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He looked at her; and he seemed to be struggling silently with some emotion too deep for words.
“It’s so silly to sit here like mutes,” Nina went on hurriedly – a little frightened, now she had begun, but more than a little determined not to be frightened. “If we were at a dance we shouldn’t know any more of each other than we do now – and you’d have to talk then. Why shouldn’t we now?”
Then the stranger spoke, and at the first sentence Nina understood exactly what reason had decided the stranger that they should not talk. Yet now they did. If this were a work of fiction I shouldn’t dare to pretend that the train took more than two hours to get to Mill Vale. But in a plain record of fact one must speak the truth. The train took exactly two hours and fifty minutes to cover the eleven miles between London and Mill Vale. After that first question and reply Nina and the stranger talked the whole way.
He walked with her to the door of her lodging, and she offered him her hand without that moment of hesitation which would have been natural to any heroine, because she had debated the question of that handshake all the way from the station, and made up her mind just as they reached the church, a stone’s throw from her home. When the door closed on her he went slowly back to the churchyard to lay his violets on a grave. Nina saw them there next day when she came out of church. She saw him too, and gave him a bow and a very small smile, and turned away quickly. The bow meant: “You see I’m not going to speak to you. You mustn’t think I want to be always talking to you.” The smile meant: “But you mustn’t think I’m cross. I’m not – only – ”
In the hot, stuffy “life-room” at the Slade next day Molly teased with ill-judged bread-crumbs an arm hopelessly ill drawn, and chattered softly to Nina, who in the Saturday solitude had drawn her easel behind her friend’s “donkey.” “It’s all very well here when you first come in, but when once you are warm, oh dear, how warm you are! Why do models want such boiling rooms? Why can’t they be soaked in alum or myrrh or something to harden their silly skins so that they won’t mind a breath of decent air? And I believe the model’s deformed – she certainly is from where I am. Oh, look at my arm! I ask you a little – look at the beastly thing. Foreshortened like this it looks like a fillet of veal with a pound of sausages tied on to it for a hand. Oh, my own and only Nina – save the sinking ship!”
“It ought to go more like that,” Nina said with indicative brush, “and don’t keep on rubbing out so fiercely. You’ll get paralysed with bread – it’s a disease, you know. I heard Tonks telling you so only the other day – ”
“It’s rather a good phrase: I wonder where he got it? He was rather nice that day,” said Molly. “Oh, this arm! It’s no good – I believe the model’s moved – I tell you I must.” More bread. Nina re-absorbed in her canvas. “Yours is coming well. What’s the matter with you to-day? You’re very mousy. Has the ‘stranger who might’ been scowling more than usual? Or have you got a headache? I’m sure this atmosphere’s enough to make you. Did you see him this morning? Have you fainted at his feet yet? Has he relented in the matter of umbrellas? I’m sure he can’t have passed the whole week without some act of grumpiness.”
Nina leaned back and looked through half-shut eyes at the model’s beautiful form and stupid face.
“I went down in the same carriage with him on Thursday,” she said slowly.
“You did? Did he rush into the third class, where angels like himself ought to fear to tread?”
“There was a fog. Thirds all full, and seconds too. The guard bundled us both in, and the train started – and it took three or four hours to get down.”
“Any one else in the carriage?”
“Not so much as a mouse.”
“What did you do?”
“Do? What could I do? We sat in opposite corners as far as we could get from each other, exchanging occasional glances of mutual detestation for about an hour and a half. He knocked me down and walked on me once, and took his hat off very politely and beg-pardoningly, but he never said a word. He didn’t even say he thought I was the door-mat. And then some cabbages of his fell off the seat.”
“Sure they weren’t thistles?”
“Vegetables of some sort. And I said: ‘You’ve dropped your – whatever they were.’ And he just bowed again in a thank-you-very-much-but-I’m-sure-I-don’t-know-what-business-it-is-of-yours sort of way. Do leave that bread alone.”
Molly, lost in the interest of the recital, was crumbling the bread as though the floor of the life-room were the natural haunt of doves and sparrows.
“Well?” she said.
“Well?” said Nina.
“Why ever didn’t you ask him to put the window up, or down, or something? I would have – just to hear if he has a voice.”
