Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “Yes,” she said.

  “All that you said about the life — it was like my other self speaking.”

  “You mean that when I spoke, your inside self said, ‘Yes, yes; that’s what I mean’?”

  “I mean more than that. My inside self said, ‘Yes, yes, that’s what I always meant. That’s what I meant and what I wanted before ever I met you.’ Then meeting you obscured everything else, but when you spoke I saw that what I had always wanted rhymed with what you had always wanted. But I want to be quite sure. May I ask questions?”

  “Yes.”

  “Suppose we had been really married — would you have been contented to spend your working life on a farm, to live just that life that you spoke of that day going to Warwick?”

  She did not speak for a moment, and for a moment he wished that he had not questioned. And when she did speak it was not to give him an answer.

  “I didn’t believe it was possible,” she said. “I thought people couldn’t make farming succeed, nowadays, and I don’t think I could bear to spend my working life, as you call it, on a thing that is foredoomed to failure.”

  “Nor could I; and I don’t mean to, either. My farm will succeed. If it costs me every penny I have it shall succeed. I shall go a new way to work. You know I’ve really got quite a lot of money, and I have a plan.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It’s quite simple, and absolutely opposed to all the accursed teachings of political economy. Of course I shall get the best machinery and the best seeds and the best implements. But I shall also get the best labor.”

  “Doesn’t every one try to do that?”

  “Oh yes, every farmer tries to get the best labor he can, at current rates. I sha’n’t bother about the current rates. I shall get the best men that are to be got and I shall pay them wages that will make them glad to come to me rather than to any one else. If I find a man’s good I shall give him a share in the profits of the farm; if I find he isn’t any good I shall sack him.”

  “I wonder,” she said, “whether you’d have the heart to sack any one?”

  “I might hesitate to sack a mere fool,” he admitted. “I might be tempted to keep him on and find some work for him that even a fool could do. But I’d chuck a slacker at a week’s notice and never turn a hair. You’ll see; I shall have failures, many of them, but the whole thing won’t be a failure. Before I’ve done I shall have the best carters, the best dairy-women, the best bailiff, and the best plowman and the most successful farm in the country. You don’t know how men can work who are working for themselves and not just for a master.”

  “You mean to make it a sort of communal farm?”

  “Never,” he said. “That’s the last thing I mean it to be. But it will be a profit-sharing farm, and I shall run it. It’s my own idea, the darling of my soul, and I won’t trust its life to any other man. I’m almost afraid to trust it to you, for fear you should not be kind to it. But if what you said on the way to Warwick meant something that lasts in you — not just the beautiful thoughts of the moment — tell me, if we were really married could you endure a life like that?”

  “I should know nothing about it; I should be of no use. And we’re not married—”

  “You could learn; we could both learn. Let’s pretend for a moment that we’re really going to spend our lives together, anyhow. Let’s leave Mrs. Basingstoke out of it. Would Miss Basingstoke have been able to endure such a life?”

  “Miss Basingstoke would have loved it,” she said. “Miss Basingstoke would have done her best to learn, and — she isn’t really stupid, you know — I think Miss Basingstoke would have succeeded.”

  “It would need patience,” he said, “patience and bravery and loving-kindness and gentleness and firmness and unselfishness.”

  “And curiosity,” she said. “That quality, at least, Miss Basingstoke has. She would have wanted to know all about everything, and that’s one way of learning. She wants, now, to know ever so much more. Tell her everything that you’ve thought of about it, everything you’ve decided or not decided.”

  “You’ll be kind to my darling dream, then,” he said. “Well, here goes.”

  And with that he told her, and she listened and questioned, and he answered again till the shadows had grown heavy in the valley and they were very late indeed for dinner.

