Across the front door were nailed deal props, originally, perhaps, for the purpose of keeping it barred, and useful for holding it in its place. The Major and Gertie kept watch on the road while Frank pushed open the crazy little gate and went round to the back. A minute later he called to them softly.
He had wrenched open the back door, and within in the darkness they could make out a little kitchen, stripped of everything--table, furniture, and even the range itself. The Major kicked something presently in the gloom, swore softly, and announced he had found a kettle. They decided that all this would do very well.
Tramps do not demand very much, and these were completely contented when they had made a small fire, damped down with a turf to prevent it smoking, had boiled a little water, stewed some tea, and eaten what they had. Even this was not luxurious. The Major produced the heel of a cheese and two crushed-looking bananas, and Frank a half-eaten tin of sardines and a small, stale loaf. The Major announced presently that he would make a savory; and, indeed, with cheese melted on to the bread, and sardines on the top, he did very well. Gertie moved silently about; and Frank, in the intervals of rather abrupt conversation with the Major, found his eyes following her as she spread out their small possessions, vanished up the stairs and reappeared. Certainly she was very like Jenny, even in odd little details--the line of her eyebrows, the angle of her chin and so forth--perhaps more in these details than in anything else. He began to wonder a little about her--to imagine her past, to forecast her future. It seemed all rather sordid. She disappeared finally without a word: he heard her steps overhead, and then silence.
Then he had to attend to the Major a little more.
"It was easy enough to tell you," said that gentleman.
"How?"
"Oh, well, if nothing else, your clothes."
"Aren"t they shabby enough?"
The Major eyed him with half-closed lids, by the light of the single candle-end, stuck in its own wax on the mantelshelf.
"They"re shabby enough, but they"re the wrong sort. There"s the cut, first--though that doesn"t settle it. But these are gray flannel trousers, for one thing, and then the coat"s not stout enough."
"They might have been given me," said Frank, smiling.
"They fit you too well for that."
"I"ll change them when I get a chance," observed Frank.
"It would be as well," a.s.sented the Major.
Somehow or another the sense of sordidness, which presently began to affect Frank so profoundly, descended on him for the first time that night. He had managed, by his very solitariness. .h.i.therto, to escape it so far. It had been possible to keep up a kind of pose so far; to imagine the adventure in the light of a very much prolonged and very realistic picnic. But with this other man the thing became impossible.
It was tolerable to wash one"s own socks; it was not so tolerable to see another man"s socks hung up on the peeling mantelpiece a foot away from his own head, and to see two dirty ankles, not his own, emerging from crazy boots.
The Major, too, presently, when he grew a trifle maudlin over his own sorrows, began to call him "Frankie," and "my boy," and somehow it mattered, from a man with the Major"s obvious record. Frank pulled himself up only just in time to prevent a retort when it first happened, but it was not the slightest use to be resentful. The thing had to be borne. And it became easier when it occurred to him to regard the Major as a study; it was even interesting to hear him give himself away, yet all with a pompous appearance of self-respect, and to recount his first meeting with Gertie, now asleep upstairs.
The man was, in fact, exactly what Frank, in his prosperous days, would have labeled "Bounder." He had a number of meaningless little mannerisms--a way of pa.s.sing his hand over his mustache, a trick of bringing a look of veiled insolence into his eyes; there were subjects he could not keep away from--among them Harrow School, the Universities (which he called "Varsity), the regiment he had belonged to, and a certain type of adventure connected with women and champagne. And underneath the whole crust of what the Major took to be breeding, there was a piteous revelation of a feeble, vindictive, and rather nasty character. It became more and more evident that the cheating incident--or, rather, the accusation, as he persisted in calling it--was merely the last straw in his fall, and that the whole thing had been the result of a crumbly unprincipled kind of will underneath, rather than of any particular strain of vice. He appeared, even now, to think that his traveling about with a woman who was not his wife was a sort of remnant of fallen splendor--as a man might keep a couple of silver spoons out of the ruin of his house.
"I recommend you to pick up with one," remarked the Major. "There are plenty to be had, if you go about it the right way."
"Thanks," said Frank, "but it"s not my line."
