The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Galsworthy

J >> John Galsworthy >> The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Galsworthy


The Rector smiled grimly.

"Nothing, nothing," he said. "I must ask you to excuse me, that's all.
I've a parish matter to attend to."

When he found himself in the drive, the feeling of vertigo and
suffocation passed, but left him unrelieved. He had, in fact, happened
on one of those psychological moments which enable a man's true nature to
show itself. Accustomed to say of himself bluffly, "Yes, yes; I've a hot
temper, soon over," he had never, owing to the autocracy of his position,
had a chance of knowing the tenacity of his soul. So accustomed and so
able for many years to vent displeasure at once, he did not himself know
the wealth of his old English spirit, did not know of what an ugly grip
he was capable. He did not even know it at this minute, conscious only
of a sort of black wonder at this monstrous conduct to a man in his
position, doing his simple duty. The more he reflected, the more
intolerable did it seem that a woman like this Mrs. Bellew should have
the impudence to invoke the law of the land in her favour a woman who was
no better than a common baggage--a woman he had seen kissing George
Pendyce. To have suggested to Mr. Barter that there was something
pathetic in this black wonder of his, pathetic in the spectacle of his
little soul delivering its little judgments, stumbling its little way
along with such blind certainty under the huge heavens, amongst millions
of organisms as important as itself, would have astounded him; and with
every step he took the blacker became his wonder, the more fixed his
determination to permit no such abuse of morality, no such disregard of
Hussell Barter.

"You have been guilty of indelicacy!" This indictment had a wriggling
sting, and lost no venom from the fact that he could in no wise have
perceived where the indelicacy of his conduct lay. But he did not try to
perceive it. Against himself, clergyman and gentleman, the monstrosity
of the charge was clear. This was a point of morality. He felt no anger
against George; it was the woman that excited his just wrath. For so
long he had been absolute among women, with the power, as it were, over
them of life and death. This was flat immorality! He had never approved
of her leaving her husband; he had never approved of her at all! He
turned his steps towards the Firs.

From above the hedges the sleepy cows looked down; a yaffle laughed a
field or two away; in the sycamores, which had come out before their
time, the bees hummed. Under the smile of the spring the innumerable
life of the fields went carelessly on around that square black figure
ploughing along the lane with head bent down under a wide-brimmed hat.

George Pendyce, in a fly drawn by an old grey horse, the only vehicle
that frequented the station at Worsted Skeynes, passed him in the lane,
and leaned back to avoid observation. He had not forgotten the tone of
the Rector's voice in the smoking-room on the night of the dance. George
was a man who could remember as well as another. In the corner of the
old fly, that rattled and smelled of stables and stale tobacco, he fixed
his moody eyes on the driver's back and the ears of the old grey horse,
and never stirred till they set him down at the hall door.

He went at once to his room, sending word that he had come for the night.
His mother heard the news with feelings of joy and dread, and she dressed
quickly for dinner, that she might see him the sooner. The Squire came
into her room just as she was going down. He had been engaged all day at
Sessions, and was in one of the moods of apprehension as to the future
which but seldom came over him.

"Why didn't you keep Vigil to dinner?" he said. "I could have given him
things for the night. I wanted to talk to him about insuring my life; he
knows, about that. There'll be a lot of money wanted, to pay my
death-duties. And if the Radicals get in I shouldn't be surprised if
they put them up fifty per cent."

"I wanted to keep him," said Mrs. Pendyce, "but he went away without
saying good-bye."

"He's an odd fellow!"

For some moments Mr. Pendyce made reflections on this breach of manners.
He had a nice standard of conduct in all social affairs.

"I'm having trouble with that man Peacock again. He's the most
pig-headed----What are you in such a hurry for, Margery?"

"George is here!"

"George? Well, I suppose he can wait till dinner. I have a lot of
things I want to tell you about. We had a case of arson to-day. Old
Quarryman was away, and I was in the chair. It was that fellow Woodford
that we convicted for poaching--a very gross case. And this is what he
does when he comes out. They tried to prove insanity. It's the rankest
case of revenge that ever came before me. We committed him, of course.
He'll get a swinging sentence. Of all dreadful crimes, arson is the
most----"

Mr. Pendyce could find no word to characterise his opinion of this
offence, and drawing his breath between his teeth, passed into his
dressing-room. Mrs. Pendyce hastened quietly out, and went to her son's
room. She found George in his shirtsleeves, inserting the links of his
cuffs.