“It wouldn’t have been any good. He’d just have bowed again, and I’d had enough bows to last a long time. No: I just said straight out that we were a couple of idiots to sit there gaping at each other with our tongues out, and why on earth shouldn’t we talk?”
“You never did!”
“Or words to that effect, anyhow. And then he said – ”
A long pause.
“What?”
“He told me why he never spoke to strangers.”
“What a slap in the face! You poor – ”
“Oh, he didn’t say it like that, you silly idiot. And it was quite a good reason.”
“What was it?”
No answer.
“Tell me exactly what he said.”
“He said, ‘I – I – I – ’ At any rate, I’m satisfied, and I rather wish we hadn’t called him pigs and beasts, and things like that.”
“Well?”
“That’s all.”
“Aren’t you going to tell me the reason? Oh, very well – you leave it to my guessing? Of course it’s quite evident he’s hopelessly in love with you, and never ventured to speak for fear of betraying his passion. But, encouraged by your advances – ”
“Molly, go on with that arm, and don’t be a vulgar little donkey.”
Molly obeyed. Presently: “Cross-patch,” she said.
“I’m not,” said Nina, “but I want to work, and I like you best when you’re not vulgar.”
“You’re very rude.”
“No: only candid.”
Molly’s wounded pride, besieged by her curiosity, held out for five minutes. Then: “Did you talk to him much?”
“Heaps.”
“All the way down?”
No answer.
“Is he nice?”
Silence.
“Is he clever?”
“I want to work.”
“Well, what I want to know is, and then I’ll let you alone – what did you talk about? Tell me that, and I won’t ask another question.”
“We talked,” said Nina deliberately, taking a clean brush, “we talked about your brother Cecil. No, I shan’t tell you what we said, or why we talked about him, or anything. You’ve had your one question, now shut up.”
“Nina,” said Molly calmly, “if I didn’t like you so much I should hate you.”
“That certainty about the other has always been the foundation of our mutual regard,” said Nina calmly.
Then they laughed, and began to work in earnest.
The next time Molly mentioned the “stranger who might have been observed” Nina laughed, and said: “The subject is forbidden; it makes you vulgar.”
“And you disagreeable.”
“Then it’s best to avoid it. Best for you and best for me.”
“But do you ever see him now?”
“On occasion. He still travels by the 9.1, and I still have the use of my eyes.”
“Does he ever talk to you like he did that Thursday?”
“No – never. And I’m not going to talk about him to you, so it’s no good. Your turn to choose a subject. You won’t? Then it becomes my turn. What a long winter this is! We seem to have taken years to get from November to February!”
The time went more quickly between February and May. It was when the country was wearing its full dress of green and the hawthorn pearls were opening into baby-roses in the hedgerows that it was Nina’s fortune to be put, by the zealous indiscretion of a mistaken porter, into an express train for Beechwood – the wrong station – the wrong line.
The “stranger who might have been observed,” on this occasion was not observed, but observer. He saw and recognised the porter’s error, hesitated a moment, and then leaped into a carriage just behind hers. So that when, after a swift journey made eventful by agonised recognition of the fleeting faces of various stations where she might have changed and caught her own train, Nina reached Beechwood, the stranger’s hand was ready to open the door for her.
“There’s no train for ages,” he said in tones deliberate, almost hesitating. “Shall we walk home? It’s only six miles.”
“But you – aren’t you going somewhere here?”
“No – I – I – I saw the porter put you in – and I thought – at least – anyway you will walk, won’t you?”
They walked. When they reached Beechwood Common, he said: “Won’t you take my arm?” And she took it. Her hands were ungloved; the other hand was full of silver may and bluebells. The sun shot level shafts of gold between the birch trees across the furze and heather.
“How beautiful it is!” she said.
“We’ve known each other three months,” said he.
“But I’ve seen you every day, and we’ve talked for hours and hours in those everlasting trains,” she said, as if in excuse.
“I’ve seen you every day for longer than that; the first time was on the 3rd of October.”
“Fancy remembering that!”
“I have a good memory.”
A silence.
Nina broke it, to say again: “How pretty!” She knew she had said it before, or something like it, but she could think of nothing else – and she wanted to say something.
He put his hand over hers as it lay on his arm. She looked up at him quickly.
“Well?” he said, stopping to look down into her eyes and tightening his clasp on her hand. “Are you sorry you came to Beechwood?”
