Ducdame (19 page)

Netta had coloured with pitiful shamefacedness under the exposure of her companion’s remark, but she exchanged a quick glance with him now.

“Why are you afraid of liquor, Granny?” said William Hastings.

“Because of
they
in there! Because of me partners!” answered the old woman.

Her repeated references to “partners” had already
disturbed
Netta’s mind and she now looked with much
uneasiness
at a large Paisley shawl which hung down from an extended rope, concealing a corner of the caravan from view.

No more was said, however, until the gipsy’s guests had finished their meal and the table had been dragged aside against the bed leaving a space in the centre of this curious interior empty and clear.

Then the old woman, with a furtive look at her visitors and a queer sort of inarticulate caressing murmur, such as a person might make to soothe the fears of some species of wild animal, drew aside a piece of the shawl and stood there, holding the fabric in her hand and clicking with her tongue. At first there was no response except a feeble scuffling in the darkness. Then to the horror of Netta and to the
amazement
of her companion there issued forth, holding each other’s hands, a pair of creatures that it was difficult to
regard
as the progeny of the human race.

They were of the masculine sex and wore extravagant clothes; the sort of clothes that one sees on the bodies of dwarfs and midgets in circuses, but it was impossible for either Netta or Hastings to look at anything but their faces, which were more horrible to human sight than if they had been creatures of a monstrous nightmare.

It was only after a second or two that the full ghastliness of the deformity that dehumanized these beings entered the consciousness of the two spectators, but when it did so Netta clapped her hands over her own face and sprang to her feet.

“I can’t bear it! I can’t bear it!” she screamed. “Take them away! Let me go from here!”

The old woman placed herself between her “partners” and the terrified girl.

“It’s all right, Missy,” she mumbled, and then making once more the same sub-human caressing sound and the same clicking noise with her tongue, she shuffled the two
unfortunates
back again into their hiding place and let fall the covering.

It was several minutes before Hastings succeeded in
pacifying
Netta and persuading her to sit down again; and even
after she was seated and was able to smile faintly at her own weakness, several involuntary spasms of shuddering ran through her frame.

“Didn’t I tell ’ee?” the old woman triumphantly protested, taking her seat on the narrow bed. “Them’s queer to look on and that’s God’s truth, dearie, but if it hadn’t been for the drink, them ’ud be as natural-like as your own self.”

“Who are they?” enquired Mr. Hastings, looking with a good deal of relief at Netta who had now overcome her shivering fit.

“Me partners,” repeated the hag. “Them as has got old Betsy her poor living, day in, day out, these twenty years. ’Ee should see ’un dance, Mister. Them can dance same as real poppets.”

“But who are they?” repeated the misanthrope, displaying more curiosity than Netta had ever seen in him before. She herself had now completely recovered her sober senses, and dimly through a turbid cloud of dream-like images there began to rise before her the vision of what she had run away from and the stark question of what she was to do next.

“Them be the childer of me own daughter, Mister,”
replied
the woman. “Of me own daughter, Nancy Cooper, what Squire Ashover sweeted. When Squire broke with she, her married a decent market-man, what grew ’taties and such-like. But ’twas no use. Squire’d learned her to drink terrible; and ’twas along o’ that she runned off wi’ Colpepper Thomas the horse-dealer. He were the drunkenest brute between Exeter and London, and it was my own self who buried her. She left me her two, them as has been my partners for twenty years. She swore they were Squire’s, and we got hundreds of pounds out of ’ee for they, unbeknown to his lady.”

Old Betsy paused, and Netta, who had been staring at her in consternation ever since she began, now began
stammering: 
“Do you mean that those poor things are—half-brothers—to—to—the present Mr. Ashover?”

“That’s what old Betsy means and not a word less,” chuckled the old woman. “We bain’t gipsies, as folks do say; not a bit o’t. We be a good Frome-side family same as Squire ’isself. Them Ashovers be Satan’s own tribe, every one of them. There be old man Dick who went and hanged ’isself so I’ve a-heard. He was Squire John’s brother. And now they say Squire Rook have got some doxy or other in house wi’ ’ee.
He
’
d
look silly, would Squire Rook, if I askit he for a few hundred for me partners here!”

William Hastings was not surprised to notice that Netta avoided meeting his eye. He had summed up her situation pretty shrewdly by this time and was vaguely considering in his own mind what line of action he ought to take. What he did not feel sure of was whether she had left Ashover with its master’s concurrence; or whether, out of sheer weariness of her equivocal position there, she had just drifted off.