"Let me do that for you, my dear boy! How dreadfully they starch your
cuffs! It is so nice to do something for you sometimes!"

George answered her:

"Well, Mother, and how have you been?"

Over Mrs. Pendyce's face came a look half sorrowful, half arch, but
wholly pathetic. 'What! is it beginning already? Oh, don't put me away
from you!' she seemed to say.

"Very well, thank you, dear. And you?"

George did not meet her eyes.

"So-so," he said. "I took rather a nasty knock over the 'City' last
week."

"Is that a race?" asked Mrs. Pendyce.

And by some secret process she knew that he had hurried out that piece of
bad news to divert her attention from another subject, for George had
never been a "crybaby."

She sat down on the edge of the sofa, and though the gong was about to
sound, incited him to dawdle and stay with her.

"And have you any other news, dear? It seems such an age since we've
seen you. I think I've told you all our budget in my letters. You know
there's going to be another event at the Rectory?"

"Another? I passed Barter on the way up. I thought he looked a bit
blue."

A look of pain shot into Mrs. Pendyce's eyes.

"Oh, I'm afraid that couldn't have been the reason, dear." And she
stopped, but to still her own fears hurried on again. "If I'd known
you'd been coming, I'd have kept Cecil Tharp. Vic has had such dear
little puppies. Would you like one? They've all got that nice black
smudge round the eye."

She was watching him as only a mother can watch-stealthily, minutely,
longingly, every little movement, every little change of his face, and
more than all, that fixed something behind which showed the abiding
temper and condition of his heart.

'Something is making him unhappy,' she thought. 'He is changed since I
saw him last, and I can't get at it. I seem to be so far from him--so
far!'

And somehow she knew he had come down this evening because he was lonely
and unhappy, and instinct had made him turn to her.

But she knew that trying to get nearer would only make him put her
farther off, and she could not bear this, so she asked him nothing, and
bent all her strength on hiding from him the pain she felt.

She went downstairs with her arm in his, and leaned very heavily on it,
as though again trying to get close to him, and forget the feeling she
had had all that winter--the feeling of being barred away, the feeling of
secrecy and restraint.

Mr. Pendyce and the two girls were in the drawing-room.

"Well, George," said the Squire dryly, "I'm glad you've come. How you
can stick in London at this time of year! Now you're down you'd better
stay a couple of days. I want to take you round the estate; you know
nothing about anything. I might die at any moment, for all you can tell.
Just make up your mind to stay."

George gave him a moody look.

"Sorry," he said; "I've got an engagement in town."

Mr. Pendyce rose and stood with his back to the fire.

"That's it," he said: "I ask you to do a simple thing for your own
good--and--you've got an engagement. It's always like that, and your
mother backs you up. Bee, go and play me something."

The Squire could not bear being played to, but it was the only command
likely to be obeyed that came into his head.

The absence of guests made little difference to a ceremony esteemed at
Worsted Skeynes the crowning blessing of the day. The courses, however,
were limited to seven, and champagne was not drunk. The Squire drank a
glass or so of claret, for, as he said, "My dear old father took his
bottle of port every night of his life, and it never gave him a twinge.
If I were to go on at that rate it would kill me in a year."

His daughters drank water. Mrs. Pendyce, cherishing a secret preference
for champagne, drank sparingly of a Spanish burgundy, procured for her by
Mr. Pendyce at a very reasonable price, and corked between meals with a
special cork. She offered it to George.

"Try some of my burgundy, dear; it's so nice."

But George refused and asked for whisky-and-soda, glancing at the butler,
who brought it in a very yellow state.

Under the influence of dinner the Squire recovered equanimity, though he
still dwelt somewhat sadly on the future.

"You young fellows," he said, with a friendly look at George, "are such
individualists. You make a business of enjoying yourselves. With your
piquet and your racing and your billiards and what not, you'll be used up
before you're fifty. You don't let your imaginations work. A green old
age ought to be your ideal, instead of which it seems to be a green
youth. Ha!" Mr. Pendyce looked at his daughters till they said:

"Oh, Father, how can you!"

Norah, who had the more character of the two, added:

"Isn't Father rather dreadful, Mother?"

But Mrs. Pendyce was looking at her son. She had longed so many evenings
to see him sitting there.

