Having pocketed his fare the
freckled rustic took himself and his antediluvian
cab back to the village limbo from
which they had briefly emerged. Loughlin checked
his luggage into the care of the porter, an angular
man with one eye who was apparently the only other
living being in this remote minute station, and sat
down in the platform shade. July noon had a stark
eye-tiring brightness, and a silence so very deep—when
that porter ceased his intolerable clatter—that
Loughlin could hear footsteps crunching in the road
half a mile away. The train was late. There were no
other passengers. Nothing to look at except his
trunks, two shiny rails in the grim track, red hollyhocks
against white palings on the opposite bank.
The holiday in this quiet neighbourhood had
delighted him, but its crowning experience had been
too brief. On the last day but one the loveliest
woman he had ever known had emerged almost as
briefly as that cabman. Some men are constantly
meeting that woman. Not so the Honourable
Gerald Loughlin, but no man turns his back tranquilly
on destiny even if it is but two days old and
already some half-dozen miles away. The visit had
come to its end, Loughlin had come to his station, the
cab had gone back to its lair, but on reflection he
could find no other reasons for going away and denying
himself the delight of this proffered experience.
Time was his own, as much as he could buy of it, and
he had an income that enabled him to buy a good deal.
Moody and hesitant he began to fill his pipe when
the one-eyed porter again approached him.
“Take a pipe of that?” said Loughlin, offering
him the pouch.
“Thanky, sir, but I can’t smoke a pipe; a cigarette
I take now and again, thanky, sir, not often, just
to keep me from cussing and damming. My wife
buys me a packet sometimes, she says I don’t swear
so much then, but I don’t know, I has to knock ’em
off soon’s they make me feel bad, and then, dam it all,
I be worsen ever....”
“Look here,” said the other, interrupting him,
“I’m not going by this train after all. Something
I have forgotten. Now look after my bags and I’ll
come along later, this afternoon.” He turned and
left the station as hurriedly as if his business was
really of the high importance the porter immediately
conceived it to be.
The Honourable Gerald, though handsome and
honest, was not a fool. A fool is one who becomes
distracted between the claims of instinct and common
sense; the larger foolishness is the peculiar doom of
imaginative people, artists and their kind, while the
smaller foolishness is the mark of all those who have
nothing but their foolishness to endorse them.
Loughlin responded to this impulse unhesitatingly
but without distraction, calmly and directly as became
a well-bred bachelor in the early thirties. He might
have written to the young beauty with the queer
name, Orianda Crabbe, but that course teemed with
absurdities and difficulties for he was modest, his
romantic imagination weak, and he had only met her
at old Lady Tillington’s a couple of days before. Of
this mere girl, just twenty-three or twenty-four, he
knew nothing save that they had been immediately
and vividly charming to each other. That was no
excuse for presenting himself again to the old invalid
of Tillington Park, it would be impossible for him
to do so, but there had been one vague moment of
their recalled intercourse, a glimmering intimation,
which just now seemed to offer a remote possibility
of achievement, and so he walked on in the direction
of the park.
Tillington was some miles off and the heat was
oppressive. At the end of an hour’s stroll he stepped
into “The Three Pigeons” at Denbury and drank
a deep drink. It was quiet and deliciously cool in the
taproom there, yes, as silent as that little station had
been. Empty the world seemed to-day, quite empty;
he had not passed a human creature. Happily
bemused he took another draught. Eighteen small
panes of glass in that long window and perhaps as
many flies buzzing in the room. He could hear and
see a breeze saluting the bright walled ivy outside and
the bushes by a stream. This drowsiness was heaven,
it made so clear his recollection of Orianda. It was
impossible to particularize but she was in her way,
her rather uncultured way, just perfection. He had
engaged her upon several themes, music, fishing
(Loughlin loved fishing), golf, tennis, and books;
none of these had particularly stirred her but she had
brains, quite an original turn of mind. There had
been neither time nor opportunity to discover anything
about her, but there she was, staying there, that
was the one thing certain, apparently indefinitely, for
she described the park in a witty detailed way even to
a certain favourite glade which she always visited in
the afternoons. When she had told him that, he
could swear she was not finessing; no, no, it was a
most engaging simplicity, a frankness that was
positively marmoreal.
He would certainly write to her; yes, and he began
to think of fine phrases to put in a letter, but could
there be anything finer, now, just at this moment,
than to be sitting with her in this empty inn. It was
not a fair place, though it was clean, but how she
would brighten it, yes! there were two long settles
and two short ones, two tiny tables and eight spittoons
(he had to count them), and somehow he felt her
image flitting adorably into this setting, defeating
with its native glory all the scrupulous beer-smelling
impoverishment. And then, after a while, he would
take her, and they would lie in the grass under a deep-bosomed
tree and speak of love. How beautiful she
would be. But she was not there, and so he left the
inn and crossed the road to a church, pleasant and
tiny and tidy, whitewalled and clean-ceilinged. A
sparrow chirped in the porch, flies hummed in the
nave, a puppy was barking in the vicarage garden.
How trivial, how absurdly solemn, everything seemed.
The thud of the great pendulum in the tower had the
sound of a dead man beating on a bar of spiritless
iron. He was tired of the vapid tidiness of these
altars with their insignificant tapestries, candlesticks
of gilded wood, the bunches of pale flowers oppressed
by the rich glow from the windows. He longed for
an altar that should be an inspiring symbol of belief,
a place of green and solemn walls with a dark velvet
shrine sweeping aloft to the peaked roof unhindered
by tarnishing lustre and tedious linen. Holiness was
always something richly dim. There was no more
holiness here than in the tough hassocks and rush-bottomed
chairs; not here, surely, the apple of Eden
flourished. And yet, turning to the lectern, he noted
the large prayer book open at the office of marriage.
He idly read over the words of the ceremony, filling
in at the gaps the names of Gerald Wilmot Loughlin
and Orianda Crabbe.
What a fool! He closed the book with a slam and
left the church. Absurd! You couldn’t fall in love
with a person as sharply as all that, could you? But
why not? Unless fancy was charged with the lightning
of gods it was nothing at all.