  You cannot be long in Llanberis without wanting to “see over” a slate-quarry. It was on their fifth day that the desire came to these two. The mention of Colonel Bertram’s name gained for them a personally conducted tour through the rows of little slate-roofed sheds where skilled workmen strip and chip and shape the flakes of quarried slate till they are the size and form needed for roofing cottages and schools and Nonconformist chapels. Having seen how the slate is treated in the sheds, they were taken into the quarry itself to see how the slate is got.

  A big slate-quarry is a very impressive sight. You walk across a great amphitheater whose walls of slate rise high above you, their green-trimmed edges sharply cut against the sky. You pick your way among pools of water so smooth, so clear, that they reflect like mirrors the blue sky and the high slate walls of the quarry. One such pool — the largest — lay in the middle of the vast amphitheater, and in it the towering cliffs of slate were reflected even more clearly than in the others.

  “I never saw such reflections,” she was saying, as they skirted the big pond. “They’re almost more real than the real thing. I am glad we came here; it’s all so clear and bright and new-looking. I wonder—”

  “I wouldn’t walk quite so near the edge, if I was you, sir,” said the foreman, who was their guide.

  “Why?” Edward asked, gazing at the reflection of high cliffs in the pool at his side, “is the water deep—”

  And even as he spoke his eyes were opened; but before he could obey their mandate, with a cry that went to his heart and held it she caught his arm and pulled him back. For in that instant she, too, had seen that this pool which reflected so perfectly the tall precipices of the quarry was not a pool at all, but another deep quarry within the first, and that what it held was no reflection, but a sheer and dreadful depth of precipice going down — she would not look to see how far. And he had been walking within six inches of its brink, carelessly and at ease, as one does walk by the safely shelving edge of any pond.

  She did not let his arm go when she had drawn him away from that perilous edge; she held it closely pressed against her side, and when he looked at her he saw that her face was white and changed. The great precipice above them swayed a little to her eyes — she dared not look at the precipice below. She held his arm closely and more closely, folding both hands on it. The foreman was saying something. Neither of them heard what it was, only both caught the concluding words:

  “Perhaps you’d like to see the place, sir.”

  “Thank you,” said Edward, mechanically, “and then I think we must leave you. It’s been most kind of you to show us all this; we’ve been most interested.”

  Her heart was beating in so wild an ecstasy of thanksgiving for an unspeakable horror escaped, his heart was beating in so passionate and proud and humble a recognition of what her touch on his arm confessed, that neither of them heard the foreman’s words or guessed at the meaning of what he was calmly and coldly telling them. Only afterward the memory of his words came back, bringing with it understanding. They were led across a flat wilderness of splintered slate toward the tall cliff from which now and then came the noise like thunder which blasting-powder makes when it does its work. They two, hardly conscious of anything but that they held each other — the one who had been in danger, safe; the other passionately grateful for that other’s safety; and the endangered one, passionately sensible of her passionate gratitude, heard not a word that the foreman spoke, though he spoke all the time.

  “You are here; I hold you safe; but, oh, if I had lost you!” her heart was singing to a breathless, syncopated measure.

  “You cared;
you cared as much as this. If I had fallen over that perilous edge. . . . Oh, but you care, you care! It is as much as this to you,” his heart sang, keeping time to hers.

  It was a trance of mutual meeting emotion such as they had not yet known. In that one moment, when he walked the narrow edge of that precipice and when she had seen the precipice for the horror it was, she learned more than in all her life before. And he, in the moments that followed, knew, beyond possibility of mistake or misunderstanding, what it was that she had learned. If only they could have walked straight out of that quarry into the world of stream and mountain, the world where you are only two — but the foreman was there, walking and talking, and at last stopping and saying:

  “This is where it happened.”

  And they came out of their dream to find themselves close to the slate cliff at whose base lay great blocks of slate newly fallen, and to see the flat slate flakes at their feet, brown and wet.

  “Where what happened?” Edward asked, vaguely.

  “What I’ve been telling you about,” said the foreman, aggrieved. “Where one of our workmen was killed just now, blasting; that’s his blood what you’re standing in,” said he.

