Antic Hay

“You? Is it you?” She seemed doubtful. Gumbril nodded. “It’s me,” he reassured her. “I’ve shaved; that’s all.” He had left his beard in the top right-hand drawer of the chest of drawers, among the ties and the collars. Emily looked at him judicially. “I like you better without it,” she decided at last. “You look nicer. Oh no, I don’t mean to say you weren’t nice before,” she hastened to add. “But—you know—gentler——” She hesitated. “It’s a silly word,” she said, “but there it is: sweeter.” That was the unkindest cut of all. “Milder and more melancholy?” he suggested. “Well, if you like to put it like that,” Emily agreed. He took her hand and raised it to his lips. “I forgive you,” he said. He could forgive her anything for the sake of those candid eyes, anything for the grave, serious mouth, anything for the short brown hair that curled—oh, but never seriously, never gravely—with such a hilarious extravagance round her head. He had met her, or rather the Complete Man, flushed with his commercial triumphs as he returned from his victory over Mr. Boldero, had met her at the National Gallery. “Old Masters, young mistresses;” Coleman had recommended the National Gallery. He was walking up the Venetian Room, feeling as full of swaggering vitality as the largest composition of Veronese, when he heard, gigglingly whispered just behind him his Open Sesame to new adventure, “Beaver.” He spun round on his tracks and found himself face to face with two rather startled young women. He frowned ferociously: he demanded satisfaction for the impertinence. They were both, he noticed, of gratifyingly pleasing appearance and both extremely young. One of them, the elder it seemed, and the more charming, as he had decided from the first, of the two, was dreadfully taken aback; blushed to the eyes, stammered apologetically. But the other, who had obviously pronounced the word, only laughed. It was she who made easy the forming of an acquaintance which ripened, half an hour later, over the tea-cups and to the strains of the most classy music on the fifth floor of Lyons’s Strand Corner House. Their names were Emily and Molly. Emily, it seemed, was married. It was Molly who let that out, and the other had been angry with her for what was evidently an indiscretion. The bald fact that Emily was married had at once been veiled with mysteries, surrounded and protected by silences; whenever the Complete Man asked a question about it, Emily did not answer and Molly only giggled. But if Emily was married and the elder of the two, Molly was decidedly the more knowledgeable about life; Mr. Mercaptan would certainly have set her down as the more civilized. Emily didn’t live in London; she didn’t seem to live anywhere in particular. At the moment she was staying with Molly’s family at Kew. He had seen them the next day, and the day after, and the day after that; once at lunch, to desert them precipitately for his afternoon with Rosie; once at tea in Kew Gardens; once at dinner, with a theatre to follow and an extravagant taxi back to Kew at midnight. The tame decoy allays the fears of the shy wild birds; Molly, who was tame, who was frankly a flirting little wanton, had served the Complete Man as a decoy for the ensnaring of Emily. When Molly went away to stay with friends in the country, Emily was already inured and accustomed to the hunter’s presence; she accepted the playful attitude of gallantry, which the Complete Man, at the invitation of Molly’s rolling eyes and provocative giggle, had adopted from the first, as natural and belonging to the established order of things. With giggling Molly to give her a lead, she had gone in three days much further along the path of intimacy than, by herself, she would have advanced in ten times the number of meetings. “It seems funny,” she had said the first time they met after Molly’s departure, “it seems funny to be seeing you without Molly.” “It seemed funnier with Molly,” said the Complete Man. “It wasn’t Molly I wanted to see.” “Molly’s a very nice, dear girl,” she declared loyally. “Besides, she’s amusing and can talk. And I can’t; I’m not a bit amusing.” It wasn’t difficult to retort to that sort of thing; but Emily didn’t believe in compliments; oh, quite genuinely not. He set out to make the exploration of her; and now that she was inured to him, no longer too frightened to let him approach, now, moreover, that he had abandoned the jocular insolences of the Complete Man in favour of a more native mildness, which he felt instinctively was more suitable in this particular case, she laid no difficulties in his way. She was lonely, and he seemed to understand everything so well; in the unknown country of her spirit and her history she was soon going eagerly before him as his guide. She was an orphan. Her mother she hardly remembered. Her father had died of influenza when she was fifteen. One of his business friends used to come and see her at school, take her out for treats and give her chocolates. She used to call him Uncle Stanley. He was a leather merchant, fat and jolly with a rather red face, very white teeth and a bald head that was beautifully shiny. When she was seventeen and a half he asked her to marry him, and she had said yes. “But why?” Gumbril asked. “Why on earth?” he repeated. “He said he’d take me round the world; it was just when the war had come to an end. Round the world, you know; and I didn’t like school. I didn’t know anything about it and he was very nice to me; he was very pressing. I didn’t know what marriage meant.” “Didn’t