Children of No Man's Land

by G. B. Stern

CHAPTER VI

I

October brought Samson Phillips to town for six weeks of special signalling instruction. Quite suddenly, from lethargic standing about in the vicinity of Deb, as he had done since her kiss-in-the-ring days, some unseen goad prodded him into courtship. The old-fashioned word exactly expressed the flavour of his proceedings. Perhaps he was afraid she would sink too deeply into the mire of Bohemianism, as exemplified by La llorraine and Cliffe Kennedy, in whose company he had found her on his previous leave. At all events, without quite knowing how it came about, Deb perceived the handsome sapper to be a prominent factor in her daily life. He rang her up on the ’phone regularly every morning, and was alternately facetious or reproachfully tender in claiming her day for the theatre, or a jaunt in the country, or dinner with his people. The play or the restaurant was always selected by him with due care for her innocence and not her preference. He loaded her with gifts that were a compromise between the generosity of an Eastern potentate in the wooing of a rapacious slave-girl, and such restraint as decorum demands before an engagement be a sealed fact: books of poetry, principally Spencer’s “Faerie Queene,” flowers, chocolates, crystallized fruits—gloves ... he was not quite sure about the gloves, and consulted his sister Beatrice, who said she thought a slight touch of unconventionality might be pleasing to Deb;—and war-trophies, which of course were “different.”

The Phillips men always conducted a courtship with their entire family rolling up behind them, wave after wave, and ready with a hearty benison instantly the signal for readiness should be given. A man with honest intentions need make no secret of them, Samson sturdily contended. Not only the Phillips’ mother and grandparents and sisters and three younger brothers with their wives, but also, by virtue of Beatrice’s marriage, the whole Redbury family assisted at the pretty spectacle of a dark-haired Jewish maiden wooed and won by a son of the same tribe. Deb told Antonia it was like being courted in the Arena at Olympia on a day when thrown open to the general public. Her set also were amused, though less ostentatiously, by the progress of the affair; it was of a species new to them, and Zoe and Cliffe, in particular, were clamorous for details; puzzled that Deb withheld these. For in spite of her exasperation with the Phillips en masse, she was loyal enough Jewess to protect her own clan from the levity of the Gentile. She confided in Antonia; Antonia knew when to control mere ribaldry; and to consider Samson as a human being, instead of an entertainment.

The whole wooing was not so incongruous to Deb’s temperament as the Studio Gang believed it. They made no account of her fundamental racial instincts responsive to just such a reaction from truancy, nor to the first twenty years of her life, spent in an atmosphere where Samson’s methods would have seemed wholly normal and pleasing. The incongruity only appeared when contrasted with more recent imprints on her development. These were responsible for her first careless acceptance of Samson’s appropriation; she forgot, until too deeply committed for withdrawal, that his actions and her acquiescence were here expressive of more ponderous significance than in the case of Cliffe Kennedy, for instance. She forgot, in fact, at the outset of the event, that the Samsons of this world do not lend themselves to wayside incident.

Apprehension faintly stirred in her only when she saw escape everywhere blocked, by the solemnly joyful expectation of Samson’s mother and grandparents who had so long and patiently waited for the eldest son to make his choice; by the already-one-of-the-family chaff of his younger brothers and their wives (Samson shorn of his strength by Delilah was a recurringly favourite joke with them); by her own folly in having yielded whenever he petitioned for her company; mainly, by Samson’s propensity to propose to her in the form of an arithmetical allegory in which Cliffe Kennedy hazily figured—“Supposing one Man were to have known one Girl for sixteen years, and she had known another Man for three and a half months, while the first Man was away; and the first Man came home again for six weeks, how long ought he to wait before taking the Girl to drink from the Singing Stream?”

The Singing Stream was not a public-house. It was Samson’s way of alluding to pure love. He was obsessed by the notion that if you take a girl to the water, she cannot help but be freshened and purified by mere sight of its freshness and purity.

Bohemia to him meant dancing and carnival and riot in hot studios; it meant glaring lights and stifling air and glittering evening dress. All the nineteenth-century rigmarole: the flash, and gleam of bare limbs; the dark hectic red of spilt wine; exotic music, and the stage, and doubtful witticisms and free love—free love as opposed to real love. It was his fixed idea that literally to remove Deb from the fetid atmosphere and take her to where a stream babbled and gurgled and splashed over the stones and between green banks, was then and there bound to react upon her system in the way that he so desired.

It did not take Deb long to perceive his motive for these day-long jaunts into the country; and mischief urged her to play up; to dabble her fingers among the slippery shallows—it was fortunately a warm October—and to sigh ... once or twice ... and murmur “I wish——” and be wistfully silent again ... and dabble a bit more ... was quite sufficient to make Samson preen himself, owning the stream, her thoughts, the crude blue sky, and the entire healing balm of Nature. He wished her to be convinced of her folly in lingering to gaze at Vanity Fair, when she might have been weaving willow garlands. It was inconceivable that she had done more than gaze with childish long-lashed eyes ... not knowing what she saw....