Having relieved her feelings by her long confession Betsy Cooper now became taciturn and practical. She indicated that in return for a small sum of money she would retire for the night behind the Paisley shawl, leaving the rest of the interior of her retreat at the disposal of her guests.

“There be a horse-trough under hedge,” she remarked, pointing at the door of the caravan, “if so be that either of ’ee want to wet your hands afore night.”

The idea of setting out again to look for a more
conventional
shelter was appalling to Netta. She slipped down the caravan steps upon the roadside for a moment; and did dip her fingers in the receptacle described by the
pseudo-gipsy
; but the night was so dark and the air so chilly that she was glad enough to return to her seat by the stove. She would have given a great deal just then for a taste of what the old woman had designated as “adder’s gall”; but her whole life seemed so broken up that she was thankful enough to
have someone, even if it were only William Hastings, to cling to as a raft in that blind sea.

Hastings also made a temporary exit into the environs of their shelter with a view of collecting his thoughts and
deciding
upon his course of action. He made up his mind to
accept
this chance-given hospitality, leaving the problem of what to do next undecided till the morning. Netta had
begun
to look as if she longed for nothing so much as sleep. Well! Sleep would perhaps clear his own mind and give him the clue to the best course of action.

While the old woman herself was filling up her water jugs at a spring that adjoined the trough, Hastings contemplated his companion, who sat on the bed, her head buried in her hands, and wondered what the circumstances actually were that had led to this flight from peace and comfort.

“Netta!” he began, anxious to get some insight into her thoughts.

“Yes, Mr. Hastings.”

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings or be impertinent, but you must know what I feel, meeting you in a place like this, after knowing you as well as I have.”

She looked at him with her forehead wrinkled in
hesitation
. Could she make a confidant of such a man?
Something
in her yearned to unburden itself in a torrent of pitiful words, but something else—a queer mixture of pride and timidity—made her feel as if it would be a sacrilege to speak to any living soul of what had happened. With the recovery of her normal self there rose up before her mind, as the one anchor to which she must cling, through ruin, through
disaster
, through blind misery, the fixed idea that she had effaced herself by her own will for the sake of her love.

“I don’t think you know me
very
well, Mr. Hastings,” she said, smiling.

He was curiously nonplussed by the ease and naturalness of her tone. Seeing her as he had seen her in the street that
night he had forgotten how far she had gone in her acceptance of the light social tone of the Ashover circle.

“No—no! Of course not,” he muttered hurriedly; but in his heart he thought: “Oh, these women! These women! One minute they fling themselves upon your neck and the next they take this society air and bow you out of the room.”

“I mean it’s difficult to explain everything to-night,” she pleaded, not missing the clouded expression that had come over his face.

He remained silent for a moment; while she looked at him rather wistfully, wishing that he
was
the kind of person to whom it would be easy to unlock the secrets of her heart. Then he said suddenly: “You won’t mind staying the night here with me, will you? I don’t see what we can do except leave everything till the morning.”

For the moment she misunderstood him and a deep
indignant
flush mounted into her cheeks, but his matter-of-fact air reassured her and she felt ashamed of herself.

“Don’t think I’m ungrateful, Mr. Hastings. You’ve been most kind to me.” And then she added as an afterthought: “But I shall hate taking the only bed in the place!”

Once more Hastings got that funny impression of
something
put on and artificial in her tone. But he let it pass and the return of Betsy Cooper brought their dialogue to a close.

The arrangements for the night were simple enough after all when they were actually made. Old Betsy retired
behind
the suspended shawl from the recesses of which emerged the most extraordinary succession of inhuman sounds that Hastings had ever heard in his life.

The clergyman himself, notwithstanding the libidinous leer to which the old woman treated him as she disappeared, a look that was made doubly significant by her manifest recognition of his profession, proceeded to wrap his overcoat round Netta’s passive form as she lay on the bed and then, making himself as comfortable as he could in the wicker
chair, prepared to spend the night in metaphysical reverie, his pipe lit, and his feet on the stove.

Netta’s quiet breathing soon showed she was free from her troubles among the eidolons of sleep, and the man was left to his own thoughts.

Strange enough were his thoughts!

This lonely wheeled hut in the midst of the darkness seemed to him like a silent ship voyaging through the gulfs of immensity. He visualized the unspeakable deformities behind that curtain, sleeping against the lap of that old woman, like Phorkyads against the knees of Medusa; and it seemed to him as if that invisible group were a fitting enough symbol of all that this whole terrestrial ship carried, in
its
voyage, through the godless and measureless ether.

