The solicitor"s son agreed it was indubitable.
"Of course if I had the cash to hang on in Harley Street for ten years as a specialist, it would be another matter. But I can"t, so there it is."
Even this fellow had his dreams, Guy thought; even he would make acquaintance with thwarted ambitions.
"Been doing anything with a rod lately?" asked Willsher, whose pastime, when he could not be standing in action on the river"s bank, was always to steer a conversation in the direction of anglers" gossip.
"No, not lately," said Guy. "Though I knocked down a lot of apples with one last month."
"Ha-ha! that"s good," Brydone e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "That"s very good, Hazlewood.
That"s good, isn"t it, Charlie?"
"Awfully good," agreed the angler.
Their appreciation seemed perfectly genuine, and Guy was touched by the readiness of them to be entertained by his lame wit.
"I mustn"t forget to tell the old man that," Brydone chuckled. "He"s always digging at me over the fish. Done anything with a rod lately? I knocked down a lot of apples last month. Your governor will like that, Charlie!"
Guy heard the clink of a tray deposited cautiously on the floor of the pa.s.sage outside. He allowed Miss Peasey time to retreat before he opened the door, because it was one of the clauses in her charter that she was never, as a lady-housekeeper, to be asked to bring a tray into a room when anyone but Guy was present. He hoped that after they had drunk, his visitors would depart; but alas, the unintended charm of his conversation seemed likely to prolong their stay.
"Rabelais," Brydone read slowly as he saw the volumes on the shelves.
"That"s a bit thick, isn"t it?"
"In quant.i.ty or quality, do you mean?" asked Guy.
"I"ve heard that"s the thickest book ever written," said Brydone.
"Do you read old French easily?" asked Guy.
"Oh, it"s in old French, is it?" said Brydone in a disappointed voice.
"That would biff me."
A silence fell upon the room, a silence that seemed to symbolize the "biffing" of the doctor"s son by old French. Willsher took the opportunity to steer the conversation back to fish, and ten o"clock struck in the middle of an argument between him and his friend over the merits of two artificial flies. Guy must be on the Rectory lawn by eleven o"clock, and he began to be anxious, so animated was the discussion, about the departure of these well-meaning intruders. He did not want to plunge straight from their company into the glorious darkness that would hold Pauline; and he eyed the volume of Keats lying face downward on the table, hoping he would be allowed to come back to the knights and ladies praying in their dumb oratories, while he thought with a thrill of the moment when he should be able to read:
_And they are gone; ay, ages long ago_ _These lovers fled away into the storm._
"If you can"t get a chub any other way, you can sometimes get him with a bit of bacon," Willsher was saying. "And I know a fellow who caught one of those woppers under Marston"s Mill with a cherry. Fact, I a.s.sure you."
"I know a man at Oldbridge, who caught a four pounder with a b.u.mble-bee."
"I caught a six pounder at Oxford with a mouse"s head myself," Guy declared.
The friends looked at him in the admiration and envy with which anglers welcome a pleasant companionable sort of a lie. It was a bad move, for it seemed as if by that lie he had drawn closer the bonds of sympathy between himself and his guests. They visibly warmed to his company, for Brydone at once invited himself to another "tot" and was obviously settling down to a compet.i.tive talk about big fish; while Willsher"s first shyness turned to familiarity, so completely indeed that he asked if Guy would mind his moving the furniture in order to try to explain to that fathead Brydone the exact promontory of the Greenrush where he had caught thirty trout in an hour when the mayfly was up two years ago.
Half-past-ten struck from the church tower, and Guy became desperate.
There was nothing he hated so much as asking people to go, which was one reason why he always discouraged them at the beginning; but it really seemed as if he must bring himself to the point of asking Brydone and Willsher to leave him to his work. He decided to allow them until a quarter-to-eleven. The minutes dragged along, and when the quarter sounded Guy said he was sorry but that he was very much afraid he would have to work now.
"Right O," said Brydone. "We"ll tootle off." But it took ten minutes to get them out of the house, and when at last they disappeared into the mazy garden Guy was in a fume of anxiety about his tryst. He could not now go round by Rectory Lane, as he had intended at first. No doubt Brydone and Willsher would stay talking half-an-hour on the bridge, for the rain had stopped and they had given the impression of having the night before them. In fact Brydone had once definitely announced that the night was still young. Yet in a way the fact of their nearness and of his having to avoid them added a zest to the adventure.
How dark it was and how heavily the trees dripped in the orchard. Guy pulled the canoe from the shed and dragged it squeaking over the wet gra.s.s: not even he in the exaltation of the moment was going to swim the h.e.l.lespont.
When he was in the canoe and driving it with silent strokes along the straight black stream; when the lantern was put out and the darkness was at first so thick that like the water it seemed to resist the sweep of his paddle, Guy could no longer imagine that Pauline would venture out.
He became oppressed by the impenetrable and humid air, and he began to long for rain to fall as if it would rea.s.sure him that nature in such an annihilation of form was still alive. Now he had swung past the overhanging willows of the churchyard; his eyes grown accustomed to the darkness discovered against a vague sky the vague bulk of the church, and in a minute or two he could be sure that he was come to the Rectory paddock. He was wet to the knees and his feet, sagging in the gra.s.s, seemed to make a most prodigious noise with their gurgling.
