§
It was impossible for young Carruthers, having been vouchsafed a vision of Sally, to stop himself from trying to have another. He was drawn as by a magnet. His walks, after that Sunday, took him daily down to St. Mawes, where, having briskly gone the length of the front swinging his stick, he would lean awhile—as long as he dared without becoming conspicuous—against the sea-wall, smoking and ostensibly considering the horizon, but really missing nobody who came or went along the road. The Sealyham Sally was left at home, but other dogs were brought because they are such wonderful introducers, and the road to acquaintanceship, young Carruthers knew, is paved with good dogs.
He wasn’t sure that any profit would come of it if he did see the honeymooners and get into conversation,—probably not; but he couldn’t help it; he had to try; he was drawn. And very soon he discovered which house they were staying in, because the other loungers, smoking and gazing out to sea, rare figures at ordinary times and scattered sparsely over a quarter of a mile, were now considerably increased in numbers, and thickened into a knot at one particular point. That point, Carruthers unhesitatingly concluded, was where she lived.
Unwilling to be seen doing this sort of thing, he held himself aloof from the knot, smoking his pipe at a decent distance; but none the less nothing escaped him that happened at the windows or the door of the little house. The house, he knew, for his family had lived in the neighbourhood for many years, was the house of the fisherman Cupp. And he thought, thrice happy Cupp, and three times thrice happy Mrs. Cupp,—for she would be constantly in and out of the very room, and be able to look at—no, he wouldn’t, he couldn’t say Sally, not with his own four-legged Sally so grotesquely profaning the name.
He was all wrong, however, about the Cupps. They were not at all happy; at least, Mrs. Cupp wasn’t, and unless Mrs. Cupp was happy Cupp, though he only dimly apprehended this truth and explained the fact of his discomfort in many ways that were not the right ones, couldn’t be happy either. For Mrs. Cupp, who beheld Sally with astonishment on her first appearance, no one in the least like that ever yet having been seen in St. Mawes, quickly began to have doubts as to whether her lodgers were married. Everybody in St. Mawes was married, except those who were going to be or had been, and it disturbed Mrs. Cupp terribly, who all her life had held her head high and looked people in the face, to think she was perhaps harbouring and cooking for a person who was neither virgin, wife, nor widow.
For a brief time, so brief that it could be counted in hours, Sally’s nightgown had reassured her, because it was essentially the nightgown of the really married, a nightgown that Mrs. Cupp herself might have worn, and the most moral laundress had not to blush over. Up to the chin, down to the toes, long-sleeved, stiff, solid, edged at the throat and wrists with plain scallops, this nightgown did at first help Mrs. Cupp to hope that her lodgers were all right; but back came her doubts, and more insistent than before, when she perceived that Cupp too was noticing the young person’s appearance, and, though he said nothing, was beginning to behave all sly; and they deepened finally into certainty on her becoming aware of those thickening clusters of loungers constantly hanging about opposite her house. Even young Mr. Carruthers. Oh, she saw him plain enough, and knew all right what he was after; for she hadn’t been to the pictures over at Falmouth for nothing, and she had learned from them that that sort of girl got men come buzzing round her as if she were a pot of honey and they just so many flies. Cupp shouldn’t, though. Cupp shouldn’t get buzzing. Cupp, after fifteen years of being a steady husband, wasn’t going to be let buzz—not much, said Mrs. Cupp to herself, scouring her kitchen with violence.
She said nothing to him, however, for two, as she would soon show him, could play at his game of acting sly; but when at the end of the first fortnight of the Lukes’ stay Jocelyn, on her coming in to clear away the breakfast, got out his money and was preparing as usual to pay her the next week’s lodging in advance, she told him without wasting words that the rooms were let.
‘Let?’ repeated Jocelyn, taken aback.
‘There’s an end to everything,’ said Mrs. Cupp enigmatically, as she cleared the table with great swift swoops.
‘But,’ protested Jocelyn, annoyed and surprised, ‘we intended to stay at least another week.’
‘I say there’s an end to everything,’ said Mrs. Cupp even more emphatically, crowding the plates noisily on to a tray. ‘And one of them’s my patience.’
Jocelyn stared. Sally, raising her head from her daily task, on which she was at that moment engaged, looked on with the air of a mild, disinterested angel.
‘But what on earth has happened? What’s the matter?’ asked Jocelyn.
‘You only got to cast an eye out of the winder to see what’s the matter,’ said Mrs. Cupp, jerking her elbow in its direction. ‘They don’t collect like that round parties that’s respectable.’
And dropping some forks off the overloaded tray she clattered out of the room.
Jocelyn turned swiftly to Sally. ‘You see?’ he said.
‘See wot?’ asked Sally, who was about to stoop and pick up the forks, but remembered not to just in time.
Yes; see what, indeed. That it was her fault? That this disgrace had been brought on him through her fault? Was that, Jocelyn asked himself, shocked at the tempest of injustice that had for an instant swept him off his feet, what he wanted her to see?
‘I meant,’ he said, ashamed of his unfairness, ‘you heard. You did hear, didn’t you, what the horrible woman was saying?’
Sally nodded. ‘Thinks we ain’t married,’ she said. She seemed quite undisturbed. ‘Well, it ain’t much use thinkin’ we ain’t when we are,’ she remarked.
‘Unfortunately she’s sure we’re not, so that we are being turned out,’ said Jocelyn, dropping her hand, which he had taken, for this placidity, which seemed to him evidence of inability to grasp a situation, instead of soothing made him angry again.
He strode across to the window, and grabbing at the blind pulled it down still lower. How inexpressibly humiliating to be turned out, how unendurable to have people thinking Sally wasn’t respectable, and that he, he of all people, would come off with a girl for that sort of loathsome lark.
‘It ain’t much use bein’ sure, when I got my marriage lines,’ said Sally with the same calm. ‘Let alone my weddin’ ring.’ And she added complacently after a minute, ‘Upstairs in my box.’ And after a further minute, ‘I mean, my marriage lines.’
Then, supposing that the interruption to the lesson might now be regarded as over, and that it would therefore be expected of her that she should get on with it, she applied herself once more with patient industry to her task.
‘H-usbands h-in’abit h-eaven,’ she began again, assiduously blowing.
‘Oh, my God,’ said Jocelyn, under his breath.