He recalled what Betsy had said of that “Cimmery Land” to be revealed by these pariahs in a “girt wold crystal stone”; and he smiled grimly to himself as he thought of how all over the county of Dorset men and women were moving in their dreams through just such an impossible country.

And then he thought of his book and of how during these last spring days he had neglected it; seduced a little, he could not tell why, by a certain quality in his wife he had not noticed before.

And then letting himself go upon the full stream of his misanthropic fancies, he imagined that this caravan, in which he sat, warming himself and smoking, contained all that was left alive in the whole stellar system. He imagined it transported through empty space; through space star-less, planet-less, moon-less; a vast “Cimmery Land” crystal, void of everything except the unconscious spirit of darkness.

And in the gray hollowness of that crystal, which he now saw as the very rondure of eternity, he was obscurely
conscious
of a projection of himself, of William Hastings; not the William Hastings who was on the verge of discovering the secret of universal death; but a William Hastings who was a
little unhappy boy at school, persecuted by his companions and hating all the world, but able to
think
the
whole
world
away
and to sink back, back, far back, into the comfortable arms of the infinite Nothingness!

His last thought, before his pipe fell from his mouth and his head sank back in sleep, was that of the two creatures behind the Paisley shawl. He fancied he saw them emerge from their retreat. He fancied he saw them take each other’s hands and dance a strange and monstrous dance, the dance of the Annihilation of All Life; the dance of
That
which was destined to take the place of Life; when the
Caravan
of the Universe touched at last the circumference of its voyage!

T
HE day that broke over the five human heads—if Betsy Cooper’s “partners” could be called human—domiciled in that fantastic shelter was one of those exceptional spring days that seem created by Nature to protect herself against the too exquisite intensity of her own birth pangs.

It was as if a tenuous film, composed of some aërial stuff more delicate than vapour or cloud, had been drawn like a floating veil between earth and sky.

Every palpable object by roadside or meadow seemed to emerge from a soft enveloping mist that was neither white nor yellow nor purple but resembled rather that
mother-of-pearl
opalescence which shimmers in the hollowness of certain seashells.

The mental atmosphere in the caravan was, however, as so often happens with our persecuted humanity, in direct and discordant opposition to the tender vaporousness of the relaxed weather outside.

It was an atmosphere of cold and obstinate resolution; disenchanted, joyless, weary, but rigid in its purposes, and defiant of all opposition.

The mood that dominated that small group as they talked over their bread and tea was the mood of Netta Page. So hopeless in its inflexible determination was this mood that it seemed to obsess and preoccupy the girl herself to the
complete
exclusion of her other normal faculties.

She manifested no more than the very faintest shrinking when, in the process of satisfying the needs of the deformed twins, the Paisley curtain was dragged completely aside.

What she had decided upon was to take the midday train
to London and just lose herself in the unsearchable depths of that great sea of tossing humanity.

Contrary to Cousin Ann’s opinion, she had taken no more money when she left Ashover than the coins in her purse; and the appeal she now made to Hastings was that he should purchase her railway ticket for her before they separated.

Hastings refused for a long time even to consider such a thing. What he felt was that whatever may have been the reasons for her unaccountable flight it was incumbent upon him to plead for second thoughts; incumbent upon him to prevent any irrevocable step till Rook had seen her again. He was anxious to hire a conveyance and just take her back to the village, leaving it to herself and Ashover to settle their difficulties when they met. If he had had the least inkling of the fatal visit to Tollminster, it might have given him a clue as to how to act, but the situation being so dark and obscure, all he could think of was just to retard the rush of events.

It was unfortunately true, and he had had to confess this to the obstinate girl, that the bank he dealt with happened to be in Bishop’s Forley, so that if he once agreed to lend her this money all they had to do was to wait till the hour for the building to open. She dragged this out of him by wild talk about pawning her cloak and rings, but he cursed himself for his candour when he found how ardently she jumped at it.

Old Betsy Cooper listened with intense interest to all this talk and hurried off with alacrity to find pencil and paper, when, the discussion concluded at last and Hastings
conquered
, Netta insisted upon writing a letter for him to take to Rook.

Had the clergyman been more of a man of the world, had he been less hopeless and disenchanted himself, he might have held out against her entreaties. But what could he do? He couldn’t put her by force into a cart bound for Ashover; and to leave her to trail round in desperation through the
pawn-shops 
of this forlorn town seemed more heartless than to accede to her wishes.

