‘And then after I had smoothed things over again, she put her cards on the table. Leap Year, and all that tomfoolery, not a bit of it! She was in dead earnest. She told me what I had guessed already, that she had scarcely a friend in the world. Never a word, mind you, of the Colonel – interloping old Pepper-face! She assured me, as I say, she hadn’t not only a single relative, but hardly a friend; that she was, as you might say, alone in life, and – well, that her sentiments had become engaged. In honour bound I wouldn’t have breathed this to a living soul who knew the parties; but to a stranger, if I may say so, it isn’t quite the same thing. What she said was – in the kitchen there, and me in an apron, mind you, tied round me – doing chores – she said – well, in short, that she wanted to make a match of it. She had taken a fancy to me, and was I agreeable.’ There was no vanity in his face; only a stark unphilosophical astonishment. He seemed to think that to explain all is to forgive all; and was awaiting my concurrence.
‘You mean she proposed marriage,’ I interrupted him with needless pedantry, and at once, but too late, wished the word back. For vestiges of our conversation had evidently reached the counter. Our waitress, still nibbling her pencil, was gazing steadily in our direction. And for some obscure reason this heat that we were sharing with the world at large, combined with this preposterous farrago, was now irritating me almost beyond endurance. The fellow’s complacency was incredible.
I beckoned to the young woman. ‘You said this gentleman’s bus to King’s Cross was an Eighteen, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, ’Ighteen,’ she repeated.
‘Then would you please bring him an ice.’
Mr Bleet gazed at me in stupefaction; a thick colour had mounted into his face. ‘You don’t mean to say,’ he spluttered, ‘that I made any such mention of such a thing. I’m sure I never noticed it.’
My impulse had been nothing more than a protest against my own boredom and fatigue; but the way he had taken it filled me with shame. What would the creature’s state of mind be like if his memory was as untrustworthy as that? The waitress retired.
It’s so devilishly hot in here,’ I explained. ‘And even talking is fatiguing in this weather.’
‘Ay,’ he said in a low voice. ‘It is. But you aren’t having one yourself?’
‘No, thank you,’ I said, ‘I daren’t. I can’t take ices. Indigestion – it’s a miserable handicap … You were saying that at the time of Miss Dutton’s proposal, you were in the kitchen.’
There was a pause. He sat looking foolishly at the little glass dishful of ice-cream: as surprising a phenomenon apparently as to an explorer from the torrid zone earth’s northern snows must first appear. There was a look upon his face as if he had been ‘hurt’, as if, like a child, at another harsh word he might burst out crying.
‘I hardly know that it’s worth repeating,’ he said at last lamely. His fine resonant voice had lost its tone. ‘I suppose she intended it kindly enough. And I wouldn’t say I hadn’t suspected which way the wind was blowing: Willie this, and Willie that. I’ve always been William to them that know me, except Bill at school. But it was always Willie with her; and a languishing look to match. Still, I never expected what came after that. It took me aback.
‘There she was, hanging on my every word, looking volumes, and me not knowing what to say. In a way too, I was attached to her. There were two sides to her, I allow that.’ He turned away but not, it seemed, in order to see the less conspicuous side more clearly. ‘I asked her to let me think things over, and I said it as any gentleman would. “Let me think it over, Edna,” I said. “You do me honour,” I said. Her hand was on my arm. She was looking at me. God being my witness, I tried to spare her feelings. I eased it over, meaning it all for the best. You see that little prospect had no more than occurred to me, Married life wasn’t what I was after. I shouldn’t be as old as I am now – and unmarried, I mean – if that had been so. It was uncomfortable to see her carrying on like that: too early. But things having come to such a pass, well, as you might say, we glided into an understanding at last. And with what result? Why … she made it an occasion for putting her foot down all the way round. And hadn’t I known it of old?’
He looked at me searchingly, with those dog-bright eyes, those high-set ears, as if to discover where precisely I now was in relation to his confidences.