Tramping away still in the direction of Tillington
Park he came in the afternoon to that glade under
a screen of trees spoken of by the girl. It was
green and shady, full of scattering birds. He flung
himself down in the grass under a deep-bosomed
tree. She had spoken delightfully of this delightful
spot.
When she came, for come she did, the confrontation
left him very unsteady as he sprang to his feet.
(Confound that potation at “The Three Pigeons”!
Enormously hungry, too!) But he was amazed,
entranced, she was so happy to see him again. They
sat down together, but he was still bewildered and
his confusion left him all at sixes and sevens. Fortunately
her own rivulet of casual chatter carried them
on until he suddenly asked: “Are you related
to the Crabbes of Cotterton—I fancy I know
them?”
“No, I think not, no, I am from the south country,
near the sea, nobody at all, my father keeps an inn.”
“An inn! How extraordinary! How very ...
very ...”
“Extraordinary?” Nodding her head in the
direction of the hidden mansion she added: “I am
her companion.”
“Lady Tillington’s?”
She assented coolly, was silent, while Loughlin
ransacked his brains for some delicate reference that
would clear him over this ... this ... cataract. But
he felt stupid—that confounded potation at “The
Three Pigeons”! Why, that was where he had
thought of her so admirably, too. He asked if she
cared for the position, was it pleasant, and so on.
Heavens, what an astonishing creature for a domestic,
quite positively lovely, a compendium of delightful
qualities, this girl, so frank, so simple!
“Yes, I like it, but home is better. I should love
to go back to my home, to father, but I can’t, I’m
still afraid—I ran away from home three years ago,
to go with my mother. I’m like my mother, she ran
away from home too.”
Orianda picked up the open parasol which she had
dropped, closed it in a thoughtful manner, and laid
its crimson folds beside her. There was no other
note of colour in her white attire; she was without a
hat. Her fair hair had a quenching tinge upon it that
made it less bright than gold, but more rare. Her
cheeks had the colour of homely flowers, the lily and
the pink. Her teeth were as even as the peas in a
newly opened pod, as clear as milk.
“Tell me about all that. May I hear it?”
“I have not seen him or heard from him since, but
I love him very much now.”
“Your father?”
“Yes, but he is stern, a simple man, and he is so
just. We live at a tiny old inn at the end of a village
near the hills. ‘The Black Dog.’ It is thatched
and has tiny rooms. It’s painted all over with pink,
pink whitewash.”
“Ah, I know.”
“There’s a porch, under a sycamore tree, where
people sit, and an old rusty chain hanging on a hook
just outside the door.”
“What’s that for?”
“I don’t know what it is for, horses, perhaps, but
it is always there, I always see that rusty chain. And
on the opposite side of the road there are three lime
trees and behind them is the yard where my father
works. He makes hurdles and ladders. He is the
best hurdle maker in three counties, he has won many
prizes at the shows. It is splendid to see him working
at the willow wood, soft and white. The yard is full
of poles and palings, spars and fagots, and long
shavings of the thin bark like seaweed. It smells so
nice. In the spring the chaffinches and wrens are
singing about him all day long; the wren is lovely, but
in the summer of course it’s the whitethroats come
chippering, and yellow-hammers.”
“Ah, blackbirds, thrushes, nightingales!”
“Yes, but it’s the little birds seem to love my
father’s yard.”
“Well then, but why did you, why did you run
away?”
“My mother was much younger, and different
from father; she was handsome and proud too, and
in all sorts of ways superior to him. They got to hate
each other; they were so quiet about it, but I could
see. Their only common interest was me, they both
loved me very much. Three years ago she ran away
from him. Quite suddenly, you know; there was
nothing at all leading up to such a thing. But I could
not understand my father, not then, he took it all so
calmly. He did not mention even her name to me
for a long time, and I feared to intrude; you see, I
did not understand, I was only twenty. When I did
ask about her he told me not to bother him, forbade
me to write to her. I didn’t know where she was, but
he knew, and at last I found out too.”
“And you defied him, I suppose?”
“No, I deceived him. He gave me money for
some purpose—to pay a debt—and I stole it. I left
him a letter and ran away to my mother. I loved her.”
“O well, that was only to be expected,” said
Loughlin. “It was all right, quite right.”
“She was living with another man. I didn’t know.
I was a fool.”
“Good lord! That was a shock for you,” Loughlin
said. “What did you do?”
“No, I was not shocked, she was so happy. I
lived with them for a year....”
“Extraordinary!”
“And then she died.”
“Your mother died!”
“Yes, so you see I could not stop with my ...
I could not stay where I was, and I couldn’t go back
to my father.”
“I see, no, but you want to go back to your father
now.”
“I’m afraid. I love him, but I’m afraid. I don’t
blame my mother, I feel she was right, quite right—it
was such happiness. And yet I feel, too, that
father was deeply wronged. I can’t understand that,
it sounds foolish. I should so love to go home again.
This other kind of life doesn’t seem to eclipse me—things
have been extraordinary kind—I don’t feel
out of my setting, but still it doesn’t satisfy, it is
polite and soft, like silk, perhaps it isn’t barbarous
enough, and I want to live, somehow—well, I have
not found what I wanted to find.”
“What did you want to find?”
“I shan’t know until I have found it. I do want
to go home now, but I am full of strange feelings
about it. I feel as if I was bearing the mark of something
that can’t be hidden or disguised of what my
mother did, as if I were all a burning recollection for
him that he couldn’t fail to see. He is good, a just
man. He ... he is the best hurdle maker in three
counties.”
While listening to this daughter of a man who
made ladders the Honourable Gerald had been
swiftly thinking of an intriguing phrase that leaped
into his mind. Social plesiomorphism, that was it!
Caste was humbug, no doubt, but even if it was
conscious humbug it was there, really there, like the
patterned frost upon a window pane, beautiful though
a little incoherent, and conditioned only by the size
and number of your windows. (Eighteen windows
in that pub!) But what did it amount to, after all?
