The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Galsworthy

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


Home! The long narrow lane without a turning, the mists and stillness,
the driving rain and hot bright afternoons; the scents of wood smoke and
hay and the scent of her flowers; the Squire's voice, the dry rattle of
grass-cutters, the barking of dogs, and distant hum of threshing; and
Sunday sounds--church bells and rooks, and Mr. Barter's preaching; the
tastes, too, of the very dishes! And all these scents and sounds and
tastes, and the feel of the air to her cheeks, seemed to have been for
ever in the past, and to be going on for ever in the time to come.

She turned red and white by turns, and felt neither joy nor sadness, for
in a wave the old life came over her. She went at once to the study to
wait for her husband to come in. At the hoarse sound he made, her heart
beat fast, while old Roy and the spaniel John growled gently at each
other.

"John," she murmured, "aren't you glad to see me, dear?"

The spaniel John, without moving, beat his tail against his master's
foot.

The Squire raised his head at last.

"Well, Margery?" was all he said.

It shot through her mind that he looked older, and very tired!

The dinner-gong began to sound, and as though attracted by its long
monotonous beating, a swallow flew in at one of the narrow windows and
fluttered round the room. Mrs. Pendyce's eyes followed its flight.

The Squire stepped forward suddenly and took her hand.

"Don't run away from me again, Margery!" he said; and stooping down, he
kissed it.

At this action, so unlike her husband, Mrs. Pendyce blushed like a girl.
Her eyes above his grey and close-cropped head seemed grateful that he
did not reproach her, glad of that caress.

"I have some news to tell you, Horace. Helen Bellew has given George
up!"

The Squire dropped her hand.

"And quite time too," he said. "I dare say George has refused to take
his dismissal. He's as obstinate as a mule."

"I found him in a dreadful state."

Mr. Pendyce asked uneasily:

"What? What's that?"

"He looked so desperate."

"Desperate?" said the Squire, with a sort of startled anger.

Mrs. Pendyce went on:

"It was dreadful to see his face. I was with him this afternoon-"

The Squire said suddenly:

"He's not ill, is he?"

"No, not ill. Oh, Horace, don't you understand? I was afraid he might
do something rash. He was so--miserable."

The Squire began to walk up and down.

"Is he is he safe now?" he burst out.

Mrs. Pendyce sat down rather suddenly in the nearest chair.

"Yes," she said with difficulty, "I--I think so."

"Think! What's the good of that? What----Are you feeling faint,
Margery?"

Mrs. Pendyce, who had closed her eyes, said:

"No dear, it's all right."

Mr. Pendyce came close, and since air and quiet were essential to her at
that moment, he bent over and tried by every means in his power to rouse
her; and she, who longed to be let alone, sympathised with him, for she
knew that it was natural that he should do this. In spite of his efforts
the feeling of faintness passed, and, taking his hand, she stroked it
gratefully.

"What is to be done now, Horace?"

"Done!" cried the Squire. "Good God! how should I know? Here you are
in this state, all because of that d---d fellow Bellew and his d---d
wife! What you want is some dinner."

So saying, he put his arm around her, and half leading, half carrying,
took her to her room.

They did not talk much at dinner, and of indifferent things, of Mrs.
Barter, Peacock, the roses, and Beldame's hock. Only once they came too
near to that which instinct told them to avoid, for the Squire said
suddenly:

"I suppose you saw that woman?"

And Mrs. Pendyce murmured:

"Yes."

She soon went to her room, and had barely got into bed when he appeared,
saying as though ashamed:

"I'm very early."

She lay awake, and every now and then the Squire would ask her, "Are you
asleep, Margery?" hoping that she might have dropped off, for he himself
could not sleep. And she knew that he meant to be nice to her, and she
knew, too, that as he lay awake, turning from side to side, he was
thinking like herself: 'What's to be done next?' And that his fancy,
too, was haunted by a ghost, high-shouldered, with little burning eyes,
red hair, and white freckled face. For, save that George was miserable,
nothing was altered, and the cloud of vengeance still hung over Worsted
Skeynes. Like some weary lesson she rehearsed her thoughts: 'Now Horace
can answer that letter of Captain Bellow's, can tell him that George will
not--indeed, cannot--see her again. He must answer it. But will he?'

