"She"s taken rooms in Putney."
"Alone?" I asked, with a quick glance at Kitty.
"Oh yes!... Until June or July, that is----"
"It is then that she expects----"
"Yes.... And I thought, Jeff, that perhaps next Sat.u.r.day--we shall be out that way----"
We had arranged a little excursion for the following Sat.u.r.day, the four of us--Evie and Archie, and Kitty and myself. We were to wander on Wimbledon Common.
"I never really knew her well, Jeff, understood her, I mean," she went on, "but after all I did see a good deal of her. It"s horrible, when I remember the things she used to say.... And--and--you"ve made such a difference to me, darling--I wasn"t going--to be married--before.... I should like to go, Jeff--just once," she begged.
"You wouldn"t commit yourself to anything?"
"Oh no!"
"Does Evie want to go too?" I asked.
"No. She says she couldn"t bear it. She cried half last night as it is."
"Then you"d call on your way next Sat.u.r.day, and meet the three of us later?"
"Yes."
"Very well," I concluded. "You"d better go."
She threw her arms impulsively about my neck.
Then a change came over her. I think the change began with the failure of the supply of gas from the penny-in-the-slot meter. She had arranged for her little party a pink tissue-paper shade about her milky globe, an idea she had borrowed from Woburn Place; and slowly its colour faded. I had several pennies in my pocket. Quickly I felt for them.
But she moved closer to me. I was still on my knees by her deck-chair.
"Don"t bother about it--just for once, Jeff," she murmured.
She could do it with impunity now. After what had pa.s.sed our situation could hardly be commonplace, and our nearness was as little compromising as nearness ever can be. She luxuriated in her little perilous letting-go--could toy with, and yet be immune from, a danger.
Slowly the gas expired, and the firelight glowed on the blue and white check tablecloth and the disarray of tea-things upon it. On the back wall of the restaurant yard was a square of orange light which the shadow of a waiter"s head crossed from time to time. I don"t know that with some men--Mackie, for instance--her position would have been all she supposed it to be, but, poor heart, she had had little enough experience from which to surmise that. And I myself could hardly be said to be there at all. She lay in my arms; and in whatever false sweet fancies she lay endrowsed she was not alone. I had my torturing vision too. It was neither of her nor of Louie Causton, that vision. I was trying to persuade myself that she was another than Kitty Windus.
VI
Of our visit to Wimbledon on the following Sat.u.r.day I intend to say as little as may be. When you have read it you will not, I know, ask my reason.
Archie did not appear. This time he had cause enough. The wire which was handed to me at Rixon Tebb & Masters" a little before Sat.u.r.day midday (Polwhele brought it to me with a look that said plainly, "What next?") announced that his father had died during the night, and he had despatched it from Victoria Station on his way down to Guildford.
Instantly my heart leaped.
Kitty was going to see Miss Causton. If, this new tidings notwithstanding, Evie would still keep to the engagement, I should have an hour with her alone.
I persuaded Evie to come. At first she obstinately refused, but I had the support of Miss Angela, to whom I privately whispered the desirability of "taking her mind off it." We left Woburn Place, the two of us, called for Kitty, and sought the Putney "bus. Kitty left us at the corner of a street off the New King"s Road, and Evie and I pa.s.sed on to the bridge.
That was about four o"clock, and Kitty was to rejoin us near the Windmill at an hour that would depend upon the length of her stay with Miss Causton. She expected to be at the Windmill by five.
But at five there was no sign of her, nor had she appeared by half-past five. At a little before six I said to Evie, "She"ll know we"ve gone on to the nearest place to tea, and will follow us. Let"s go----"
Not far from the Windmill, on the Wimbledon side, there is a sort of small hamlet, with cottages and alleys and split-oak palings, and a refreshment house at the end of a garden. There Evie and I had tea, and there we sat after tea, waiting for Kitty. I talked of this and that, all very much away from the two subjects uppermost in her heart, and by half-past six I had given Kitty up.
"She"s missed us," I said. "We may happen to run across her, but it"s no good waiting here. Shall we take a turn before we go back?"
We left the refreshment-room, and walked among the gorse and birches in the direction of Queen"s Mere.
