Story 1
(i) The Darnells
Edward Darnell awoke from a dream of an ancient wood, and of a clear well rising into grey film and vapour beneath a misty, glimmering heat; and as his eyes opened he saw the sunlight bright in the room, sparkling on the varnish of the new furniture. He turned and found his wife’s place vacant, and with some confusion and wonder of the dream still lingering in his mind, he rose also, and began hurriedly to set about his dressing, for he had overslept a little, and the ‘bus passed the corner at 9.15. He was a tall, thin man, dark-haired and dark-eyed, and in spite of the routine of the City, the counting of coupons, and all the mechanical drudgery that had lasted for ten years, there still remained about him the curious hint of a wild grace, as if he had been born a creature of the antique wood, and had seen the fountain rising from the green moss and the grey rocks.
The breakfast was laid in the room on the ground floor, the back room with the French windows looking on the garden, and before he sat down to his fried bacon he kissed his wife seriously and dutifully. She had brown hair and brown eyes, and though her lovely face was grave and quiet, one would have said that she might have awaited her husband under the old trees, and bathed in the pool hollowed out of the rocks. They had a good deal to talk over while the coffee was poured out and the bacon eaten, and Darnell’s egg brought in by the stupid, staring servant-girl of the dusty face. They had been married for a year, and they had got on excellently, rarely sitting silent for more than an hour, but for the past few weeks Aunt Marian’s present had afforded a subject for conversation which seemed inexhaustible. Mrs. Darnell had been Miss Mary Reynolds, the daughter of an auctioneer and estate agent in Notting Hill, and Aunt Marian was her mother’s sister, who was supposed rather to have lowered herself by marrying a coal merchant, in a small way, at Turnham Green. Marian had felt the family attitude a good deal, and the Reynoldses were sorry for many things that had been said, when the coal merchant saved money and took up land on building leases in the neighbourhood of Crouch End, greatly to his advantage, as it appeared. Nobody had thought that Nixon could ever do very much; but he and his wife had been living for years in a beautiful house at Barnet, with bow-windows, shrubs, and a paddock, and the two families saw but little of each other, for Mr. Reynolds was not very prosperous. Of course, Aunt Marian and her husband had been asked to Mary’s wedding, but they had sent excuses with a nice little set of silver apostle spoons, and it was feared that nothing more was to be looked for. However, on Mary’s birthday her aunt had written a most affectionate letter, enclosing a cheque for a hundred pounds from ‘Robert’ and herself, and ever since the receipt of the money the Darnells had discussed the question of its judicious disposal. Mrs. Darnell had wished to invest the whole sum in Government securities, but Mr. Darnell had pointed out that the rate of interest was absurdly low, and after a good deal of talk he had persuaded his wife to put ninety pounds of the money in a safe mine, which was paying five per cent. This was very well, but the remaining ten pounds, which Mrs. Darnell had insisted on reserving, gave rise to legends and discourses as interminable as the disputes of the schools.
At first Mr. Darnell had proposed that they should furnish the ‘spare’ room. There were four bedrooms in the house: their own room, the small one for the servant, and two others overlooking the garden, one of which had been used for storing boxes, ends of rope, and odd numbers of ‘Quiet Days’ and ‘Sunday Evenings,’ besides some worn suits belonging to Mr. Darnell which had been carefully wrapped up and laid by, as he scarcely knew what to do with them. The other room was frankly waste and vacant, and one Saturday afternoon, as he was coming home in the ‘bus, and while he revolved that difficult question of the ten pounds, the unseemly emptiness of the spare room suddenly came into his mind, and he glowed with the idea that now, thanks to Aunt Marian, it could be furnished. He was busied with this delightful thought all the way home, but when he let himself in, he said nothing to his wife, since he felt that his idea must be matured. He told Mrs. Darnell that, having important business, he was obliged to go out again directly, but that he should be back without fail for tea at half-past six; and Mary, on her side, was not sorry to be alone, as she was a little behindhand with the household books. The fact was, that Darnell, full of the design of furnishing the spare bedroom, wished to consult his friend Wilson, who lived at Fulham, and had often given him judicious advice as to the laying out of money to the very best advantage. Wilson was connected with the Bordeaux wine trade, and Darnell’s only anxiety was lest he should not be at home.
However, it was all right; Darnell took a tram along the Goldhawk Road, and walked the rest of the way, and was delighted to see Wilson in the front garden of his house, busy amongst his flower-beds.
‘Haven’t seen you for an age,’ he said cheerily, when he heard Darnell’s hand on the gate; ‘come in. Oh, I forgot,’ he added, as Darnell still fumbled with the handle, and vainly attempted to enter. ‘Of course you can’t get in; I haven’t shown it you.’
It was a hot day in June, and Wilson appeared in a costume which he had put on in haste as soon as he arrived from the City. He wore a straw hat with a neat pugaree protecting the back of his neck, and his dress was a Norfolk jacket and knickers in heather mixture.
‘See,’ he said, as he let Darnell in; ‘see the dodge. You don’t turn the handle at all. First of all push hard, and then pull. It’s a trick of my own, and I shall have it patented. You see, it keeps undesirable characters at a distance-such a great thing in the suburbs. I feel I can leave Mrs. Wilson alone now; and, formerly, you have no idea how she used to be pestered.’
‘But how about visitors?’ said Darnell. ‘How do they get in?’
‘Oh, we put them up to it. Besides,’ he saidvaguely, ‘there is sure to be somebody looking out. Mrs. Wilson is nearly always at the window. She’s out now; gone to call on some friends. The Bennetts’ At Home day, I think it is. This is the first Saturday, isn’t it? You know J. W. Bennett, don’t you? Ah, he’s in the House; doing very well, I believe. He put me on to a very good thing the other day.’
