Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  “That’s rather a cruel way of regarding it, isn’t it?”

  “Well, my dear boy, what’s a man to do in these jammed and crushed and overcrowded days of ours? Nature demands the safety-valve of a harmless flirtation. If one can’t afford to marry, the natural affections will find an outlet, on a cousin or somebody. But it’s quite impossible, as things go nowadays, for a penniless man to dream of taking to wife a penniless woman and living on the sum of their joint properties. According to Cocker, nought and nought make nothing. So one must just wait till one’s chance in life turns up, one way or the other. If you make a fluke some day, and paint a successful picture, or write a successful hook, or get off a hopeless murderer at the Old Bailey, or invent a new nervous disease for women, or otherwise rise to sudden fortune by any one of the usual absurd roads, then you can marry your pretty cousin or other little girl in a lordly way out of your own resources. If not, you must just put up with the plain daughter of an eminent alderman in the wine and spirit business, or connected with tallow, or doing a good thing in hides, and let her hard cash atone vicariously for your own want of tender affection. When a man has no patrimony, he must obviously make it up in matrimony. Only, the great point to avoid is letting the penniless girl meanwhile get too deep a hold upon your personal feelings. The wisest men — like me, for example — are downright fools when it comes to high play on the domestic instincts. Even Achilles had a vulnerable point, you know. So has every wise man. With Achilles, it was the heel; with us, it’s the heart. The heart will wreck the profoundest and most deliberate philosopher living. I acknowledge it myself. I ought to wait, of course, till I catch the eminent alderman’s richly endowed daughter. Instead of that, I shall doubtless fling myself away like a horn fool upon the pretty cousin or some other equally unprofitable investment.”

  “Well, I hope you will,” Relf answered, cutting himself a huge chunk of bread with his pocket clasp-knife. “I am awfully glad to hear you say so. For your own sake, I hope you’ll keep your word. I hope you won’t stifle everything you’ve got that’s best within you for the sake of money and position and success. — Have a bit of this corned beef, will you? — A woman who sells herself for money is bad enough, though it’s woman’s way — they’ve all been trained to it for generations. But a man who sells himself for money — who takes himself to market for the highest bidder — who makes capital out of his face and his manners and his conversation — is absolutely contemptible, and nothing short of it. — I could never go on knowing you, if I thought you capable of it. But I don’t think you so. I’m sure you do yourself a gross injustice. You’re a great deal better than you pretend yourself. If the occasion ever actually arose, you’d follow your better and not your worse nature. — I’ll trouble you for the mustard.”

  Massinger passed it, and pretended to feel awfully bored. “I’m sure I don’t know,” he answered; “I shall wait and see. I don’t undertake either to read or to guide my own character. According to the fashionable modern doctrine, it was all settled for me irrevocably beforehand by my parents and grandparents in past generations. I merely stand by and watch where it leads me, with passive resignation and silent curiosity. The attitude’s not entirely devoid of plot-interest. It’s amusing to sit, like the gods of Epicurus, enthroned on high, and look down from without with critical eyes upon the gradual development on the stage of life of one’s own history and one’s own idiosyncrasy.”

  CHAPTER III.

  ARCADIA.

  THE village of Whitestrand, on the Suffolk coast — an oasis in a stretch of treeless desert — was, and is, one of the remotest and most primitive spots to be found anywhere on the shores of England. The railways, running inland away to the west, have left it for ages far in the lurch; and even the two or three belated roads that converge upon it from surrounding villages lead nowhere. It is, so to speak, an absolute terminus. The World’s End is the whimsical title of the last house at Whitestrand. The little river Char that debouches into the sea just below the church, with its scattered group of thatched cottages, cuts off the hamlet effectually with its broad estuary from the low stretch of reclaimed and sluice-drained pasture-land of wiry grass that rolls away to southward. On the north, a rank salt marsh hems it in with broad flats of sedge and thrift and wan sea-lavender; and eastward, the low line of the German Ocean spreads dimly in front its shallow horizon on the very level of the beach and the village. Only to the west is there any dry land, a sandy heath across whose barren surface the three roads from the neighbouring hamlets meander meaninglessly by tortuous curves towards the steeple of Whitestrand. All around, the country lies flat, stale, and singularly unprofitable. The village, in fact, occupies a tiny triangular peninsula of level ground, whose isthmus is formed by the narrow belt of heath-clad waste which alone connects it with the outer universe.