It was a green and amber evening, with the shadows already deepening over Coombe Woods and the calling of homing rooks in the air. Here and there in the glades family parties still continued to play games with a ball that was quickly becoming difficult to see, and lovers appeared among the coppices. The blackthorn was over, and the may hung in sprays of delicate drooping buds; and in the south-west hung the pale sickle of the new moon. Evie and I, saying little, dropped down a steep over-grown alley that led to the mere, and it was in a sandy bottom at the foot of the alley that I heard a distant rasping call. Another call followed it, and then a throaty thrilling, and then another short series of acrid and moving calls.
It was a nightingale.
By the time we had reached the motionless amber-green water it had broken into full song.
I cannot tell--hitherto I have not attempted to tell--the mystery of that eve and of the song with which it rang. I cannot speak--nor would I if I could--of the responses that eve and that song called up in my heart. It was, I think, for both of us as if that bird"s voice cried aloud all that we had left unuttered during the past few hours. Even Louie Causton, even Archie"s father, had their part in it. It was as if that voice spoke of the feeble and infinitely moving wonder of birth--of the impinging of that relentless shadow that closes all--and of the griefs and joys and smarts and healings again of the brief pa.s.sage from that unknowing to this forgetting again. All this crowded upon me in that exquisite agony of notes. And more came, until I could hardly endure it. There was no poignancy, no utter melting and surrender, that those importunate wellings did not give to the falling night. The unattainable greatness of Life and our own puny reachings forth for that greatness--Life"s glory and the indignities of the miserable livers of it--Life"s majesty and the nosings and burrowings of the fallen heirs to that majesty--all these shortcomings were reconciled in the song; and what man would be, that for an hour he was. I fail in expressing this; Evie, I am sure, did not seek to express it; but in that loud and lost and anguished outpouring, raptures and torments were folded together as in an Amen.... For one moment only I shuddered; I had remembered that but for an accident I might have stood by that water, listening to that song, with Kitty Windus, but the physical convulsion pa.s.sed, and the bird sang on.
I had not looked at Evie. I do not think she knew she had drawn a little closer to me. Other listeners had been attracted by the melody, but we stood in a shadow, near a rill that fell into the mere. The water was nacre; the moon"s sickle in it was a thin blade of amethyst; and I thrilled unspeakably as the bird"s song changed without warning to long, low, caressing notes that drew the heart out of me as the nectar-bag of a floret is drawn from a flower. I heard Evie"s slow sob.
Oh, might I but have crushed out that other nectar, to trans.m.u.te into honey of our own!
Suddenly Evie flung herself on my breast, sobbing and strangling. Her fingers worked at the lapel of my collar; by bending my head I could have touched her small white knuckles with my lips. I was conscious that in my efforts not to do this I bared my teeth like a dog, but I remembered in time that to s.n.a.t.c.h was to lose. It was not my bosom against which her bosom heaved--it was the nearest sentient resting-place on which she could lay it. Her unhappiness and her happiness, her dream and her disillusion, her knowledge and her already failing hopes, rushed together in her sobs. Her love of a wastrel and her love for all he was a wastrel, and that hidden and sacred nook from which Louie Causton had ruthlessly ripped the curtain--for the pure strangeness of these things her tears gushed forth. I felt the long heave of her body.
"Come, come, my dear!" I said, with an infinitude of tender encouragement, close to her ear.
"Oh--oh--oh!" she sobbed.
"Dear, dear girl!" I murmured, pa.s.sing my arm about her to support her.
But at that moment I could no more have said or done more than this than I could have sued for a favour by the bier of a scarce-cold lover.
"Hush, poor child!" I whispered, patting her shoulder. "Come, let"s go.
Let"s leave that dreadful bird."
"Just a--mi--mi--minute----" she quavered. "I--I--love it--and I can"t bear it----"
Even so did I love, and yet could scarce bear to hold the tender form in my arms.
Presently we left the mere, mounted the dark lane, and began to cross the common. Her hand was now on my sleeve, and it did not leave it again. Once her fingers made an impulsive little pressure on it, which, I cried sternly to my heart, I must not regard. But G.o.d knows the war there was between the sweetness of it and my fort.i.tude.
"Jeff," she said more quietly by-and-by, using that name for the first time. "I--I couldn"t have borne it if it hadn"t been for you. It was too--too----"
"Never mind, dear," I soothed her. "Let"s walk a little more quickly--your aunt will be wondering what"s become of you----"
She laughed tremulously. "Kitty will be wondering what"s become of _you_," she said. Then she added timidly, "She"s a lucky girl!"