‘Certainly, by all means. But let’s have tea fairly early, so that you won’t have to rush back and tire yourself out.’
The girl patted his shoulder affectionately. ‘All right,’ she laughed, ‘we’ll be here in good time. I’m not going to kidnap Mr Storm.’
Her tone apparently gave satisfaction to the painter, for he bestowed upon them an amiable nod of dismissal and resumed his work.
Miss Moreton led her companion past the west door of the cathedral, down a little avenue of limes, between nursery-maids holding gargantuan infants, and aged nondescript philosophers, the smoke of whose placid pipes ascended to heaven.
On the further side of the close she led him down a narrow brick alley, over one wall of which hung wistaria and over the other white and blue clematis.
At last they came to a little brightly painted green door which she opened with a small key taken from her purse. ‘Mrs Ireton was a friend of mother’s,’ she said, and they passed through. ‘I can pick anything I like here, as long as Mr Tip doesn’t see me. They’re all terribly afraid of Mr Tip. He’s the dean’s man really; but he works for them all since the war.’
How much of England and its incurable charm lay, for Richard, at that moment, in that insignificant sentence! The obstinate importance of personal character, or personal peculiarity; the relaxed, easy-going, unofficial casualness of the old traditional methods which lent to Mr Tip – who doubtless tyrannized mercilessly over the dean – a more carefully respected authority than was vouchsafed to any chief of police, how profoundly national it all was!
Richard could see Mr Tip among his own private roses, in his own trim villa, reading The Times through his spectacles to his good lady who in her day had doubtless ruled over more difficult personages than deans.
‘Well! what do you think of it?’ sounded the youthful voice at his side. ‘Isn’t it a sweet place? Do you wonder I wanted you to see it?’
Richard was indeed so overcome by the beauty of it all, by the charm of Nelly herself, by the delicious symbolic figure of Mr Tip – who fortunately was elsewhere just then – that this wonderful garden seemed to him the last drop in the cup of mortal happiness.
It was the sort of garden that one cannot conceive of as existing outside England. It was not large, and the high walls that surrounded it – for the house against which it lifted its waves of fragrant fertility was itself, it seemed, no more than a great buttressed monastic wall with massive-mullioned windows – made it look smaller than it really was.
The lawn across which the girl led her new friend was so velvet- soft to the touch and so incredibly smooth that it seemed to reject as sacrilege the idea of any sportive usage except perhaps the ancient and venerable game of bowls.
Richard thought to himself that he would feel as indignant as Mr Tip if anyone suggested playing croquet or lawn tennis here. It was hieratic grass, suitable to be trodden by the most learned of all canons, as he read his Greek Testament before Matins. It was not grass from which tennis balls should be allowed to bounce.
‘How many years has it taken, do you suppose,’ he asked his little friend, ‘to get this lawn as smooth as this?’
‘That tree,’ she pointed to a tremendous cedar of Lebanon, ‘is supposed to have been planted by Henry the Third. And they always planted cedars on lawns; so I suppose it was there then.’
They stepped off the grass upon a long brick path, on both sides of which was a high herbaceous border from whose carefully weeded brown earth rose in luxuriant green profusion the promise of every sort of summer perennial. Many of the plants, canterbury bells, London pride, pinks and stocks and sweet william were scarcely in bud; but ‘the wealth of the globèd peonies ’was in full glory and the delphinium flowers were already appearing, some purple, some light blue, like delicately poised butterflies, on their tapering stalks of pale fresh green.
The brick path ended in a terrace at both its northern and southern extremity, and each terrace was overhung with white and red and yellow roses. On one of these terraces, under the massive stonework of the old monastic house, Nelly and her companion sat down upon a wooden bench.
Richard removed his hat; and with a charming blush of girlish self-consciousness, for which this time no critical demon in him found a mocking jibe, the girl did the same. –
Moved by a simultaneous impulse they then proceeded quite openly and without shame to survey one another from head to foot, smiling happily as they did so as if well pleased with the result of their scrutiny.