“No – ”
“Then be glad. My dear, I wish you could ever be as glad as I am.”
Then they walked on, still with his hand on hers.
Nina and Molly sat on a locker swinging their feet and eating their lunch in the Slade corridor next day. Nina was humming softly under her breath.
“What are you so happy for all of a sudden?” Molly asked. “Your sketch-club things are the worst I’ve ever seen, and the Professor was down on you like a hundred of bricks this morning.”
“I’m not happy,” said Nina, turning away what seemed to Molly a new face.
“What is it, then?”
“Nothing. Oh yes – by the way, I’m going to be married.”
“Not really?”
“Check this unflattering display of incredulity – I am.”
“Really and truly? And you never told me a thing. I hate slyness and secretiveness. Nina, who is it? Do I know him?”
Nina named a name.
“Never even heard of him. But where did you meet him? It really is rather deceitful of you.”
“I always meant to tell you, only there was nothing to tell till yesterday except – ”
“Except everything,” said Molly. “Well, tell me now.”
Nina jumped up and shook the bath-bun crumbs off her green muslin pinafore.
“Promise not to be horrid, and I will.”
“I won’t – I promise I won’t.”
“Then it’s – it’s him – the ‘stranger who might’ – you know. And I really should have told you, though there wasn’t anything to tell, only – don’t laugh.”
“I’m not. Can’t you see I’m not? Only what?”
“Well, when I spoke to him that day in the train, I said, ‘Why shouldn’t we talk?’ And he said, ‘I – I – I – be – be – be – because I stammer so.’ And he did. You never heard anything like it. It was awful. He took hours to get out those few words, and I didn’t know where to look. And I felt such a brute because of the things we’d said about him, that I had no sense left; and I told him straight out how I’d wondered he never even said he wondered how late the train was when we were waiting for the 9.1, and I was glad it was stammering and not disagreeableness. And then I said I wasn’t glad he stammered, but so sorry; and he was awfully nice about it, and I told him about that man who cured your brother Cecil of stammering, and he went to him at once: and he’s almost all right now.”
“Good gracious!” said Molly. “Are you sure – but why didn’t he get cured long ago?”
“He had a mother: she stammered frightfully – after the shock of his father’s death, or something, and he got into the way of it from her. And – anyway he didn’t. I think it was so as not to hurt his mother’s feelings, or something. I don’t quite understand. And he said it didn’t seem to matter when she was dead. And he’s an artist. He sells his pictures too, and he teaches. He has a studio in Chelsea.”
“It all sounds a little thin; but if you’re pleased, I’m sure I am.”
“I am,” said Nina.
“But what did he say when he asked you?”
“He didn’t ask me,” said Nina.
“But surely he said he’d loved you since the first moment he saw you?”
Nina had to admit it.
“Then you see I wasn’t such a vulgar little donkey after all.”
“Yes, you were. You hadn’t any business even to think such things, much less say them. Why, even I didn’t dare to think it for – oh – for ever so long. But I’ll forgive it – and if it’s good it shall be a pretty little bridesmaid, it shall.”
“When is it to be?” asked Molly, still adrift in a sea of wonder.
“Oh, quite soon, he says. He says we’re only wasting time by waiting. You see we’re both alone.”
But Molly, looking wistfully at her friend’s transfigured face, perceived sadly that it was she who was alone, not they.
And the thought of the red-haired Pierrot with whom she had danced nine times at the Students’ Fancy Dress dance, an indiscretion hitherto her dearest memory, now offered no solid consolation.
Nina went away, singing softly under her breath. Molly sighed and followed slowly.
IV
RACK AND THUMBSCREW
Her eyelids were red and swollen, her brown hair, flattened out of its pretty curves, clung closely to her head. Ink stained her hands, and there was even a bluish smear of it on her wrist. A tray with tea-things stood among the litter of manuscript on her table. The tea-pot had only cold tea-leaves in it; the bread and butter was untouched.
She put down the pen, and went to the window. The rose-tint of the sunset was reflected on the bank of mist and smoke beyond the river. Above, where the sky was pale and clear, a star or two twinkled contentedly.
She stamped her foot.