A vague idea did for a moment cross his mind that he might leave her imprisoned in Betsy Cooper’s care while he hurried back himself to Ashover; but even so abstracted a disciple of Paracelsus was too well acquainted with the tenacity of women when under the power of a fixed idea to give more than the attention of a second to such a scheme.

Another line of action that flashed through his mind was to send the old woman off to despatch a messenger or a
message
to Rook, while he himself held Netta by force just where she was. But Netta’s impatience, shut up with him there alone for half a day, in close propinquity to those Deformities, was more than he found himself prepared to face. Had she been a younger girl or a weaker girl, the thing would have been easier. He could have dominated her then by sheer official authority. But how could he dominate a self-possessed, reserved woman, her own mistress, knowing exactly what she wanted, and knowing exactly what she wanted of him?

The end of it was that with Netta’s letter to Rook in his pocket and with all the money he had had on him transferred to Betsy’s pocket, he started off with the girl through that vaporous spring haze on their way to Stockit’s Dorset Bank.

He found no difficulty in drawing out the money from his small savings. The difficulty came when it was a question of giving her something beyond the actual price of the ticket so that she should not find herself penniless when she reached London.

Another woman perhaps would have been unpersuadable over this, too, but as long as the money she made use of was not Rook’s money Netta’s scruples were feeble and easily over-ridden. He had the satisfaction of knowing, before they separated, that what she finally accepted was enough to keep her alive for at least a month after she reached town, and
even longer than that if she were very careful. But if she yielded on this point and seemed quite vague and uncertain as to whether the money were a loan or a gift, she became as rigid as adamant when Hastings asked for some address.

“London is enough address for any one,” she said, with that peculiar society tone that Hastings found so difficult to put up with. “You’ll hear of me, if I become a celebrated actress,” she added more naturally.

Hastings had taken for granted that since he had made it possible for her to escape he was in a position to demand her address, and this point-blank refusal outraged his sense of justice. When he understood that she really intended to remain obdurate, he began to regret that he had not made this stipulation earlier, made it before the means to exact it had passed from his hands.

It was eleven o’clock when this conversation took place, and the London express left at noon. The girl entreated him to say good-bye to her before she actually went to the station. She was nervous, she said, lest someone should recognize him, even if she herself passed unnoticed.

Her umbrella was rolled up neatly now and her black bag looked eminently respectable. No one would have
recognized
in this quiet dignified woman the forlorn creature of last night’s encounter.

They went together into a little dairy shop and had a luncheon of cocoa and halfpenny buns on a marble counter. It was then that, in a final attempt to change her resolution, he began to emphasize the unfairness of the course she was taking and its cruelty to Rook. The girl’s reply to this was to break, without a moment’s warning, into a passion of silent weeping. Her big tears, for it was a peculiarity of Netta’s to shed very large tears when she wept, came literally splashing down upon the marble table and reduced all his arguments to silence. Even at this juncture, however, he was struck by the manner in which women can give way to
mental anguish and yet retain their consciousness of
practical
exigencies. For even in the midst of her tears he saw her glance at the clock and begin feeling in her purse to make sure she had not mislaid the money he had given her.

It came over him like a sudden illumination, the tenacious power of life in human beings, this mysterious life, against which he was waging his insane metaphysical war!

For Netta pulled out of her pocket one of those tiny handkerchiefs, compressed into the shape of a small puff-ball by being clutched in the palm of a feverish hand, such as all the lovers and all the sons of women see so often
without
see
ing
,
as if they were the handles of doors or the knobs of bedposts, and after rubbing her cheeks and adjusting her hair looked straight into his face with a spontaneous smile.

That smile, more pitiful and more heroic than anything Hastings was destined to witness for many a long day,
returned
to his mind more than once in the course of the next twenty-four hours. It followed him back to his cottage by the water meadows. It followed him to his supper table. It followed him to his bed. And when he was next seated at his desk, reassembling the dark threads of his devastating philosophy, it troubled his sentences and ruffled his thought in the same way that the discovery of a gleaming bracelet in an ash pit would disturb the occupation of a gatherer-up of cinders.

Though there was so little of a link between them, the mere sense of the fatality and finality of the step she was taking made it difficult for both of them to bring themselves to the irrevocable moment of saying good-bye. He walked with her lingeringly down the narrow street, with its rows of little greengrocers’ and confectioners’ shops, faintly hoping as they went along that even yet, at the last, she might draw back from her desperate plunge.

