom trying to make its way and find out about things. I’m sorry to say I dropped some ashes from my pipe on it to see what it would do. Providence all over—always dropping ashes from its pipe on us
to observe the result. I’ve been in several minds, but I’ve come to the conclusion that if you’re really in love with Dinny—” a convulsive movement of Wilfrid’s body ended in the tight clenching of his hands on his hat—“as I see you are, and as I know her to be with you, then stand fast and work your way with her through the ashes. She’d rather be in the cart with you than in a Pullman with the rest of us. I believe”—and Adrian’s face was illuminated by earnestness—“that she is one of those of whom it is not yet written, ‘and they twain shall be one SPIRIT.’” The young man’s face quivered.

  ‘Genuine!’ thought Adrian.

  “So think first of her, but not in the ‘I love you so that nothing will induce me to marry you’ fashion. Do what she wants—when she wants it—she’s not unreasonable. And, honestly, I don’t believe you’ll either of you regret it.”

  Desert took a step towards him, and Adrian could see that he was intensely moved. But he mastered all expression, save a little jerky smile, made a movement of one hand, turned, and went out.

  Adrian continued to shut the doors of cupboards that contained bones. ‘That,’ he was thinking, ‘is the most difficult, and in some ways the most beautiful face I’ve seen. The spirit walks upon its waters and is often nearly drowned. I wonder if that advice was criminal, because for some reason or other I believe he’s going to take it.’ And he returned to the reading of a geographical magazine which Wilfrid’s visit had interrupted. It contained a spirited account of an Indian tribe on the Amazon which had succeeded, even without the aid of American engineers at capitalistic salaries, in perfecting the Communistic ideal. None of them, apparently, owned anything. Their whole lives, including the processes of nature, were passed in the public eye. They wore no clothes, they had no laws; their only punishment, something in connection with red ants, was inflicted for the only offence, that of keeping anything to themselves. They lived on the cassava root variegated with monkey, and were the ideal community!

  ‘A wonderful instance,’ thought Adrian, ‘of how the life of man runs in cycles. For the last twenty thousand years or so we’ve been trying, as we thought, to improve on the principle which guides the life of these Indians, only to find it reintroduced as the perfect pattern.’

  He sat for some time with a smile biting deep into the folds about his mouth. Doctrinaires, extremists! That Arab who put a pistol to young Desert’s head was a symbol of the most mischievous trait in human nature! Ideas and creeds—what were they but half-truths, only useful in so far as they helped to keep life balanced? The geographical magazine slipped off his knee.

  He stopped on the way home in the garden of his square to feel the sun on his cheek and listen to a blackbird. He had all he wanted in life: the woman he loved, fair health, a fair salary—seven hundred a year and the prospect of a pension—two adorable children, not his own, so that he was free from the misgivings of more normal parents; an absorbing job, a love of nature, and another thirty years, perhaps, before him. ‘If at this moment,’ he thought, ‘someone put a pistol to my head and said: “Adrian Cherrell, renounce Christianity or out go your brains!” should I say with Clive in India: “Shoot and be damned!”?’ And he could not answer. The blackbird continued to sing, the young leaves to twitter in the breeze, the sun to warm his cheek, and life to be desirable in the quiet of that one-time fashionable square…

  Dinny, when she left those two on the verge of acquaintanceship, had paused, in two minds, and then gone north to St. Augustine’s-inthe-Meads. Her instinct was to sap the opposition of the outlying portions of her family, so as to isolate the defences of her immediate people. She moved towards the heart of practical Christianity with a certain rather fearful exhilaration.

  Her Aunt May was in the act of dispensing tea to two young ex-Collegians before their departure to a club where they superintended the skittles, chess, draughts, and ping-pong of the neighbourhood.

  “If you want Hilary, Dinny, he had two committees, but they might collapse, because he’s almost the whole of both.”

  “You and uncle know about me, I suppose?”

  Mrs. Hilary nodded. She was looking very fresh in a sprigged dress.

  “Would you mind telling me what uncle feels about it?”

  “I’d rather leave that to him, Dinny. We neither of us remember Mr. Desert very well.”

  “People who don’t know him well will always misjudge him. But neither you nor uncle care what other people think.” She said this with a guileless expression which by no means deceived Mrs. Hilary, accustomed to Women’s Institutes.

  “We’re neither of us very orthodox, as you know, Dinny, but we do both of us believe very deeply in what Christianity stands for, and it’s no good pretending we don’t.”

  Dinny thought a moment.

  “Is that more than gentleness and courage and self-sacrifice, and must one be a Christian to have those?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it. I should be sorry to say anything that would put me in a position different from Hilary’s.”

