Sorrell and Son (Alfred A. Knopf, printing 9)/Chapter 34
FROM that moment Molly Pentreath disappeared. She had let the flat in the Taunton Street house, and inquiries at her club produced no profitable information. Miss Pentreath had not been at her club for a week, nor had she notified the club-porter of any change in her London address. At Chelsea Cherry Roland had no news for Kit. She could only point out to him that Molly had a temperament, and that people who write books have a way of disappearing while they were "with book." But then, of course, there was the bungalow at Marley.
Kit had not forgotten the bungalow on the river, Molly's "Self's Paradise" as she called it. It stood on a small island, away from the shouts of little common children, and on a part of the river where humanity drifted but seldom. "No boatloads of cheap voices, no breezy young men, and jumperish young women. The skylarks over the water meadows,—and in the evening a green twilight."
It was a Saturday in June when Kit took a train to Marley where a blue grey and overcast sky overhung the green valley and the breathless calm of the river. No sunlight in June, but nature went her way, just as Kit went his. Molly's island had a name of its own, and having no notion of its whereabouts, he asked a porter at the station. The Pollards lay a mile or more up the river. You took the lane past Marley Church, and it brought you out on the towing-path within a hundred yards of the island. Or Kit could hire a boat at one of the Marley boat-houses and scull up stream. There was no lock till you reached Hambdon.
Christopher's mood was for walking. He left Marley red and old among its elms and poplars and went westwards into a world of willows and of fields green and secret under a heavy sky. The day had a melancholy, sweet stillness, and on the hills flanking the valley great beech woods gloomed. Silent, empty country dreaming dreams, and English in its sadness under that moody sky. Kit did not hurry, for there was no haste in the landscape, nor in the glassy glide of the river, nor in the droop of the willows. He was conscious of a curious reluctance, of a slow desire moving in a world of foreboding. Blind love wandering between the hedgerows, with a little flame in its heart, and a vague foretaste of the eternal bitterness under its tongue.
And why? Ah, why? This one particular woman, this bitter sweet creature, whose own mouth had warned him that she could bring him no happiness! What a fool's passion! And yet he was conscious of the inevitableness of it, and that it had the same quality as this English sky. Tantalizing, grey, elusive, tricking the eyes with a promise of pale sunlight.
But he went on. He came out upon the towing-path and upon a deserted stretch of gleaming water, with the interminable willows feathering the banks, and the green fields heavy and sweet. Not a boat, not a voice; rain in the west, stillness. He felt a kind of shivering excitement, a hard anguish. He turned to the right and walked on towards a whiteness upon an outjutting boss of green, the bungalow and the island. She might be there, and she might not. An uncertain anger at the very uncertainty of it stirred in him.
The bungalow enlarged itself. The island lay towards the south bank, and was separated from it by a backwater overhung and clogged with trees. The island stood feathered with willows. It had a rough lawn and some roses, and he saw the droop of a hammock between two old apple trees. A deep loggia with its posts painted white ran along the front of the bungalow, and Kit's eyes told him that the loggia was not empty. He saw two figures in deck chairs, the figures of a girl and a man. A green punt, and a white dinghy were moored at the wooden landing stage.
Sorrell's son stood quite still upon the towing-path, directly opposite the landing stage, and looked across the river. He did not call or wave; he waited, and with a kind of inexorable and angry obstinacy. All that was sensitive and soft in him became ice.
The man in the chair sat up. Kit imagined an ironical wave of the hand.
He saw Molly coming down to the landing stage. She was in green picked out with cerise. She unfastened the dinghy, and sculled across, turning the boat under the northern bank so that she was facing Christopher.
"Do you want to come across!"
"I do."
"Get in."
Her face seemed to him absolutely expressionless, and during the crossing to the island they neither looked at each other nor exchanged a word. Mr. Wolffe was waiting on the landing stage. With intimate and helpful serenity he caught hold of the painter and fastened it to the iron ring.
"You are just about in time. It is going to rain."
Kit landed and watched Molly shipping her sculls.
"Usual June weather," he said.
She emerged lightly, and going straight to the loggia, reseated herself in the same chair. Oscar Wolffe was equally practical. Kit, seeing a third chair leaning folded against the wall, opened it, placed it on Molly's unoccupied flank and sat down.