‘But, I say,’ said Wilson, as they turned and strolled towards the front door, ‘what do you wear those black things for? You look hot. Look at me. Well, I’ve been gardening, you know, but I feel as cool as a cucumber. I dare say you don’t know where to get these things? Very few men do. Where do you suppose I got them?’
‘In the West End, I suppose,’ said Darnell, wishing to be polite.
‘Yes, that’s what everybody says. And it is a good cut. Well, I’ll tell you, but you needn’t pass it on to everybody. I got the tip from Jameson-you know him, “Jim-Jams,” in the China trade, 39 Eastbrook-and he said he didn’t want everybody in the City to know about it. But just go to Jennings, in Old Wall, and mention my name, and you’ll be all right. And what do you think they cost?’
‘I haven’t a notion,’ said Darnell, who had never bought such a suit in his life.
‘Well, have a guess.’
Darnell regarded Wilson gravely.
The jacket hung about his body like a sack, the knickerbockers drooped lamentably over his calves, and in prominent positions the bloom of the heather seemed about to fade and disappear.
‘Three pounds, I suppose, at least,’ he said at length.
‘Well, I asked Dench, in our place, the other day, and he guessed four ten, and his father’s got something to do with a big business in Conduit Street. But I only gave thirty-five and six. To measure? Of course; look at the cut, man.’
Darnell was astonished at so low a price.
‘And, by the way,’ Wilson went on, pointing to his new brown boots, ‘you know where to go for shoe-leather? Oh, I thought everybody was up to that! There’s only one place. “Mr. Bill,” in Gunning Street,-nine and six.’
They were walking round and round the garden, and Wilson pointed out the flowers in the beds and borders. There were hardly any blossoms, but everything was neatly arranged.
‘Here are the tuberous-rooted Glasgownias,’ he said, showing a rigid row of stunted plants; ‘those are Squintaceæ; this is a new introduction, Moldavia Semperflorida Andersonii; and this is Prattsia.’
‘When do they come out?’ said Darnell.
‘Most of them in the end of August or beginning of September,’ said Wilson briefly. He was slightly annoyed with himself for having talked so much about his plants, since he saw that Darnell cared nothing for flowers; and, indeed, the visitor could hardly dissemble vague recollections that came to him; thoughts of an old, wild garden, full of odours, beneath grey walls, of the fragrance of the meadowsweet beside the brook.
‘I wanted to consult you about some furniture,’ Darnell said at last. ‘You know we’ve got a spare room, and I’m thinking of putting a few things into it. I haven’t exactly made up my mind, but I thought you might advise me.’
‘Come into my den,’ said Wilson. ‘No; this way, by the back’; and he showed Darnell another ingenious arrangement at the side door whereby a violent high-toned bell was set pealing in the house if one did but touch the latch. Indeed, Wilson handled it so briskly that the bell rang a wild alarm, and the servant, who was trying on her mistress’s things in the bedroom, jumped madly to the window and then danced a hysteric dance. There was plaster found on the drawing-room table on Sunday afternoon, and Wilson wrote a letter to the ‘Fulham Chronicle,’ ascribing the phenomenon ‘to some disturbance of a seismic nature.’
For the moment he knew nothing of the great results of his contrivance, and solemnly led the way towards the back of the house. Here there was a patch of turf, beginning to look a little brown, with a background of shrubs. In the middle of the turf, a boy of nine or ten was standing all alone, with something of an air.
‘The eldest,’ said Wilson. ‘Havelock. Well, Lockie, what are ye doing now? And where are your brother and sister?’
The boy was not at all shy. Indeed, he seemed eager to explain the course of events.
‘I’m playing at being Gawd,’ he said, with an engaging frankness. ‘And I’ve sent Fergus and Janet to the bad place. That’s in the shrubbery. And they’re never to come out any more. And they’re burning for ever and ever.’
‘What d’you think of that?’ said Wilson admiringly. ‘Not bad for a youngster of nine, is it? They think a lot of him at the Sunday-school. But come into my den.’
The den was an apartment projecting from the back of the house. It had been designed as a back kitchen and washhouse, but Wilson had draped the ‘copper’ in art muslin and had boarded over the sink, so that it served as a workman’s bench.
‘Snug, isn’t it?’ he said, as he pushed forward one of the two wicker chairs. ‘I think out things here, you know; it’s quiet. And what about this furnishing? Do you want to do the thing on a grand scale?’
‘Oh, not at all. Quite the reverse. In fact, I don’t know whether the sum at our disposal will be sufficient. You see the spare room is ten feet by twelve, with a western exposure, and I thought if we could manage it, that it would seem more cheerful furnished. Besides, it’s pleasant to be able to ask a visitor; our aunt, Mrs. Nixon, for example. But she is accustomed to have everything very nice.’
‘And how much do you want to spend?’
‘Well, I hardly think we should be justified in going much beyond ten pounds. That isn’t enough, eh?’
Wilson got up and shut the door of the back kitchen impressively.
‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I’m glad you came to me in the first place. Now you’ll just tell me where you thought of going yourself.’
‘Well, I had thought of the Hampstead Road,’ said Darnell in a hesitating manner.
‘I just thought you’d say that. But I’ll ask you, what is the good of going to those expensive shops in the West End? You don’t get a better article for your money. You’re merely paying for fashion.’
‘I’ve seen some nice things in Samuel’s, though. They get a brilliant polish on their goods in those superior shops. We went there when we were married.’