"We'll have a game of piquet to-night, George."

George looked up and nodded with a glum smile.

On the thick, soft carpet round the table the butler and second footman
moved. The light of the wax candles fell lustrous and subdued on the
silver and fruit and flowers, on the girls' white necks, on George's
well-coloured face and glossy shirt-front, gleamed in the jewels on his
mother's long white fingers, showed off the Squire's erect and still
spruce figure; the air was languorously sweet with the perfume of azaleas
and narcissus bloom. Bee, with soft eyes, was thinking of young Tharp,
who to-day had told her that he loved her, and wondering if father would
object. Her mother was thinking of George, stealing timid glances at his
moody face. There was no sound save the tinkle of forks and the voices
of Norah and the Squire, talking of little things. Outside, through the
long opened windows, was the still, wide country; the full moon, tinted
apricot and figured like a coin, hung above the cedar-trees, and by her
light the whispering stretches of the silent fields lay half enchanted,
half asleep, and all beyond that little ring of moonshine, unfathomed and
unknown, was darkness--a great darkness wrapping from their eyes the
restless world.




CHAPTER III

THE SINISTER NIGHT

On the day of the big race at Kempton Park, in which the Ambler, starting
favourite, was left at the post, George Pendyce had just put his
latch-key in the door of the room he had taken near Mrs. Bellew, when a
man, stepping quickly from behind, said:

"Mr. George Pendyce, I believe."

George turned.

"Yes; what do you want?"

The man put into George's hand a long envelope.

"From Messrs. Frost and Tuckett."

George opened it, and read from the top of a slip of paper:

"'ADMIRALTY, PROBATE, AND DIVORCE. The humble petition of Jaspar
Bellew-----'"

He lifted his eyes, and his look, uncannily impassive, unresenting,
unangered, dogged, caused the messenger to drop his gaze as though he had
hit a man who was down.

"Thanks. Good-night!"

He shut the door, and read the document through. It contained some
precise details, and ended in a claim for damages, and George smiled.

Had he received this document three months ago, he would not have taken
it thus. Three months ago he would have felt with rage that he was
caught. His thoughts would have run thus 'I have got her into a mess; I
have got myself into a mess. I never thought this would happen. This is
the devil! I must see someone--I must stop it. There must be a way out.'
Having but little imagination, his thoughts would have beaten their wings
against this cage, and at once he would have tried to act. But this was
not three months ago, and now----

He lit a cigarette and sat down on the sofa, and the chief feeling in his
heart was a strange hope, a sort of funereal gladness. He would have to
go and see her at once, that very night; an excuse--no need to wait in
here--to wait--wait on the chance of her coming.

He got up and drank some whisky, then went back to the sofa and sat down
again.

'If she is not here by eight,' he thought, 'I will go round.'

Opposite was a full-length mirror, and he turned to the wall to avoid it.
There was fixed on his face a look of gloomy determination, as though he
were thinking, 'I'll show them all that I'm not beaten yet.'

At the click of a latch-key he scrambled off the sofa, and his face
resumed its mask. She came in as usual, dropped her opera cloak, and
stood before him with bare shoulders. Looking in her face, he wondered
if she knew.

"I thought I'd better come," she said. "I suppose you've had the same
charming present?"

George nodded. There was a minute's silence.

"It's really rather funny. I'm sorry for you, George."

George laughed too, but his laugh was different.

"I will do all I can," he said.

Mrs. Bellew came close to him.

"I've seen about the Kempton race. What shocking luck! I suppose you've
lost a lot. Poor boy! It never rains but it pours."

George looked down.

"That's all right; nothing matters when I have you."

He felt her arms fasten behind his neck, but they were cool as marble; he
met her eyes, and they were mocking and compassionate.

Their cab, wheeling into the main thoroughfare, joined in the race of
cabs flying as for life toward the East--past the Park, where the trees,
new-leafed, were swinging their skirts like ballet-dancers in the wind;
past the Stoics' and the other clubs, rattling, jingling, jostling for
the lead, shooting past omnibuses that looked cosy in the half-light with
their lamps and rows of figures solemnly opposed.

At Blafard's the tall dark young waiter took her cloak with reverential
fingers; the little wine-waiter smiled below the suffering in his eyes.
The same red-shaded lights fell on her arms and shoulders, the same
flowers of green and yellow grew bravely in the same blue vases. On the
menu were written the same dishes. The same idle eye peered through the
chink at the corner of the red blinds with its stare of apathetic wonder.