It was stuck upon your clear polished outline for
every eye to see, but within was something surprising
as the sight of a badger in church—until you got
used to the indubitable relation of such badgers to
such churches. Fine turpitudes!
“My dear girl,” he burst out, “your mother and
you were right, absolutely. I am sure life is enhanced
not by amassing conventions, but by destroying them.
And your feeling for your father is right, too, rightest
of all. Tell me ... let me ... may I take you back
to him?”
The girl’s eyes dwelt upon his with some intensity.
“Your courage is kind,” she said, “but he doesn’t
know you, nor you him.” And to that she added,
“You don’t even know me.”
“I have known you for ten thousand years. Come
home to him with me, we will go back together. Yes,
you can explain. Tell him”—the Honourable
Gerald had got the bit between his teeth now—“tell
him I’m your sweetheart, will you—will
you?”
“Ten thousand ...! Yes, I know; but it’s
strange to think you have only seen me just once
before!”
“Does that matter? Everything grows from that
one small moment into a world of ... well of ...
boundless admiration.”
“I don’t want,” said Orianda, reopening her
crimson parasol, “to grow into a world of any kind.”
“No, of course you don’t. But I mean the
emotion is irresistible, ‘the desire of the moth for the
star,’ that sort of thing, you know, and I immolate
myself, the happy victim of your attractions.”
“All that has been said before.” Orianda
adjusted her parasol as a screen for her raillery.
“I swear,” said he, “I have not said it before,
never to a living soul.”
Fountains of amusement beamed in her brilliant
eyes. She was exquisite; he was no longer in doubt
about the colour of her eyes—though he could not
describe them. And the precise shade of her hair was—well,
it was extraordinarily beautiful.
“I mean—it’s been said to me!”
“O damnation! Of course it’s been said to you.
Ah, and isn’t that my complete justification? But
you agree, do you not? Tell me if it’s possible.
Say you agree, and let me take you back to your
father.”
“I think I would like you to,” the jolly girl said,
slowly.
On an August morning a few weeks later they
travelled down together to see her father. In
the interim Orianda had resigned her appointment,
and several times Gerald had met her secretly
in the purlieus of Tillington Park. The girl’s cool
casual nature fascinated him not less than her
appearance. Admiration certainly outdistanced his
happiness, although that also increased; but the bliss
had its shadow, for the outcome of their friendship
seemed mysteriously to depend on the outcome of the
proposed return to her father’s home, devotion to
that project forming the first principle, as it were, of
their intercourse. Orianda had not dangled before
him the prospect of any serener relationship; she took
his caresses as naturally and undemonstratively as a
pet bird takes a piece of sugar. But he had begun to
be aware of a certain force behind all her charming
naivete; the beauty that exhaled the freshness, the
apparent fragility, of a drop of dew had none the less
a savour of tyranny which he vowed should never,
least of all by him, be pressed to vulgar exercise.
When the train reached its destination Orianda
confided calmly that she had preferred not to write to
her father. Really she did not know for certain
whether he was alive or even living on at the old home
she so loved. And there was a journey of three miles
or more which Orianda proposed to walk. So they
walked.
The road lay across an expanse of marshy country
and approached the wooded uplands of her home
only by numerous eccentric divagations made
necessary by culverts that drained the marsh. The
day was bright; the sky, so vast an arch over this
flat land, was a very oven for heat; there were cracks
in the earth, the grass was like stubble. At the mid
journey they crossed a river by its wooden bridge,
upon which a boy sat fishing with stick and string.
Near the water was a long white hut with a flag; a
few tethered boats floated upon the stream. Gerald
gave a shilling to a travelling woman who carried a
burden on her back and shuffled slowly upon the
harsh road sighing, looking neither to right nor left;
she did not look into the sky, her gaze was fastened
upon her dolorous feet, one two, one two, one two;
her shift, if she had such a garment, must have clung
to her old body like a shrimping net.
In an hour they had reached the uplands and soon,
at the top of a sylvan slope where there was shade and
cooling air, Gerald saw a sign hung upon a sycamore
tree, The Black Dog by Nathaniel Crabbe. The inn
was small, pleasant with pink wash and brown paint,
and faced across the road a large yard encircled by
hedges, trees, and a gate. The travellers stood
peeping into the enclosure which was stocked with
new ladders, hurdles, and poles of various sizes.
Amid them stood a tall burly man at a block,
trimming with an axe the butt of a willow rod. He
was about fifty, clad in rough country clothes, a white
shirt, and a soft straw hat. He had mild simple
features coloured, like his arms and neck, almost to
the hue of a bay horse.
“Hullo!” called the girl. The man with the axe
looked round at her unrecognizingly. Orianda
hurried through the gateway. “Father!” she cried.
“I did not know. I was not rightly sure of ye,”
said the man, dropping the axe, “such a lady you’ve
grown.”
As he kissed his daughter his heavy discoloured
hands rested on her shoulders, her gloved ones lay
against his breast. Orianda took out her purse.
“Here is the money I stole, father.”
She dropped some coins one by one into his palm.
He counted them over, and saying simply “Thank
you, my dear,” put them into his pocket.
“I’m dashed!”—thought Loughlin, who had
followed the girl—“it’s exactly how she would take
it; no explanation, no apology. They do not know
what reproach means. Have they no code at all?”
She went on chatting with her father, and seemed
to have forgotten her companion.
“You mean you want to come back!” exclaimed
her father eagerly, “come back here? That would
be grand, that would. But look, tell me what I am
to do. I’ve—you see—this is how it is—”
He spat upon the ground, picked up his axe,
rested one foot upon the axe-block and one arm upon
his knee. Orianda sat down upon a pile of the logs.
“This is how it is ... be you married?”
“Come and sit here, Gerald,” called the girl.
As he came forward Orianda rose and said: “This
is my very dear friend, father, Gerald Loughlin.
He has been so kind. It is he who has given me the
courage to come back. I wanted to for so long. O,
a long time, father, a long time. And yet Gerald had
to drag me here in the end.”
