SATURDAY TO MONDAY.
SO at length I yielded to repeated invitations, and made up my mind to visit the Vernons again. And it was in June. I had not been for nearly two years. The last visit was in the month of August: I remembered it too well—that year, that month, that day!
Under the most favourable circumstances, it needs enterprise and energy for a Londoner to pay a week-end visit to a friend’s house in the country. No matter how intimate the friend—and the Vernons, though charming and full of good nature, were not really very intimate friends of mine—there is always an element of risk in the affair; I will go further and say an element of preliminary unpleasantness. It means the disarrangement of regular habits; it means packing one’s bag and lugging it into a hansom; it means a train-journey; it often means a drive at the other end; it means sleeping in a strange bed and finding a suitable hook for one’s razor strop the next morning; it means accommodating oneself to a new social atmosphere, and the expenditure of much formal politeness. And suppose some hitch occurs—some trifling contretemps to ruffle the smoothness of the hours—where are you then? You are bound to sit tight and smile till Monday, and at parting to enlarge on your sorrow that the visit is over, all the while feeling intensely relieved; and you have got nothing in exchange for your discomfort and inconvenience save the satisfaction of duty done—a poor return, I venture to add. You know you have wasted a week-end, an irrecoverable week-end of eternity.
However, I boarded the train at St. Pancras in a fairly cheerful mood, and I tried to look on the bright side of life. The afternoon was certainly beautiful, and the train not too crowded, and I derived some pleasure, too, from the contemplation of a new pair of American boots which I had recently purchased. I remembered that Mrs. Vernon used to accuse me of a slight foppishness in the matter of boots, at the same time wishing audibly (in his hearing) that Jack would give a little more attention to the lower portions of his toilet; Jack was a sportsman, and her husband. And I thought of their roomy and comfortable house on the side of the long slope to Bedbury, and of their orchard and the hammocks under the trees in the orchard, and of tea and cakes being brought out to those hammocks, and of the sunsets over the Delectable Mountains (we always called them the Delectable Mountains because they are the identical hills which Bunyan had in mind when he wrote “The Pilgrim’s Progress”), and of Jack’s easy drawl and Mrs. Vernon’s chatter, and the barking of the dogs, and the stamping of the horses in the stable. And I actually thought: This will be a pleasant change after London.
“I do hope they won’t be awkward and self-conscious,” I said to myself. “And I also must try not to be.”
You see I was thinking of that last visit and what occurred during it. I was engaged to be married then, to a girl named Lucy Wren. Just as I had arrived at the Vernons’ house in their dog-cart the highly rural postman came up in his cart, and after delivering some letters produced still another letter and asked if anyone of the name of Bostock was staying there. I took the letter: the address was in Lucy’s handwriting (I had seen her only on the previous night, and of course she knew of my visit). I read the letter, standing there in the garden near the front door, and having read it I laughed loudly and handed it to Mrs. Vernon, saying: “What do you think of that for a letter?” In the letter Lucy said that she had decided to jilt me (she didn’t use those words—oh no!), and that on the following day she was going to be married to another man. Yes, that was a cheerful visit I paid to the Vernons, that August! At first I didn’t know what I was doing. They soothed me, calmed me. They did their best. It wasn’t their fault after all. They suggested I should run back to town and see Lucy; Jack offered to go with me. (Jack!) I declined. I declined to do anything. I ate hearty meals. I insisted on our usual excursions. I talked a lot. I forced them to pretend that nothing had happened. And on Monday morning I went off with a cold smile. But it was awful. It stood between me and the Vernons for a long time, a terrible memory. And when next Mrs. Vernon encountered me, in London, there were tears in her eyes and she was speechless.
Now you will understand better why I said to myself, with much sincerity: “I do hope they won’t be awkward and self-conscious. And I also must try not to be.”
As the train approached Bedbury I had qualms. I had qualms about the advisability of this visit to the Vernons. How could it possibly succeed, with that memory stalking like a ghost in the garden near the front door of their delightful and hospitable house? How could——? Then we rumbled over the familiar bridge, and I saw the familiar station yard, and the familiar dog-cart, and the familiar Dalmatian dog, and the familiar white mare that was rather young and skittish when Lucy jilted me. “That mare must be rising seven now,” I thought, “and settled down in life.”