Adam & Eve & Pinch Me

by A. E. Coppard

IV

Between the sisters there grew a feud; Ianthe behaved evilly when she discovered their mutual infatuation for their one lover. The echoes of that feud, at first dim, but soon crashingly clear, reached him, touched him and moved him on Kate’s behalf: all his loyalty belonged to her. What did it matter if he could not fathom his own desire, that Ianthe was still his for a word, that Kate’s implacable virtue still offered its deprecatory hand, when Kate herself came back to him?

They were to spend a picnic day together and she went to him for breakfast. Her tremors of propriety were fully exercised as she cycled along to his home; she was too fond of him and he was more than fond of her; but all her qualms were lulled. He did not appear in any of the half-expected negligee, he was beautifully and amusingly at home.

“My dear!” he exclaimed in the enjoyment of her presence; she stood staring at him as she removed her wrap, the morn though bright being fresh and cool: “Why do I never do you justice! Why do I half forget! You are marvellously, irresistibly lovely. How do you do it—or how do I fail so?”

She could only answer him with blushes. His bungalow had but two rooms, both on the ground floor, one a studio and the other his living and sleeping room. It was new, built of bricks and unpainted boards. The interior walls were unplastered and undecorated except for three small saucepans hung on hooks, a shelf of dusty volumes, and nails, large rusty nails, projecting everywhere, one holding a discarded collar and a clothes brush. A tall flat cupboard contained a narrow bed to be lowered for sleeping, huge portmanteaus and holdalls reposed in a corner beside a bureau, there was a big brass candle-pan on a chair beside the round stove. While he prepared breakfast the girl walked about the room, making shy replies to his hilarious questions. It was warm in there but to her tidy comfort-loving heart the room was disordered and bare. She stood looking out of the window: the April air was bright but chilly, the grass in thin tufts fluttered and shivered.

“It is very nice,” she said to him once, “but it’s strange and I feel that I ought not to be here.”

“O, never mind where you ought to be,” he cried, pouring out her coffee, “that’s where you are, you suit the place, you brighten and adorn it, it’s your native setting, Kate. No—I know exactly what is running in your mind, you are going to ask if I suffer loneliness here. Well, I don’t. A great art in life is the capacity to extract a flavour from something not obviously flavoured, but here it is all flavour. Come and look at things.”

He rose and led her from egg and toast to the world outside. Long fields of pasture and thicket followed a stream that followed other meadows, soon hidden by the ambulating many folding valleys, and so on to the sea, a hundred miles away. Into his open door were blown, in their season, balls of thistledown, crisp leaves, twigs and dried grass, the reminder, the faint brush, of decay. The airs of wandering winds came in, odours of herb, the fragrance of viewless flowers. The land in some directions was now being furrowed where corn was greenly to thrive, to wave in glimmering gold, to lie in the stook, to pile on giant stack. Horses were trailing a harrow across an upland below the park, the wind was flapping the coats of the drivers, the tails and manes of the horses, and heaving gladly in trees. A boy fired the heaps of squitch whose smoke wore across the land in dense deliberate wreaths. Sportsmen’s guns were sounding from the hollow park.

Kate followed Masterman around his cottage; he seemed to be fascinated by the smoke, the wind, the horses and men.

“Breakfast will be cold.”

How queerly he looked at her before he said: “Yes, of course, breakfast will be getting cold,” and then added, inconsequently: “Flowers are like men and women, they either stare brazenly at the sun or they bend humbly before it, but even the most modest desire the sun.”

When he spoke like that she always felt that the words held a half-hidden, perhaps libidinous, meaning, which she could not understand but only guess at; and she was afraid of her guesses. Full of curious, not to say absurd superstitions about herself and about him, his strange oblique emotions startled her virginal understanding; her desire was to be good, very very good, but to be that she could not but suspect the impulses of most other people, especially the impulses of men. Well, perhaps she was right: the woman who hasn’t any doubts must have many illusions.

He carried a bag of lunch and they walked out into the day. Soon the wind ceased, the brightness grew warm, the warmth was coloured; clouds lolled in the air like tufts of lilac. At the edge of a spinney they sat down under a tree. Boughs of wood blown down by the winter gales were now being hidden by the spring grass. A rabbit, twenty yards away, sat up and watched the couple, a fat grey creature. “Hoi,” cried Kate, and the rabbit hopped away. It could not run very fast, it did not seem much afraid.

“Is it wounded?” she asked.

“No, I think it is a tame one, escaped from a farm or a cottage near us, I expect.”