No one said anything. They sat and stared at the water and the willows, until the one flexible temperament bent under the tension of the silence, and producing a cigar case, opened it.
"Try one."
He leaned across Molly with arm extended.
"Quite mild."
"Thanks."
Kit accepted a cigar neither as a peace offering nor as a challenge. He realized Wolffe's position, and understood it in finding himself one of the three. The fellow had sense, and the easy balance of the worldling, and Kit was aware of the need for balance. The two of them poised with that incorrigible slip of wildness between them! And Christopher was thinking—"Did she come down here to write—or because? And how long has that fellow been here? And did she ask him to come? Anyhow—I'm staying."
He began to talk, and not to the reclining and enigmatic woman in the middle chair, but across her at the sallow and sagacious face, and the little brown chocolate coloured eyes of Oscar Wolffe. A sudden sense of vower had come to him, of staying power, callous and untiring. He felt himself like a block of conscious stone bedded down in the green cushion of the landscape. Unshiftable.
He talked the most platitudinous stuff.
"Quite out of the world here. Where have all the motor boats gone to?"
"Good weather forecast in the paper. People go by opposites. That's the significance of a daily press."
"Low pressure system approaching over the Atlantic."
"Even the office boy is given a chance to talk about isobars."
Kit smiled at Wolffe's formless face. The fellow understood the game; he was something of a sportsman; Kit hit the ball over the net to him and he returned it, and they maintained these interminable rallies. Molly, silent and sunk in a kind of staring, cat-like malevolence, neither moved her head, nor raised an eyelid. She was the net, the inevitable net. An immense weariness seemed to possess her, an apathetic cynicism. The water glided past; so did life; so did men.
About five o'clock Wolffe pulled out a gold watch, and appeared to be making silent calculations. Was there to be any tea? With dry matter-of-factness he informed Christopher that he had to catch the 6.15 train at Marley. "Dining in town, you know. Not much margin." Kit looked at the willows across the river, and felt the mutterings of a coming storm, for Molly had risen and was stretching herself like some feline thing.
"You greedy things shall have tea. It is ready. I have only to boil water."
She paused in the doorway, looking back at them with eyes that seemed preternaturally dark.
"What time is it, Oscar?"
"Two minutes past five."
"If you two leave here at ten minutes to six."
Kit got up, with his hands in his pockets.
"I am staying the night at Marley."
She said nothing; but went into the bungalow, and Christopher strolled down to the water's edge and stood staring at the dark sloth of it, and Oscar Wolffe watched him. "That young man will get a scratching." He was quite sure that he knew more about women than Kit did; he had every right to think so.
Molly stepped down into the green punt, for it was more roomy than the dinghy, and the challenge to Kit was as obvious as she could make it. He bent down and unfastened the painter, and held the punt against the stage while Wolffe was getting on board, and Molly was slipping the punt pole from its straps. She stood up with the pole trailing, her eyes on Kit's.
But he, without a word, and with a tranquil and fateful face, thrust the punt away from the stage, and stood up and nodded at Oscar Wolffe. There was complete silence. The situation was accepted and laid aside for its ultimate solution. Molly began to pole the punt across the river, and Mr. Wolffe's formless and pallid face receded like a whimsical mask in which the eyes became two little expressionless dots.
Kit, with his hands in his pockets, watched the swirl die out of the sleek brown water. The punt swung sideways into the opposite bank, there was a mooring post by the steps, and Kit heard Molly's level voice, and saw Wolffe's response to it. He climbed out with the painter and fastened the punt to the post. The green figure joined him on the towing path.
Wolffe waved an ironic hand, but Molly Pentreath's head remained in profile. They moved away together towards the end of the lane.
Kit felt for his pipe and pouch, and filling his pipe, with conclusive deliberation, lit it, threw the match into the river, and considered the significance of the manœuvre. Obviously, she was walking with Wolffe to Marley station, hatless and in that green and cerise knitted frock. Would she come back? Her temperament was capable of taking her up to town just as she was, in mood and dress. If she did not come back there was the dinghy, but he realized that if he were left to ferry himself across in the dinghy it would be a passage of humiliation, self-tempted. Wolffe would go to that dinner with a pleasant smirk upon his face. And what a piquant little tale it would make when the first glass of champagne had begun to simmer warmly! The buccaneering lover left to soliloquize upon an island.