“What was you afraid of, my girl?” asked the
big man.
“Myself.”
The two visitors sat upon the logs. “Shall I tell
you about mother?” asked the girl.
Crabbe hesitated; looked at the ground.
“Ah, yes, you might,” he said.
“She died, did you know?”
The man looked up at the trees with their myriads
of unmoving leaves; each leaf seemed to be listening.
“She died?” he said softly. “No, I did not
know she died.”
“Two years ago,” continued the girl, warily, as if
probing his mood.
“Two years!” He repeated it without emotion.
“No, I did not know she died. ’Tis a bad job.” He
was quite still, his mind seemed to be turning over
his own secret memories, but what he bent forward
and suddenly said was: “Don’t say anything about
it in there.” He nodded towards the inn.
“No?” Orianda opened her crimson parasol.
“You see,” he went on, again resting one foot on
the axe-block and addressing himself more particularly
to Gerald: “I’ve ... this is how it is. When I
was left alone I could not get along here, not by
myself. That’s for certain. There’s the house and
the bar and the yard—I’d to get help, a young woman
from Brighton. I met her at Brighton.” He rubbed
the blade of the axe reflectively across his palm—“And
she manages house for me now, you see.”
He let the axe fall again and stood upright. “Her
name’s Lizzie.”
“O, quite so, you could do no other,” Gerald
exclaimed cheerfully, turning to the girl. But
Orianda said softly: “What a family we are! He
means he is living with her. And so you don’t want
your undutiful daughter after all, father?” Her
gaiety was a little tremulous.
“No, no!” he retorted quickly, “you must come
back, you must come back, if so be you can. There’s
nothing I’d like better, nothing on this mortal earth.
My God, if something don’t soon happen I don’t
know what will happen.” Once more he stooped
for the axe. “That’s right, Orianda, yes, yes, but
you’ve no call to mention to her”—he glared uneasily
at the inn doorway—“that ... that about your
mother.”
Orianda stared up at him though he would not
meet her gaze.
“You mean she doesn’t know?” she asked, “you
mean she would want you to marry her if she did
know?”
“Yes, that’s about how it is with us.”
Loughlin was amazed at the girl’s divination. It
seemed miraculous, what a subtle mind she had,
extraordinary! And how casually she took the old
rascal’s—well, what could you call it?—effrontery,
shame, misdemeanour, helplessness. But was not
her mother like it too? He had grasped nothing at
all of the situation yet, save that Nathaniel Crabbe
appeared to be netted in the toils of this housekeeper,
this Lizzie from Brighton. Dear Orianda was
“dished” now, poor girl. She could not conceivably
return to such a menage.
Orianda was saying: “Then I may stay, father,
mayn’t I, for good with you?”
Her father’s eyes left no doubt of his pleasure.
“Can we give Gerald a bedroom for a few days?
Or do we ask Lizzie?”
“Ah, better ask her,” said the shameless man.
“You want to make a stay here, sir?”
“If it won’t incommode you,” replied Loughlin.
“O, make no doubt about that, to be sure no, I
make no doubt about that.”
“Have you still got my old bedroom?” asked
Orianda, for the amount of dubiety in his air was in
prodigious antagonism to his expressed confidence.
“Why yes, it may happen,” he replied slowly.
“Then Gerald can have the spare room. It’s all
wainscot and painted dark blue. It’s a shrimp of a
room, but there’s a preserved albatross in a glass case
as big as a van.”
“I make no doubt about that,” chimed in her
father, straightening himself and scratching his chin
uneasily, “you must talk to Lizzie.”
“Splendid!” said Gerald to Orianda, “I’ve
never seen an albatross.”
“We’ll ask Lizzie,” said she, “at once.”
Loughlin was experiencing not a little inward
distress at this turn in the affair, but it was he who had
brought Orianda to her home, and he would have to
go through with the horrid business.
“Is she difficult, father?”
“No, she’s not difficult, not difficult, so to say,
you must make allowance.”
The girl was implacable. Her directness almost
froze the blood of the Hon. Loughlin.
“Are you fond of her. How long has she been
here?”
“O, a goodish while, yes, let me see—no, she’s
not difficult, if that’s what you mean—three years,
perhaps.”
“Well, but that’s long enough!”
(Long enough for what—wondered Loughlin?)
“Yes, it is longish.”
“If you really want to get rid of her you could
tell her ...”
“Tell her what?”
“You know what to tell her!”
But her father looked bewildered and professed his
ignorance.
“Take me in to her,” said Orianda, and they all
walked across to “The Black Dog.” There was
no one within; father and daughter went into the
garden while Gerald stayed behind in a small parlour.
Through the window that looked upon a grass plot
he could see a woman sitting in a deck chair under a
tree. Her face was turned away so that he saw only
a curve of pink cheek and a thin mound of fair hair
tossed and untidy. Lizzie’s large red fingers were
slipping a sprig of watercress into a mouth that was
hidden round the corner of the curve. With her
other hand she was caressing a large brown hen that
sat on her lap. Her black skirt wrapped her limbs
tightly, a round hip and a thigh being rigidly outlined,
while the blouse of figured cotton also seemed
strained upon her buxom breast, for it was torn and
split in places. She had strong white arms and holes
in her stockings. When she turned to confront
the others it was easy to see that she was a foolish,
untidy, but still a rather pleasant woman of about
thirty.
“How do you do, Lizzie?” cried Orianda,
offering a cordial hand. The hen fluttered away as,
smiling a little wanly, the woman rose.
“Who is it, ’Thaniel?” she asked.
Loughlin heard no more, for some men came noisily
into the bar and Crabbe hurried back to serve them.
In the afternoon Orianda drove Gerald in the gig
back to the station to fetch the baggage.
“Well, what success, Orianda?” he asked as
they jogged along.
“It would be perfect but for Lizzie—that was
rather a blow. But I should have foreseen her—Lizzies
are inevitable. And she is difficult—she
weeps. But, O I am glad to be home again. Gerald,
I feel I shall not leave it, ever.”