They passed a vulgar modern hostelry entitled the Antiger
Arms just before they reached the final turn to the station; and quite casually and with that peculiar kind of dull, sick, superficial curiosity, such as must often be the mood of
condemned
criminals as they are led to execution, the girl glanced into the little carriage yard of this place.

Her fingers clutched her companion’s wrist.

“There’s Mr. Twiney!” she whispered.

Hastings did not need to be told. With a rush of fierce relief, which showed how far below his misanthropic
indifference
his uneasiness at Netta’s departure had gone, he recognized the familiar figure of the most affable of his parishioners.

Netta made now an instinctive movement to escape; but the priest held her arm tightly and pulled her into the yard after him, past the painted shafts and the muddy
splash-boards
of a long line of farmers’ gigs, till he had attracted Mr. Twiney’s attention.

“Mr. Hastings! Lord ’a’ mercy on us! And Miss Page! Well, I’ll be blotted out of Book! Ay, won’t Squire be glorified to see ’ee! A’ve been raging and carrying on like a ferret in a poke. It’s been hither and thither with him and no mistake; no rest, no sleep you might say, since he drove wi’ I to get tied up to’s cousin. Ye’ve a-heard of
that
goings-on, I reckon? ’Tis all over Dorset. Tied up and married
he
be, safe and sound; but a’s had no pleasure in’t so far; only hither and thither, as a person might say. But a’ll be a man again now, belike, the poor gentleman, now you’ve a-found this lady, Mister Hastings!”

The clergyman looked at Netta to see if she had caught the drift as unmistakably as he had done himself of Mr. Twiney’s words.

Her head was rigid on her neck, but tilted a little to one side, like a flower-pot on the top of a dahlia stick.

“Mr. Ashover and Lady Ann are married, you say?” She repeated the words as if they were an echo of something else,
of some other, quite different words that were resounding in her own ears.

Mr. Twiney looked at them now with an expression of grave concern upon his countenance. It came over him that he had “let his tongue hang out” as his wife Eliza was wont to express it.

“That be just how it be, miss,” he answered solemnly. “But don’t ’ee take on because of that, lady,” he added anxiously. “Gents like our Squire do marry or not marry same as the likes of I do throw peelings to pigs. ’Tis a small matter to they, lady. Why, ’tis nothink at all! They sleeps the same; and they eats the same. ’Tis a kind of whimsy with they, and I’m blind sure Squire’ll be as joyed to see ’ee as if he ain’t never set eyes on that grand young woman what is now his lawful missus!”

Hastings slipped his hand into his waistcoat pocket and glanced at his watch. It was a quarter to twelve. In fifteen minutes the express would come in. In twenty minutes it would have come and gone.

He found himself looking nervously at the entrance to the yard. At any moment, he thought, Rook might appear on the scene and settle everything!

Netta might have easily noticed both these significant movements on the part of her indiscreet protector; but at the close of Mr. Twiney’s speech she had produced a lead pencil and a bit of paper—legacies, both of them, from their night with Betsy—and had begun writing hurriedly and quickly. She held up the paper now toward William
Hastings
.

“That’ll find me in London,” she said. “But you must swear to me, by God’s truth, that you won’t show it to Mr. Ashover. Do you swear that?”

Confused and bewildered by the rapidity of her movement, and only anxious to retain her with him till the train had gone, Hastings gave her his promise.

“I shall Want to know how he gets on,” she murmured hurriedly, repossessing herself of her black bag which he had placed on the ground. And then with her hand on his arm: “But you swear you won’t even tell him you’ve got an address? If you do, if you give him the least hint, remember you’ve broken your word!”

She need not have pressed her point so desperately. In the earlier hours of their contact the priest’s consideration had been mostly for Rook, who, after all, was his patron if not his friend. But, as so often happens in these cases, when one enters an emotional imbroglio from one particular entrance it is likely enough that one comes out of it on quite the opposite side. Hastings had been swept so far into the tide of Netta’s feelings that it was impossible for him to remain the neutral spectator he had been at the beginning. The mere fact that she had taken him into her confidence as she had done drew him to her side and compelled him to divide his loyalty.

As he took from her this little bit of paper he saw a look on her face which made him realize her identity as he had never done in the days at Ashover; realise it in the way human beings so seldom do realize these mysteries as they pass and repass in the casual encounters of life.