  “Auntie, how model of you!”

  Mrs. Hilary smiled. And Dinny knew that judgment in this quarter was definitely reserved.

  She waited, talking of other things, till Hilary came in. He was looking pale and worried. Her aunt gave him tea, passed a hand over his forehead, and went out.

  Hilary drank off his tea and filled his pipe with a knot of tobacco screwed up in a circular paper.

  “Why corporations, Dinny? Why not three doctors, three engineers, three architects, an adding machine, and a man of imagination to work it and keep them straight?”

  “Are you in trouble, Uncle?”

  “Yes, gutting houses on an overdraft is ageing enough, without corporational red tape.”

  Looking at his worn but smiling face, Dinny thought: ‘I can’t bother him with my little affairs.’ “You and Aunt May couldn’t spare time, I suppose, to come to the Chelsea Flower Show on Tuesday?”

  “My goodness!” said Hilary, sticking one end of a match into the centre of the knob and lighting the knob with the other end, “how I would love to stand in a tent and smell azaleas!”

  “We thought of going at one o’clock, so as to avoid the worst of the crush. Aunt Em would send for you.”

  “Can’t promise, so don’t send. If we’re not at the main entrance at one, you’ll know that Providence has intervened. And now, what about you? Adrian has told me.”

  “I don’t want to bother you, Uncle.”

  Hilary’s shrewd blue eyes almost disappeared. He expelled a cloud of smoke.

  “Nothing that concerns you will bother me, my dear, except in so far as it’s going to hurt you. I suppose you MUST, Dinny?”

  “Yes, I must.”

  Hilary sighed.

  “In that case it remains to make the best of it. But the world loves the martyrdom of others. I’m afraid he’ll have a bad Press, as they say.”

  “I’m sure he will.”

  “I can only just remember him, as a rather tall, scornful young man in a buff waistcoat. Has he lost the scorn?”

  Dinny smiled.

  “It’s not the side I see much of at present.”

  “I sincerely trust,” said Hilary, “that he has not what they call devouring passions.”

  “Not so far as I have observed.”

  “I mean, Dinny, that once that type has eaten its cake, it shows all the old Adam with a special virulence. Do you get me?”

  “Yes. But I believe it’s a ‘marriage of true minds’ with us.”

  “Then, my dear, good luck! Only, when people begin to throw bricks, don’t resent it. You’re doing this with your eyes open, and you’ll have no right to. Harder to bear than having your own toe trodden on is seeing one you love batted over the head. So catch hold of yourself hard at the start, and go on catching hold, or you’ll make it worse for him. If I’m not wrong, Dinny, you can get very hot about things.”

  “I’ll try not to. When Wilfrid’s book of poems comes out, I want y
ou to read one called ‘The Leopard’; it gives his state of mind about the whole thing.”

  “Oh!” said Hilary blankly. “Justification? That’s a mistake.”

  “That’s what Michael says. I don’t know whether it is or not; I think in the end—not. Anyway, it’s coming out.”

  “There beginneth a real dog-fight. ‘Turn the other cheek’ and ‘too proud to fight’ would have been better left unsaid. All the same, it’s asking for trouble, and that’s all about it.”

  “I can’t help it, Uncle.”

  “I realise that, Dinny; it’s when I think of the number of things you won’t be able to help that I feel so blue. And what about Condaford? Is it going to cut you off from that?”

  “People do come round, except in novels; and even there they have to in the end, or else die, so that the heroine may be happy. Will you say a word for us to Father if you see him, Uncle?”

  “No, Dinny. An elder brother never forgets how superior he was to you when he was big and you were not.”

  Dinny rose.

  “Well, Uncle; thank you ever so for not believing in damnation, and even more for not saying so. I shall remember all you’ve said. Tuesday, one o’clock at the main entrance; and don’t forget to eat something first; it’s a very tiring business.”

  When she had gone Hilary refilled his pipe.

  ‘“And even more for not saying so!”’ he repeated in thought. ‘That young woman can be caustic. I wonder how often I say things I don’t mean in the course of my professional duties.’ And, seeing his wife in the doorway, he added:

  “May, would you say I was a humbug—professionally?”

  “Yes, dear. How could it be otherwise?”

  “You mean, the forms a parson uses aren’t broad enough to cover the variations of human nature? But I don’t see how they could be. Would you like to go to the Chelsea Flower Show on Tuesday?”

  Mrs. Hilary, thinking: ‘Dinny might have asked ME,’ replied cheerfully: “Very much.”

  “Let’s try and arrange so that we can get there at one o’clock.”

  “Did you talk to her about her affair?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she immovable?”