“Yes, Orianda,” he protested, “leave it for me.
I’ll give your nostalgia a little time to fade. I think
it was a man named Pater said: ‘All life is a wandering
to find home.’ You don’t want to omit the
wandering?”
“Not if I have found my home again?”
“A home with Lizzie!”
“No, not with Lizzie.” She flicked the horse
with the whip. “I shall be too much for Lizzie;
Lizzie will resume her wandering. She’s as stupid
as a wax widow in a show. Nathaniel is tired of
Lizzie, and Lizzie of Nathaniel. The two wretches!
But I wish she did not weep.”
Gerald had not observed any signs of tearfulness in
Lizzie at the midday dinner; on the contrary, she
seemed rather a jolly creature, not that she had spoken
much beyond “Yes, ’Thaniel, No, ’Thaniel,” or
Gerald, or Orianda, as the case had been. Her use
of his Christian name, which had swept him at once
into the bosom of the family, shocked him rather
pleasantly. But he did not know what had taken
place between the two women; perhaps Lizzie had
already perceived and tacitly accepted her displacement.
He was wakened next morning by unusual sounds,
chatter of magpies in the front trees, and the ching of
hammers on a bulk of iron at the smithy. Below his
window a brown terrier stood on its barrel barking
at a goose. Such common simple things had power
to please him, and for a few days everything at “The
Black Dog” seemed planned on this scale of novel
enjoyment. The old inn itself, the log yard, harvesting,
the chatter of the evening topers, even the village
Sunday delighted him with its parade of Phyllis and
Corydon, though it is true Phyllis wore a pink frock,
stockings of faint blue, and walked like a man, while
Corydon had a bowler hat and walked like a bear.
He helped ’Thaniel with axe, hammer, and plane, but
best of all was to serve mugs of beer nightly in the
bar and to drop the coins into the drawer of money.
The rest of the time he spent with Orianda whom he
wooed happily enough, though without establishing
any marked progress. They roamed in fields and in
copses, lounged in lanes, looking at things and idling
deliciously, at last returning home to be fed by Lizzie,
whose case somehow hung in the air, faintly deflecting
the perfect stream of felicity.
In their favourite glade a rivulet was joined by a
number of springs bubbling from a pool of sand and
rock. Below it the enlarged stream was dammed into
a small lake once used for turning a mill, but now,
since the mill was dismantled, covered with arrow
heads and lily leaves, surrounded by inclining trees,
bushes of rich green growth, terraces of willow herb,
whose fairy-like pink steeples Orianda called “codlins
and cream,” and catmint with knobs of agreeable
odour. A giant hornbeam tree had fallen and lay half
buried in the lake. This, and the black poplars whose
vacillating leaves underscored the solemn clamour
of the outfall, gave to it the very serenity of desolation.
Here they caught sight of the two woodpeckers
bathing in the springs, a cock and his hen, who had
flown away yaffling, leaving a pretty mottled feather
tinged with green floating there. It was endless
pleasure to watch each spring bubble upwards from
a pouch of sand that spread smoke-like in the water,
turning each cone into a midget Vesuvius. A wasp
crawled laboriously along a flat rock lying in the
pool. It moved weakly, as if, marooned like a
mariner upon some unknown isle, it could find no
way of escape; only, this isle was no bigger than a
dish in an ocean as small as a cartwheel. The wasp
seemed to have forgotten that it had wings, it creepingly
examined every inch of the rock until it came
to a patch of dried dung. Proceeding still as wearily
it paused upon a dead leaf until a breeze blew leaf
and insect into the water. The wasp was overwhelmed
by the rush from the bubbles, but at last
it emerged, clutching the woodpecker’s floating
feather and dragged itself into safety as a swimmer
heaves himself into a boat. In a moment it preened
its wings, flew back to the rock, and played at Crusoe
again. Orianda picked the feather from the pool.
“What a fool that wasp is,” declared Gerald, “I
wonder what it is doing?”
Orianda, placing the feather in his hat, told him
it was probably wandering to find home.
One day, brightest of all days, they went to picnic
in the marshes, a strange place to choose, all rank
with the musty smell of cattle, and populous with
grasshoppers that burred below you and millions,
quadrillions of flies that buzzed above. But Orianda
loved it. The vast area of coarse pasture harboured
not a single farmhouse, only a shed here and there
marking a particular field, for a thousand shallow
brooks flowed like veins from all directions to the
arterial river moving through its silent leagues.
Small frills of willow curving on the river brink, and
elsewhere a temple of lofty elms, offered the only
refuge from sun or storm. Store cattle roamed
unchecked from field to field, and in the shade of
gaunt rascally bushes sheep were nestling. Green
reeds and willow herb followed the watercourses
with endless efflorescence, beautiful indeed.
In the late afternoon they had come to a spot where
they could see their village three or four miles away,
but between them lay the inexorable barrier of the
river without a bridge. There was a bridge miles
away to the right, they had crossed it earlier in the
day; and there was another bridge on the left, but
that also was miles distant.
“Now what are we to do?” asked Orianda. She
wore a white muslin frock, a country frock, and a
large straw hat with poppies, a country hat. They
approached a column of trees. In the soft smooth
wind the foliage of the willows was tossed into delicate
greys. Orianda said they looked like cockshy heads
on spindly necks. She would like to shy at them,
but she was tired. “I know what we could do.”
Orianda glanced around the landscape, trees, and
bushes; the river was narrow, though deep, not more
than forty feet across, and had high banks.
“You can swim, Gerald?”
Yes, Gerald could swim rather well.
“Then let’s swim it, Gerald, and carry our own
clothes over.”
“Can you swim, Orianda?”
Yes, Orianda could swim rather well.
“All right then,” he said. “I’ll go down here
a little way.”
“O, don’t go far, I don’t want you to go far away,
Gerald,” and she added softly, “my dear.”
