In the Roaring Fifties

by Edward Dyson

But Lucy Woodrow was not to be denied; she had been forced into the current of his life, and he would make no effective fight against her. After a few days her pale face, animated with an expression of pathetic appeal, obtruded itself upon his meditations. He surprised himself mapping out a pleasant and beautiful future for her, or dwelling upon her misfortunes with a tender regret, and at such times took refuge from his thoughts in sudden action, shaking this folly off with fierce impatience, heaping abusive epithets upon his own head, arraigning himself as a drivelling sentimentalist; and what shame could equal that of a puling sentimentality?

After all, this girl stood for everything he had learned to despise and hate. To her the conventions behind which society shields itself, its shams and its bunkum, were sacred. He was convinced that had she known the whole truth as Chisley knew it, she must have ranged herself with his enemies. He admitted that he had been guilty of an impertinent interference in her private affairs when he plucked her from the sea, but did it follow that he need worry himself further about the young woman? Certainly not! That point being settled, he could return to his dreams of the Promised Land, the land of liberty, only to find the fair face obscuring his fine visions, or to be interrupted by the girl herself, who sometimes took refuge near him from the importunities of the male blonde, but more often sought him out to satisfy the new interest his morbid and peculiar character and, it must be admitted, his cold, good looks had created in her breast.

At her approach Done felt the stir of a novel exultation in his traitorous flesh. To be sure, he had woven romances for himself, but his heroines were always of a type totally different to Lucy Woodrow. They were strong, dark-eyed, imperious creatures, who espoused all his beliefs and echoed his defiance of the world. What sense of humour had as yet found place in his nature was exercised to the full at the expense of the lackadaisical lover in life and in fiction, and now he felt there was something absurdly pensive in this phenomenon of his own. He satisfied himself that he was not in love with Lucy, but here were the marked characteristics of the fond and fatuous hero—the obtruding face of the beloved, idealized and transfused with a sickly pathos; the premonitory tremblings; the recurrence of thoughts of the fair. It was all in defiance of his philosophy—an insult to his manhood. Like many very young men, Done was extremely jealous of the honour of his manhood. It is the pride of a new possession.

Certainly Lucy Woodrow was quite honest to her nature in her attitude towards the young stranger. She did not dissect her emotions: she did not even question them. In becoming her hero Done had levelled all the conventional barriers, and her friendship and concern were sincere. She had never recurred to the incident of the rescue, feeling that the subject was painful to him, and glad to dwell no further upon an act of her own that of late had become quite inexplicable to her. Lucy no longer turned her eyes to the wake of the Francis Cadman: she no longer yearned backward to the land where she had left only a grave. Her mind was employed with a most serious duty: she had adopted a mission, and that mission was the regeneration of James Done. The regeneration was not to be so much religious as moral. The poor boy's life was disordered; he had suffered some great wrong; his naturally beautiful, brave, generous disposition was soured; he had lost faith in God and in woman, and it remained for her to restore his belief, to teach him that his fellow-creatures were in the main animated with the most excellent motives, and to drive away all those strange, wild opinions of his, and generally brighten and sweeten his life and turn him out a new man. She could not have explained how she was going to accomplish all this, but every maiden is at heart a missionary of some sort, and Lucy had a vague idea that the influence of a good woman was always effective in such cases. She never imagined that the youth would test her pretty, heartfelt opinions and her glowing faith in the rightness of things in the cold, sceptical light of his logic.

'Women don't bother themselves much to know if things are true,' he said.
'They're content with thinking they ought to be true.'

'Well,' she answered, 'why not try to be true to the things that ought to be true?'

'If I wanted to, the world wouldn't let me.'

'You cannot believe that. The really good man is always obeyed and reverenced.'

'And has always a fat billet. Yes; that kind of goodness is an excellent thing as a speculation.'

She thought him wilfully paradoxical, and it came about, when their acquaintanceship was about three weeks old, that while Jim Done, the small and early philosopher, held Lucy in fine disdain as a born fool, his vital humanity discovered strange allurements in her, and her proximity fired a craving in his blood that sometimes tempted him to crush her in his arms and bruise her lips with kisses. He grew less brusque with her, and showed on occasions a sort of diffident gentleness, and then Lucy was satisfied that her work was progressing.