‘She took the reins, as they say. All in good temper for the most part; but there was no mistaking it. Mistress first and Mrs after, in a manner of speaking. But when it came to speaking sharply to my poor sister on a matter which you wouldn’t expect even a full-witted person to be necessarily very quick about at the uptake – I began to suspect I had made a mistake. I knew it then: but forewarned isn’t always forearmed. And mistakes are easier to make than to put right. It had gone too far …’
‘If you really don’t want that ice, I can easily ask the waitress to take it away,’ I assured him, if only to bring back that wandering empty eye from the reverie into which he seemed to have fallen. Or was it that he was merely absorbed in the picture of the rain-drenched street that was reflected in the looking-glass behind my chair?
‘Thank you,’ he said, taking up the spoon.
‘And Miss Dutton left you at last. Did she tell you she had any intention of going?’
‘Never,’ he asseverated. ‘Not a word. No, not a single word. And if you can’t explain it, well then, why go on trying? I say. Not at this late day. But you might as well argue with a stone wall. The heat had come by then. Last summer, you know: the drought. Not the great drought, I mean – but round our parts in particular. The whole place was dried up to a tinder; cracks in the clay; weeds dying; birds gone. Even the trees flagging: and the oaks half eaten up by caterpillars already. Meantime, I don’t know how it was – unless, perhaps, the heat – but there had been another quarrel. They never got that out of me at the Inquiry, though; I can tell you. And that was patched up, too. I apologized because she insisted. But she had hurt me; she had hurt my feelings. And I couldn’t see that marriage was going to be a very practical experiment on those lines. But she came round; and considering what an easy woman of the world she looks like in that photograph, you wouldn’t have guessed, would you, that crying, weeping, I mean, was much in her way? I found that out, too. Fatiguing.
‘And it didn’t suit her, either. But she was what they call a woman made for affection. And I mean by that,’ he broke in emphatically, ‘she liked to monopolize. She wasn’t a sharer. We were badly in want of a servant ourselves by that time, as you may imagine. Going from bad to worse, and me with a poisoned thumb, opening tins. But she was in want of servants still more. She wanted me. Husbands often are nothing much better. What’s more, I don’t wish to say anything against the – against her now; but for the life of me I can’t see any reason why she should have gone so far as to insult me. And not a week since we were like birds on one roost. To insult me, mind you, with my poor sister there, listening by!
‘But I had learned a bit by then. I held my tongue, though there was plenty of things to say in reply if I could have demeaned myself to utter them. Plenty. I just went on looking out of the window, easing myself with my foot – we were in the drawing-room at the time – and the very sight of the dried-up grass and the dead vegetables, and the sun pouring down out of the sky like lava from a volcano would have been enough in themselves to finish off most people’s self-restraint. But as I say, I just stood there thinking of what I might have said, but saying nothing – just let her rant on.
‘Why, for instance, do you suppose she had made out weeks before that her investments were bringing in twice as much as they really did? Why all that stuff about Monte Carlo and that lady from America when it was only Boulogne and what they call a pension, which in plain English is nothing more than lodgings? Mind you,’ he said, as if to intercept the remark I had no intention of making, ‘mind you, I agree there was a competence, and I agree that, apart from a silly legacy to the Home for Cats and Dogs and
that Belgian knacker trade, she had left all there was to leave to my sister – and long before what I told you about just now. I saw that in black and white. It was my duty. That was all settled. On the other hand, how was I to know that she wouldn’t change her mind; that she hadn’t been paving the way, as you may call it? And why had she deliberately deceived me? I thought it then, and I think it now, more than ever – considering what I have been through. It wasn’t treating me fairly, and particularly before she was in a position when things couldn’t be altered, so to speak, as between husband and wife. Stretch it too far, and …’
Owing to the noise of the rain – and possibly in part to his grammar – it was only with difficulty that I could now follow what the creature was mumbling. I found my attention wandering. A miniature Niagara at least eighteen inches wide was at this moment foaming along the granite gutter while the rain in the middle of the street as it rebounded above the smoking asphalt was lifting into the air an exquisite mist of spray. I watched it enthralled; it was sweet as the sight of palm-trees to my tired hot eyes, and its roar and motion lulled me for a moment or two into a kind of hypnotic trance. When I came back to myself and my trivial surroundings, I found my companion eyeing me as if he had eagerly taken advantage of these moments of oblivion.