“No, I won’t go far,” he said, and sat down
behind a bush a hundred yards away. Here he
undressed, flung his shoes one after the other across
the river, and swimming on his back carried his
clothes over in two journeys. As he sat drying in the
sunlight he heard a shout from Orianda. He peeped
out and saw her sporting in the stream quite close
below him. She swam with a graceful overarm stroke
that tossed a spray of drops behind her and launched
her body as easily as a fish’s. Her hair was bound in a
handkerchief. She waved a hand to him. “You’ve
done it! Bravo! What courage! Wait for me.
Lovely.” She turned away like an eel, and at every
two or three strokes she spat into the air a gay little
fountain of water. How extraordinary she was.
Gerald wished he had not hurried. By and by he
slipped into the water again and swam upstream.
He could not see her.
“Have you finished?” he cried.
“I have finished, yes.” Her voice was close above
his head. She was lying in the grass, her face
propped between her palms, smiling down at him.
He could see bare arms and shoulders.
“Got your clothes across?”
“Of course.”
“All dry?”
She nodded.
“How many journeys? I made two.”
“Two,” said Orianda briefly.
“You’re all right then.” He wafted a kiss, swam
back, and dressed slowly. Then as she did not appear
he wandered along to her humming a discreet and
very audible hum as he went. When he came upon
her she still lay upon the grass most scantily clothed.
“I beg your pardon,” he said hastily, and full of
surprise and modesty walked away. The unembarrassed
girl called after him: “Drying my hair.”
“All right”—he did not turn round—“no
hurry.”
But what sensations assailed him. They aroused
in his decent gentlemanly mind not exactly a tumult,
but a flux of emotions, impressions, and qualms;
doubtful emotions, incredible impressions, and torturing
qualms. That alluring picture of Orianda,
her errant father, the abandoned Lizzie! Had the
water perhaps heated his mind though it had cooled
his body? He felt he would have to urge her, drag
her if need be, from this “Black Dog.” The setting
was fair enough and she was fair, but lovely as she
was not even she could escape the brush of its
vulgarity, its plebeian pressure.
And if all this has, or seems to have, nothing, or
little enough to do with the drying of Orianda’s hair,
it is because the Honourable Gerald was accustomed
to walk from grossness with an averted mind.
“Orianda,” said he, when she rejoined him,
“when are you going to give it up. You cannot stay
here ... with Lizzie ... can you?”
“Why not?” she asked, sharply tossing back her
hair. “I stayed with my mother, you know.”
“That was different from this. I don’t know how,
but it must have been.”
She took his arm. “Yes, it was. Lizzie I hate,
and poor stupid father loves her as much as he loves
his axe or his handsaw. I hate her meekness, too.
She has taken the heart out of everything. I must
get her away.”
“I see your need, Orianda, but what can you do?”
“I shall lie to her, lie like a libertine. And I shall
tell her that my mother is coming home at once. No
Lizzie could face that.”
He was silent. Poor Lizzie did not know that
there was now no Mrs. Crabbe.
“You don’t like my trick, do you?” Orianda
shook his arm caressingly.
“It hasn’t any particular grandeur about it, you
know.”
“Pooh! You shouldn’t waste grandeur on clearing
up a mess. This is a very dirty Eden.”
“No, all’s fair, I suppose.”
“But it isn’t war, you dear, if that’s what you
mean. I’m only doing for them what they are
naturally loth to do for themselves.” She pronounced
the word “loth” as if it rimed with moth.
“Lizzie,” he said, “I’m sure about Lizzie. I’ll
swear there is still some fondness in her funny little
heart.”
“It isn’t love, though; she’s just sentimental in her
puffy kind of way. My dear Honourable, you don’t
know what love is.” He hated her to use his title,
for there was then always a breath of scorn in her
tone. Just at odd times she seemed to be—not
vulgar, that was unthinkable—she seemed to display
a contempt for good breeding. He asked with a
stiff smile “What is love?”
“For me,” said Orianda, fumbling for a definition,
“for me it is a compound of anticipation and gratitude.
When either of these two ingredients is
absent love is dead.”
Gerald shook his head, laughing. “It sounds like
a malignant bolus that I shouldn’t like to take. I feel
that love is just self-sacrifice. Apart from the taste
of the thing or the price of the thing, why and for
what this anticipation, this gratitude?
“For the moment of passion, of course. Honour
thy moments of passion and keep them holy. But O,
Gerald Loughlin,” she added mockingly, “this you
cannot understand, for you are not a lover; you are
not, no, you are not even a good swimmer.” Her
mockery was adorable, but baffling.
“I do not understand you,” he said. Now why in
the whole world of images should she refer to his
swimming? He was a good swimmer. He was
silent for a long time and then again he began to speak
of marriage, urging her to give up her project and
leave Lizzie in her simple peace.
Then, not for the first time, she burst into a strange
perverse intensity that may have been love but might
have been rage, that was toned like scorn and yet
must have been a jest.
“Lovely Gerald, you must never marry, Gerald,
you are too good for marriage. All the best women
are already married, yes, they are—to all the worst
men.” There was an infinite slow caress in her tone
but she went on rapidly. “So I shall never marry
you, how should I marry a kind man, a good man?
I am a barbarian, and want a barbarian lover, to crush
and scarify me, but you are so tender and I am so
crude. When your soft eyes look on me they look
on a volcano.”
“I have never known anything half as lovely,” he
broke in.
Her sudden emotion, though controlled, was unconcealed
and she turned away from him.
“My love is a gentleman, but with him I should
feel like a wild bee in a canary cage.”
“What are you saying!” cried Gerald, putting
his arms around her. “Orianda!”
“O yes, we do love in a mezzotinted kind of way.
You could do anything with me short of making me
marry you, anything, Gerald.” She repeated it
tenderly. “Anything. But short of marrying me I
could make you do nothing.” She turned from him
again for a moment or two. Then she took his arm
and as they walked on she shook it and said chaffingly,
“And what a timid swimmer my Gerald is.”
But he was dead silent. That flux of sensations in
his mind had taken another twist, fiery and exquisite.