Kate crept after it on hands and knees and it let her approach. She offered it the core of an apple she had just eaten. The rabbit took it and bit her finger. Then Kate caught it by the ears. It squealed but Kate held it to her bosom with delight, and the rabbit soon rested there if not with delight at least with ease. It was warm against her breast, it was delicious to feel it there, to pull its ears and caress its fat flanks, but as she was doing this she suddenly saw that its coat was infested with fleas. She dropped the rabbit with a scream of disgust and it rushed into the thicket.

“Come here,” said Masterman to her, “let me search you, this is distressing.”

She knelt down before him and in spite of her wriggling he reassured her.

“It’s rather a nice blouse,” he said.

“I don’t care for it. I shall not wear it again. I shall sell it to someone or give it to them.”

“I would love to take it from you stitch by stitch.”

With an awkward movement of her arm she thrust at his face, crying loudly, “No, how dare you speak to me like that!”

“Is it very daring?” For a moment he saw her clenched hands, detestably bloodless, a symbol of roused virtue: but at once her anger was gone, Kate was contrite and tender. She touched his face with her white fingers softly as the settling of a moth. “O, why did we come here?”

He did not respond to her caresses, he was sullen, they left the spinney; but as they walked she took his arm murmuring: “Forgive me, I’ll make it all up to you some day.”

Coyness and cunning, passion and pride, were so much at odds that later on they quarrelled again. Kate knew that he would neither marry her nor let her go; she could neither let him go nor keep him. This figure of her distress amused him, he was callously provoking, and her resentment flowed out at the touch of his scorn. With Kate there seemed to be no intermediate stages between docility and fury, or even between love and hatred.

“Why are you like this?” she cried, beating her pallid hands together, “I have known you for so long.”

“Ah, we have known each other for so long, but as for really knowing you—no! I’m not a tame rabbit to be fondled any more.”

She stared for a moment, as if in recollection; then burst into ironical laughter. He caught her roughly in his arms but she beat him away.

“O, go to ... go to....”

“Hell?” he suggested.

“Yes,” she burst out tempestuously, “and stop there.”

He was stunned by her unexpected violence. She was coarse like Ianthe after all. But he said steadily:

“I’m willing to go there if you will only keep out of my way when I arrive.”

Then he left her standing in a lane, he hurried and ran, clambering over stiles and brushing through hedges, anything to get away from the detestable creature. She did not follow him and they were soon out of sight of each other. Anger and commination swarmed to his lips, he branded her with frenzied opprobrium and all the beastliness that was in him. Nothing under heaven should ever persuade him to approach the filthy beast again, the damned intolerable pimp, never, never again, never.

But he came to a bridge. On it he rested. And in that bright air, that sylvan peace, his rancour fell away from him, like sand from a glass, leaving him dumb and blank at the meanness of his deed. He went back to the lane as fast as he could go. She was not there. Kate, Kate, my dove! But he could not find her.

He was lost in the fields until he came at last upon a road and a lonely tavern thereby. It had a painted sign; a very smudgy fox, in an inexplicable attitude, destroying a fowl that looked like a plum-pudding but was intended to depict a snipe. At the stable door the tiniest black kitten in the world was shaping with timid belligerency at a young and fluffy goose who, ignoring it, went on sipping ecstatically from a pan of water. On the door were nailed, in two semicircles of decoration, sixteen fox pads in various stages of decay, an entire spiral shaving from the hoof of a horse, and some chalk jottings:

2 pads
3 cruppers
1 Bellyband
2 Set britchin

The tavern was long and low and clean, its garden was bare but trim. There was comfort, he rested, had tea, and then in the bar his painful musings were broken by a ragged unfortunate old pedlar from Huddersfield.

“Born and bred in Slatterwick, it’s no lie ah’m speaking, ah were born and bred Slatterwick, close to Arthur Brinkley’s farm, his sister’s in Canady, John Orkroyd took farm, Arthur’s dead.”

“Humph!”

“And buried. That iron bridge at Jackamon’s belong to Daniel Cranmer. He’s dead.”

“Humph!”

“And buried. From th’ iron bridge it’s two miles and a quarter to Herbert Oddy’s, that’s the ‘Bay Horse,’ am ah right, at Shelmersdyke. Three miles and three-quarters from dyke to the ‘Cock and Goat’ at Shapley Fell, am ah right?”

Masterman, never having been within a hundred miles of Yorkshire, puffed at his cigarette and nodded moodily, “I suppose so” or “Yes, yes.”

“From Arthur Brinkley’s to th’ iron bridge is one mile and a half and a bit, and from Arthur Brinkley’s to Jury Cartright’s is just four mile. He’s dead, sir.”

“Yes.”

“And buried. Is that wrong? Am ah speaking wrong? No. It’s long step from yon, rough tramp for an old man.”