(IV)
The morning, too, was a little trying.
Frank had pa.s.sed a tolerable night. The Major had retired upstairs about ten o"clock, taking his socks with him, presumably to sleep in them, and Frank had heard him creaking about upstairs for a minute or two; there had followed two clumps as the boots were thrown off; a board suddenly spoke loudly; there was a little talking--obviously the Major had awakened Gertie in order to make a remark or two--and then silence.
Frank had not slept for half an hour; he was thinking, with some depression, of the dreary affair into which he had been initiated, of the Major, and of Gertie, for whom he was beginning to be sorry. He did not suppose that the man actually bullied her; probably he had done this sufficiently for the present--she was certainly very quiet and subdued--or perhaps she really admired him, and thought it rather magnificent to travel about with an ex-officer. Anyhow, it was rather deplorable....
When he awoke next morning, the depression was on him still; and it was not lifted by the apparition of Gertie on which he opened his eyes from his corner, in an amazingly dirty petticoat, bare-armed, with her hair in a thick untidy pig-tail, trying to blow the fire into warmth again.
Frank jumped up--he was in his trousers and shirt.
"Let me do that," he said.
"I"ll do it," said Gertie pa.s.sionlessly.
The Major came down ten minutes later, considerably the worse for his night"s rest. Yesterday he had had a day"s beard on him; to-day he had two, and there was a silvery sort of growth in the stubble that made it look wet. His eyes, too, were red and sunken, and he began almost instantly to talk about a drink. Frank stood it for a few minutes, then he understood and capitulated.
"I"ll stand you one," he said, "if you"ll get me two packets of Cinderellas."
"What"s the good of that?" said the Major. "Pubs aren"t open yet. It"s only just gone five."
"You"ll have to wait, then," said Frank shortly.
Presently the Major did begin to bully Gertie. He asked her what the devil was the good of her if she couldn"t make a fire burn better than that. He elbowed her out of the way and set to work at it himself. She said nothing at all. Yet there was not the faintest use in Frank"s interfering, and, indeed, there was nothing to interfere in.
Food, too, this morning, seemed disgusting; and again Frank learned the difference between a kind of game played by oneself and a reality in which two others joined. There had been something almost pleasing about unrolling the food wrapped up at supper on the previous night, and eating it, with or without cooking, all alone; but there was something astonishingly unpleasant in observing sardines that were now common property lying in greasy newspaper, a lump of bread from which their hands tore pieces, and a tin bowl of warmish cocoa from which all must drink. This last detail was a contribution on the part of Major and Mrs.
Trustcott, and it would have been ungracious to refuse. The Major, too, was sullen and resentful this morning, and growled at Gertie more than once.
Even the weather seemed unpropitious as they set out together again soon after six. Rain had fallen in the night, yet not all the rain that there was overhead. There were still clouds hanging, mixed with the smoke from the chimneys; the hedges seemed dulled and black in spite of their green; the cinder path they walked on was depressing, the rain-fed road even more so. They pa.s.sed a dozen men on their way to the pits, who made remarks on the three, and retaliation was out of the question.
It was very disconcerting to Frank to find the difference that his new circ.u.mstances made; and yet he did not seriously consider changing them.
It seemed to him, somehow or other, in that strange fashion in which such feelings come, that the whole matter was pre-arranged, and that the company in which he found himself was as inevitably his--at least for the present--as the family to a child born into it. And there was, of course, too, a certain element of relief in feeling himself no longer completely alone; and there was also, as Frank said later, a curious sense of attraction towards, and pity for, Gertie that held him there.
At the first public-house that was open the Major stopped.
"I"ll get your Cinderellas now, if you like," he said.
This had not been Frank"s idea, but he hardly hesitated.
"All right," he said. "Here"s fourpence."
The Major vanished through the swing-doors as a miner came out, and a gush of sweet and sickly scent--beer, spirits, tobacco--poured upon the fresh air. And there was a vision of a sawdusted floor and spittoons within.
Frank looked at Gertie, who had stopped like a patient donkey, and, like a prudent one, had let her bundle instantly down beside the Major"s.
"Like one, too?" he said.
She shook her head.