  Then, indeed, she clung to his arm. “Take me away,” she whispered. “Oh, why does everything turn horrible like this? It’s like a horrible dream. Let’s get away. Give him something and let’s get away.”

  “It’s not my fault,” said the foreman, in very injured tones. “She said she’d like to see it. I wondered, at the time, but there’s no accounting for females, is there?”

  They got away from the place — out of the quarry and into the road. They found the stream that flows from the waterfall under Snowdon, and the flagged path that lies beside the stream. They passed along it, she still clinging to his arm. Presently a smooth, mossy rock invited them, and before either of them knew it they were seated there, side by side, and she was weeping on his shoulder.

  He did not need her whispered words that broke a long silence—”Thank God, you’re safe” — to tell him what he had to think, nor what, from that hour, he had to live for.

  “But, oh,” she said at last, lifting her face from his coat-sleeve, “what a horrible day! We’ve struck a streak of horrible things. Let’s go back to the south, where things aren’t like this.”

  “We’ll go to-night, if you like,” he said.

  “Yes,” she answered, eagerly, “yes. But this isn’t the end. I feel there’s something more coming — I felt it at Chester. It wasn’t only that thing I couldn’t tell you — something’s going to happen to separate us.”

  “Nothing can — but you,” he said, hugging to his heart all that her admission implied.

  “I feel that something will,” she said.

  And he, for all that he laughed at her fears and her predictions, with pride and joy swelling in his heart till they almost broke the resolution of quiescence, of waiting, of submitting his will to her will, yet felt in those deep caves that lie behind the heart, behind the soul, behind the mind of man, the winds of coming misfortune blow chilly.

  It was no surprise to either of them to find at the hotel a telegram for Mrs. Basingstoke:

  Aunt Alice much worse. Please come at once.

  It was signed with the name of the aunt whose dog-cart had run over Charles, and beneath whose legs Charles had experienced his miraculous resurrection from death.

  There was no reason to mistrust this telegram as they had mistrusted the advertisement. But she said to herself, “There! That’s because of what I said at Warwick.”

  They caught the last train to London that night, and through the long, lamp-lit journey Charles no longer lay between them. The white, bullet head lay on her lap — but on her other side was Edward, and her shoulder and his touched all the way, even as, on the journey to Warwick, he had dreamed of their touching. They spoke little; it seemed as though everything had been said. Only when her head drooped against his shoulder and he knew that she had fallen asleep he felt no sense of daring, no doubts as to his rights or her resentments when he passed his arm around her and rested his chin on her soft hair, gazing straight before him in the flickering half-light while she slept — oh, dreams come true — upon his breast.

  XVIII. LONDON

  IT was very late when they parted on the door-step of the house in Hyde Park Square.

  “I don’t know how to let you go,” he said, and took both her hands, regardless of the cabman’s stony attention. “I shall just go back to my rooms in Montague Street — Thirty-seven; I’ve written it down for you. And, look here, I won’t come and see you and I won’t bother you, but if you want me I’ll be there. You must just do what you want to do.”

  What she wanted to do was to jump into the waiting taxicab and go back with him into that world of fine and delicate adventure where were blue skies, gold sun, green leaves, the mystery of mountains, the sparkle of water, and the velvet of old lawns; and, for each in the soul of the other, a whole world of unexplored wonder and delight.

  What she said was: “Thank you. I will write and tell you what happens. Good-by — oh, good-by. I feel as though I ought to ask you to forgive me.”

  “For what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, “but — no — I don’t know; but you do understand that I couldn’t stay away when she asked for me. She’s the only person in the world, except you, that I — that ever — Good-by!”

  There was a moment of hesitation which, later, in the recollection of it, thrilled them both. Then the cabman had the satisfaction, such as it was, of seeing one of his fares raise to his lips the fingers of the other. Then the knocker sounded softly, the heavy door opened and received her into a warmly lamp-lit hall, closed again, and left him alone.