‘Exactly, and paid ten per cent more than you need have paid. It’s throwing money away. And how much did you say you had to spend? Ten pounds. Well, I can tell you where to get a beautiful bedroom suite, in the very highest finish, for six pound ten. What d’you think of that? China included, mind you; and a square of carpet, brilliant colours, will only cost you fifteen and six. Look here, go any Saturday afternoon to Dick’s, in the Seven Sisters Road, mention my name, and ask for Mr. Johnston. The suite’s in ash, “Elizabethan” they call it. Six pound ten, including the china, with one of their “Orient” carpets, nine by nine, for fifteen and six. Dick’s.’
Wilson spoke with some eloquence on the subject of furnishing. He pointed out that the times were changed, and that the old heavy style was quite out of date.
(ii) Mrs Murry
All day long a fierce and heavy heat had brooded over the City, and as Darnell neared home he saw the mist lying on all the damp lowlands, wreathed in coils about Bedford Park to the south, and mounting to the west, so that the tower of Acton Church loomed out of a grey lake. The grass in the squares and on the lawns which he overlooked as the ‘bus lumbered wearily along was burnt to the colour of dust. Shepherd’s Bush Green was a wretched desert, trampled brown, bordered with monotonous poplars, whose leaves hung motionless in air that was still, hot smoke. The foot passengers struggled wearily along the pavements, and the reek of the summer’s end mingled with the breath of the brickfields made Darnell gasp, as if he were inhaling the poison of some foul sick-room.
He made but a slight inroad into the cold mutton that adorned the tea-table, and confessed that he felt rather ‘done up’ by the weather and the day’s work.
‘I have had a trying day, too,’ said Mary. ‘Alice has been very queer and troublesome all day, and I have had to speak to her quite seriously. You know I think her Sunday evenings out have a rather unsettling influence on the girl. But what is one to do?’
‘Has she got a young man?’
‘Of course: a grocer’s assistant from the Goldhawk Road-Wilkin’s, you know. I tried them when we settled here, but they were not very satisfactory.’
‘What do they do with themselves all the evening? They have from five to ten, haven’t they?’
‘Yes; five, or sometimes half-past, when the water won’t boil. Well, I believe they go for walks usually. Once or twice he has taken her to the City Temple, and the Sunday before last they walked up and down Oxford Street, and then sat in the Park. But it seems that last Sunday they went to tea with his mother at Putney. I should like to tell the old woman what I really think of her.’
‘Why? What happened? Was she nasty to the girl?’
‘No; that’s just it. Before this, she has been very unpleasant on several occasions. When the young man first took Alice to see her-that was in March-the girl came away crying; she told me so herself. Indeed, she said she never wanted to see old Mrs. Murry again; and I told Alice that, if she had not exaggerated things, I could hardly blame her for feeling like that.’
‘Why? What did she cry for?’
‘Well, it seems that the old lady-she lives in quite a small cottage in some Putney back street-was so stately that she would hardly speak. She had borrowed a little girl from some neighbour’s family, and had managed to dress her up to imitate a servant, and Alice said nothing could be sillier than to see that mite opening the door, with her black dress and her white cap and apron, and she hardly able to turn the handle, as Alice said. George (that’s the young man’s name) had told Alice that it was a little bit of a house; but he said the kitchen was comfortable, though very plain and old-fashioned. But, instead of going straight to the back, and sitting by a big fire on the old settle that they had brought up from the country, that child asked for their names (did you ever hear such nonsense?) and showed them into a little poky parlour, where old Mrs. Murry was sitting “like a duchess,” by a fireplace full of coloured paper, and the room as cold as ice. And she was so grand that she would hardly speak to Alice.’
‘That must have been very unpleasant.’
‘Oh, the poor girl had a dreadful time. She began with: “Very pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Dill. I know so very few persons in service.” Alice imitates her mincing way of talking, but I can’t do it. And then she went on to talk about her family, how they had farmed their own land for five hundred years-such stuff! George had told Alice all about it: they had had an old cottage with a good strip of garden and two fields somewhere in Essex, and that old woman talked almost as if they had been country gentry, and boasted about the Rector, Dr. Somebody, coming to see them so often, and of Squire Somebody Else always looking them up, as if they didn’t visit them out of kindness. Alice told me it was as much as she could do to keep from laughing in Mrs. Murry’s face, her young man having told her all about the place, and how small it was, and how the Squire had been so kind about buying it when old Murry died and George was a little boy, and his mother not able to keep things going. However, that silly old woman “laid it on thick,” as you say, and the young man got more and more uncomfortable, especially when she went on to speak about marrying in one’s own class, and how unhappy she had known young men to be who had married beneath them, giving some very pointed looks at Alice as she talked. And then such an amusing thing happened: Alice had noticed George looking about him in a puzzled sort of way, as if he couldn’t make out something or other, and at last he burst out and asked his mother if she had been buying up the neighbours’ ornaments, as he remembered the two green cut-glass vases on the mantelpiece at Mrs. Ellis’s, and the wax flowers at Miss Turvey’s. He was going on, but his mother scowled at him, and upset some books, which he had to pick up; but Alice quite understood she had been borrowing things from her neighbours, just as she had borrowed the little girl, so as to look grander. And then they had tea-water bewitched, Alice calls it-and very thin bread and butter, and rubbishy foreign pastry from the Swiss shop in the High Street-all sour froth and rancid fat, Alice declares. And then Mrs. Murry began boasting again about her family, and snubbing Alice and talking at her, till the girl came away quite furious, and very unhappy, too. I don’t wonder at it, do you?’
‘It doesn’t sound very enjoyable, certainly,’ said Darnell, looking dreamily at his wife. He had not been attending very carefully to the subject-matter of her story, but he loved to hear a voice that was incantation in his ears, tones that summoned before him the vision of a magic world.
