Comedies and Errors

by Henry Harland

III

Will left his room somewhat early the next morning, and went down into the garden. The sun was shining briskly, the dew still sparkled on the grass, the air was heady with a hundred keen earth-odours. A mile away, beyond the wide green levels of Sumpter Meads, the sea glowed blue as the blue of larkspur, under the blue June sky. And everywhere, everywhere, innumerable birds piped and twittered, filling the world with a sense of gay activity, of whole-hearted, high-hearted life.

“What! up already?” a voice called softly, from behind him.

He turned, and met Johannah.

“Why not, since you are?” he responded.

She laughed, and gave him her hand, a warm, elastic hand, firm of grasp. In a garden-hat and a white frock, her eyes beaming, her cheeks faintly flushed, she seemed to him a sort of beautiful incarnation of the spirit of the summer morning, its freshness, and sweetness, and richness.

“Oh, we furriners,” she explained; “we’re all shocking early risers. In Italy we love the day when it is young, and deem it middle-aged by eight o’clock. But in England I had heard it was the fashion to lie late.”

“I woke, and couldn’t go to sleep again, so I tossed the fashion to the winds. Perhaps it was a sort of dim presentiment that I should surprise Aurora walking in the garden, that banished slumber,” he suggested, with a flourish.

“Flowery speeches are best met by flowery deeds,” said she. “Come with me to the rosery, and I will give you a red, red rose.”

And in the rosery, as she stood close to him, pinning the red, red rose in his coat, her smooth cheek and fragrant hair so near, so near, he felt his heart all at once begin to throb, and he had to control a sudden absurd longing to put his arms round her and kiss her. “Good heavens,” he said to himself, “I must be on my guard.”

“There,” she cried, bestowing upon her task a gentle pat, by way of finish, “that makes us quits.” And she raised her eyes to his, and held them for an instant with a smile that did anything but soothe the trouble in his heart, such a sly little teasing, cryptic smile. Could it possibly be, he wondered wildly, that she had divined his monstrous impulse, and was coquetting with it?

“Now let’s be serious,” she said, leading the way back to the lawn. “It’s like a hanging-garden, high up here, with the meads and the sea below, isn’t it? And àpropos of the sea, I would beg you to observe its colour. Is it blue? I would also ask you kindly to cast an eye on that line of cliffs, there to the eastward, as it goes winding in and out away to the vanishing point. Are the cliffs white?”

“Oh, yes, the cliffs are white,” agreed the unwary Will.

“How can you tell such dreadful fibs?” she caught him up. “The cliffs are prismatic. White, indeed! when they gleam with every transparent tint from rose to violet, as if the light that falls on them had passed through rubies and amethysts, and all sorts of precious stones. That is an optical effect due doubtless to reflection or refraction or something—no?”

“I should say it was almost certainly due to something,” he acquiesced.

“And now,” she continued, “will you obligingly turn your attention to the birds? Tweet-weet-willow-will-weet. I don’t know what it means, but they repeat it so often and so earnestly, I’m sure it must be true.”

“It’s relatively true,” said he. “It means that it’s a fine morning, and their digestion’s good, and their affairs are prospering—nothing more than that. They’re material-minded little beasts, you know.”

“All truth is relative,” said she, “and one’s relatively a material-minded little beast oneself. Is the greensward beyond there (relatively) spangled with buttercups and daisies? Is the park (relatively) leafy, and shadowy, and mysterious, and delightful? Is the may in bloom? Voyons donc! you’ll never be denying that the may’s in bloom. And is the air like an elixir? I vow, it goes to one’s head like some ethereal elixir. And yet you have the effrontery to tell me that you’re pining for the flesh-pots of Great College Street, Westminster, S.W.”

“Oh, did I tell you that? Ah, well, it must have been with intent to deceive, for nothing could be farther from the truth,” he owned.

“The relative truth? Then you’re not homesick?”

“Not consciously,” said he.

“Neither am I,” said she.

“Why should you be?” he asked.

“This is positively the first day since my arrival in England that I haven’t been, more or less,” she answered.

“Oh?” he wondered sympathetically.

“You can’t think how dépaysée I’ve felt. After having lived all one’s life in Prague, suddenly to find oneself translated to the mistress-ship of an English country house,” she submitted.

“In Prague? I thought you had lived in Rome and Paris, chiefly,” he exclaimed.

“Prague is a figure of rhetoric,” she reminded him. “I mean the capital of Bohemia. Wasn’t my father a sculptor? And wasn’t I born in a studio? And haven’t my playmates and companions always been of Florizel the loyal subjects? So whether you call it Rome or Paris or Florence or Naples, it was Prague, none the less.”

“At that rate, I live in Prague myself, and we’re compatriots,” said Will.

“That’s no doubt why I don’t feel homesick any more,” she responded, smiling. “Where two of the faithful are gathered together they can form a miniature Prague of their own. If I decide to stay in England, I shall send for a lot of my Prague friends to come and visit me, and you can send for an equal number of yours; and then we’ll turn this bright particular corner of the British Empire into a province of Bohemia, and the County may be horrified with reason. But meanwhile, let’s be Pragueians in practice as well as theory. Let’s go to the strawberry beds, and steal some strawberries,” was her conclusion.

