“I got away in the country sometimes. I just loved that. I think I was really living for it all the time.... I always called myself Rosamund in the country.... I hate men—why are they such beasts to us always?”
“They are beasts,” said George, giving his sex away cheerfully. But he was not thinking of Traill and the Fossetts; he was thinking of himself. “It’s very strange,” he went on; “all the time I thought that the others were just what they seemed to be, and that I alone had a private life of my own which I hid from everybody. And all the time you.... Perhaps Traill is really somebody else sometimes. Even Ransom has his secret—his mother.... What a horrible prig I’ve been!”
“No, no! Oh, but you were!”
“And a coward. I never even tried.... I might have made things much easier for you.”
“You’re not a coward.”
“Yes, I am. I’ve just funked life. It’s too much for me, I’ve said, and I’ve crept into my shell and let it pass over my head.... And I’m still a coward. I can’t face it by myself. Rosamund, will you marry me and help me to be braver?”
“No, no, no,” she cried, and pushed him away and laid her head on her arms and wept.
Saved, George, saved! Now’s your chance. You’ve been rash and impetuous, but she has refused you, and you can withdraw like a gentleman. Just say “I beg your pardon,” and move to Finsbury Park next month ... and go on dreaming about the woman. Not a landlady’s vulgar little daughter, but——
George, George, what are you doing?
He has taken the girl in his arms! He is kissing her eyes and her mouth and her wet cheeks! He is telling her....
I wash my hands of him.
V
John Lobey, landlord of “The Dog and Duck,” is on the track of a mystery. Something to do with they anarchists and such-like. The chief clue lies in the extraordinary fact that on three Sundays in succession Parson has called “George Crosby, bachelor, of this parish,” when everybody knows that there isn’t a Crosby in the parish, and that the gentleman from London, who stayed at his inn for three weeks and comes down Saturdays—for which purpose he leaves his bag and keeps on his room—this gentleman from London, I tell you, is Mr. Geoffrey Carfax. Leastways it was the name he gave.
John Lobey need not puzzle his head over it. Geoffrey Carfax is George Crosby, and he is to be married next Saturday at a neighbouring village church, in which “Gertrude Rosamund Morrison, spinster, of this parish,” has also been called three times. Mr. and Mrs. Crosby will then go up to London and break the news to Mrs. Morrison.
“Not until you are my wife,” said George firmly, “do you go into that boarding-house again.” He was afraid to see her there.
“You dear,” said Rosamund; and she wrote to her mother that the weather was so beautiful, and she was getting so much stronger, and her friend so much wanted her to stay, that ... and so on. It is easy to think of things like that when you are in love.
On the Sunday before the wedding George told her that he had practically arranged about the little house in Bedford Park.
“And I’m getting on at the office rippingly. It’s really quite interesting after all. I shall get another rise in no time.”
“You dear,” said Rosamund again. She pressed his hand tight and....
But really, you know, I think we might leave them now. They have both much to learn; they have many quarrels to go through, many bitter misunderstandings to break down; but they are alive at last. And so we may say good-bye.
The Cherub
By Oliver Onions Army Service Corps
It was provided in the roster of Garrison Duties, Section “Guards and Picquets,” that a sentry should march and return along that portion of the grey wall that lay between the Sowgate Steps and the Tower of the ancient South Bar, a hundred yards away; but fate alone had determined that that sentry should be Private Hey. And, since Private Hey was barely tall enough to look forth from the grey embrasures of the outer wall to the pleasant Maychester Plain where the placid river wound, the same fate had further decreed that his gaze should be directed inwards, over the tall trees below him, to the row of Georgian houses of mellow plum-like brick that stood beyond the narrow back gardens, and past these again to other trees and other houses, to where the minster towers arose in the heart of the ancient city. Only occasionally did a fleeting, pathetic wonder cross Private Key’s mind whether there was an irony in this.
A lithograph of uniforms outside the post office (guards, artillery, and militia, all in one frame) had turned his thoughts to the Army seven years before, and the recruiting-sergeant had clinched the matter. Until then he had been a builder’s clerk. He was just five-and-twenty. He had a pink, round face, wide-open blue eyes, the slightest of blond moustaches, and his soft, slack mouth seemed only to be held closed by his chin-strap. He always looked hot and on the point of perspiration.
Knowing something of the building trade, it had been his amusement, while on his lofty beat, to work out in his mind the interiors of the Georgian houses of which he saw only the outsides. With the chimney-stacks thus and thus, the fireplaces were probably distributed after such and such a fashion; white-sashed windows irregularly placed among the ivy doubtless gave on landings; waste and cistern-pipes were traceable to sources here and there; and Private Hey had his opinion on each of the chimney-cowls that turned this way and that with the wind. He knew the habits, too, of the folk on whose back gardens he looked down. The nurse in native robes reminded him of his five years in India; the old lady in black merino who fed the birds was familiar; and he liked to see the children who spread white cloths on the grass beneath the pear and cherry trees and held their small tea-parties. Sometimes he wondered whether, to them, so far above them, he did not look like one of the scarlet geraniums of their own window-boxes.
It had been during the previous spring that the incoming of a new tenant to the end house of the row had interested him mildly. He had watched the white-jacketed house-painters at work, and had reflected that the small window they were covering with a coloured transparency was probably that of a bathroom. Then the new tenants had moved in, and one day a small, plump woman’s figure had appeared shaking a table-cloth at the top of the narrow garden. The sentry had stopped suddenly in his beat, and broken into the sweat he always seemed on the point of. Even at that distance he had recognised her; and when, after some minutes, he had begun to think again, the only idea that had come to him was, why, during the seven years in which he had not ceased to think of Mollie Westwood, had he never once pictured her in a blue gown?
But