‘And has the young man’s mother always been like this?’ he said after a long pause, desiring that the music should continue.
‘Always, till quite lately, till last Sunday in fact. Of course Alice spoke to George Murry at once, and said, like a sensible girl, that she didn’t think it ever answered for a married couple to live with the man’s mother, “especially,” she went on, “as I can see your mother hasn’t taken much of a fancy to me.” He told her, in the usual style, it was only his mother’s way, that she didn’t really mean anything, and so on; but Alice kept away for a long time, and rather hinted, I think, that it might come to having to choose between her and his mother. And so affairs went on all through the spring and summer, and then, just before the August Bank Holiday, George spoke to Alice again about it, and told her how sorry the thought of any unpleasantness made him, and how he wanted his mother and her to get on with each other, and how she was only a bit old-fashioned and queer in her ways, and had spoken very nicely to him about her when there was nobody by. So the long and the short of it was that Alice said she might come with them on the Monday, when they had settled to go to Hampton Court-the girl was always talking about Hampton Court, and wanting to see it. You remember what a beautiful day it was, don’t you?’
‘Let me see,’ said Darnell dreamily. ‘Oh yes, of course-I sat out under the mulberry tree all day, and we had our meals there: it was quite a picnic. The caterpillars were a nuisance, but I enjoyed the day very much.’ His ears were charmed, ravished with the grave, supernal melody, as of antique song, rather of the first made world in which all speech was descant, and all words were sacraments of might, speaking not to the mind but to the soul. He lay back in his chair, and said-
‘Well, what happened to them?’
‘My dear, would you believe it; but that wretched old woman behaved worse than ever. They met as had been arranged, at Kew Bridge, and got places, with a good deal of difficulty, in one of those char-à-banc things, and Alice thought she was going to enjoy herself tremendously. Nothing of the kind. They had hardly said “Good morning,” when old Mrs. Murry began to talk about Kew Gardens, and how beautiful it must be there, and how much more convenient it was than Hampton, and no expense at all; just the trouble of walking over the bridge. Then she went on to say, as they were waiting for the char-à-banc, that she had always heard there was nothing to see at Hampton, except a lot of nasty, grimy old pictures, and some of them not fit for any decent woman, let alone girl, to look at, and she wondered why the Queen allowed such things to be shown, putting all kinds of notions into girls’ heads that were light enough already; and as she said that she looked at Alice so nastily-horrid old thing-that, as she told me afterwards, Alice would have slapped her face if she hadn’t been an elderly woman, and George’s mother. Then she talked about Kew again, saying how wonderful the hot-houses were, with palms and all sorts of wonderful things, and a lily as big as a parlour table, and the view over the river. George was very good, Alice told me. He was quite taken aback at first, as the old woman had promised faithfully to be as nice as ever she could be; but then he said, gently but firmly, “Well, mother, we must go to Kew some other day, as Alice has set her heart on Hampton for to-day, and I want to see it myself!” All Mrs. Murry did was to snort, and look at the girl like vinegar, and just then the char-à-banc came up, and they had to scramble for their seats. Mrs. Murry grumbled to herself in an indistinct sort of voice all the way to Hampton Court. Alice couldn’t very well make out what she said, but now and then she seemed to hear bits of sentences, like: Pity to grow old, if sons grow bold; and Honour thy father and mother; and Lie on the shelf, said the housewife to the old shoe, and the wicked son to his mother; and I gave you milk and you give me the go-by. Alice thought they must be proverbs (except the Commandment, of course), as George was always saying how old-fashioned his mother is; but she says there were so many of them, and all pointed at her and George, that she thinks now Mrs. Murry must have made them up as they drove along. She says it would be just like her to do it, being old-fashioned, and ill-natured too, and fuller of talk than a butcher on Saturday night. Well, they got to Hampton at last, and Alice thought the place would please her, perhaps, and they might have some enjoyment. But she did nothing but grumble, and out loud too, so that people looked at them, and a woman said, so that they could hear, “Ah well, they’ll be old themselves some day,” which made Alice very angry, for, as she said, they weren’t doing anything. When they showed her the chestnut avenue in Bushey Park, she said it was so long and straight that it made her quite dull to look at it, and she thought the deer (you know how pretty they are, really) looked thin and miserable, as if they would be all the better for a good feed of hog-wash, with plenty of meal in it. She said she knew they weren’t happy by the look in their eyes, which seemed to tell her that their keepers beat them. It was the same with everything; she said she remembered market-gardens in Hammersmith and Gunnersbury that had a better show of flowers, and when they took her to the place where the water is, under the trees, she burst out with its being rather hard to tramp her off her legs to show her a common canal, with not so much as a barge on it to liven it up a bit. She went on like that the whole day, and Alice told me she was only too thankful to get home and get rid of her. Wasn’t it wretched for the girl?’
‘It must have been, indeed. But what happened last Sunday?’