Already the beautiful garments of the evening mist, with veiled lights in the folds of it, was embroidered sparsely with the early litten lamps of impatient workers, and as she gazed, the embroidery was enriched by more and more yellow and white and orange – the string of jewels along the embankment, the face of the church clock.
She turned from the window to the room, and lighted her own lamp, for the room was now deeply dusk. It was a large, low, pleasant room. It had always seemed pleasant to her through the five years in which she had worked, and played, and laughed, and cried there. Now she wondered why she had not always hated it.
The stairs creaked. The knocker spoke. She caught her head in both hands.
“My God!” she said, “this is too much!”
Yet she went to the door.
“Oh – it’s only you,” she said, and, with no other greeting, walked back into the room, and sat down at the table.
The newcomer was left to close the outer door, and to follow at her own pleasure. The newcomer was another girl, younger, prettier, smarter. She turned her head sidewise, like a little bird, and looked at her friend with very bright eyes. Then she looked round the room.
“My dear Jane,” she said, “whatever have you been doing to yourself?”
“Nothing,” said her dear Jane very sulkily.
“Oh, if genius burns – your stairs are devilish – but if you’d rather I went away – ”
“No, don’t go, Milly. I’m perfectly mad.” She jumped up and waved her outstretched arms over the mass of papers on the table. “Look at all this – three days’ work – rot – abject rot! I wish I was dead. I was wondering just now whether it would hurt much if one leaned too far out of the window – and – No, I didn’t do it – as you see.”
“What’s the matter?” asked the other prosaically.
“Nothing. That’s just it. I’m perfectly well – at least I was – only now I’m all trembly with drink.” She pointed to the tea-cups. “It’s the chance of my life, and I can’t take it. I can’t work: my brain’s like batter. And everything depends on my idiot brain – it has done for these five years. That’s what’s so awful. It all depends on me – and I’m going all to pieces.”
“I told you so!” rejoined the other. “You would stay in town all the summer and autumn, slaving away. I knew you’d break down, and now you’ve done it.”
“I’ve slaved for five years, and I’ve never broken down before.”
“Well, you have now. Go away at once. Take a holiday. You’ll work like Shakespeare and Michelangelo after it.”
“But I can’t– that’s just it. It’s those stories for the Monthly Multitude; I’m doing a series. I’m behind now: and if I don’t get it done this week, they’ll stop the series. It’s what I’ve been working for all these years. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had, and it’s come now, when I can’t do it. Your father’s a doctor: isn’t there any medicine you can take to make your head more like a head and less like a suet pudding?”
“Look here,” said Milly, “I really came in to ask you to come away with us at Whitsuntide; but you ought to go away now. Just go to our cottage at Lymchurch. There’s a dear old girl in the village – Mrs Beale – she’ll look after you. It’s a glorious place for work. Father did reams down there. You’ll do your stuff there right enough. This is only Monday. Go to-morrow.”
“Did he? I will. Oh yes, I will. I’ll go to-night, if there’s a train.”
“No, you don’t, my dear lunatic. You are now going to wash your face and do your hair, and take me out to dinner – a real eighteenpenny dinner at Roches. I’ll stand treat.”
It was after dinner, as the two girls waited for Milly’s omnibus, that the word of the evening was spoken.
“I do hope you’ll have a good quiet time,” Milly said; “and it really is a good place for work. Poor Edgar did a lot of work there last year. There’s a cabinet with a secret drawer that he said inspired him with mysterious tales, and – There’s my ’bus.”
“Why do you say poor Edgar?” Jane asked, smiling lightly.
“Oh, hadn’t you heard? Awfully sad thing. He sailed from New York a fortnight ago. No news of the ship. His mother’s in mourning. I saw her yesterday. Quite broken down. Good-bye. Do take care of yourself, and get well and jolly.”
Jane stood long staring after the swaying bulk of the omnibus, then she drew a deep breath and went home.
Edgar was dead. What a brute Milly was! But, of course, Edgar was nothing to Milly – nothing but a pleasant friend. How slowly people walked in the streets! Jane walked quickly – so quickly that more than one jostled foot-passenger stopped to stare after her.
She had known that he was coming home – and when. She had not owned to herself that the constant intrusion of that thought, “He is here – in London,” the wonder as to when and how she should see him again, had counted for very much in these last days of fierce effort and resented defeat.
