§
They lunched at Thaxted. It was still only half past twelve, and Charles had managed to be three hours doing the forty odd miles. There was a beautiful church at Thaxted in which he could linger with her, for he didn’t want to get to Crippenham till tea-time, and Crippenham was only about nine miles beyond Cambridge, off the Ely road between Waterbeach and Swaffham Prior.
Up to Thaxted, Charles was filled with an embarrassingly strong desire to appropriate Sally for ever to himself. He hadn’t an idea how to do it, but that was his wish. She sat there silent, beautiful beyond his dreams—and how often and how wistfully had he not dreamt of what a woman’s beauty might be!—pathetic, defenceless in the midst of a rudely jostling, predatory world, like a child with a priceless pearl in its hand among the poor and hungry, and he passionately loved her. As the miles increased, so did Charles’s passion. He looked at her sideways, and each time with a fresh throb of wonder. He wove dreams about her; he saw visions of magic casements and perilous seas, and she behind them, protected, guarded, worshipped by him alone; his soul was filled with poetry; he was lifted above himself by this Presence, this Manifestation; he thought in terms of music; the whole of England sang.
But at Thaxted he felt different, and began to think Sally ought to be with those she belonged to; and by the time it was evening, and he was meditating alone in the garden at Crippenham, he was quite sure of it.
At Thaxted he ordered the best lunch he could—Sally’s mouth watered as she listened,—and while it was being got ready he took her into the church. She was inattentively polite. The brisk movements of a big, close-cropped man in a cassock, who strode busily about and made what seemed to Sally a curtsey each time he crossed the middle aisle, appeared to interest her much more than Charles’s remarks on the clear, pale beauty of the building. It was rather like taking a dog to look at things. Charles didn’t consciously think this, but there was an unawareness about Sally when faced by the beauties of Thaxted Church, and when faced, coming down, by the beauties of certain bits of the country that singing April morning, which was very like, Charles subconsciously thought, the unawareness of a dog. Ah, but how far, far more beautiful she herself was than anything else, he thought; how exquisite she looked in Laura’s chinchilla wrap, with the exalted thoughts of the men who had built the church, thoughts frozen into the delicate greys, and silvers, and rose-colours of that fair wide place, for her background.
The man in the cassock left off doing whatever he was doing on catching sight of Sally, and, after looking at her a moment, came up and offered, his eyes on her face, to show them round the church; a little cluster of Americans dissolved, and flowed towards her; and a woman dressed like a nun broke off her prayers, and presently sidled up to where she stood.
Charles removed her.
Thaxted is a quiet place, and he strolled with her through its streets till their food should be ready. Its streets, quiet to begin with, didn’t stay quiet. The people of Thaxted, for some reason incomprehensible to Charles, because no two women could be more unlike, seemed to think Sally was Mary Pickford. He heard whispers to that effect. Did they then think, too, that he was the person known, he understood, as Doug?
He removed her a second time.
Perhaps the inn was as good a place as any to wait in. He had, however, to engage a private room for their lunch, because so many people came in and wished to lunch too; and it was when Sally had eaten a great deal of greengage tart and cream—bottled greengages, Charles feared, but she said she liked them—and drunk a great deal of raspberry syrup which had, he was sure, never been near real raspberries and couldn’t be very good for her, and then, while he was having coffee and she tea—he had somehow stumbled on the fact that she liked tea after meals, and he watched with concern the strength and number of the cups she drank—it was then that she began to thaw, and to talk.
Alas, that she should. Alas, that she didn’t remain for ever silent, wonderful, mysterious, of God.
Once having started thawing, it wasn’t in Sally’s generous nature to stop. She thawed and thawed, and Charles became more and more afflicted. Lord Charles—so, the night before, she had learned he was called—was evidently a chip off the same block as her friend Laura; kind, that is. See what a lovely dinner he was giving her. Also he had been much more like a gentleman that day, and less like somebody who wanted to be a husband; and after the greengage tart she began to warm up, and by the time she had got to the cups of tea she felt great confidence in Charles.
‘Kind, ain’t you,’ she said with her enchanting smile, when he suggested, much against his convictions, another pot of tea.
‘Isn’t everybody?’ asked Charles.
‘Does their best,’ said Sally charitably. ‘But it’s up ’ill all the way for some as I could mention.’
By this time Charles was already feeling chilled. The raspberry syrup and the cups of strong tea had estranged him. This perfect girl, he thought, ought to be choice too in her food, ought instinctively to reject things out of bottles, and have no desire for a second helping of obviously bad pastry. Still, she was very young. He too, at Eton, had liked bad tuck. After all, queer as it seemed, she had only got to the age he was at then.
He made excuses for her; and, it appearing to him important that he should be in possession of more facts about her than those Laura had told him the evening before, said encouragingly, ‘Do mention them.’
Sally did. She mentioned everybody and everything; and soon he knew as much about her hasty marriage, hurried on within a fortnight to the first man who came along, her return from her honeymoon to South Winch, the determination of her mother-in-law to keep her apart from her husband, her flight, helped by her father-in-law, back to her father, his rejection of her, and her intention to rejoin her husband next day at Cambridge whether he liked it or not, as he could bear.