She walked a little in front of him. Her garden-hat had come off, and she was swinging it at her side, by its ribbons. Will noticed the strong, lithe sway and rhythm of her body, as she moved. “What a woman she is,” he thought; “how one feels her sex.” And with that, he all at once became aware of a singular depression. “Surely,” a malevolent little voice within him argued, “woman that she is, and having passed all her life with the subjects of Florizel, surely, surely, she must have had... experiences. She must have loved—she must have been loved.” And (as if it was any of his business!) a kind of vague jealousy of her past, a kind of suspiciousness and irrelevant resentment, began to burn, a small dull spot of pain, somewhere in his breast.

She, apparently, was in the highest spirits. There was something expressive of joyousness in the mere way she tripped over the grass, swinging her garden-hat like a basket; and presently she fell to singing, merrily, in a light voice, that prettiest of old French songs, Les Trots Princesses, dancing forward to its measure:

“Derrièr’ chez mon père,

(Vole, vole, mon cour, vole!)

Derrièr’ chez mon père,

Ya un pommier doux,

Tout doux, et iou,

Ya un pommier doux.”

“Don’t you like that song?” she asked. “The tune of it is like the smell of faded rose-leaves, isn’t it?”

And suddenly she began to sing a different one, possibly an improvisation:

“ And so they set forth for the strawberry beds,

The strawberry beds, the strawberry beds,

And so they set forth for the strawberry beds,

On Christmas day in the morning.”

And when they had reached the strawberry beds, she knelt, and plucked a great red berry, and then leapt up again, and held it to her cousin’s lips, saying, “Bite—but spare my fingers.” And so, laughing, she fed it to him, while he, laughing too, consumed it. But when her pink finger-tips all but touched his lips, his heart had a convulsion, and it was only by main-force that he restrained his kisses. And he said to himself, “I must go back to town to-morrow. This will never do. It would be the devil to pay if I should let myself fall in love with her.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve felt terribly dépaysée,” she told him again, herself nibbling a berry. “I’ve felt like the traditional cat in the strange garret. And then, besides, there was my change of name. I can’t reconcile myself to being called Miss Silver. I can’t realise the character. It’s like an affectation, like making-believe. Directly I relax my vigilance, I forget, and sink back into Johannah Rothe. I’m always Johannah Rothe when I’m alone. Directly I’m alone, I push a big ouf, and send Miss Silver to Cracklimbo. Then somebody comes, and, with a weary sigh, I don my sheep’s clothing again. Of course, there’s nothing in a name, and yet there’s everything. There’s a furious amount of mental discomfort when the name doesn’t fit.”

“It’s a discomfort that will pass,” he said consolingly. “The change of name is a mere formality—a condition attached to coming into a property. In England, you know, it’s a rather frequent condition.”

“I’m aware of that,” she informed him. “But to me,” she went on, “it seems symbolic—symbolic of my whole situation, which is false, abnormal. Silver? Silver? It’s a name meant for a fair person, with light hair and a white skin. And here I am, as black as any Gipsy. And then! It’s a condition attached to coming into a property. Well, I come into a property to which I have no more moral right than I have to the coat on your back; and I’m obliged to do it under an alias, like a thief in the night.”

“Oh, my dear young lady,” he cried out, “you’ve the very best of rights, moral as well as legal. You come into a property that is left to you by will, and you’re the last representative of the family in whose hands it has been for I forget how many hundreds of years.”

“That,” said she, “is a question I shall not refuse to discuss with you upon some more fitting occasion. For the present I am tempted to perpetrate a simply villainous pun, but I forbear. Suffice it to say that I consider the property that I’ve come into as nothing more nor less than a present made me by my cousin, William Stretton. No—don’t interrupt!” she forbade him. “I happen to know my facts. I happen to know that if Will Stretton hadn’t, for reasons in the highest degree honourable to himself, quarrelled and broken with his father, and refused to receive a penny from him, I happen to know, I say, that Sir William Silver would have left Will Stretton everything he possessed in the world. Oh, it’s not in vain that I’ve pumped the man named Burrell. So, you see, I’m indebted to my Quixotic cousin for something in the neighbourhood, I’m told, of eight thousand a year. Rather a handsome little present, isn’t it? Furthermore, let me add in passing, I absolutely forbid my cousin to call me his dear young lady, as if he were seven hundred years my senior and only a casual acquaintance. A really nice cousin would take the liberty of calling me by my Christian name.”

“I’ll take the liberty of calling you by some exceedingly unChristian name,” he menaced, “if you don’t leave off talking that impossible rot about my making you a present.”

“I wasn’t talking impossible rot about your making me a present,” she contradicted. “I was merely telling you how dépaysée I’d felt. The rest was parenthetic. So now, then, keep your promise, call me Johannah.”

“Johannah,” he called, submissively.

“Will,” said she. “And when you feel, Will, that on the whole, Will, you’ve had strawberries enough, Will, quite to destroy your appetite, perhaps it would be as well if we should go in to breakfast, Willie.”