‘That’s the most extraordinary thing of all. I noticed that Alice was rather queer in her manner this morning; she was a longer time washing up the breakfast things, and she answered me quite sharply when I called to her to ask when she would be ready to help me with the wash; and when I went into the kitchen to see about something, I noticed that she was going about her work in a sulky sort of way. So I asked her what was the matter, and then it all came out. I could scarcely believe my own ears when she mumbled out something about Mrs. Murry thinking she could do very much better for herself; but I asked her one question after another till I had it all out of her. It just shows one how foolish and empty-headed these girls are. I told her she was no better than a weather-cock. If you will believe me, that horrid old woman was quite another person when Alice went to see her the other night. Why, I can’t think, but so she was. She told the girl how pretty she was; what a neat figure she had; how well she walked; and how she’d known many a girl not half so clever or well-looking earning her twenty-five or thirty pounds a year, and with good families. She seems to have gone into all sorts of details, and made elaborate calculations as to what she would be able to save, “with decent folks, who don’t screw, and pinch, and lock up everything in the house,” and then she went off into a lot of hypocritical nonsense about how fond she was of Alice, and how she could go to her grave in peace, knowing how happy her dear George would be with such a good wife, and about her savings from good wages helping to set up a little home, ending up with “And, if you take an old woman’s advice, deary, it won’t be long before you hear the marriage bells.”‘
‘I see,’ said Darnell; ‘and the upshot of it all is, I suppose, that the girl is thoroughly dissatisfied?’
‘Yes, she is so young and silly. I talked to her, and reminded her of how nasty old Mrs. Murry had been, and told her that she might change her place and change for the worse. I think I have persuaded her to think it over quietly, at all events. Do you know what it is, Edward? I have an idea. I believe that wicked old woman is trying to get Alice to leave us, that she may tell her son how changeable she is; and I suppose she would make up some of her stupid old proverbs: “A changeable wife, a troublesome life,” or some nonsense of the kind. Horrid old thing!’
‘Well, well,’ said Darnell, ‘I hope she won’t go, for your sake. It would be such a bother for you, hunting for a fresh servant.’
(iii) Darnell Had Matured a Plan
It might have been different in the evening, and Darnell had matured a plan by which he hoped to gain much. He intended to ask his wife if she would mind having only one gas, and that a good deal lowered, on the pretext that his eyes were tired with work; he thought many things might happen if the room were dimly lit, and the window opened, so that they could sit and watch the night, and listen to the rustling murmur of the tree on the lawn. But his plans were made in vain, for when he got to the garden gate his wife, in tears, came forth to meet him.
‘Oh, Edward,’ she began, ‘such a dreadful thing has happened! I never liked him much, but I didn’t think he would ever do such awful things.’
‘What do you mean? Who are you talking about? What has happened? Is it Alice’s young man?’
‘No, no. But come in, dear. I can see that woman opposite watching us: she’s always on the look out.’
‘Now, what is it?’ said Darnell, as they sat down to tea. ‘Tell me, quick! you’ve quite frightened me.’
‘I don’t know how to begin, or where to start. Aunt Marian has thought that there was something queer for weeks. And then she found-oh, well, the long and short of it is that Uncle Robert has been carrying on dreadfully with some horrid girl, and aunt has found out everything!’
‘Lord! you don’t say so! The old rascal! Why, he must be nearer seventy than sixty!’
‘He’s just sixty-five; and the money he has given her–‘
The first shock of surprise over, Darnell turned resolutely to his mince.
‘We’ll have it all out after tea,’ he said; ‘I am not going to have my meals spoilt by that old fool of a Nixon. Fill up my cup, will you, dear?’
‘Excellent mince this,’ he went on, calmly. ‘A little lemon juice and a bit of ham in it? I thought there was something extra. Alice all right to-day? That’s good. I expect she’s getting over all that nonsense.’
He went on calmly chattering in a manner that astonished Mrs. Darnell, who felt that by the fall of Uncle Robert the natural order had been inverted, and had scarcely touched food since the intelligence had arrived by the second post. She had started out to keep the appointment her aunt had made early in the morning, and had spent most of the day in a first-class waiting-room at Victoria Station, where she had heard all the story.
‘Now,’ said Darnell, when the table had been cleared, ‘tell us all about it. How long has it been going on?’
‘Aunt thinks now, from little things she remembers, that it must have been going on for a year at least. She says there has been a horrid kind of mystery about uncle’s behaviour for a long time, and her nerves were quite shaken, as she thought he must be involved with Anarchists, or something dreadful of the sort.’
‘What on earth made her think that?’
‘Well, you see, once or twice when she was out walking with her husband, she has been startled by whistles, which seemed to follow them everywhere. You know there are some nice country walks at Barnet, and one in particular, in the fields near Totteridge, that uncle and aunt rather made a point of going to on fine Sunday evenings. Of course, this was not the first thing she noticed, but, at the time, it made a great impression on her mind; she could hardly get a wink of sleep for weeks and weeks.’
‘Whistling?’ said Darnell. ‘I don’t quite understand. Why should she be frightened by whistling?’
‘I’ll tell you. The first time it happened was one Sunday in last May. Aunt had a fancy they were being followed a Sunday or two before, but she didn’t see or hear anything, except a sort of crackling noise in the hedge. But this particular Sunday they had hardly got through the stile into the fields, when she heard a peculiar kind of low whistle. She took no notice, thinking it was no concern of hers or her husband’s, but as they went on she heard it again, and then again, and it followed them the whole walk, and it made her so uncomfortable, because she didn’t know where it was coming from or who was doing it, or why. Then, just as they got out of the fields into the lane, uncle said he felt quite faint, and he thought he would try a little brandy at the “Turpin’s Head,” a small public-house there is there. And she looked at him and saw his face was quite purple-more like apoplexy, as she says, than fainting fits, which make people look a sort of greenish-white. But she said nothing, and thought perhaps uncle had a peculiar way of fainting of his own, as he always was a man to have his own way of doing everything. So she just waited in the road, and he went ahead and slipped into the public, and aunt says she thought she saw a little figure rise out of the dusk and slip in after him, but she couldn’t be sure. And when uncle came out he looked red instead of purple, and said he felt much better; and so they went home quietly together, and nothing more was said. You see, uncle had said nothing about the whistling, and aunt had been so frightened that she didn’t dare speak, for fear they might be both shot.