But Christopher was not coquetting with his sense of humour. He looked at the still water and the heavy hills, and that sky of amethyst threatening rain, and at the sadness of the willows and the fields. Yes, it was the very setting for his mood, sombre and inevitable, deep with a soft green northern intensity. He was in the very midst of it. There was no break in his purpose just as there was no break in the sky. That sophisticated farceur was out of the picture. Two figures were left in the green gloom, his own and Molly's.
He glanced at his wrist-watch and found that the time was six o'clock. If she waited to see Wolffe's train steam out of Marley station, and walked back at once, she should be on the river bank soon after half past six. He had half an hour's idleness before the battle, if battle there was to be, and he wandered about, smoking his pipe and exploring the island, her island. It was less than fifty yards long, and about half as wide, in shape like a green turtle floating upon the water. The backwater, overhung by willows and alders, had a mysterious biackness, and the murk of the water hid rotting wood and sodden leaves. And he thought—"What a place for a lone woman. All right in the sunlight, perhaps. But on a grey day or a wet one." Yet, he had to suppose that Molly liked it, and her liking of such green isolation led him towards the unknown in Molly. How little he knew of her, the real Molly; and leaning against one of the old apple trees supporting the hammock he fell into a contemplation of her hidden self. There was so much of her that seemed to him unknowable, elusive, secret. Clever—yes! Confound that subtlety of hers. There were times when he felt that he was being left to stare at her like an uncomprehending boy. To love did not mean to understand. Perhaps it made for misunderstanding, a blurring of the personality, conflict, repression? And then a rain drop splashed upon the hand that was resting on the hammock rope. He glanced at the sky, and then across the water. No Molly. The hands of his watch stood at half past six.
The raindrops increased. They were beginning to blur the surface of the water, making little, widening, vanishing circles that met and disappeared and were followed by other circles. The hammock was getting wet. He unhooked it, gathered it over one arm, and carrying into the loggia, hung it on the back of the chair that Wolffe had occupied.
That fellow! Was he chuckling in a railway carriage over a disconsolate fool, and catching Molly's satirical eyes?
He faced about, and then stood very still. Molly was unfastening the punt's painter. Her white face looked like a distant flower against the dim, wet greenness. She stepped into the punt, picked up the pole, and came gliding across with smooth fatefulness.
Kit went down to the landing stage.
"You must be wet?"
"O, nothing."
"I have brought the hammock in."
He bent down and held the punt against the stage. She stepped out, and leaving the pole lying in the punt, fastened the painter.
"Oscar caught the train—and the psychological moment. Let's go in."
There was a deep sofa under the window, and she let herself sink into it, with her head upon a black velvet cushion. Her neck, from chin to the low collar of her dress, showed as a white curve. Kit stood by the window. The room seemed dim and shadowy, with the overcast evening sky, and the rain steaming down upon the river and the trees. An early and green twilight covered the earth.
"How it pours," she said.
One arm, bare to the elbow, lay along the top of the sofa, and Kit could see the movements of her dress as she breathed. Her eyes were half closed. There was something in her languor which gave him a feeling of breathlessness and wonder, for her very languor seemed to embody a secret expectancy. The dim light or some emotion had softened her face; her young fierceness lay relaxed.
"I could not help coming here," he said.
His eyes were fixed upon the hand and arm that rested on the top of the sofa.
"Obstinate old Kit."
Her voice made him tremble.
"I asked Oscar to see me here on business. We have dissolved partnership, and there were some figures to be looked into, and one or two papers to sign. How did you know I was here?"
"I did not know."
"Guessed?"
"Partly. Came to see."
"And you brought a suitcase with you?"
"No."
"No."
"But you said."
"I was bluffing."
"Then you are not staying at Marley?"
"No."
There was a pause, and the hiss of the rain filled it.
"What time is the last train?"
"O, somewhere about ten, I think."