  When he reached Montague Street rain was falling and a chill wind blew. He had not been expected and his rooms were dusty and disheveled. Intensely quiet, too; through the roar of London far below one could almost hear the silence of these deserted rooms where, day by day, while he had been out in the beautiful bright world, the dim dust had slowly settled down.

  It was characteristic of him that he lit a big fire and carried his bedding out and spread it in the growing glow and warmth. “I’m not going to risk a cold in the head at this crisis of my affairs,” he told himself, “even if she doesn’t care — and Heaven knows how she can! I needn’t make myself a ridiculous and disgusting object in her eyes.”

  To the same end he set the kettle on the fire and made hot coffee for himself. When, at last, he turned into well-aired sheets he found that he could not sleep.

  “Confound the coffee!” he said, and tried to attribute to that brown exotic elixir the desperate sense of futility and emptiness which possessed him. His mind assured him that there was nothing the matter with him but coffee; but his heart said: “You won’t see her in the morning. You won’t spend the day with her to-morrow, nor the next day, nor the next.” And his heart cursed the mock marriage and all the reservations and abstentions that it demanded. “If she had been really my wife—” If she had been really his wife he would have called three times a day to know how things were with her. He would have seen her, held her hands, felt again the confiding droop of her head on his shoulder. But as it was — She had consented to the mock marriage, he knew, because she did not desire to give him any rights, not even the right to ring at her aunt’s front door and ask for Mrs. Basingstoke.

  He fell asleep at last, and dreamed that they had taken an unfurnished flat in a neolithic cave and that he had killed a bear and was dragging it home to show her. The bear seemed to be not quite dead, for it was growling, and its weight on his back awoke him, to find that Charles had thought his master’s shoulders a convenient site for slumber. He sleepily had it out with Charles, and when he slept again he dreamed that he and she had decided to live in a captive balloon. She was already installed, but he could find no ladder long enough to reach her. She was laughing down at him and showering pink rose-leaves on his up
-turned face when he woke to find Charles conscientiously licking his ears. This time he found energy to get up and put a closed door between himself and Charles, and then he dreamed that he had arranged to meet her under the clock at Charing Cross Station, and that the Government had just decided to establish uniformity in railway stations, and had called every station Charing Cross, and had, moreover, furnished each station with six hundred and sixty-six clocks, which all ticked louder than Big Ben. He awoke, and it was morning, and there were no clocks ticking, but from beyond the door came the measured thump-thump-thump of Charles’s tail on the floor of the sitting-room. So all night he had dreamed of her, yet never once seen her.

  “If I believed in omens—” he said, and rang, to make known his return to the people of the house.

  While his sitting-room was being put in order he went down to Covent Garden and came back with his arms full of roses and white lilies, which he set up in mugs and pots of Grès de Flandre and old brass and green Bruges ware.

  “I wish you’d only ‘a’ told me, sir,” said his landlady, kindly but aggrieved. “I wouldn’t have had you come home and find the place all of a mess like this, not for a pound, I wouldn’t. But you never wrote nor nothing, and the dust it do incriminate so. But if you’re going out for the day I’ll make it all as clean as a whistle by this evening. It’s a twelve-hour job, so it is. If I’d only known you was to be expected.”

  “But you didn’t know,” said Edward, “and it’s not going to be a twelve-hour job, but a two-hour job. I’ll go out for two hours, and when I come back I sha’n’t know the place, shall I? You’ll work like a good fairy. I know you.”

  “Go on with you, sir,” she advised. “You will have your joke.”

  “I was never more serious. You see, a lady might call.” He voiced in words what he had not dared to voice in his heart.

  “Oh, if it’s a lady,” said the landlady — and through the tired, ridged, gray, London face something pretty and immortally young stirred and sparkled—”the young lady, sir, if I might make so bold?”