‘She wasn’t thinking anything more about it, when two Sundays afterwards the very same thing happened just as it had before. This time aunt plucked up a spirit, and asked uncle what it could be. And what do you think he said? “Birds, my dear, birds.” Of course aunt said to him that no bird that ever flew with wings made a noise like that: sly, and low, with pauses in between; and then he said that many rare sorts of birds lived in North Middlesex and Hertfordshire. “Nonsense, Robert,” said aunt, “how can you talk so, considering it has followed us all the way, for a mile or more?” And then uncle told her that some birds were so attached to man that they would follow one about for miles sometimes; he said he had just been reading about a bird like that in a book of travels. And do you know that when they got home he actually showed her a piece in the “Hertfordshire Naturalist” which they took in to oblige a friend of theirs, all about rare birds found in the neighbourhood, all the most outlandish names, aunt says, that she had never heard or thought of, and uncle had the impudence to say that it must have been a Purple Sandpiper, which, the paper said, had “a low shrill note, constantly repeated.” And then he took down a book of Siberian Travels from the bookcase and showed her a page which told how a man was followed by a bird all day long through a forest. And that’s what Aunt Marian says vexes her more than anything almost; to think that he should be so artful and ready with those books, twisting them to his own wicked ends. But, at the time, when she was out walking, she simply couldn’t make out what he meant by talking about birds in that random, silly sort of way, so unlike him, and they went on, that horrible whistling following them, she looking straight ahead and walking fast, really feeling more huffy and put out than frightened. And when they got to the next stile, she got over and turned round, and “lo and behold,” as she says, there was no Uncle Robert to be seen! She felt herself go quite white with alarm, thinking of that whistle, and making sure he’d been spirited away or snatched in some way or another, and she had just screamed out “Robert” like a mad woman, when he came quite slowly round the corner, as cool as a cucumber, holding something in his hand. He said there were some flowers he could never pass, and when aunt saw that he had got a dandelion torn up by the roots, she felt as if her head were going round.’
Mary’s story was suddenly interrupted. For ten minutes Darnell had been writhing in his chair, suffering tortures in his anxiety to avoid wounding his wife’s feelings, but the episode of the dandelion was too much for him, and he burst into a long, wild shriek of laughter, aggravated by suppression into the semblance of a Red Indian’s war-whoop. Alice, who was washing-up in the scullery, dropped some three shillings’ worth of china, and the neighbours ran out into their gardens wondering if it were murder. Mary gazed reproachfully at her husband.
‘How can you be so unfeeling, Edward?’ she said, at length, when Darnell had passed into the feebleness of exhaustion. ‘If you had seen the tears rolling down poor Aunt Marian’s cheeks as she told me, I don’t think you would have laughed. I didn’t think you were so hard-hearted.’
‘My dear Mary,’ said Darnell, faintly, through sobs and catching of the breath, ‘I am awfully sorry. I know it’s very sad, really, and I’m not unfeeling; but it is such an odd tale, now, isn’t it? The Sandpiper, you know, and then the dandelion!’
His face twitched and he ground his teeth together. Mary looked gravely at him for a moment, and then she put her hands to her face, and Darnell could see that she also shook with merriment.
‘I am as bad as you,’ she said, at last. ‘I never thought of it in that way. I’m glad I didn’t, or I should have laughed in Aunt Marian’s face, and I wouldn’t have done that for the world. Poor old thing; she cried as if her heart would break. I met her at Victoria, as she asked me, and we had some soup at a confectioner’s. I could scarcely touch it; her tears kept dropping into the plate all the time; and then we went to the waiting-room at the station, and she cried there terribly.’
‘Well,’ said Darnell, ‘what happened next? I won’t laugh any more.’
‘No, we mustn’t; it’s much too horrible for a joke. Well, of course aunt went home and wondered and wondered what could be the matter, and tried to think it out, but, as she says, she could make nothing of it. She began to be afraid that uncle’s brain was giving way through overwork, as he had stopped in the City (as he said) up to all hours lately, and he had to go to Yorkshire (wicked old story-teller!), about some very tiresome business connected with his leases. But then she reflected that however queer he might be getting, even his queerness couldn’t make whistles in the air, though, as she said, he was always a wonderful man. So she had to give that up; and then she wondered if there were anything the matter with her, as she had read about people who heard noises when there was really nothing at all. But that wouldn’t do either, because though it might account for the whistling, it wouldn’t account for the dandelion or the Sandpiper, or for fainting fits that turned purple, or any of uncle’s queerness. So aunt said she could think of nothing but to read the Bible every day from the beginning, and by the time she got into Chronicles she felt rather better, especially as nothing had happened for three or four Sundays. She noticed uncle seemed absent-minded, and not as nice to her as he might be, but she put that down to too much work, as he never came home before the last train, and had a hansom twice all the way, getting there between three and four in the morning. Still, she felt it was no good bothering her head over what couldn’t be made out or explained anyway, and she was just settling down, when one Sunday evening it began all over again, and worse things happened. The whistling followed them just as it did before, and poor aunt set her teeth and said nothing to uncle, as she knew he would only tell her stories, and they were walking on, not saying a word, when something made her look back, and there was a horrible boy with red hair, peeping through the hedge just behind, and grinning. She said it was a dreadful face, with something unnatural about it, as if it had been a dwarf, and before she had time to have a good look, it popped back like lightning, and aunt all but fainted away.’
‘A red-headed boy?’ said Darnell. ‘I thought–What an extraordinary story this is. I’ve never heard of anything so queer. Who was the boy?’
‘You will know in good time,’ said Mrs. Darnell. ‘It is very strange, isn’t it?’