‘That’s the real thing,’ he said, as if to humour me, beckoning with his thumb over his shoulder. ‘That rain. But it’s waste on only stones.’ He eyed it pensively, turning his head completely round on his narrow shoulders to do so. But only for a moment. He returned to the business in hand as promptly as if we gossipers had been called to order by the Chairman of a Committee.
‘Now it says in that report there, which you have just been reading, that Miss Dutton had not been seen after she left Crowstairs that afternoon of the 3rd of July. That’s what it says – in so much print. And I say that’s a lie. As it came out later on. And it doesn’t make it any truer being in print. It’s inaccurate – proved so. But perhaps I ought to tell you first exactly how the whole thing came about. Things get so confused in memory.’ Once more he wearily drew his hand over his face as if to obliterate even the memory itself. ‘But – quite apart from the others – it’s a relief to get things clearer even in one’s own mind. The fact is, the whole thing was over between us a day or two before. As I say, after the last little upset which I told you about, things were smoothed out again as usual. At least on her side, though there was precious little in which I was really myself at fault. But my own belief is that she was an hysterical woman. What I mean is, she didn’t need anything to make a fuss about; to fire up over. No foundation except just her own mood and feelings. I never was what they call a demonstrative person; it isn’t in our family. My father himself was a school-masterish kind of man. “It hurts me more than it hurts you”; that kind of man. And up to the age of ten I can honestly say that I never once heard my mother answer him back. She felt it, mind you. He thrashed me little short of savage at times. She’d look on, crying; but she kept herself in. She knew it only made matters worse; and she died when I was twelve.
‘Well, what I think is this – that Miss Dutton made a mistake about me. She liked comfort. Breakfast in bed; slippers at night; hot water to wash in; that kind of thing. I’ll go further: she was meant for luxury. You could see it in her habits. If she had been twice as well off, she’d have wanted three times as many luxuries: lady’s maid, evening dress, tea-gowns, music in the drawing-room – that sort of thing. And maybe it only irritated her when she found that I could keep myself in and just look calm, whatever she did or said. Hesitate to say whatever came into her mind? – not she! – true or untrue. Nor actual physical violence, either. Why months before, she threw a vause full of flowers at me: snowdrops.’
The expression on his face suddenly became fixed, as if at an unexpected recollection.
‘I am not suggesting,’ he testified earnestly, ‘considering – considering what came after, that I bear her any grudge or malice on account of all that. All I mean is that I was pressed and pushed on to a point that some would say was beyond human endurance. Maybe it was. But what I say is, let’, his voice trembled, ‘bygones be bygones. I will say no more of that. My point is that Miss Dutton, after all, was to be, as they say, a bird of passage. There had been a final flare up and all was over between us. Insult on insult she heaped on me. And my poor sister there, in her shabby old black dress, peering out at us, from between her fingers, trembling in the corner like a dumb animal. She had called her in.
‘And me at my wits’ end, what with the servant trouble and the most cantankerous and unreasonable lot of tradespeople you could lay hands on, north or south. I can tell you, I was pretty hard pressed. They dragged all that up at the Inquiry. Oh, yes, bless you. Trust ’em for that. Once it’s men against man, then look to it. Not a public Inquiry, mind you. No call for that. And I will say the police, though pressing, and leaving no stone unturned in a manner of speaking, were gentlemen by comparison. But such things leak out. You can’t keep a penny-a-liner from gabbing, and even if there had been nothing worse to it they’d have made my life a hell upon earth.
‘Nothing worse to it? How do you mean?’
His glance for the instant was entirely vacant of thought. ‘I mean,’ he said stubbornly, after a moment’s hesitation, ‘the hurt to my private feelings. That’s what I mean. I can hear her now. And the first thing I felt after it was all over, was nothing but relief. We couldn’t have hit it off together, not for long: not after the first few weeks, anyhow. Better, I say, wash your hands of the whole thing. I grant you her decision had left me in a nasty pickle. As a matter of fact, she was to go in a week, and me to clear up the mess. Bills all over the place – fresh butter, mind you, olives, wine, tinned mock turtle – that kind of thing; and all down to my account. What I feel is, she oughtn’t to have kept on at me like that right up to the last. Wouldn’t you have thought, considering all things, any woman with an ounce of common sense – not to speak of common caution – would have let sleeping dogs lie?’