  The very name Whitestrand, as old as the days of the Danish invasion of the East Anglian plain, at once describes the one striking and noteworthy feature of the entire district. It has absolutely no salient point of its own of any sort, except the hard and firm floor of pure white sand that extends for miles and miles on either side of the village. The sands begin at the diked land south of the river — rescued from the tide by Oliver’s Dutch engineers — and narrowing gradually as they pass northward, disappear altogether into low muddy cliff some four or five miles beyond the church of Whitestrand. No strip of coast anywhere in England can boast such a splendid beach of uniform whiteness, firmness, and solidity. At Whitestrand itself, the sands extend for three-quarters of a mile seaward at low tide, and are so smooth and compact in their consistent level, that a horse can gallop over them at full speed without leaving so much as the mark of a hoof upon the even surface of that natural arena. Whitestranders are enormously proud of their beach; the people of Walberswick, a rival village some miles off, with a local reputation for what passes in Suffolk as rural picturesqueness, maliciously declare this is because the poor Whitestranders — heaven help them! — have nothing else on earth to be proud of. Such remarks, however, savour no doubt of mere neighbourly jealousy; the Walberswick folk, having no beach at all of their own to brag about, are therefore naturally intolerant of beaches in other places.

  All Whitestrand — what there was left of it — belonged to Mr. Wyville Meysey. His family had bought the manor and estate a hundred years before, from their elder representatives, when the banking firm of Meysey’s in the Strand was in the first heydey of its financial glory. Unhappily for him, his particular ancestor, a collateral member of the great house, had preferred the respectable position of a country gentleman to an active share in the big concern in London. From that day forth the sea had been steadily eating away the Meysey estate, till very little was left of it now but salt marsh and sandhills and swampy pasture-lands.

  It was Tuesday when Hugh Massinger and Warren Relf set sail from the Tower on their voyage in the Mud-Turtle down the crowded tidal Thames; on Thursday morning, two pretty girls sat together on the roots of an old gnarled poplar that overhung the exact point where the Char empties itself into the German Ocean. The Whitestrand poplar, indeed, had formed for three centuries a famous landmark to seafaring men who coast round the inlets of the Eastern Counties. In the quaint words of the old county historian, it rose “from the manor of Whitestrand straight up towards the kingdom of heaven;” and round its knotted roots and hollow trunk the current ran fierce at the turn of the tides, for it formed the one frail barrier to the encroachment of the sea on that portion of the low and decaying Suffolk coast-line. Everybody had known the Whitestrand poplar as a point to sail by ever since the spacious days of great Elizabeth. When you get in a line with the steeple of Walberswick, with the windmill on Snade Hill opening to the right, you can run straight up the mouth of Char towards the tiny inland port of Woodford. Vessels of small burden in distress off the coast in easterly gales often take shelter in this little creek as a harbour of refuge from heavy weather on the German Ocean.

  The elder
of the two girls who sat together picturesquely on this natural rustic seat was dark and handsome, and so like Hugh Massinger himself in face and feature, that no one would have had much difficulty in recognizing her for the second cousin of whom he had spoken, Elsie Challoner. Her expression was more earnest and serious, to be sure, than the London poet’s; her type of beauty was more tender and true; but she had the same large melting pathetic eyes, the same melancholy and chiselled mouth, the same long black wiry hair, and the same innate grace of bearing and manner in every movement as her Byronic relative. The younger girl, her pupil, was fairer and shorter, a pretty and delicate blonde of eighteen, with clear blue eyes and wistful mouth, and a slender but dainty girlish figure. They sat hand in hand on the roots of the tree, half overarched by its hollow funnel, looking out together over the low flat sea, whose fresh breeze blew hard in their faces, with the delicious bracing coolness and airiness peculiar to the shore of the German Ocean. There is no other air in all England to equal that strong air of Suffolk; it seems to blow right through and through one, and to brush away the dust and smoke of town from all one’s pores with a single whiff of its clear bright purity.

  “How do you think your cousin’ll come, Elsie?” the younger girl asked, twisting her big straw hat by its strings carelessly in her hands. “I expect he’ll drive over in a carriage from Daw’s from the Almundham Station.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know, dear,” the elder and darker answered with a smile. “But how awfully interested you seem to be, Winifred, in this celebrated cousin of mine! What a thing it is for a man to be a poet! You’ve talked of nothing else the whole morning.”