‘Strange!’ Darnell ruminated for a while.
‘I know what I think, Mary,’ he said at length. ‘I don’t believe a word of it. I believe your aunt is going mad, or has gone mad, and that she has delusions. The whole thing sounds to me like the invention of a lunatic.’
‘You are quite wrong. Every word is true, and if you will let me go on, you will understand how it all happened.’
(iv) Darnell Fell into a Dream
In a haze as of a dream Darnell’s thoughts seemed to move through the opening days of the next week. Perhaps nature had not intended that he should be practical or much given to that which is usually called ‘sound common sense,’ but his training had made him desirous of good, plain qualities of the mind, and he uneasily strove to account to himself for his strange mood of the Sunday night, as he had often endeavoured to interpret the fancies of his boyhood and early manhood. At first he was annoyed by his want of success; the morning paper, which he always secured as the ‘bus delayed at Uxbridge Road Station, fell from his hands unread, while he vainly reasoned, assuring himself that the threatened incursion of a whimsical old woman, though tiresome enough, was no rational excuse for those curious hours of meditation in which his thoughts seemed to have dressed themselves in unfamiliar, fantastic habits, and to parley with him in a strange speech, and yet a speech that he had understood.
With such arguments he perplexed his mind on the long, accustomed ride up the steep ascent of Holland Park, past the incongruous hustle of Notting Hill Gate, where in one direction a road shows the way to the snug, somewhat faded bowers and retreats of Bayswater, and in another one sees the portal of the murky region of the slums. The customary companions of his morning’s journey were in the seats about him; he heard the hum of their talk, as they disputed concerning politics, and the man next to him, who came from Acton, asked him what he thought of the Government now. There was a discussion, and a loud and excited one, just in front, as to whether rhubarb was a fruit or vegetable, and in his ear he heard Redman, who was a near neighbour, praising the economy of ‘the wife.’
‘I don’t know how she does it. Look here; what do you think we had yesterday? Breakfast: fish-cakes, beautifully fried-rich, you know, lots of herbs, it’s a receipt of her aunt’s; you should just taste ’em. Coffee, bread, butter, marmalade, and, of course, all the usual etceteras. Dinner: roast beef, Yorkshire, potatoes, greens, and horse-radish sauce, plum tart, cheese. And where will you get a better dinner than that? Well, I call it wonderful, I really do.’
But in spite of these distractions he fell into a dream as the ‘bus rolled and tossed on its way Citywards, and still he strove to solve the enigma of his vigil of the night before, and as the shapes of trees and green lawns and houses passed before his eyes, and as he saw the procession moving on the pavement, and while the murmur of the streets sounded in his ears, all was to him strange and unaccustomed, as if he moved through the avenues of some city in a foreign land. It was, perhaps, on these mornings, as he rode to his mechanical work, that vague and floating fancies that must have long haunted his brain began to shape themselves, and to put on the form of definite conclusions, from which he could no longer escape, even if he had wished it. Darnell had received what is called a sound commercial education, and would therefore have found very great difficulty in putting into articulate speech any thought that was worth thinking; but he grew certain on these mornings that the ‘common sense’ which he had always heard exalted as man’s supremest faculty was, in all probability, the smallest and least-considered item in the equipment of an ant of average intelligence. And with this, as an almost necessary corollary, came a firm belief that the whole fabric of life in which he moved was sunken, past all thinking, in the grossest absurdity; that he and all his friends and acquaintances and fellow-workers were interested in matters in which men were never meant to be interested, were pursuing aims which they were never meant to pursue, were, indeed, much like fair stones of an altar serving as a pigsty wall. Life, it seemed to him, was a great search for-he knew not what; and in the process of the ages one by one the true marks upon the ways had been shattered, or buried, or the meaning of the words had been slowly forgotten; one by one the signs had been turned awry, the true entrances had been thickly overgrown, the very way itself had been diverted from the heights to the depths, till at last the race of pilgrims had become hereditary stone-breakers and ditch-scourers on a track that led to destruction-if it led anywhere at all. Darnell’s heart thrilled with a strange and trembling joy, with a sense that was all new, when it came to his mind that this great loss might not be a hopeless one, that perhaps the difficulties were by no means insuperable. It might be, he considered, that the stone-breaker had merely to throw down his hammer and set out, and the way would be plain before him; and a single step would free the delver in rubbish from the foul slime of the ditch.
It was, of course, with difficulty and slowly that these things became clear to him. He was an English City clerk, ‘flourishing’ towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the rubbish heap that had been accumulating for some centuries could not be cleared away in an instant. Again and again the spirit of nonsense that had been implanted in him as in his fellows assured him that the true world was the visible and tangible world, the world in which good and faithful letter-copying was exchangeable for a certain quantum of bread, beef, and house-room, and that the man who copied letters well, did not beat his wife, nor lose money foolishly, was a good man, fulfilling the end for which he had been made. But in spite of these arguments, in spite of their acceptance by all who were about him, he had the grace to perceive the utter falsity and absurdity of the whole position. He was fortunate in his entire ignorance of sixpenny ‘science,’ but if the whole library had been projected into his brain it would not have moved him to ‘deny in the darkness that which he had known in the light.’ Darnell knew by experience that man is made a mystery for mysteries and visions, for the realization in his consciousness of ineffable bliss, for a great joy that transmutes the whole world, for a joy that surpasses all joys and overcomes all sorrows. He knew this certainly, though he knew it dimly; and he was apart from other men, preparing himself for a great experiment.