Guy was too early when he crept over the lawn, for there were still lights in all the upper windows, and he withdrew to the plantation, where he waited in rapt patience while the branches dripped and pattered, dripped and pattered ceaselessly. One by one the lights had faded out, but still he must not signal to Pauline. How should he after all make known to her his presence on that dark lawn? Scarcely would she perceive from her window his shadowy form. He must not even whisper; he must not strike a match. Suddenly a light crossed his vision and he started violently before he realized that it was only a glow-worm moving with laborious progress along the damp edge of the lawn. Black indeed was the hour when a glow-worm belated on this drear night of the year"s decline could so alarm him. For a while he watched the creeping phosph.o.r.escence and wondered at it in kindly fellowship, thinking how like it was to a human lover, so small and solitary in this gigantic gloom. Then he began to pick it up and, as it moved across his hand and gave it with the wan fire a ghostly semblance, he resolved to signal with this lamp to Pauline.
Midnight crashed its tale from the belfry, and nowhere in the long house was there any light. There was nothing now in the world but himself and this glow-worm wandering across his hand. He moved nearer to the house and stood beneath Pauline"s window; surely she was leaning out: surely that was her shadow tremulous on the insp.i.s.sate air. Guy waved, and the pale light moving to and fro seemed to exact an answer, for something fell at his feet and by the glow-worm"s melancholy radiance he read "_now_" on a piece of paper. Gratefully he set the insect down to vanish upon its own amorous path into the murk. Not a tree quivered, not a raindrop slipped from a blade of gra.s.s but Guy held out his arms to clasp his long awaited Pauline. The "_now_" prolonged its duration into hours, it seemed; and then when she did come she was in his arms before he knew by her step or by the rustle of her dress that she was coming.
She was in his arms as though like a moth she had floated upon a flower.
Their good-night was kissed in a moment, and she was gone like a moth that cannot stay upon the flower it visits.
Guy waited until he thought he saw her leaning from her window once more. Then he drew close to the wall of the house and strained his eyes to catch the farewell of her hand. As he looked up, the rain began to fall again; and in an ecstasy he glided back to Plashers Mead, adoring the drench of his clothes and the soft sighing of the rain.
ANOTHER WINTER
_December_
In the first elation of having been able to prove to Guy how exclusively she loved him, Pauline had no misgivings about the effect upon herself of that dark descent into the garden. It was only when Guy, urging the success of what almost seemed disturbingly to state itself as an experiment, begged her to go farther and take the negligible risk of coming out with him on the river at night, that she began to doubt if she had acted well in yielding that first small favour. The problem, that she must leave herself to determine without a hint of its existence to anyone outside, stuck unresolved at the back of her conscience, whence in moments of depression it would, as it were, leap forth to a.s.sail her peace of mind. She was positive, however, that the precedent had been unwise from whatever point of view regarded, and for a while she resisted earnestly the arguments Guy evoked about the privileges conferred on lovers by the customary judgment of the world. Nevertheless in the end she did surrender anew to his persistence, and on two nights of dim December moonlight she escaped from the house and floated with him unhappily upon the dark stream, turning pale at every lean branch that stretched out from the bank, at every shadow, and at every sound of distant dogs" barking.
Guy would not understand the falseness of this pleasure and, treating with scorn her alarm, he used to invent excuses by which she would be able to account for the emptiness of the room in the event of her absence being discovered. The mere prospect of such deceit distressed Pauline, and when she realized that even already by doing what she had done deceit had been set on foot, she told him she could not bear the self-reproach which followed. It was true, as she admitted, that there was really nothing to regret except the unhappiness the discovery of her action would bring to her family, but of course the chief effect of this was that Guy became even more jealous of her sisters" influence. The disaccord between him and them was making visible progress, and much of love"s joy was being swallowed up in the sadness this brought to her.
She wished now that she had said nothing about the rebuke she had earned for that unfortunate afternoon in the Abbey. Margaret and Monica had both tried hard ever since to atone for the part they played, and having forgiven them and accepted the justice of their point of view, Pauline was distressed that Guy should treat them now practically as avowed enemies. She might have known that happiness such as hers could not last, and she reproached herself for the many times she had triumphed in the thought of the superiority of their love to any other she had witnessed. She deserved this anxiety and this doubt as a punishment for the way in which she had often scoffed at the dulness of other people who were in love. Marriage, which at first had been only a delightful dream the remoteness of which did not matter, was now appearing the only remedy for the ills that were gathering round Guy and her. As soon as she had set her heart upon this panacea she began to watch Guy"s work from the point of view of its subservience to that end. She was anxious that he should work particularly hard and she became very sensitive to any implication of laziness in the casual opinion that Margaret or Monica would sometimes express. Guy was obviously encouraged by the interest she took, and for a while in the new preoccupation of working together as it were for a common aim the strain of their restricted converse was allayed.
One day early in December Guy announced that really he thought he had now enough poems to make a volume, news which roused Pauline to the greatest excitement and which on the same evening she triumphantly announced to her family at dinner.
"My dears, his book is finished! And, Father, he has translated some poems of that man--that Latin creature you gave him on his birthday."
"Propertius is difficult," said the Rector. "Very difficult."
"Oh, but I"m so glad he"s difficult, because that will make it all the more valuable if Guy ... or won"t it? Oh, don"t let me talk nonsense: but really, darlings, aren"t you all glad that his book is finished?"
"We"ll drink the poet"s health," said the Rector.
"Oh, Father, I must kiss you ... aren"t you pleased Guy appreciated your present?"
"Now, Pauline, you"re sweeping your napkin down on the floor...."
"Oh, but Mother, I must kiss Francis for being so sweet."
"He promised to show me the poems," said Margaret. "But Guy doesn"t like me any more."
"Oh, yes, Margaret, he does. Oh, Margaret, he really does. And if you say that, I shall have to break a secret. He"s written two poems about you."