The Hurly Burly and Other Stories Page 2

  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.

  II

  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 c
asually 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.