She got back to her rooms. She remembers letting herself in with her key. She remembers that some time during the night she destroyed all those futile beginnings of stories. Also, that she found herself saying over and over again, and very loud: “There are the boys – you know there are the boys.” Because, when you have two little brothers to keep, you must not allow yourself to forget it.
But for the rest she remembers little distinctly. Only she is sure that she did not cry, and that she did not sleep.
In the morning she found her rooms very tidy and her box packed. She had put in the boys’ portraits, because one must always remember the boys.
She got a cab and she caught a train, and she reached the seaside cottage. Its little windows blinked firelit welcome to her, as she blundered almost blindly out of the station fly and up the narrow path edged with sea-shells.
Milly had telegraphed. Mrs Beale was there, tremulous, kindly, effective; with armchairs wheeled to the April fire – cups of tea, timid, gentle solicitude.
“My word, Miss, but you do look done up,” said she. “The kettle’s just on the boil, and I’ll wet you a cup o’ tea this instant minute, and I’ve a perfect picture of a chick a-roastin’ ready for your bit o’ dinner.”
Jane leaned back in the cushioned chair and looked round the quiet, pleasant little room. For the moment it seemed good to have a new place to be unhappy in.
But afterwards, when Mrs Beale had gone and she was alone in the house, there was time to think – all the time there had ever been since the world began – all the time that there would ever be till the world ended. Of that night, too, Jane cannot remember everything; but she knows that she did not sleep, and that her eyes were dry: very dry and burning, as though they had been licked into place between their lids by a tongue of flame. It was a long night: a spacious night, with room in it for more memories of Edgar than she had known herself mistress of.
Edgar, truculent schoolboy; Edgar at Oxford, superior to the point of the intolerable; Edgar journalist, novelist, war correspondent – always friend; Edgar going to America to lecture, and make the fortune that – he said – would make all things possible. He had said that on the last evening, when a lot of them – boys and girls, journalists, musicians, art students – had gone to see him off at Euston. He had said it at the instant of farewell, and had looked a question. Had she said “Yes” – or only thought it? She had often wondered that, even when her brain was clear.
Then – she pushed away the next thought with both hands, and drove herself back to the day when the schoolboy next door whom she had admired and hated, saved her pet kitten from the butcher’s dog – an heroic episode with blood in it and tears. Edgar’s voice, the touch of his hand, the swing of his waltz-step – the way his eyes smiled before his mouth did. How bright his eyes were – and his hands were very strong. He was strong every way: he would fight for his life – even with the sea. Great, smooth, dark waves seemed rushing upon her in the quiet room; she could hear the sound of them on the beach. Why had she come near the sea? It was the same sea that – She pushed the waves away with both hands. The church clock struck two.
“You mustn’t go mad, you know,” she told herself very gently and reasonably, “because of the boys.”
Her hands had got clenched somehow, her whole body was rigid. She relaxed the tense muscles deliberately, made up the fire, swept up the hearth.
The new flame her touch inspired flickered a red reflection on the face of the cabinet – the cabinet with the secret drawer that had “inspired Edgar with mysterious tales.”
Jane went to it, and patted it, and stroked it, and coaxed it to tell her its secret. But it would not.
“If it would only inspire me,” she said, “if I could only get an idea for the story, I could do it now – this minute. Lots of people work best at night. My brain’s really quite clear again now, or else I shouldn’t be able to remember all these silly little things. No, no,” she cried to a memory of a young man kissing a glove, a little creeping memory that came to sting. She trampled on it.
Next day Jane walked four miles to see a doctor and get a sleeping draught.
“You see,” she explained very earnestly, “I have some work to finish, and if I don’t sleep I can’t. And I must do it. I can’t tell you how important it is.”
The doctor gave her something in a bottle when he had asked a few questions, and she went back to the cottage to go on bearing what was left of the interminable, intolerable day.
That was the day when she set out the fair white writing paper, and the rosy blotting-paper, and the black ink and the black fountain pen, and sat and looked at them for hours and hours. She prayed for help – but no help came.
“I’m probably praying to the wrong people,” she said, when through the dusk the square of paper showed vague as a tombstone in twilit grass – “the wrong people – No, there are no tombstones in the sea – the wrong people. If St Anthony helps you to find things, and the other saints help you to be good, perhaps the dead people who used to write themselves are the ones to help one to write!”