They made indeed a charming contrast as they sat together, the man’s grizzled hair, swarthy unbearded face, and hawk-like profile, pedestalled in the manner of some old imperial statue against a cluster of white roses, while a neighbouring spray of heavy damask ones, deep red as a wood-god’s blood, overhung the girl’s fair head, fair face, and bare slender neck. She might have been, but for her English dress, some early Forentine’s conception of Psyche waiting for her invisible lover.
‘We seem to be making friends extremely quickly,’ Nelly shyly observed, withdrawing her eyes from his face and following the sweep of the great cedar’s shadow as it turned the sun-warmed grass into cool velvety blackness.
There was a faint recrudescence of the imp of criticism in him at this. Was she, after all, just an ordinary little flirt? And then some other, subtler, deeper devil reminded him that all these pathetic, frail, wilful beings were driven by the eternal necessity of things to be something of that sort, if life was to proceed. How else could anything at all, in this chaotic world, begin to happen?
‘It was certainly fate,’ he remarked stupidly, his thoughts more occupied with the general situation than with anything he actually said, ‘that brought us together like this.’
‘I hope,’ she responded quickly, ‘not the fate whose name is also Sorrow.’
Richard felt slightly annoyed with her for this. He wanted her to be receptive, silent and dreamy. He didn’t want her to indulge in neat quotations from authors which he might possibly have forgotten!
‘It’s odd,’ she continued, ‘how little we know of each other except that we are getting on so well. What was it that brought you back to England?’
One of his troublesome demons prompted him to answer quick as a shot, ‘The white skin of Elise Angel,’ but what he said was quite different. ‘I’m a writer, you know – what I suppose you might call a professional critic. What I’ve done so far is to write about poetry, mostly about the French. Now what I want to do is to say something for myself, something that’s come into my mind lately, something that can’t be said in any other way except in the form of poetry.’
Nelly looked at him with deep interest. Her instinct made her aware that he was less certain of his ‘line’, less confident of his power, much more receptive to influence, than was Robert Canyot. The profound feminine passion for offering ‘help’, any sort of ‘help’, to an artist, a thinker, a person with ideas, thrilled her young blood with a thrill like the answer to a caress.
‘And you came to England because you thought you could express your real self better here than in a foreign country?’
He loved the eager girlish tone with which she said this; but the too familiar expression ‘your real self’ made him jib like a touchy horse. He seemed to remember that every woman who had ever got him into her power had used the expression ‘real self’ when the sharp claws came out from below the velvet pads.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I felt I must hide away from everybody. And everybody for me means France nowadays. Why are you smiling? Was that a rude thing to say? Of course I couldn’t know I should meet Miss Nelly Moreton?’
It was the twinge of anger at being discovered in something approaching a faux pas that made him give her that little stab; but she did not hold it against him.
‘And Sussex?’ she inquired. ‘Why Sussex?’
‘Oh, that’s another story,’ he responded, gratified to her for letting him off, ‘that’s a matter of duty. I wanted to see the
graves of my people who’re in your churchyard. My grandfather was the Vicar of Littlegate.’
The girl jumped to her feet at this, so pleased she was. To a well-brought- up young Englishwoman such clerical ancestry was a kind of hallmark of security. It meant a social equality between them which was a decided point to the good. She felt immensely reassured. Now, at any rate, no one could say she had acted in an unladylike manner in making friends with a stranger.
‘How silly of me!’ she cried in radiant spirits. ‘Of course your name is Storm; and there’s a monument in the church to the Reverend Benjamin Storm, D.D. I see it from my pew. I’d have shown it to you if I’d known. I will show it to you when you come out again!’
He also had risen to his feet and they stood surveying that unequalled garden with the peculiar thrill of inter-conscious pleasure which comes at the first stage of any rapport between the sexes and is never quite reproduced again. It is the discovery of the fact, which the solitary soul in us can hardly believe to be really true, that another person can feel, at the same moment and under the same influence, exactly what we feel. It is the stirring of the waters by the divine Eros, before the appearance of desire, jealousy, responsibility and suspicion mar and spoil it all.