Often during that dinner George looked at her face by stealth, and its
expression baffled him, so careless was it. And, unlike her mood of
late, that had been glum and cold, she was in the wildest spirits.

People looked round from the other little tables, all full now that the
season had begun, her laugh was so infectious; and George felt a sort of
disgust. What was it in this woman that made her laugh, when his own
heart was heavy? But he said nothing; he dared not even look at her, for
fear his eyes should show his feeling.

'We ought to be squaring our accounts,' he thought--'looking things in
the face. Something must be done; and here she is laughing and making
everyone stare!' Done! But what could be done, when it was all like
quicksand?

The other little tables emptied one by one.

"George," she said, "take me somewhere where we can dance!"

George stared at her.

"My dear girl, how can I? There is no such place!"

"Take me to your Bohemians!"

"You can't possibly go to a place like that."

"Why not? Who cares where we go, or what we do?"

"I care!"

"Ah, my dear George, you and your sort are only half alive!"

Sullenly George answered:

"What do you take me for? A cad?"

But there was fear, not anger, in his heart.

"Well, then, let's drive into the East End. For goodness' sake, let's do
something not quite proper!"

They took a hansom and drove East. It was the first time either had ever
been in that unknown land.

"Close your cloak, dear; it looks odd down here."

Mrs. Bellew laughed.

"You'll be just like your father when you're sixty, George."

And she opened her cloak the wider. Round a barrel-organ at the corner
of a street were girls in bright colours dancing.

She called to the cabman to stop.

"Let's watch those children!"

"You'll only make a show of us."

Mrs. Bellew put her hands on the cab door.

"I've a good mind to get out and dance with them!"

"You're mad to-night," said George. "Sit still!"

He stretched out his arm and barred her way. The passers-by looked
curiously at the little scene. A crowd began to collect.

"Go on!" cried George.

There was a cheer from the crowd; the driver whipped his horse; they
darted East again.

It was striking twelve when the cab put them down at last near the old
church on Chelsea Embankment, and they had hardly spoken for an hour.

And all that hour George was feeling:

'This is the woman for whom I've given it all up. This is the woman to
whom I shall be tied. This is the woman I cannot tear myself away from.
If I could, I would never see her again. But I can't live without her.
I must go on suffering when she's with me, suffering when she's away from
me. And God knows how it's all to end!'

He took her hand in the darkness; it was cold and unresponsive as a
stone. He tried to see her face, but could read nothing in those
greenish eyes staring before them, like a cat's, into the darkness.

When the cab was gone they stood looking at each other by the light of a
street lamp. And George thought:

'So I must leave her like this, and what then?'

She put her latch-key in the door, and turned round to him. In the
silent, empty street, where the wind was rustling and scraping round the
corners of tall houses, and the lamplight flickered, her face and figure
were so strange, motionless, Sphinx-like. Only her eyes seemed alive,
fastened on his own.

"Good-night!" he muttered.

She beckoned.

"Take what you can of me, George!" she said.




CHAPTER IV

Mr. PENDYCE'S HEAD

Mr. Pendyce's head, seen from behind at his library bureau, where it was
his practice to spend most mornings from half-past nine to eleven or even
twelve, was observed to be of a shape to throw no small light upon his
class and character. Its contour was almost national. Bulging at the
back, and sloping rapidly to a thin and wiry neck, narrow between the
ears and across the brow, prominent in the jaw, the length of a line
drawn from the back headland to the promontory at the chin would have
been extreme. Upon the observer there was impressed the conviction that
here was a skull denoting, by surplusage of length, great precision of
character and disposition to action, and, by deficiency of breadth, a
narrow tenacity which might at times amount to wrong-headedness. The
thin cantankerous neck, on which little hairs grew low, and the
intelligent ears, confirmed this impression; and when his face, with its
clipped hair, dry rosiness, into which the east wind had driven a shade
of yellow and the sun a shade of brown, and grey, rather discontented
eyes, came into view, the observer had no longer any hesitation in saying
that he was in the presence of an Englishman, a landed proprietor, and,
but for Mr. Pendyce's rooted belief to the contrary, an individualist.
His head, indeed, was like nothing so much as the Admiralty Pier at
Dover--that strange long narrow thing, with a slight twist or bend at the
end, which first disturbs the comfort of foreigners arriving on these
shores, and strikes them with a sense of wonder and dismay.

He sat very motionless at his bureau, leaning a little over his papers
like a man to whom things do not come too easily; and every now and then
he stopped to refer to the calendar at his left hand, or to a paper in
one of the many pigeonholes. Open, and almost out of reach, was a back
volume of Punch, of which periodical, as a landed proprietor, he had an
almost professional knowledge. In leisure moments it was one of his
chief recreations to peruse lovingly those aged pictures, and at the
image of John Bull he never failed to think: 'Fancy making an Englishman
out a fat fellow like that!'

It was as though the artist had offered an insult to himself, passing him
over as the type, and conferring that distinction on someone fast going
out of fashion. The Rector, whenever he heard Mr. Pendyce say this,
strenuously opposed him, for he was himself of a square, stout build, and
getting stouter.

With all their aspirations to the character of typical Englishmen, Mr.
Pendyce and Mr. Barter thought themselves far from the old beef and beer,
port and pigskin types of the Georgian and early Victorian era. They
were men of the world, abreast of the times, who by virtue of a public
school and 'Varsity training had acquired a manner, a knowledge of men
and affairs, a standard of thought on which it had really never been
needful to improve. Both of them, but especially Mr. Pendyce, kept up
with all that was going forward by visiting the Metropolis six or seven
or even eight times a year. On these occasions they rarely took their
wives, having almost always important business in hand--old College,
Church, or Conservative dinners, cricket-matches, Church Congress, the
Gaiety Theatre, and for Mr. Barter the Lyceum. Both, too, belonged to
clubs--the Rector to a comfortable, old-fashioned place where he could
get a rubber without gambling, and Mr. Pendyce to the Temple of things as
they had been, as became a man who, having turned all social problems
over in his mind, had decided that there was no real safety but in the
past.

They always went up to London grumbling, but this was necessary, and
indeed salutary, because of their wives; and they always came back
grumbling, because of their livers, which a good country rest always
fortunately reduced in time for the next visit. In this way they kept
themselves free from the taint of provincialism.

In the silence of his master's study the spaniel John, whose head, too,
was long and narrow, had placed it over his paw, as though suffering from
that silence, and when his master cleared his throat he guttered his tail
and turned up an eye with a little moon of white, without stirring his
chin.

The clock ticked at the end of the long, narrow room; the sunlight
through the long, narrow windows fell on the long, narrow backs of books
in the glassed book-case that took up the whole of one wall; and this
room, with its slightly leathery smell, seemed a fitting place for some
long, narrow ideal to be worked out to its long and narrow ending.

But Mr. Pendyce would have scouted the notion of an ending to ideals
having their basis in the hereditary principle.

"Let me do my duty and carry on the estate as my dear old father did, and
hand it down to my son enlarged if possible," was sometimes his saying,
very, very often his thought, not seldom his prayer. "I want to do no
more than that."

The times were bad and dangerous. There was every chance of a Radical
Government being returned, and the country going to the dogs. It was but
natural and human that he should pray for the survival of the form of
things which he believed in and knew, the form of things bequeathed to
him, and embodied in the salutary words "Horace Pendyce." It was not his
habit to welcome new ideas. A new idea invading the country of the
Squire's mind was at once met with a rising of the whole population, and
either prevented from landing, or if already on shore instantly taken
prisoner. In course of time the unhappy creature, causing its squeaks
and groans to penetrate the prison walls, would be released from sheer
humaneness and love of a quiet life, and even allowed certain privileges,
remaining, however, "that poor, queer devil of a foreigner." One day, in
an inattentive moment, the natives would suffer it to marry, or find that
in some disgraceful way it had caused the birth of children unrecognised
by law; and their respect for the accomplished fact, for something that
already lay in the past, would then prevent their trying to unmarry it,
or restoring the children to an unborn state, and very gradually they
would tolerate this intrusive brood. Such was the process of Mr.
Pendyce's mind. Indeed, like the spaniel John, a dog of conservative
instincts, at the approach of any strange thing he placed himself in the
way, barking and showing his teeth; and sometimes truly he suffered at
the thought that one day Horace Pendyce would no longer be there to bark.
But not often, for he had not much imagination.