“Yes,” said the gardener, and thought how peaceful and how stupid life would be without her. “I shan’t dream of letting you go.” And even while he said it, he experienced the awful feeling of being powerless to make his words good. He realised for the first time how indispensable to a man’s sight are soft straight hair that has never committed itself to any real colour, and a small pointed face, and quick questioning eyes. But there was something indescribable, peculiar to the suffragette, that made it impossible to humble oneself before her. She was anything but a queen among women; no man had ever wished to be trodden under her feet, though they were small and pretty. Plain people often have pretty hands and feet, a mark of Nature’s tardy self-reproach.
To any other woman, the gardener might have said, “Please, my dear ...” with excellent results. He had a good voice with a tenor edge to it, and he could pose very nicely as a supplicator. But not to the suffragette.
“I have not brought you all this way just to let you return to your militant courses,” he said, with a sort of hollow firmness. “I owe a duty to Trinity Island, after all, now that I have imported you.”
The suffragette smiled and said she was tired and would go to bed—good-bye.
The gardener said Good-night.
The Caribbeania and the first ray of the sun reached the Island simultaneously next morning. When the gardener came on deck at half-past seven he found himself confronted by the town of Union, backed by its sudden hills. The Caribbeania, like a robber’s victim, ignominiously bound to the pier, was being relieved of its valuables. The air was thick with talk. On the pier the over-dressed representatives of British rule, in blue serge and gold braid, rubbed shoulders with the under-dressed results of their kind tyranny, in openwork shirts and three-quarters of a pair of trousers.
“Your wife went off early,” said the fourth officer to the gardener. “I asked her whether she were eloping all by herself, and she said you knew all about it.”
“Thanks,” said the gardener curtly.
You will hardly believe me when I tell you that his first conscious thought after this announcement was that he had no money to tip the steward with. The suffragette meant a good deal to him, and among the things she meant was temporary financial accommodation.
I hope that you have noticed by now that he was not a money-lover, but a steward was a steward, and this particular steward had been kind in improvising a crutch for Hilda. Any assistance from the suffragette was, of course, taken as temporary: independence was one of the gardener’s chronic poses. He meant to change it from a rather hollow dream into reality on arriving on the Island; he supposed that he would be able to turn his brains into money. He considered that no such brain could ever have landed at Union Town. Its price in coin, which had been rather at a discount in the stupid turmoil of London, would be instantly appreciable under this empty sky. His pose on the Island was to be The One Who Arrives, in capital letters.