know?” She shook her head; it was quite true. “But not in the least.” And she had been born within the twentieth century. It seemed a case for the text-books of sexual psychology. “Mrs. Emily X., born in 1901, was found to be in a state of perfect innocence and ignorance at the time of the Armistice, 11th November 1918,” etc. “And so you married him?” She had nodded. “And then?” She had covered her face with her hands, she had shuddered. The amateur uncle, now professionally a husband, had come to claim his rights—drunk. She had fought him, she had eluded him, had run away and locked herself into another room. On the second night of her honeymoon he gave her a bruise on the forehead and a bite on the left breast which had gone on septically festering for weeks. On the fourth, more determined than ever, he seized her so violently by the throat, that a blood-vessel broke and she began coughing bright blood over the bedclothes. The amateur uncle had been reduced to send for a doctor and Emily had spent the next few weeks in a nursing home. That was four years ago; her husband had tried to induce her to come back, but Emily had refused. She had a little money of her own; she was able to refuse. The amateur uncle had consoled himself with other and more docile nieces. “And has nobody tried to make love to you since then?” he asked. “Oh, lots of them have tried.” “And not succeeded?” She shook her head. “I don’t like men,” she said. “They’re hateful, most of them. They’re brutes.” “_Anch’ io?_” “What?” she asked, puzzled. “Am I a brute too?” And behind his beard, suddenly, he felt rather a brute. “No,” said Emily, after a little hesitation, “you’re different. At least I think you are; though sometimes,” she added candidly, “sometimes you do and say things which make me wonder if you really are different.” The Complete Man laughed. “Don’t laugh like that,” she said. “It’s rather stupid.” “You’re perfectly right,” said Gumbril. “It is.” And how did she spend her time? He continued the exploration. Well, she read a lot of books; but most of the novels she got from Boots’ seemed to her rather silly. “Too much about the same thing. Always love.” The Complete Man gave a shrug. “Such is life.” “Well, it oughtn’t to be,” said Emily. And then, when she was in the country—and she was often in the country, taking lodgings here and there in little villages, weeks and months at a time—she went for long walks. Molly couldn’t understand why she liked the country; but she did. She was very fond of flowers. She liked them more than people, she thought. “I wish I could paint,” she said. “If I could, I’d be happy for ever, just painting flowers. But I can’t paint.” She shook her head. “I’ve tried so often. Such dirty, ugly smudges come out on the paper; and it’s all so lovely in my head, so lovely out in the fields.” Gumbril began talking with erudition about the flora of West Surrey: where you could find butterfly orchis and green man and the bee, the wood where there was actually wild columbine growing, the best localities for butcher’s broom, the outcrops of clay where you get wild daffodils. All this odd knowledge came spouting up into his mind from some underground source of memory. Flowers—he never thought about flowers nowadays from one year’s end to the other. But his mother had liked flowers. Every spring and summer they used to go down to stay at their cottage in the country. All their walks, all their drives in the governess cart had been hunts after flowers. And naturally the child had hunted with all his mother’s ardour. He had kept books of pressed flowers, he had mummified them in hot sand, he had drawn maps of the country and coloured them elaborately with different coloured inks to show where the different flowers grew. How long ago all that was! Horribly long ago! Many seeds had fallen in the stony places of his spirit, to spring luxuriantly up into stalky plants and wither again because they had no deepness of earth; many had been sown there and had died, since his mother scattered the seeds of the wild flowers. “And if you want sundew,” he wound up, “you’ll find it in the Punch Bowl, under Hindhead. Or round about Frensham. The Little Pond, you know, not the Big.” “But you know all about them,” Emily exclaimed in delight. “I’m ashamed of my poor little knowledge. And you must really love them as much as I do.” Gumbril did not deny it; they were linked henceforth by a chain of flowers. But what else did she do? Oh, of course she played the piano a great deal. Very badly; but at any rate it gave her pleasure. Beethoven: she liked Beethoven best. More or less, she knew all the sonatas, though she could never keep up anything like the right speed in the difficult parts. Gumbril had again shown himself wonderfully at home. “Aha!” he said. “I bet you can’t shake that low B in the last variation but one of Op. 106 so that it doesn’t sound ridiculous.” And of course she couldn’t, and of course she was glad that he knew all about it and how impossible it was. In the cab, as they drove back to Kew that evening, the Complete Man had decided it was time to do something decisive. The parting kiss—more of a playful sonorous buss than a serious embracement—that was already in the protocol, as signed and sealed before her departure by giggling Molly. It was time, the Complete Man considered, that this salute should take on a character less formal and less playful. One, two, three and, decisively, as they passed through Hammersmith Broadway, he risked the gesture. Emily burst into tears. He was not