The girl’s ‘I will show it to you when you come out again’ had been accepted by them both as natural and inevitable. The mocking demon in Richard seemed to have been exorcized by the spirit of a garden seven centuries old.
With a movement that was tenderly possessive in its gentleness he handed her her broad-brimmed hat and watched her thrust the long hat-pin into her soft hair. He resumed his own hat and picked up his stick as soon as she was ready, and there swept over both of them a delicious sense of intimacy as they moved away; as if the bench beneath the red and white roses had been some sort of a shrine that had initiated them into a sacred conspiracy.
Their silence was at that moment more voluble than any words. Their silence moved at their side as they moved, and whispered to them things sweet and strange, things older than that ancient garden. Life however turns only too quickly its terrible hourglass. Before they had even crossed the lawn their hour was gone.
They were near the little green door into the lane when an odious discord rose from just behind it. A cruel rustic laugh was followed by a chorus of gross merriment and a rush of stampeding footsteps. Then there was the noise of a shower of stones and then a bloodcurdling hush. This hush was immediately broken by a horrible cry which made them stand for a moment as if petrified. It was the cry like that of a hurt animal and yet it was sickeningly human. It had in it something weird and unnatural, something that seemed to proceed from a level of existence obscure, tragic, dark, different and alien.
The indestructible pain which like an underground stream of poison flows round the roots of all the roses in the world had burst its barriers once more. The war was not over.
They flung themselves together upon the little green gate, pulled it open and plunged into the alley.
They caught sight of a group of boys fleeing helterskelter round the corner, two hulking rapscallions among them, half-boys, half- men.
Squatting on the ground, his face streaming with blood, was a wretched hydrocephalic child beating on the earth with his clenched fists and uttering a horrible wailing cry. Even at that moment the callous observer in Richard’s brain noted two facts. That in one of the boy’s clenched fists was a stick of dust-covered sugar candy; and that the cry he uttered when they approached him was like the scream of a frightened plover.
Nelly Moreton was on her knees in a moment by the child’s side, staunching the blood with her handkerchief and lifting up his hands to see if they were hurt.
It was this movement that made the child think that she intended to take away his candy and with blind fury he struck at her heart. ‘That’ll do! That’ll do!’ cried Richard, bending down from above them and lifting the boy upon his feet The child staggered against the wall, hiding the hand that held the candy behind his back. ‘He didn’t mean it. He didn’t hurt me. They’ve driven him mad, the brutes! Give me your handkerchief will you? He’ll be better soon’ And she put her arm tenderly around him and pressed him tightly to her, kissing his tear-stained cheek.
The blood on the child’s forehead was soon staunched. The skin was only slightly scratched; but there appeared a great bruise where a stone had struck him.
‘I won’t take your candy away. Nice candy! Give the lady a little taste.’ The great abnormal head began to droop now against her neck and long quiet sobs took the place of his former anger.
Suddenly he became quite still, leaning against her, his face buried.
‘He seems all right now,’ said Richard; thinking in his heart – shall I have to get this child to his home? Shall I have to call upon the police or some terrible society? Shall I have to take him to a sweet shop? Have I displayed sufficient sympathy?
The girl did not speak. She seemed to derive a strange pleasure from hugging this idiot to her heart and feeling his head nestle down against her in some obscure baby-instinct.
The situation was – for Richard at least – relieved by the appearance of a red-faced panting female of about forty who, with many exclamations of ‘Thank you Mum! He be the trouble of my life Mum! Much obliged to you Mum!’ slapped the child severely, threw his squeezed-up piece of candy over the wall and dragged him off by the hand.
‘The wretch!’ cried Richard Storm when the two had gone a little way. But Nelly was watching them intently.
‘She’s not a cruel woman,’ she remarked at last. ‘She’s probably fonder of that child than of all her other children. Look!’
And Richard saw to his surprise that the woman had picked the idiot up in her arms. ‘Listen!’ murmured the girl; and a strange crooning chant made itself audible. ‘She’s singing to him,’ she said with a queer smile.
‘But she slapped him,’ remarked Richard staring after them, ‘and she threw his candy away.’
‘You all have to be slapped sometimes,’ said Nelly Moreton. ‘I wouldn’t have let him eat that filthy thing!’
They made their way slowly back to where they had left Mr Canyot. The girl was silent and abstracted, as if she still felt against her breast the head of the idiot.
Richard in his heart was making plans for the future. ‘Is there,’ he asked at last, as they came out into the open space by the cathedral, ‘any least chance of finding a room in Littlegate? I believe if I settled down there I really should be able to write.’
They were passing close to the open door of the cathedral as he made this inquiry. In the distance, just where they had left him, they could see the painter still absorbed in his work.
‘Let’s go in here for a minute,’ said Nelly. ‘I want to tell you something.’
Her tone was strained and tense. Richard was completely puzzled. Nothing, after all, had passed between them of sufficient seriousness to warrant her making confessions to him or elucidating difficult situations. She was a sweet creature, but he was by no means sure that he would ever be more than mildly attracted to her. He was still a little irritated by the flippant way she had said, ‘You all have to be slapped sometimes.’ That remark did not harmonize, he thought, with her mood in the garden. She ought to remember that, after all, he wasn’t a lad of her own age. There was a certain respect due to his – well! not grey hairs, but experience of the world!
Nelly Moreton, as she looked about for a convenient place in the great dim building, had not the remotest idea of what was going on in his mind. One of the most touching forms that a young girl’s innocence takes is her ignorance of the labyrinthine vanity of men. Respect for one’s father, quite a childish feeling, made one very considerate with old men. But a man in the prime of life, like her new friend – she took it for granted that she could say things to him, anything that came into her head, as she would have hesitated to say them to a younger person.
She found a suitable place at last for their colloquy, in
a little altar-less side chapel surrounded by monuments to extinct Sussex worthies.
Richard was still too puzzled and startled, too engaged in frantically wondering what on earth she was going to say to him, to take much notice of the noble pillars and beautiful carved mouldings of the spacious antiquity about him.
As he sat down by her side, however, his eyes fixed themselves upon the recumbent image of a dead crusader lying with his mailed feet upon a crouching dog and his sword pressed close against his thigh. The hands of the figure were clasped in an eternal gesture of prayer and his whole pose suggested such absolute quiescence of patient expectation that it seemed as if nothing short of the final catastrophe could ever disturb him.
The girl seemed unwilling to break the silence that fell between them then, a silence not like that which had whispered to them in the garden, but a sad human silence, through which the gulf that divided their ages seemed to tick out the moments like a clock in a drowned ship.
Thoughts, swift as bits of wreckage on an inrushing tide, whirled one after another through Richard’s brain; and, as they came, the demon observer within him noted them one by one.
Queer – what thoughts can follow one another without conscious incongruity! Her phrase ‘You all have to be slapped sometimes,’ associating him, Richard Storm, with a hydrocephalic idiot, jostled in his mind with those eternally lifted marble hands of the silent crusader. Had some daring maiden slapped, in her time, those solemn and courtly cheeks? Well! with that cross-handled sword on his armoured hip, he seemed able to lie quiet enough now, without any blush of tingling memory.
But what was he, Richard Storm, doing – that was the next thought that drifted by – seated here with this young girl? Vanity whispered to him that he had already made an emotional impression on her – where would that impression lead them both to, if it deepened and increased? Where did he desire it to lead them to? Hurriedly he moved out of the track of this final thought! She was a sweet child; but what was she to him? His business was with something deeper, more serious, more worthy of his age, than flirtations with little girls.
After My Fashion Page 4
