§
The car came round, and Jocelyn came in.
‘Hasn’t Cupp turned up yet?’ he asked.
Sally shook her head.
‘I want him to help me cord the luggage on,’ said Jocelyn, squeezing past between her and the trunk.
‘I can,’ said Sally.
‘No you can’t,’ snapped Jocelyn, striding to the kitchen door and opening it.
‘Is Mr. Cupp anywhere about?’ he haughtily asked the figure bent over the saucepan. He needed his help, or nothing would have induced him to speak to Mrs. Cupp again.
‘No,’ said Mrs. Cupp, without ceasing to stir; but being a good woman, who tried always to speak the truth, she amplified this into accuracy. ‘’E’s somewhere, but he ain’t about,’ said Mrs. Cupp.
For, having, a short way with her when it came to husbands, she had turned the key that morning on Cupp while he was still asleep, well knowing that he wouldn’t dare get banging and shouting lest the neighbours should find out his wife had locked him in, and his shame become public. Besides, he was aware of the reason, and would keep quiet all right, she having had a straight talk with him the night before.
Cupp had been discomfited.
‘Don’t you go thinkin’ you’re goin’ to get adulteratin’ at your age and after ’avin’ been a decent ’usband these fifteen years,’ said Mrs. Cupp.
’Oo’s been adulteratin’?’ growled Cupp, strong in the knowledge that he hadn’t, but weak in the consciousness that he would have liked to have.
‘In your ’eart you ’ave, Cupp,’ said Mrs. Cupp, who had her Bible at her fingers’ ends, ‘and Scripture says it’s the same thing.’
Cupp at this sighed deeply, for he knew it wasn’t.
‘Scripture says,’ said Mrs. Cupp, sitting up very straight in bed and addressing Cupp’s back as he lay speechless beside her, ‘that ’ooso looks at a woman an’ lusts after ’er ’as committed adultery with ’er in ’is ’eart. Ain’t you been lookin’ at that there girl and lustin’ after ’er in your ’eart, Cupp? Ain’t you? Why, I seen you. Seen you doin’ it round doors, seen you doin’ it out of winders. You been adulteratin’ all over the place. I’ll learn you to get lustin’——’
And when she went downstairs in the morning she locked him in.
So Jocelyn had to carry out the luggage himself, bidding Sally stay where she was and wait quietly till he called her, and cording it on without the assistance, curtly refused, of the loungers against the sea-wall.
His mother’s luggage on their little holiday jaunts had been so neat, so easily handled, fixed on in two minutes; but the tin trunk was a difficult, slippery shape, and anyhow an ignoble object. Every aspect of it annoyed him. It was like going about with a servant’s luggage, he thought, wrestling with the thing, which was too high and not long enough, and refused to fit in with his suitcase.
‘Off?’ inquired one of the loungers affably.
‘Looks like it,’ said Jocelyn, tugging at the cord.
What a question. Silly ass. ‘Do you mind standing a little further back?’ he said with icy anger. ‘You see, if you come so close I can’t get——’ he tugged—‘any——’ he tugged, setting his teeth—‘purchase——’
Nobody moved; neither the particular lounger he was speaking to, nor the others.
‘Upon my word, sir,’ said Jocelyn, jerking round furiously, ready to fight the lot of them.
But they were not attending to him. Their eyes were all fixed on the parlour window, to which Sally, so anxious not to keep Jocelyn waiting a minute when he called as to risk disobeying him, had stolen to see how near ready he was.
There she stood, almost full length, the blind, now that they were leaving, drawn up, and the sun shining straight on her. St. Mawes had not had such a chance before. Its other glimpses of her had been flashes. Nor had the place in all its history ever till now been visited by beauty. Pretty girls had passed through it and disappeared, or stayed in it and disappeared equally completely because of growing old, and there was a tradition that in the last century the doctor had had a wife who for a brief time was very pretty, and during that brief time caused considerable uproar; but no one living had seen her, it was all hearsay from the last generation. This at the window wasn’t hearsay. This was the thing itself, the rare, heavenly thing at its most exquisite moment. Naturally the loungers took no further heed of Jocelyn; naturally with one accord they lifted up their eyes, and greedily drank in.
Jocelyn gave the cord one final and very vicious tug, knotted it somehow, and ran indoors.
‘What on earth you must go and stand at the window for——’ he exclaimed, hurrying into the room and catching her by the arm. ‘I was going to fetch you in a minute. Come along, then—let’s start, let’s get out of this confounded place. Ready? Got everything? I don’t want any delays once we’re outside——’
Hastily he looked round the room; there was nothing there. Hastily he looked over Sally; she seemed complete. Then he rushed her out to the car exactly as if, head downwards, they were both plunging into something most unpleasant which had to be gone through before they could escape to freedom.
‘Monstrous, monstrous,’ said Jocelyn to himself. ‘The whole thing is incredible and fantastic. I might be the impresario of a prima donna or a cinema star’—and he remembered, though at the time, like so many other things, it had drifted past his ears unnoticed, that that grotesque creature his father-in-law had said Sally had a gift for collecting crowds.
How painfully true, thought Jocelyn, plunging into the one waiting outside. What a regrettable gift. Of all gifts this was the one he could best have done without in anybody he was obliged to be with; for he hated crowds, he hated public attention, he was thin-skinned and sensitive directly anything pulled him out of the happy oblivion of his work. As far as he had got in life, and it seemed to him a long way, he judged that quite the best of all conditions was to sit in an eye-proof shell, invisible to and unconscious of what is usually called the world. And speculate; and discover; and verify.
Well, no use thinking of that now.
‘Get in, get in,’ he urged under his breath, helping Sally with such energy that she was clumsier at it than usual. ‘Never mind the rug—you can arrange that afterwards. Here—I’ll hold the umbrella——’
They got off. He could drive perfectly well, yet they got off only after a series of forward bounds and the stopping of his engine. But they did get off—through the loungers, past the windows with heads at them, round the sharp corner beyond the houses, up the extraordinarily steep hill.
Sally held her breath. This hill terrified her. Suppose the car, which each time seemed very nearly to stop on it, stopped quite, couldn’t go on at all, and they rolled down backwards, down, down, straight into the sea?
But they reached the top safely. It wasn’t the car that rolled down backwards that day; it was the tin trunk, and with it Jocelyn’s suitcase.
Unconscious, they drove on towards Truro.