With such thoughts as these for his secret and concealed treasure, he was able to bear the threatened invasion of Mrs. Nixon with something approaching indifference. He knew, indeed, that her presence between his wife and himself would be unwelcome to him, and he was not without grave doubts as to the woman’s sanity; but after all, what did it matter? Besides, already a faint glimmering light had risen within him that showed the profit of self-negation, and in this matter he had preferred his wife’s will to his own. Et non sua poma; to his astonishment he found a delight in denying himself his own wish, a process that he had always regarded as thoroughly detestable. This was a state of things which he could not in the least understand; but, again, though a member of a most hopeless class, living in the most hopeless surroundings that the world has ever seen, though he knew as much of theaskesis as of Chinese metaphysics; again, he had the grace not to deny the light that had begun to glimmer in his soul.
And he found a present reward in the eyes of Mary, when she welcomed him home after his foolish labours in the cool of the evening. They sat together, hand in hand, under the mulberry tree, at the coming of the dusk, and as the ugly walls about them became obscure and vanished into the formless world of shadows, they seemed to be freed from the bondage of Shepherd’s Bush, freed to wander in that undisfigured, undefiled world that lies beyond the walls. Of this region Mary knew little or nothing by experience, since her relations had always been of one mind with the modern world, which has for the true country an instinctive and most significant horror and dread. Mr. Reynolds had also shared in another odd superstition of these later days-that it is necessary to leave London at least once a year; consequently Mary had some knowledge of various seaside resorts on the south and east coasts, where Londoners gather in hordes, turn the sands into one vast, bad music-hall, and derive, as they say, enormous benefit from the change. But experiences such as these give but little knowledge of the country in its true and occult sense; and yet Mary, as she sat in the dusk beneath the whispering tree, knew something of the secret of the wood, of the valley shut in by high hills, where the sound of pouring water always echoes from the clear brook. And to Darnell these were nights of great dreams; for it was the hour of the work, the time of transmutation, and he who could not understand the miracle, who could scarcely believe in it, yet knew, secretly and half consciously, that the water was being changed into the wine of a new life. This was ever the inner music of his dreams, and to it he added on these still and sacred nights the far-off memory of that time long ago when, a child, before the world had overwhelmed him, he journeyed down to the old grey house in the west, and for a whole month heard the murmur of the forest through his bedroom window, and when the wind was hushed, the washing of the tides about the reeds; and sometimes awaking very early he had heard the strange cry of a bird as it rose from its nest among the reeds, and had looked out and had seen the valley whiten to the dawn, and the winding river whiten as it swam down to the sea. The memory of all this had faded and become shadowy as he grew older and the chains of common life were riveted firmly about his soul; all the atmosphere by which he was surrounded was well-nigh fatal to such thoughts, and only now and again in half-conscious moments or in sleep he had revisited that valley in the far-off west, where the breath of the wind was an incantation, and every leaf and stream and hill spoke of great and ineffable mysteries. But now the broken vision was in great part restored to him, and looking with love in his wife’s eyes he saw the gleam of water-pools in the still forest, saw the mists rising in the evening, and heard the music of the winding river.
They were sitting thus together on the Friday evening of the week that had begun with that odd and half-forgotten visit of Mrs. Nixon, when, to Darnell’s annoyance, the door-bell gave a discordant peal, and Alice with some disturbance of manner came out and announced that a gentleman wished to see the master. Darnell went into the drawing-room, where Alice had lit one gas so that it flared and burnt with a rushing sound, and in this distorting light there waited a stout, elderly gentleman, whose countenance was altogether unknown to him. He stared blankly, and hesitated, about to speak, but the visitor began.
‘You don’t know who I am, but I expect you’ll know my name. It’s Nixon.’
He did not wait to be interrupted. He sat down and plunged into narrative, and after the first few words, Darnell, whose mind was not altogether unprepared, listened without much astonishment.
It would be impossible to carry on the history of Edward Darnell and of Mary his wife to a greater length, since from this point their legend is full of impossible events, and seems to put on the semblance of the stories of the Graal. It is certain, indeed, that in this world they changed their lives, like King Arthur, but this is a work which no chronicler has cared to describe with any amplitude of detail. Darnell, it is true, made a little book, partly consisting of queer verse which might have been written by an inspired infant, and partly made up of ‘notes and exclamations’ in an odd dog-Latin which he had picked up from the ‘Iolo MSS.’, but it is to be feared that this work, even if published in its entirety, would cast but little light on a perplexing story. He called this piece of literature ‘In Exitu Israel,’ and wrote on the title page the motto, doubtless of his own composition, ‘Nunc certe scio quod omnia legenda; omnes historiæ, omnes fabulæ, omnis Scriptura sint de ME narrata.’ It is only too evident that his Latin was not learnt at the feet of Cicero; but in this dialect he relates the great history of the ‘New Life’ as it was manifested to him. The ‘poems’ are even stranger. One, headed (with an odd reminiscence of old-fashioned books) ‘Lines written on looking down from a Height in London on a Board School suddenly lit up by the Sun’ begins thus:-
One day when I was all alone I found a wondrous little stone,It lay forgotten on the road far from the ways of man’s abode. When on this stone mine eyes I cast I saw my treasure found at last. I pressed it hard against my face,I covered it with my embrace,I hid it in a secret place.And every day I went to seeThis stone that was my ecstasy; and worshipped it with flowers rare, and secret words and sayings fair. From such documents as these it is clearly impossible to gather any very definite information. But on the last page Darnell has written-
‘So I awoke from a dream of a London suburb, of daily labour, of weary, useless little things; and as my eyes were opened I saw that I was in an ancient wood, where a clear well rose into grey film and vapour beneath a misty, glimmering heat. And a form came towards me from the hidden places of the wood, and my love and I were united by the well.’