  Winifred laughed. “Cousins are so very rare in this part of the country, you see,” she said apologetically. “We don’t get sight of a cousin, you know — or, for the matter of that, of any other male human being, erect upon two legs, and with a beard on his face — twice in a twelvemonth. The live young man is rapidly becoming an extinct animal in these parts, I believe. He exists only in the form of a photograph. We shall soon have him stuffed, whenever we catch him, or exhibit a pair of his boots, with a label attached, in a glass case at all the museums, side by side with the dodo, and the something-or-other-osaurian. A live young man in a tourist suit is quite a rarity, I declare, nowadays. — And then a poet too! I never in my life set eyes yet upon a genuine all-wool unadulterated poet. — And you say he’s handsome, extremely handsome! Handsome, and a poet, and a live young man, all at once, like three gentlemen rolled into one, as Mrs. Malaprop says: that’s really something to make one’s self excited about.”

  “Winifred! Winifred! you naughty bad girl!” Elsie laughed out, half in jest and half in earnest, “moderate your transports. You’ve got no sense of propriety in you, I do believe — and no respect for your instructress’s dignity either. I oughtn’t to let you talk on like that. It isn’t becoming in the guardian of youth. The guardian of youth ought sternly to insist on due reticence in speaking of strangers, especially when they belong to the male persuasion. — But as it’s only Hugh, after all, I suppose it really doesn’t matter. I look upon Hugh, Winnie, like my own brother.”

  “What a jolly name, Hugh!” Winifred cried, enthusiastically. “It goes so awfully well together, too, Hugh Massinger. There’s a great deal in names going well together. I wouldn’t marry a man called Adair, now, Elsie, or O’Dowd, either, not if you were to pay me for it (though why you should pay me, I’m sure I don’t know), for Winifred Adair doesn’t sound a bit nice; and yet Elsie Adair goes just beautifully. — Winifred Challoner — that’s not bad, either. Three syllables, with the accent on the first. Winifred Massinger — that sounds very well too; best of all, perhaps. I shouldn’t mind marrying a man named Massinger.”

  “Other things equal,” Elsie put in, laughing.

  “Oh, of course he must have a moustache,” Winifred went on in quite a serious voice. “Even if a man was a poet, and was called Massinger, and had lovely eyes, and could sing like a nightingale, but hadn’t a moustache — a beautiful, long, wiry, black moustache, like the curate’s at Snade — I wouldn’t for the world so much as look at him. No close-shaven young man need apply. I insist upon a moustache as absolutely indispensable. Not red: red is quite inadmissible. If ever I marry — and I suppose I shall have to, some day, to please papa — I shall lay it down as a fixed point in the settlements, or whatever you call them, that my husband must have a black moustache, and must bind himself down by contract beforehand as long as I live never to shave it.”

  Elsie shaded her eyes with her hand and looked out seaward. “I shan’t let you talk so any more, Winnie,” she said, with a vigorous effort to be sternly authoritative. “It isn’t right; and you know it isn’t. The instructress of youth must exert her authority. We ought to be as grave as a couple of church owls. — What a funny small sailing-boat that is on the sea out yonder! A regular little tub! So flat and broad! She’s the roundest boat I ever saw in my life. How she dances about like a walnut-shell on the top of the water!”

  “Oh, that’s the Mud-Turtle!” Winifred cried eagerly, anxious to display her nautical knowledge to the full extent before Elsie, the town-bred governess. “She’s a painter’s yawl you know. I’ve seen her often. She belongs to an artist, a marine artist, who comes this way every summer to sketch and paint mud-banks. He lies by up here in the shallows of the creek, and does, oh, the funniest little pictures you ever saw, all full of nothing — just mud and water and weeds and herons — or else a great dull flat stretch of calm sea, with a couple of gulls and a buoy in the foreground. They’re very clever, I suppose, for people who understand those things; but, like the crater of Vesuvius, there’s nothing in them. She can go anywhere, though, even in a ditch — the Mud-Turtle can; and she sails like a bird, when she’s got all her canvas on. You should just see her in a good breeze, putting out to sea before a fresh sou’-wester!”

  “She’s coming in here now, I think,” Elsie murmured, half aloud. “ Oh no, she’s not; she’s gone beyond it, towards the point at Walberswick.”