She groped after the secret springs of her husband's character, turning
and turning and trying to understand, that she might know the best way of
approaching him. And she could not feel sure, for behind all the little
outside points of his nature, that she thought so "funny," yet could
comprehend, there was something which seemed to her as unknown, as
impenetrable as the dark, a sort of thickness of soul, a sort of
hardness, a sort of barbaric-what? And as when in working at her
embroidery the point of her needle would often come to a stop against
stiff buckram, so now was the point of her soul brought to a stop against
the soul of her husband. 'Perhaps,' she thought, 'Horace feels like that
with me.' She need not so have thought, for the Squire never worked
embroideries, nor did the needle of his soul make voyages of discovery.

By lunch-time the next day she had not dared to say a word. 'If I say
nothing,' she thought, 'he may write it of his own accord.'

Without attracting his attention, therefore, she watched every movement
of his morning. She saw him sitting at his bureau with a creased and
crumpled letter, and knew it was Bellew's; and she hovered about, coming
softly in and out, doing little things here and there and in the hall,
outside. But the Squire gave no sign, motionless as the spaniel John
couched along the ground with his nose between his paws.

After lunch she could bear it no longer.

"What do you think ought to be done now, Horace?"

The Squire looked at her fixedly.

"If you imagine," he said at last, "that I'll have anything to do with
that fellow Bellew, you're very much mistaken."

Mrs. Pendyce was arranging a vase of flowers, and her hand shook so that
some of the water was spilled over the cloth. She took out her
handkerchief and dabbed it up.

"You never answered his letter, dear," she said.

The Squire put his back against the sideboard; his stiff figure, with
lean neck and angry eyes, whose pupils were mere pin-points, had a
certain dignity.

"Nothing shall induce me!" he said, and his voice was harsh and strong,
as though he spoke for something bigger than himself. "I've thought it
over all the morning, and I'm d---d if I do! The man is a ruffian. I
won't knuckle under to him!"

Mrs. Pendyce clasped her hands.

"Oh, Horace," she said; "but for the sake of us all! Only just give him
that assurance."

"And let him crow over me!" cried the Squire. "By Jove, no!"

"But, Horace, I thought that was what you wanted George to do. You wrote
to him and asked him to promise."

The Squire answered:

"You know nothing about it, Margery; you know nothing about me. D'you
think I'm going to tell him that his wife has thrown my son over--let him
keep me gasping like a fish all this time, and then get the best of it in
the end? Not if I have to leave the county--not if I----"

But, as though he had imagined the most bitter fate of all, he stopped.

Mrs. Pendyce, putting her hands on the lapels of his coat, stood with her
head bent. The colour had gushed into her cheeks, her eyes were bright
with tears. And there came from her in her emotion a warmth and
fragrance, a charm, as though she were again young, like the portrait
under which they stood.

"Not if I ask you, Horace?"

The Squire's face was suffused with dusky colour; he clenched his hands
and seemed to sway and hesitate.

"No, Margery," he said hoarsely; "it's--it's--I can't!"

And, breaking away from her, he left the room.

Mrs. Pendyce looked after him; her fingers, from which he had torn his
coat, began twining the one with the other.




CHAPTER IX

BELLEW BOWS TO A LADY

There was silence at the Firs, and in that silent house, where only five
rooms were used, an old manservant sat in his pantry on a wooden chair,
reading from an article out of Rural Life. There was no one to disturb
him, for the master was asleep, and the housekeeper had not yet come to
cook the dinner. He read slowly, through spectacles, engraving the words
for ever on the tablets of his mind. He read about the construction and
habits of the owl: "In the tawny, or brown, owl there is a manubrial
process; the furcula, far from being joined to the keel of the sternum,
consists of two stylets, which do not even meet; while the posterior
margin of the sternum presents two pairs of projections, with
corresponding fissures between." The old manservant paused, resting his
blinking eyes on the pale sunlight through the bars of his narrow window,
so that a little bird on the window-sill looked at him and instantly flew
away.

The old manservant read on again: "The pterylological characters of
Photodilus seem not to have been investigated, but it has been found to
want the tarsal loop, as well as the manubrial process, while its
clavicles are not joined in a furcula, nor do they meet the keel, and the
posterior margin of the sternum has processes and fissures like the tawny
section." Again he paused, and his gaze was satisfied and bland.

Up in the little smoking-room in a leather chair his master sat asleep.
In front of him were stretched his legs in dusty riding-boots. His lips
were closed, but through a little hole at one corner came a tiny puffing
sound. On the floor by his side was an empty glass, between his feet a
Spanish bulldog. On a shelf above his head reposed some frayed and
yellow novels with sporting titles, written by persons in their
inattentive moments. Over the chimneypiece presided the portrait of Mr.
Jorrocks persuading his horse to cross a stream.