He couldn’t bear much. It wasn’t only how she said it, but what she said. Charles, who had at first been afflicted by her language, was now afflicted by her facts. He shifted uneasily in his chair. He smoked cigarette after cigarette. His thin brown face was flushed, and he looked distressed. In that strange, defective, yet all too vivid speech which he so deeply deplored, she drew for him a picture of what seemed sheer exploitation, culminating in his own sister’s flinging herself hilariously into the game. This child; this helpless child, who would obey anybody, go anywhere, do anything she was told—in Charles’s eyes, as he listened and drew her out, she became the most pathetic thing on earth. Everybody, it appeared, first grabbed at her and then wanted to get rid of her. Everybody; himself too. Yes, he too had grabbed at her, under a mealy-mouthed pretence of helping her, and now he too wanted—not to get rid of her, that seemed too violent, too brutal a way of putting it, but to hand her over, to pass her on, to send her back to that infernal young Luke, who himself was trying to escape from her and leave her to his mother. And the courage of the child! It was the courage of ignorance, of course, but still it seemed to Charles a lovely thing, that was afraid of nothing, of no discomfort, of no hard work, if only she might be with her husband in their own home. Charles discovered that that was Sally’s one wish, and that her simple ambition appeared to be to do what she called work her fingers to the bone on behalf of that odious youth.
‘Mr. Luke,’ said Sally, who was unacquainted with any reason why she shouldn’t say everything she knew to anyone who wished to hear, ‘Mr. Luke, ’e thinks ’e can’t afford a ’ome yet for me, and so——’
‘Then he oughtn’t to have married you,’ flashed out Charles, infuriated by the young brute.
‘Seemed ’e couldn’t ’elp it,’ said Sally. ‘Seemed as if it ’ad to be. ’E——’
‘Oh yes, yes,’ interrupted Charles impatiently, for he hated hearing anything about Jocelyn’s emotions. ‘Of course, of course. That was a quite foolish remark of mine.’
‘Five ’undred pounds a year ’e got,’ went on Sally, ‘and me able to make sixpence go twice as far as most can. Dunno wot ’e’s talkin’ about.’
And indeed she didn’t know, for she shared Mr. Pinner’s opinion that five hundred a year was wealth.
‘Fair beats me,’ she added, after a thoughtful pause.
Well, thought Charles, the Moulsford family had behaved badly, and, under the cloak of sympathy and wishing to help, his and Laura’s conduct had been most base; but they were certainly going to make up for it now. By God, yes. Crippenham, which he had at first thought of from sheer selfishness as the very place to get Sally to himself in, was evidently now the place of all others from which she could be helped. Quite close to Cambridge, within easy reach of young Luke, and in it, all-powerful even now in spite of his age, certainly all-powerful when it came to putting the fear of God into an undergraduate, or whatever he was, his ancient but still inflammable father. Naturally at ninety-three the old man consisted principally of embers; but these embers could still be fanned into a partial glow by the sight of a good horse or a beautiful woman, and Charles would only need to show Sally to him to have the old man on her side. Not able to hear, but able to see: what combination could, in the case of Sally, possibly be more admirable?
He drove on after lunch, his conscience clear; so clear that before leaving Thaxted he sent Laura a telegram telling her they were going to Crippenham, because he no longer wanted her to be made anxious,—for those only, thought Charles, are angry and wish to make others uncomfortable who are themselves in the wrong. He was no longer in the wrong; or, rather, he was no longer thinking with rapture of the wrong he would like to be in if Sally could be in it with him. Her speech made a gulf between them which his fastidious soul couldn’t cross. There had to be h’s before Charles could love with passion. Where there were none, passion with him collapsed and died. On this occasion it died at the inn at Thaxted towards the end of lunch; and he was grateful, really, however unpleasant at the moment its dying was. For what mightn’t have happened if she had gone on being silent and only saying yes and no, and smiling the divine, delicious smile that didn’t only play in her dimples but laughed and danced in her darling eyes? Charles was afraid that in that case he would have been done for. Talking, she had saved him; and though he still loved her, for no man could look at Sally and not love her, he loved her differently,—kindly, gently, with a growingly motherly concern for her welfare. After Thaxted there was no further trace in his looks and manner of that which had made Sally suspect him of a wish to be a husband.
But she was surprised when he asked her, as they drove along, whether she would mind if he took her to his father in the country for the night, instead of back to what he called noisy London. Laura was in London; why should she be taken somewhere else, away from her? And to his father too—to more picks, fresh ones; just as she was beginning to shake down nicely with the ones she knew. Surely the father of the picks would be the most frightening of all?
So she said, ‘Pardon?’ and looked so much alarmed that Charles, smiling, explained that his father was staying at that moment quite near Cambridge, and it would be convenient for the search for rooms she had told him Laura had promised to undertake with her next day.
‘He’s quite harmless,’ Charles assured her, for she continued to look alarmed—if where she was to be taken to next was near Cambridge, it must also be near Woodles, and suppose her father were to happen to see her?—‘and he’s all alone there till Laura goes back to him tomorrow. It will cheer him up to have us. He’s ninety-three.’
Ninety-three? ‘Oh, my,’ said Sally politely. ‘’E ain’t ’alf old. Poor old gentleman,’ she added with compassion, old people having been objects of special regard and attention in the Pinner circle.
But for the rest of the drive she was silent, for she was trying to thread her way among her indistinct and entangled thoughts, all of which seemed confusedly to press upon her notice that she oughtn’t to be where she was at all, that if she was anywhere it ought to be with her husband, and that with every hour that passed she was sinking deeper and deeper in wrong-doing.
‘Soon be in right up to the neck,’ she said to herself with resigned unhappiness; and sincerely wished it were that time tomorrow, and she safely joined up with Mr. Luke, and finished for good and all with these soft-spoken but headstrong picks.