  “That’s only to tack,” Winifred answered, with conscious pride in her superior knowledge. “She’s got to tack because of the wind, you know. She’ll come up the creek as soon as she catches the breeze. She’ll luff soon. — Look there, now; they’re luffing her. Then in a minute they’ll put her about a bit, and tack again for the creek’s mouth. — There you are, you see: she’s tacking, as I told you. — That’s the artist, the shorter man in the sailor’s jersey. He looks like a common A.B. when he’s got up so in his seafaring clothes; but when you hear him speak, you can tell at once by his voice he’s really a gentleman. I don’t know who the second man is, though, the tall man in the tweed suit: he’s not the one that generally comes — that’s Mr. Potts. But, oh, isn’t he handsome! I wonder if they’re going to sail close alongside? I do hope they are. The water’s awfully deep right in by the poplar here. If they turn up the creek, they’ll run under the roots just below us. — They seem to be making signs to us now. — Why, Elsie, the man in the tweed suit’s waving his hand to you!”

  Elsie’s face was crimson to look upon. As the instructress of youth, she felt herself distinctly discomposed. “It’s my cousin,” she cried, jumping up in a tremor of excitement, and waving back to him eagerly with her tiny handkerchief. “It’s Hugh Massinger! How very delightful! He must have come down by sea with the painter.”

  “They’re going to run in just close by the tree,” Winifred exclaimed, quite excited also at the sudden apparition of the real live poet. “Oh, Elsie, doesn’t he just look poetical! A man with a face and eyes like that couldn’t help writing poetry, even if he didn’t want to. He must be a friend of Mr. Relf’s, I suppose. What a lovely, romantic, poetical way to come down from London — tossing about at sea in a glorious breeze on a wee bit of a tub like that funny little Mud-Turtle l.”

  By this time, the yawl, with the breeze in her sails, had run rapidly before the wind for the mouth of the river, and wa
s close upon them by the roots of the poplar. As it neared the tree, Hugh stood up on the deck, bronzed and ruddy with his three days’ yachting, and called out cheerily in a loud voice, “Hullo, Elsie, this is something like a welcome! We arrive at the port, after a stormy passage on the high seas, and are met at its mouth by a deputation of the leading inhabitants. Shall we take you on board with your friend at once, and carry you up the rest of the way to Whitestrand?”

  Elsie’s heart came up into her mouth. She would have given the world to be able to cry out cordially, “Oh, Hugh, that’d be just lovely;” but propriety and a sense of the duties of her position compelled her instead to answer in a set voice, “Well, thank you; it’s ever so kind of you, Hugh; but we’re here in our own grounds, you know, already. — This is Miss Meysey, Winifred Meysey: Winnie, this is my cousin Hugh, dear. Now you know one another. — Hugh, I’m so awfully glad to see you!” Warren Relf turned the bow toward the tree, and ran the yawl close alongside till her tiny taffrail almost touched the roots of the big poplar. “That’s better,” he said. “Now, Massinger, introduce us. You do it like a Lord Chamberlain, I know. — You won’t come up with us, then, Miss Challoner?” Elsie bent her head. “We mustn’t,” she said candidly, “though I own I should like it. — It’s so very long since I’ve seen you, Hugh. Where are you going to stop at in the village? You must come up this very afternoon to see me.”

  Hugh bowed a bow of profound acquiescence. “If you say so,” he answered with less languor than his wont, “your will is law. We shall certainly come up. — I suppose I may bring my friend Relf with me — the owner and skipper of this magnificent and luxurious vessel? — We’ve had the most delightful passage down, Elsie. In future, in fact, I mean to live permanently upon a yawl. It’s glorious fun. You sail all day before the free, free breeze; and you dodge the steamers that try to run you down; and you put up at night in a convenient creek; and you sleep like a top on the bare boards; and you live upon sea-biscuit and bottled beer and the fresh sea-air; and you feel like a king or a Berserker or a street arab; and you wonder why the dickens you were ever such a stupid fool before as to wear black clothes, and lie on a feather-bed, and use a knife and fork, and eat olives and pâté de foie gras, and otherwise give way to the ridiculous foibles of an effete and superannuated western civilization. I never in my life felt anything like it. The blood of the old Sea-kings comes up in my veins, and I’ve been rhyming ‘viking’ and ‘liking,’ and ‘striking’ and ‘diking,’ ever since we got well clear of London Bridge, till this present moment — I shall write a volume of Sonnets of the Sea, and dedicate them duly to you — and Miss Meysey.”