And the face of Jaspar Bellew asleep was the face of a man who has ridden
far, to get away from himself, and to-morrow will have to ride far again.
His sandy eyebrows twitched with his dreams against the dead-white,
freckled skin above high cheekbones, and two hard ridges were fixed
between his brows; now and then over the sleeping face came the look of
one riding at a gate.

In the stables behind the house she who had carried him on his ride,
having rummaged out her last grains of corn, lifted her nose and poked it
through the bars of her loosebox to see what he was doing who had not
carried her master that sweltering afternoon, and seeing that he was
awake, she snorted lightly, to tell him there was thunder in the air.
All else in the stables was deadly quiet; the shrubberies around were
still; and in the hushed house the master slept.

But on the edge of his wooden chair in the silence of his pantry the old
manservant read, "This bird is a voracious feeder," and he paused,
blinking his eyes and nervously puckering his lips, for he had partially
understood....

Mrs. Pendyce was crossing the fields. She had on her prettiest frock, of
smoky-grey crepe, and she looked a little anxiously at the sky. Gathered
in the west a coming storm was chasing the whitened sunlight. Against
its purple the trees stood blackish-green. Everything was very still, not
even the poplars stirred, yet the purple grew with sinister, unmoving
speed. Mrs. Pendyce hurried, grasping her skirts in both her hands, and
she noticed that the cattle were all grouped under the hedge.

'What dreadful-looking clouds!' she thought. 'I wonder if I shall get to
the Firs before it comes?' But though her frock made her hasten, her
heart made her stand still, it fluttered so, and was so full. Suppose he
were not sober! She remembered those little burning eyes, which had
frightened her so the night he dined at Worsted Skeynes and fell out of
his dogcart afterwards. A kind of legendary malevolence clung about his
image.

'Suppose he is horrid to me!' she thought.

She could not go back now; but she wished--how she wished!--that it were
over. A heat-drop splashed her glove. She crossed the lane and opened
the Firs gate. Throwing frightened glances at the sky, she hastened down
the drive. The purple was couched like a pall on the treetops, and these
had begun to sway and moan as though struggling and weeping at their
fate. Some splashes of warm rain were falling. A streak of lightning
tore the firmament. Mrs. Pendyce rushed into the porch covering her ears
with her hands.

'How long will it last?' she thought. 'I'm so frightened!'...

A very old manservant, whose face was all puckers, opened the door
suddenly to peer out at the storm, but seeing Mrs. Pendyce, he peered at
her instead.

"Is Captain Bellew at home?"

"Yes, ma'am. The Captain's in the study. We don't use the drawing-room
now. Nasty storm coming on, ma'am--nasty storm. Will you please to sit
down a minute, while I let the Captain know?"

The hall was low and dark; the whole house was low and dark, and smelled
a little of woodrot. Mrs. Pendyce did not sit down, but stood under an
arrangement of three foxes' heads, supporting two hunting-crops, with
their lashes hanging down. And the heads of those animals suggested to
her the thought: 'Poor man! He must be very lonely here.'

She started. Something was rubbing against her knees: it was only an
enormous bulldog. She stooped down to pat it, and having once begun,
found it impossible to leave off, for when she took her hand away the
creature pressed against her, and she was afraid for her frock.

"Poor old boy--poor old boy!" she kept on murmuring. "Did he want a
little attention?"

A voice behind her said:

"Get out, Sam! Sorry to have kept you waiting. Won't you come in here?"

Mrs. Pendyce, blushing and turning pale by turns, passed into a low,
small, panelled room, smelling of cigars and spirits. Through the
window, which was cut up into little panes, she could see the rain
driving past, the shrubs bent and dripping from the downpour.

"Won't you sit down?"

Mrs. Pendyce sat down. She had clasped her hands together; she now
raised her eyes and looked timidly at her host.

She saw a thin, high-shouldered figure, with bowed legs a little apart,
rumpled sandy hair, a pale, freckled face, and little dark blinking eyes.

"Sorry the room's in such a mess. Don't often have the pleasure of
seeing a lady. I was asleep; generally am at this time of year!"

The bristly red moustache was contorted as though his lips were smiling.

Mrs. Pendyce murmured vaguely.

It seemed to her that nothing of this was real, but all some horrid
dream. A clap of thunder made her cover her ears.

Bellew walked to the window, glanced at the sky, and came back to the
hearth. His little burning eyes seemed to look her through and through.
'If I don't speak at once,' she thought, 'I never shall speak at all.'