He moved to the other end of the sofa, and sitting slantwise on the back of it, half facing her as she lay, he looked out of the window. The landscape was sheeted in rain. It dropped from the roof of the loggia; the feathery green of the willows seemed to droop under it. The hills were blotted out. And he thought how secret and strange this place seemed on its island in the midst of the river and the rain, and that he and Molly were alone together as they had never been before. Her relaxation, her sudden acceptance of their aloneness, had confused him. He could look at her hand and her arm, but somehow he could not bring himself to look at her face, as though he were leaning over the brink of a crisis and felt giddy and bewildered, and her face—shining dimly out of the deeps of the crisis—might make him throw himself over.
He was aware of a little, restless movement below him.
"Still raining?"
"It looks like keeping on."
"Lucky for you that I did some shopping this morning, or Man Friday would have found himself empty."
"I'm Man Saturday. And I can fast."
"Six eggs, six raspberry tarts, some Stilton. And I can raise a bottle of Pommard."
"Your rations for the week-end. But six eggs for supper! Is that necessary? We must leave something for your breakfast."
He looked at the hand. It was lying palm upwards now, and hollowed like a cup, and he felt an impulse upon him urging him to stoop and press his lips into the hollow of that hand. He resisted the impulse, and sat rigid, and tried to think of the rain, and the ten o'clock train at Marley station.
She turned her head on the cushion.
"It is not going to stop."
"No; it does not look like clearing."
"How final," she said, and stirred gently, and looked at nothing through half-closed eyelids.
Final! The word seemed to echo in him; it was like the crying of some bird in the grey of the dawn.
"O, nothing's final, unless"
He lost himself for a moment in looking down at her dim face.
"Not even the weather? Our temperamental weather! It seems to have made up its mind"
She held up a hand, not the hand on the sofa.
"Listen. On the water, on the leaves, on the grass. Drip, drip. And we two—on an island—with the grey green twilight"
"It's—it's beautiful," he said with a voice of a passionate awe.
He saw her eyes looking up, and suddenly he seemed to fall forward, and his mouth was pressed into the hollow of her hand. He trembled. Something touched his hair; he felt the pressure of her hand upon his head.
At six o'clock in the morning Kit bathed. The sky had cleared, but a mistiness lay upon the water and the fields, and a hugely yellow sun shot arrows of gold at him as he swam up the stream. That cold plunge and the glow that had followed it were a part of the mystery of the moment, and when he climbed back into the punt and stood and towelled himself he was yet more conscious of the morning's mystery. What a night and what a dawn! The confused emotions of yesterday had come forth clearly into this world of green and of gold, with the deep eyes of the river shining, and the willows a shimmering grey green mist, and the beechwoods splendid against the rain-washed blue of the sky. He understood to the full the exultation of a man's tenderness.
He dressed, thinking of many things, swift, incongruous, chasing thoughts. He had a twenty-four hour's beard upon his chin and no razor,—but if he caught an early train that detail could be remedied. Yes, it was his duty to catch an early train. He was responsible now, sacredly responsible. Amazing! The suddenness, the exquisite poignancy of it! He bent his head between his knees and remained thus for a moment like a man faint. He remembered his father. Dear old pater! He would write and tell him at once that he and Molly Pentreath were to be married.
And suddenly he heard her voice, and raised his head and sat still. She was singing—or rather murmuring some song. He heard a clatter of china, and the song changed to a soft whistling. Absurd, dear, intimate clatter of plates and tea-cups! They were to breakfast together.
"Kit."
"Hallo!"
"Did you say two eggs?"
"How many are there left?"
"Three."
"Boil one hard and we'll halve it. Or I can do with one."
He heard her soft laughter.
"If an egg and a half? I have a pot of marmalade. What are you doing?"
"Dressing.—I say,—Molly,—dear,—you will have to overlook a beard."
"I will. You may be able to persuade a barber man in Marley to break the Sabbath. Anyway—why worry?"
"I'm not worrying.—I feel that that old yellow sun had just been hoisted for the first time into the sky"
"The Creation of the World."
"That's it."
"But we—arrived—together. No old rib business. Say, do you like China tea?"
"Not much."
"Well—Indian. My coffee is like someone's sad past."
"Right."
"Hallo! Is there much water in the punt?"
"A little. Shall I mop it up?"
"Presently. I'm just about to time the eggs."
Kit ran his hands through his hair, and made some show of smoothing its wetness. He extracted a collar and tie and a stud from his coat pocket, and put them on, standing up in the punt and facing the sun.
"Ready."
She was standing in the doorway, and with a suggestion of swiftness he went to her, and grew suddenly and bigly shy, and touched her gently.
"It is all so very wonderful."
They sat down at the oak table, opposite each other, and while Molly was handling the old flowery Amhurst Japan teapot, Kit cut the bread.
"Suppose there is a train somewhere about nine."
He did not see the look she gave him.
"I dare say. Is there any hurry?"
His serious and happy face struck her as being poignantly innocent. Didn't he understand?
"O, no great hurry. But I'm feeling responsible. Rather a precious responsibility,—dear heart."
She handed him his teacup, and he sat stirring it, and smiling over some secret and sacred thought.
"Dear," he said; "if I seem a rather practical idiot—you'll know why. Because I'm so profoundly yours—in all my thinking."
"I know."
She seemed to stiffen, to be ready to resist something.
"When are we going to be married?"
"We are not going to be married. Dear lad, don't you understand?"
For most of that day Christopher strove with her passionate ruthlessness. She had shocked him, and at first he had been unable to believe in her seriousness, but when he had realized it he knew the depth and the breadth of her. And she was unshakabie. She lay in the hammock, locking at the sky, while he sat beside her with all his tense, old-fashioned chivalrous temperament contending with her newness, and finding itself baffled. For she had a rightness of view. He could put up against her the figures of sentiment and convention, and she put out a hand and sent them flying.
Never had he suspected such frankness or such intelligent honesty. Yes, she supposed that she loved him. Had she not given him proof of that? She had given herself. And did he expect her to give him everything that she cherished, to strip herself of her career, the work that she loved, all her passionate prejudices and propensities? Was that love? Man's love? While he and his work went on unchanged! And pots and pans, and domestics, and children! She made him realize that she disliked children and childishness, that she was not temperamentally made to be a mother. Noise, and napkins, and little raw egotisms, and disorder, and the eternal struggle of the mature mind with the little savage selfishnesses. "A woman who loves her craft has to choose, Kit. I have chosen. Intelligent egotism makes life intelligible. Children would drive me mad."
His stricken face hurt her, and she tried to soothe him.
"Don't you understand compromise? I have compromised in order to love you. I give all that I can honestly give, and you cry out for more. Do you wish to drag every shred of me through the mangle of marriage? Is not there something better for two workers such as we are?"
"But I cannot take it," was his refrain; "not in that way. It's impossible."
"An intrigue?"
"Yes."
She broke out scornfully.
"Ah, you are afraid of the good women, the good married women who are more cruel than any beasts shut up in cages. They have no mercy on the animal outside the cage, the animal who refuses to come in."
"Isn't there some reason for it?" he argued.
"How?"
"The man—to—has to be"
"Shame on you. Do you think I ask for a caged mate, a thing that slinks and fawns, and snuffles through the hypocritical bars? Why,—I'm working for your freedom, the worker's freedom, as well as my own."
Plead as he would Kit could not move her.
"There is something in a man you don't understand, dear."
"Ah,—the idea of permanence, of possession"
"Something more than that. It is unexplainable—somehow—sacred. Everything or nothing."
She looked at him steadily.
"You mean—that you won't go on?"
"I can't go on," he said. "For your sake,—I can't go on."
He was as sincere as she was, and as obstinate as she was ruthless, nor would either of them give way, and in the cool of the evening they faced the river and the parting of the ways. She stood in the punt with the pole in her hands, waiting to ferry him across. She had borne the struggle better than he had. His blue eyes looked tired in an unshaved and haggard face.
"Poor old Kit."
He stood in the punt and stared at the water as she poled across, all the greenness of the world withered, and the setting sun red with defeat.
"I'm sorry, Molly, more sorry than I can say. If I had known"
The punt touched the bank, and he stepped out.
"Never regret things that you cannot help, dear lad."
"It's not for myself"
"Give and take, give and take."
Leaning upon the pole she watched him walk away. At the end of the lane he paused and looked back as though he were taking leave of something, but he did not wave to her.
"No, my dear," she thought, "you shall not kill all that is best in us."