Like rich clouds they shaped themselves in the sky of
his mind, fancy’s bright towers with shining pinnacles.
Lizzie welcomed them home. Had they enjoyed
themselves—yes, the day had been fine—and so they
had enjoyed themselves—well, well, that was right.
But throughout the evening Orianda hid herself from
him, so he wandered almost distracted about the
village until in a garth he saw some men struggling
with a cow. Ropes were twisted around its horns and
legs. It was flung to the earth. No countryman ever
speaks to an animal without blaspheming it, although
if he be engaged in some solitary work and inspired
to music, he invariably sings a hymn in a voice that
seems to have some vague association with wood pulp.
So they all blasphemed and shouted. One man, with
sore eyes, dressed in a coat of blue fustian and brown
cord trousers, hung to the end of a rope at an angle of
forty-five degrees. His posture suggested that he
was trying to pull the head off the cow. Two other
men had taken turns of other rope around some stout
posts, and one stood by with a handsaw.
“What are you going to do?” asked Gerald.
“Its harns be bent, yeu see,” said the man with the
saw, “they be going into its head. ’Twill blind or
madden the beast.”
So they blasphemed the cow, and sawed off its
crumpled horns.
When Gerald went back to the inn Orianda was
still absent. He sat down but he could not rest.
He could never rest now until he had won her
promise. That lovely image in the river spat fountains
of scornful fire at him. “Do not leave me,
Gerald,” she had said. He would never leave her,
he would never leave her. But the men talking in the
inn scattered his flying fiery thoughts. They discoursed
with a vacuity whose very endlessness was
transcendent. Good God! Was there ever a living
person more magnificently inane than old Tottel, the
registrar. He would have inspired a stork to protest.
Of course, a man of his age should not have worn a
cap, a small one especially; Tottel himself was small,
and it made him look rumpled. He was bandy: his
intellect was bandy too.
“Yes,” Mr. Tottel was saying, “it’s very interesting
to see interesting things, no matter if it’s man,
woman, or a object. The most interesting man as
I ever met in my life I met on my honeymoon.
Years ago. He made a lifelong study of railways,
that man, knew ’em from Alpha to ... to ... what
is it?”
“Abednego,” said someone.
“Yes, the trunk lines, the fares, the routs, the
junctions of anywheres in England or Scotland or
Ireland or Wales. London, too, the Underground.
I tested him, every station in correct order from
South Kensington to King’s Cross. A strange thing!
Nothing to do with railways in ’imself, it was just his
’obby. Was a Baptist minister, really, but still a most
interesting man.”
Loughlin could stand it no longer, he hurried away
into the garden. He could not find her. Into the
kitchen—she was not there. He sat down excited
and impatient, but he must wait for her, he wanted to
know, to know at once. How divinely she could
swim! What was it he wanted to know? He tried
to read a book there, a ragged dusty volume about the
polar regions. He learned that when a baby whale
is born it weighs at least a ton. How horrible!
He rushed out into the fields full of extravagant
melancholy and stupid distraction. That! All that
was to be her life here! This was your rustic beauty,
idiots and railways, boors who could choke an ox and
chop off its horns—maddening doubts, maddening
doubts—foul-smelling rooms, darkness, indecency.
She held him at arm’s length still, but she was dovelike,
and he was grappled to her soul with hoops of
steel, yes, indeed.
But soon this extravagance was allayed. Dim
loneliness came imperceivably into the fields and he
turned back. The birds piped oddly; some wind
was caressing the higher foliage, turning it all one
way, the way home. Telegraph poles ahead looked
like half-used pencils; the small cross on the steeple
glittered with a sharp and shapely permanence.
When he came to the inn Orianda was gone to
bed.
The next morning an air of uneasy bustle crept
into the house after breakfast, much going in and out
and up and down in restrained perturbation.
Orianda asked him if he could drive the horse and
trap to the station. Yes, he thought he could drive it.
“Lizzie is departing,” she said, “there are her
boxes and things. It is very good of you, Gerald, if
you will be so kind. It is a quiet horse.”
Lizzie, then, had been subdued. She was faintly
affable during the meal, but thereafter she had been
silent; Gerald could not look at her until the last
dreadful moment had come and her things were in
the trap.
“Good-bye, ’Thaniel,” she said to the innkeeper,
and kissed him.
“Good-bye, Orianda,” and she kissed Orianda,
and then climbed into the trap beside Gerald, who
said “Click click,” and away went the nag.
Lizzie did not speak during the drive—perhaps
she was in tears. Gerald would have liked to comfort
her, but the nag was unusually spirited and clacked so
freshly along that he did not dare turn to the sorrowing
woman. They trotted down from the uplands
and into the windy road over the marshes. The
church spire in the town ahead seemed to change its
position with every turn of that twisting route. It
would have a background now of high sour-hued
down, now of dark woodland, anon of nothing but
sky and cloud; in a few miles further there would
be the sea. Hereabout there were no trees, few
houses, the world was vast and bright, the sky vast
and blue. What was prettiest of all was a windmill
turning its fans steadily in the draught from the sea.
When they crossed the river its slaty slow-going flow
was broken into blue waves.
At the station Lizzie dismounted without a word
and Gerald hitched the nag to a tree. A porter took
the luggage and labelled it while Gerald and Lizzie
walked about the platform. A calf with a sack over
its loins, tied by the neck to a pillar, was bellowing
deeply; Lizzie let it suck at her finger for a while, but
at last she resumed her walk and talked with her
companion.
“She’s a fine young thing, clever, his daughter;
I’d do anything for her, but for him I’ve nothing to
say. What can I say? What could I do? I gave
up a great deal for that man, Mr. Loughlin—I’d
better not call you Gerald any more now—a great
deal. I knew he’d had trouble with his wicked wife,
and now to take her back after so many years, eh!
It’s beyond me, I know how he hates her. I gave up
everything for him, I gave him what he can’t give
back to me, and he hates her; you know?”
“No, I did not know. I don’t know anything
of this affair.”
“No, of course, you would not know anything of
this affair,” said Lizzie with a sigh. “I don’t want
to see him again. I’m a fool, but I got my pride, and
that’s something to the good, it’s almost satisfactory,
ain’t it?”
As the train was signalled she left him and went
into the booking office. He marched up and down,
her sad case affecting him with sorrow. The poor
wretch, she had given up so much and could yet smile
at her trouble. He himself had never surrendered to
anything in life—that was what life demanded of you—surrender.
For reward it gave you love, this
swarthy, skin-deep love that exacted remorseless
penalties. What German philosopher was it who
said Woman pays the debt of life not by what she
does, but by what she suffers? The train rushed in.
Gerald busied himself with the luggage, saw that it
was loaded, but did not see its owner. He walked
rapidly along the carriages, but he could not find her.
Well, she was sick of them all, probably hiding from
him. Poor woman. The train moved off, and he
turned away.
But the station yard outside was startlingly empty,
horse and trap were gone. The tree was still there, but
with a man leaning against it, a dirty man with a dirty
pipe and a dirty smell. Had he seen a horse and trap?
“A brown mare?”
“Yes.”
“Trap with yaller wheels?”
“That’s it.”
“O ah, a young ooman druv away in that....”
“A young woman!”
“Ah, two minutes ago.” And he described
Lizzie. “Out yon,” said the dirty man, pointing
with his dirty pipe to the marshes.
Gerald ran until he saw a way off on the level
winding road the trap bowling along at a great pace;
Lizzie was lashing the cob.
“The damned cat!” He puffed large puffs of
exasperation and felt almost sick with rage, but there
was nothing now to be done except walk back to
“The Black Dog,” which he began to do. Rage
gave place to anxiety, fear of some unthinkable
disaster, some tragic horror at the inn.
“What a clumsy fool! All my fault, my own
stupidity!” He groaned when he crossed the bridge
at the half distance. He halted there: “It’s dreadful,
dreadful!” A tremor in his blood, the shame of his
foolishness, the fear of catastrophe, all urged him to
turn back to the station and hasten away from these
miserable complications.
But he did not do so, for across the marshes at the
foot of the uplands he saw the horse and trap coming
back furiously towards him. Orianda was driving it.
“What has happened?” she cried, jumping from
the trap. “O, what fear I was in, what’s happened?”
She put her arms around him tenderly.
“And I was in great fear,” he said with a laugh
of relief. “What has happened?”
“The horse came home, just trotted up to the door
and stood still. Covered with sweat and foam, you
see. The trap was empty. We couldn’t understand
it, anything, unless you had been flung out and were
bleeding on the road somewhere. I turned the thing
back and came on at once.” She was without a hat;
she had been anxious and touched him fondly. “Tell
me what’s the scare?”
He told her all.
“But Lizzie was not in the trap,” Orianda
declared excitedly. “She has not come back. What
does it mean, what does she want to do? Let us find
her. Jump up, Gerald.”
Away they drove again, but nobody had seen anything
of Lizzie. She had gone, vanished, dissolved,
and in that strong warm air her soul might indeed
have been blown to Paradise. But they did not know
how or why. Nobody knew. A vague search was
carried on in the afternoon, guarded though fruitless
enquiries were made, and at last it seemed clear,
tolerably clear, that Lizzie had conquered her mad
impulse or intention or whatever it was, and walked
quietly away across the fields to a station in another
direction.
For a day or two longer time resumed its sweet slow
delightfulness, though its clarity was diminished and
some of its enjoyment dimmed. A village woman
came to assist in the mornings, but Orianda was now
seldom able to leave the inn; she had come home to a
burden, a happy, pleasing burden, that could not often
be laid aside, and therefore a somewhat lonely
Loughlin walked the high and the low of the country
by day and only in the evenings sat in the parlour
with Orianda. Hope too was slipping from his heart
as even the joy was slipping from his days, for the
spirit of vanished Lizzie, defrauded and indicting,
hung in the air of the inn, an implacable obsession, a
triumphant forboding that was proved a prophecy
when some boys fishing in the mill dam hooked dead
Lizzie from the pool under the hornbeam tree.
Then it was that Loughlin’s soul discovered to him
a mass of feelings—fine sympathy, futile sentiment,
a passion for righteousness, morbid regrets—from
which a tragic bias was born. After the dread ordeal
of the inquest, which gave a passive verdict of Found
Drowned, it was not possible for him to stem this
disloyal tendency of his mind. It laid that drowned
figure accusatively at the feet of his beloved girl, and
no argument or sophistry could disperse the venal
savour that clung to the house of “The Black Dog.”
“To analyse or assess a person’s failings or
deficiencies,” he declared to himself, “is useless, not
because such blemishes are immovable, but because
they affect the mass of beholders in divers ways.
Different minds perceive utterly variant figures in the
same being. To Brown Robinson is a hero, to Jones
a snob, to Smith a fool. Who then is right? You are
lucky if you can put your miserable self in relation at
an angle where your own deficiencies are submerged
or minimized, and wise if you can maintain your
vision of that interesting angle.” But embedded in
Loughlin’s modest intellect there was a stratum of
probity that was rock to these sprays of the casuist;
and although Orianda grew more alluring than ever,
he packed his bag, and on a morning she herself
drove him in the gig to the station.
Upon that miserable departure it was fitting that
rain should fall. The station platform was piled
with bushel baskets and empty oil barrels. It rained
with a quiet remorselessness. Neither spoke a word,
no one spoke, no sound was uttered but the faint
flicking of the raindrops. Her kiss to him was long
and sweet, her good-bye almost voiceless.
“You will write?” she whispered.
“Yes, I will write.”
But he does not do so. In London he has not
forgotten, but he cannot endure the thought of that
countryside—to be far from the madding crowd is to
be mad indeed. It is only after some trance of
recollection, when his fond experience is all delicately
and renewingly there, that he wavers; but time and
time again he relinquishes or postpones his return.
And sometimes he thinks he really will write a letter
to his friend who lives in the country.
But he does not do so.