"I've come," she began, and with those words she lost her fright; her
voice, that had been so uncertain hitherto, regained its trick of speech;
her eyes, all pupil, stared dark and gentle at this man who had them all
in his power--"I've come to tell you something, Captain Bellew!"

The figure by the hearth bowed, and her fright, like some evil bird, came
guttering down on her again. It was dreadful, it was barbarous that she,
that anyone, should have to speak of such things; it was barbarous that
men and women should so misunderstand each other, and have so little
sympathy and consideration; it was barbarous that she, Margery Pendyce,
should have to talk on this subject that must give them both such pain.
It was all so mean and gross and common! She took out her handkerchief
and passed it over her lips.

"Please forgive me for speaking. Your wife has given my son up, Captain
Bellew!"

Bellew did not move.

"She does not love him; she told me so herself! He will never see her
again!"

How hateful, how horrible, how odious!

And still Bellew did not speak, but stood devouring her with his little
eyes; and how long this went on she could not tell.

He turned his back suddenly, and leaned against the mantelpiece.

Mrs. Pendyce passed her hand over her brow to get rid of a feeling of
unreality.

"That is all," she said.

Her voice sounded to herself unlike her own.

'If that is really all,' she thought, 'I suppose I must get up and go!'
And it flashed through her mind: 'My poor dress will be ruined!'

Bellew turned round.

"Will you have some tea?"

Mrs. Pendyce smiled a pale little smile.

"No, thank you; I don't think I could drink any tea."

"I wrote a letter to your husband."

"Yes."

"He didn't answer it."

"No."

Mrs. Pendyce saw him staring at her, and a desperate struggle began
within her. Should she not ask him to keep his promise, now that
George----? Was not that what she had come for? Ought she not--ought
she not for all their sakes?

Bellew went up to the table, poured out some whisky, and drank it off.

"You don't ask me to stop the proceedings," he said.

Mrs. Pendyce's lips were parted, but nothing came through those parted
lips. Her eyes, black as sloes in her white face, never moved from his;
she made no sound.

Bellew dashed his hand across his brow.

"Well, I will!" he said, "for your sake. There's my hand on it. You're
the only lady I know!"

He gripped her gloved fingers, brushed past her, and she saw that she was
alone.

She found her own way out, with the tears running down her face. Very
gently she shut the hall door.

'My poor dress!' she thought. 'I wonder if I might stand here a little?
The rain looks nearly over!'

The purple cloud had passed, and sunk behind the house, and a bright
white sky was pouring down a sparkling rain; a patch of deep blue showed
behind the fir-trees in the drive. The thrushes were out already after
worms. A squirrel scampering along a branch stopped and looked at Mrs.
Pendyce, and Mrs. Pendyce looked absently at the squirrel from behind the
little handkerchief with which she was drying her eyes.

'That poor man!' she thought 'poor solitary creature! There's the sun!'

And it seemed to her that it was the first time the sun had shone all
this fine hot year. Gathering her dress in both hands, she stepped into
the drive, and soon was back again in the fields.

Every green thing glittered, and the air was so rain-sweet that all the
summer scents were gone, before the crystal scent of nothing. Mrs.
Pendyce's shoes were soon wet through.

'How happy I am!' she thought 'how glad and happy I am!'

And the feeling, which was not as definite as this, possessed her to the
exclusion of all other feelings in the rain-soaked fields.

The cloud that had hung over Worsted Skeynes so long had spent itself and
gone. Every sound seemed to be music, every moving thing danced. She
longed to get to her early roses, and see how the rain had treated them.
She had a stile to cross, and when she was safely over she paused a
minute to gather her skirts more firmly. It was a home-field she was in
now, and right before her lay the country house. Long and low and white
it stood in the glamourous evening haze, with two bright panes, where the
sunlight fell, watching, like eyes, the confines of its acres; and behind
it, to the left, broad, square, and grey among its elms, the village
church. Around, above, beyond, was peace--the sleepy, misty peace of the
English afternoon.

Mrs. Pendyce walked towards her garden. When she was near it, away to
the right, she saw the Squire and Mr. Barter. They were standing
together looking at a tree and--symbol of a subservient under-world--the
spaniel John was seated on his tail, and he, too, was looking at the
tree. The faces of the Rector and Mr. Pendyce were turned up at the same
angle, and different as those faces and figures were in their eternal
rivalry of type, a sort of essential likeness struck her with a feeling
of surprise. It was as though a single spirit seeking for a body had met
with these two shapes, and becoming confused, decided to inhabit both.