Masterman—after giving sixpence to the pedlar who, uttering a benediction, pressed upon him a card of shirt buttons—said “Good evening” and walked out to be alone upon the road with his once angry but now penitent mind. Kate, poor dear Kate!

The sun was low down lolling near the horizon but there was an astonishing light upon the land. Cottage windows were blocks of solid gold in this lateral brilliance, shafts of shapely shade lay across leagues of field, he could have counted every leaf among the rumpled boskage of the sycamores. A vast fan of indurated cloud, shell-like and pearly, was wavering over the western sky but in the east were snowy rounded masses like fabulous balloons. At a cross road he stood by an old sign post, its pillar plastered with the faded bill of a long-ago circus. He could read every word of it but when he turned away he found everything had grown dimmer. The wind arose, the forest began to roar like a heaving beast. All verdurous things leaned one way. A flock of starlings flew over him with one movement and settled in a rolling elm. How lonely it was. He took off his hat. His skull was fearfully tender—he had dabbed it too hard with his hair brush that morning. His hair was growing thin, like his youth and his desires.

What had become of Kate, where had she hidden? What would become of her? He would never see her again. He disliked everything about her, except her self. Her clothes, her speech, her walk, the way she carried her umbrella, her reticence that was nothing if not conspicuous, her melancholy, her angular concrete piety, her hands—in particular he disliked her pale hands. She had a mind that was cultivated as perfunctorily as a kitchen garden, with ideas like roots or beans, hostilities like briars, and a fence of prudery that was as tough as hoops of galvanized iron. And yet he loved her—or almost. He was ready to love her, he wanted to, he wanted her; her deep but guarded devotion—it was limited but it was devotion—compelled this return from him. It was a passionate return. He had tried to mould that devotion into a form that could delight him—he had failed. He knew her now, he could peer into her craven soul as one peers into an empty bottle, with one eye. For her the opportunities afforded by freedom were but the preludes to misadventure. What a fool she was!

When he reached home Kate stood in darkness at the doorway of his house. He exclaimed with delight, her surprising presence was the very centre of his desire, he wanted to embrace her, loving her deeply, inexplicably again; just in a moment.

“I want my bike,” the girl said sullenly. “I left it inside this morning.

“Ah, your bicycle! Yes, you did.” He unlocked the door. “Wait, there should be a candle, there should be.”

She stood in the doorway until he had lit it.

“Come in, Kate,” he said, “let me give you something. I think there is some milk, certainly I have some cake, come in, Kate, or do you drink beer, I have beer, come in, I’ll make you something hot.”

But Kate only took her bicycle. “I ought to have been home hours ago,” she said darkly, wheeling it outside and lighting the lantern. He watched her silently as she dabbed the wick, the pallor of her hands had never appeared so marked.

“Let’s be kind to each other,” he said, detaining her, “don’t go, dear Kate.”

She pushed the bicycle out into the road.

“Won’t you see me again?” he asked as she mounted it.

“I am always seeing you,” she called back, but her meaning was dark to him.

“Faugh! The devil! The fool!” He gurgled anathemas as he returned to his cottage. “And me too! What am I?”

But no mortal man could ever love a woman of that kind. She did not love him at all, had never loved him. Then what was it she did love? Not her virtue—you might as well be proud of the sole of your foot; it was some sort of pride, perhaps the test of her virtue that the conflict between them provoked, the contest itself alone alluring her, not its aim and end. She was never happier than when having led him on she thwarted him. But she would find that his metal was as tough as her own.

Before going to bed he spent an hour in writing very slowly a letter to Kate, telling her that he felt they would not meet again, that their notions of love were so unrelated, their standards so different. “My morals are at least as high as yours though likely enough you regard me as a rip. Let us recognize then,” he wrote concludingly, “that we have come to the end of the tether without once having put an ounce of strain upon its delightful but never tense cord. But the effort to keep the affair down to the level at which you seem satisfied has wearied me. The task of living down to that assured me that for you the effort of living up to mine would be consuming. I congratulate you, my dear, on coming through scatheless and that the only appropriate condolences are my own—for myself.”

It was rather pompous, he thought, but then she wouldn’t notice that, let alone understand it. She suffered not so much from an impediment of speech—how could she when she spoke so little?—as from an impediment of intellect, which was worse, much worse, but not so noticeable being so common a failing. She was, when all was said and done, just a fool. It was a pity, for bodily she must indeed be a treasure. What a pity! But she had never had any love for him at all, only compassion and pity for his bad thoughts about her; he had neither pity for her nor compunction—only love. Dear, dear, dear. Blow out the candle, lock the door, Good-night!