He was waiting for an answer.
‘What did her uncle, the Colonel, say to that?’
‘Oh, him,’ he intimated with an incredible sneer. ‘In the Volunteers! I was speaking as man to man.’
‘And she didn’t even wait the two or three days, then?’
‘It was the 3rd of July,’ he repeated. ‘After tidying things up for the day – and by that time, mind you, every drop of water had to be brought in buckets across the burnt-up fields from a drying-up pond half a mile away. But it was done. I did it. After finishing, I say, all the rest of the morning chores, I was sitting there thinking of getting a snack of lunch and then what to do next, when I heard a cough – her door had opened; and then her footstep on the stairs – slippers.’ He held up that hairy forefinger of his as if at an auction, and he was speaking with extreme deliberation as if, with eyes and senses fixed on the scene, he were intent to give me the exactest of records in the clearest of terms. ‘And I said to myself, “She’s coming! and it’s all to begin again!” I said it; I knew it. “And face it out? … then – me?” ‘He shook his head a little like a cat tasting water, but the eyes he showed me were like the glazed windows of an empty shop. ‘No, I made myself scarce. I said to myself: “Better keep your distance. Make yourself scarce; keep out of it.” And heaven help me I had been doing my best to forget what had passed the night before and to face what was to come. And so – I went out.
‘It was early afternoon: sultry, like now. And I wandered about the fields. I must have gone miles and never met a soul. But if you ask me to say where, then all I can say is: Isn’t one field the living image of another? And what do you see when your mind isn’t there? All round Winstock way – lanes, hedges, cornfields, turnips – tramp and tramp and tramp. And it was not until about seven o’clock that evening that I got back again. Time for supper. I got out the crockery and – and raked out the fire. No sign of nobody, nor of my sister either – though there was nothi
ng in that: she had a habit of sitting up at her bedroom window, and looking out, just with her hands in her lap. And the house as still as a – as still as a church.
‘I loafed about a bit in the kitchen. Call her? Well, hardly! There was plenty to do. As usual. The supper, and all that. The village woman had left about eleven that morning – toothache. She owned to it. Not that that put me about. I can cook a boiled egg and a potato well enough for most Christians. But hot meals – meals for – well, anyhow, there was nothing hot that evening. It was about seven-thirty by then, I suppose; and I was beginning to wonder. Then I thought I’d go out in the yard and have a look at the runabout – an old Ford, you know – I hadn’t had time then for weeks to keep it decent. When I got to the shed, there was a strange cat eating up some fish-bones; and when I looked in, it was gone.’
‘You mean the Ford?’
‘Yes, the Ford. There wasn’t a sign of it. That froze me up, I can tell you, for there had been gipsies about a day or two before. I rushed into the house and called out up the stairs, “Edna! Edna! Are you there? The Ford’s gone.” No answer. I can tell you I was just like a frenzied man. I looked in the drawing-room – teapot and cup on a tray but empty: just sunshine streaming in as if nothing had happened. Then I looked into her little parlour: boudoir, she called it. Nothing doing. Then I went upstairs and tapped on her bedroom door. “Miss Dutton,” I said, “have you seen anything of the Ford? It’s gone.” And then I looked in. That was the queer thing about it. They all said that. That it never occurred to me, I mean, that she was not in the car herself. But what I say is – how can you think of everything before you say it, and wasn’t it I myself that said I had said it?
‘Anyhow, I looked in: I suppose a man can do that in his own house and his car gone from under his very nose! And believe me, the sight inside was shocking. I’m a great stickler myself for law and order, for neatness, I mean. I had noticed it before: it irritated me. In spite of all her finery, she was never what you would call a tidy woman. But that room beat everything. Drawers flung open, dresses hugger-mugger, slippers, bags, beadwork, boxes, gimcracks all over the place. But not a sign of her. I looked – everywhere. She wasn’t there, right enough. Not – not a sign of her. She was gone. And – and I have never seen her since.’
Short Stories 1895-1926 Page 37