Mrs. Pendyce did not wave to them, but passed quickly, between the
yew-trees, through the wicket-gate....

In her garden bright drops were falling one by one from every rose-leaf,
and in the petals of each rose were jewels of water. A little down the
path a weed caught her eye; she looked closer, and saw that there were
several.

'Oh,' she thought, 'how dreadfully they've let the weeds I must really
speak to Jackman!'

A rose-tree, that she herself had planted, rustled close by, letting fall
a shower of drops.

Mrs. Pendyce bent down, and took a white rose in her fingers. With her
smiling lips she kissed its face.
1907.

THE END.








FRATERNITY
By John Galsworthy



CHAPTER I

THE SHADOW

In the afternoon of the last day of April, 190-, a billowy sea of little
broken clouds crowned the thin air above High Street, Kensington. This
soft tumult of vapours, covering nearly all the firmament, was in
onslaught round a patch of blue sky, shaped somewhat like a star, which
still gleamed--a single gentian flower amongst innumerable grass. Each
of these small clouds seemed fitted with a pair of unseen wings, and, as
insects flight on their too constant journeys, they were setting forth
all ways round this starry blossom which burned so clear with the colour
of its far fixity. On one side they were massed in fleecy congeries, so
crowding each other that no edge or outline was preserved; on the other,
higher, stronger, emergent from their fellow-clouds, they seemed leading
the attack on that surviving gleam of the ineffable. Infinite was the
variety of those million separate vapours, infinite the unchanging unity
of that fixed blue star.

Down in the street beneath this eternal warring of the various
soft-winged clouds on the unmisted ether, men, women, children, and their
familiars--horses, dogs, and cats--were pursuing their occupations with
the sweet zest of the Spring. They streamed along, and the noise of
their frequenting rose in an unbroken roar: "I, I--I, I!"

The crowd was perhaps thickest outside the premises of Messrs. Rose and
Thorn. Every kind of being, from the highest to the lowest, passed in
front of the hundred doors of this establishment; and before the costume
window a rather tall, slight, graceful woman stood thinking: "It really
is gentian blue! But I don't know whether I ought to buy it, with all
this distress about!"

Her eyes, which were greenish-grey, and often ironical lest they should
reveal her soul, seemed probing a blue gown displayed in that window, to
the very heart of its desirability.

"And suppose Stephen doesn't like me in it!" This doubt set her gloved
fingers pleating the bosom of her frock. Into that little pleat she
folded the essence of herself, the wish to have and the fear of having,
the wish to be and the fear of being, and her veil, falling from the edge
of her hat, three inches from her face, shrouded with its tissue her
half-decided little features, her rather too high cheek-bones, her cheeks
which were slightly hollowed, as though Time had kissed them just too
much.

The old man, with a long face, eyes rimmed like a parrot's, and
discoloured nose, who, so long as he did not sit down, was permitted to
frequent the pavement just there and sell the 'Westminster Gazette',
marked her, and took his empty pipe out of his mouth.

It was his business to know all the passers-by, and his pleasure too; his
mind was thus distracted from the condition of his feet. He knew this
particular lady with the delicate face, and found her puzzling; she
sometimes bought the paper which Fate condemned him, against his
politics, to sell. The Tory journals were undoubtedly those which her
class of person ought to purchase. He knew a lady when he saw one. In
fact, before Life threw him into the streets, by giving him a disease in
curing which his savings had disappeared, he had been a butler, and for
the gentry had a respect as incurable as was his distrust of "all that
class of people" who bought their things at "these 'ere large
establishments," and attended "these 'ere subscription dances at the Town
'All over there." He watched her with special interest, not, indeed,
attempting to attract attention, though conscious in every fibre that he
had only sold five copies of his early issues. And he was sorry and
surprised when she passed from his sight through one of the hundred
doors.

The thought which spurred her into Messrs. Rose and Thorn's was this: "I
am thirty-eight; I have a daughter of seventeen. I cannot afford to lose
my husband's admiration. The time is on me when I really must make
myself look nice!"

Before a long mirror, in whose bright pool there yearly bathed hundreds
of women's bodies, divested of skirts and bodices, whose unruffled
surface reflected daily a dozen women's souls divested of everything, her
eyes became as bright as steel; but having ascertained the need of taking
two inches off the chest of the gentian frock, one off its waist, three
off its hips, and of adding one to its skirt, they clouded again with
doubt, as though prepared to fly from the decision she had come to.
Resuming her bodice, she asked: