CHAPTER XV

*

One day the Spawer wakes up suddenly to consciousness, like Barclay in the hedge bottom, and discovers, as his friend Barclay has not infrequently discovered before him, that he is occupying a strange and uncomfortable position. It was on a Tuesday when he made the final effort and awoke definitely to an actual sense of his location, but he had been blinking at it unseeingly for some while before that. The previous morning Father Mostyn had taken leave of Ullbrig for his few days' annual pike fishing with the Rev. the Hon. Algernon Smythe Trepinway in Norfolk, and this sudden break in the continuity of existence had served as an alarum to the Spawer's long slumber. He woke reluctantly, but with purpose, took his morocco red bathing drawers, his towel and his stick, and without pausing to any appreciable length at the lane gate, plunged across the two fields towards the cliff.

It was a glorious, steadfast blue day. Not a cloud as big as the puff of my lady's powder-box showed itself in any corner of the sky. No breezes, even of the softest, filtered through the hot hedges, or cooled the parched tips of the burning grass blades. Without intermission the sun poured his golden largess down upon the earth from on high, so forcefully that wherever the sunlight rested, it was as though a great hot hand were imposing its weight. Yesterday the harvesting had set in with a vengeance, and now the whole air was a-quiver with the whir of busy blades, whose tireless activity seemed the very music made for slumber, and lulled all other moving things towards somnolent repose.

The beach lay out dazzling in its unbroken smoothness, like white satin, and deserted quite. Not another footstep than his own had been, or in all probability would be, there that day to tread destructive perforating tracks over its beautiful surface of sand. Up and down, for something like a dozen clear miles of coast, or so far as his eyes could show him, he seemed, like a second Robinson Crusoe, monarch of all he surveyed. The true spirit of the solitude of the lower Yorkshire coast is here. There is no elaboration to the picture; it is plain and lacking detail. Of foliage by the sea there is not a leaf, excepting mere divisional hedges. Fields in cultivation and out of it run to the very edge of the cliff--a sombre cliff of soft, dark earth, stained here and there to unprepossessing rusty red, with trickling chalybeate streams, and showing terrible toothmarks of the voracious sea, that feeds its way inland on this part of the coast at the rate of a yard a year. Looking over the brink of it you can discern as many as half a dozen paths, in various stages of subsidence, that less than that number of years ago led people along the cliff top as the path you stand on leads them now. In other places you may see huge slices of grass land, descending like great steps downwards to the shore in their progress towards ultimate devourance, while warning fissures across the existing pathway show where, perhaps this very winter, another step will be detached and added to the never-ending stairway of demolition.

In a sheltered inlet, where the sea has swept up a thick white carpet of bleached sand, the Spawer pitches his bathing camp this morning. On other occasions he has trod down here more gladsomely; the sea, murmuring its musical cadences upon a lonely beach, has not made music to him in vain. But for him to-day the sun is a little dim, the sea a little jaded. The inward content that stood interpreter between his soul and his outward worldly joyance is gone from him, and he stands somehow like a stranger in the presence of strange things. Here on the seashore, he has come to play a duet more full of emotion, and more crowded with difficulties than any he knows within the province of music, for it is a duet with his own soul.

In a sense, dimly and vaguely, he has comprehended for a day past, a couple of days past, at the most--Lord help him--a week, that this duet was inevitable. He has been, indeed, since these several days, two men. The second was better than the first, but not much. The second of them held the strings of the conscience bag (slackly, however) and rattled it ominously--though more as a warning, if the truth were told--to give the first his chance of escape. In the heart of the second (if heart it could be called) there lingered a sneaking sympathy with the delinquent first, as for a younger brother. And now, after a mutual game of hide-and-seek, when the one would not look while the other showed, and the other would not show while the other was looking, through a kind of desperate conviction that something must be done, they had sneaked their two ways down to the beach this morning, prepared (though only badly) to declare themselves to one another, and come to some understanding, though whether this understanding should be creditable or discreditable to both or to either was yet unsettled.

By what subtle, imperceptible paths has he outjourneyed the territory of that great happiness which seemed so lately his, to find himself all suddenly in this unpleasant no-man's land of the imagination? By subtle, imperceptible paths indeed. By the touch of hands; by the gazing of eyes; by the inflection of voice. Time was, in the early days it was, when he could look on Pam's fascinating sprinkling of freckles with an eye as purely interested, and as purely disinterested, as though they had been the specklings of a wild bird's egg. He had begun by making a friend of her. He had come ultimately to regard her as a sister, to whom he had acted in all good faith the strong, reliant, reliable, affectionate, unemotional elder brother--who could have kissed her, and thought no more of that kiss, nor prepared his lips for kisses to come. And now ... what was he going to make of her next? ... of himself? Who but a brother can act the brother? Who but a father--even though he doddle benevolently on his legs and have respectable white hairs--can be sure of acting the father to any daughter not his own? What are the sexes but phosphorus and sandpaper for the kindling of love's emotion? Already the phosphorus had not wanted signs of impending ignition. Just a very little more rubbing of this friendly intercourse--a day or two ... a week at most ... and the flame would burst out for them both to see. So here let him settle it. What was he going to do?

He did not know what he was going to do.... There were complications.

Complications of his own allowing, remember. Why had he not let it be plainly understood--as soon as his relations with this girl grew--that he was a man with a claim upon him?

Ah! If only he had.

Why had n't he? Had he shirked it? If he had shirked it, then he was indeed guilty.

He did not think he had shirked it ... at least, with intention.

But the idea had come to him. Come to him more than once. Did he not on one occasion at Hesketh's corner make the resolve to tell the girl that he was going to be married?

Yes.

Then why did n't he?

Because he could think of no expression at the time to relieve the news of a certain primitive brutality--a blunt statement quite out of accord with the moment and the mood.

Thought must always be in some measure of accord with the moment and the mood. You could not say, for instance: "Good morning. What a beautiful day. I am going to be married."

But he had thought the same thought subsequently.

True.

Why had he not acted on it?

## Partly for the same reason. And then again ... it seemed so easy in

thought and so difficult in effect. He was frightened he might bungle it, and make it sound like an unpalatable caution to the girl. "Don't set your aspirations upon me. I warn you. I am not for you." Faugh! The idea--in this girl's case--was revolting.

Because, therefore, of a little unpleasantness on account, he had run up a long score--prepared to declare himself bankrupt when occasion arose, and involve the girl in his own insolvency. Was that it?

He had certainly avoided anything that might be odious to the girl ... or painful to her feelings--but he had had no ideas of involving her. God forbid!

And the other? The Absent One? What had been his feelings towards her? Had he thought his conduct such as to merit her confidence in him?

He had not thought it undeserving of her confidence. Their relations were of long standing. Before now he had kissed some mutual girl friends in her presence. She had smiled.

Supposing he had kissed them in her absence ... and she had come subsequently to hear of it? Would she have smiled? Of course he had told her in his letters all about the post-girl--and their present relations?

He had told her the postman was a girl.

Exactly. But what sort of a girl.

Was there more than one sort of a girl? A girl, it seemed to him, was a girl all the world over. The definition was plain enough.

Had he said she was a pretty girl?

Why should he have said that?

Why should he have avoided it?

He had n't avoided it. It was only one of the things he had n't ... specified. Why should he specify a "pretty girl" any more than he should have specified an "ugly one"? Besides ... prettiness was all abstract, and relative, and indefinable. When we called a thing pretty we only meant that it excited that particular degree of emotion in our own mind. Other people might decide upon it as ugly.

Exactly. Had he, by any chance, spoken of Cliff Wrangham as a delightful corner of the world's end?

He believed he had.

And he had mentioned Father Mostyn?

Certainly. He had alluded to him.

In affectionate and laudatory terms?

He did n't know about affectionate and laudatory terms. Perhaps he had. He had spoken of him as he bad found him. Father Mostyn had always been kind. In writing he had no doubt alluded to that kindness.

More than once?

Doubtless more than once. Kindness was not such a common quality that it would not bear a little repetition.

He had mentioned the Doctor.

Some of him. His stockings, he believed, and his strange happiness in speaking the truth.

How often had he met the Doctor?

Perhaps half a dozen times.

And the post-girl?

Let him see....

Exactly. He could n't count the number. He had mentioned with some small degree of detail a man who was but a cypher in his visit, and he had overlooked altogether the figure which was its numerator, so to speak.

Suppose he had put the case, as it stood, before a referee, chosen from the Sons of the World. Suppose he 'd said, for instance: There was a fellow once, engaged to a girl. The girl went with a maiden aunt by marriage to Switzerland for the aunt's health. It was arranged that while they were there the fellow was to go into obscurity by the sea-coast and complete some great compositional work he had the vanity to think he could achieve, and that, after the girl's return, either towards the end of November or the early part of January, these two were to be married. But during this obscurity the fellow came upon an altogether unusual sample of a post-girl. She was supposed to be derived from a family of importance; had all the inherited gifts of a lady; the low, musically-balanced voice; the symmetrical, graceful figure and carriage; beautiful teeth and a smile like dawn. Suppose everything about the girl appealed to this fellow tremendously. Suppose they became ... well, call it friends. Suppose he taught her music and French, and met her as often as possible. Suppose all his moments were occupied in thinking of her. Suppose the life he had left and the life (presumably) he was going back to were receded so far away that he could scarcely distinguish them, or his obligations to them. Suppose that the girl was to all intents and purposes his little cosmos, out of which he indited letters to the Other Girl--letters that made no mention of the existing state of things. Suppose, now, he laid this case, just as it stood, before any man of the world. What, did he imagine, would that man of the world decide upon him? What would he think of him?

Another man of the world, perhaps.

Probably so. And suppose this other girl had been his sister, and he had been some other man, and the circumstances were as they were, and some enlightened friend had informed him of them. Well?

On the face of it, he might be tempted to step in and send the fellow to the devil.

And in his own case?

In his own case? Summarising like that, without any partiality, but condensed into a cold-blooded abstraction, he supposed he might seem deserving of being sent to the devil, too--if he were not there already. Every case looked black when it was formularised. The facts had accumulated without his perceiving them. It was easy now to go and roll them up like an increasing snowball of accusation against him, but at the time they had seemed slight enough. When he had scribbled off the letters it had been with a consciousness of the shuffle, but with the inward resolve, clearly defined, to atone for it by a longer letter next day, or some other day.

And he had done so?

Unfortunately, no. Fate, there again, had seemed against him. But the intention had not been wanting--it was the flesh only that had been a little weak.

In the light of present understanding, then, if by the mere wish he could blot out not only the remembrance of this weakness but the actuality of it, he would wish the wish?

No reply.

Eh? He would wish the wish at once--was n't that so?

Still no reply.

Perhaps he had n't quite understood. Put it another way. Suppose, since the doings of these latter days were not entirely creditable to him, when viewed dispassionately, was he prepared to wish that he had never come to Cliff Wrangham?

He could n't honestly wish that. It was n't fair to Cliff Wrangham or the Dixons. He 'd had a very happy time there and done good work. Cliff Wrangham was n't to blame.

Since Cliff Wrangham was n't to blame, then, would he be prepared to wish that he had never come across the post-girl?

He 'd have been bound to come across her.

Not if, for instance, she 'd been ill, and somebody else had brought the letters.

He would n't wish anybody ill for the mere sake of saving his conscience.

Supposing she had been away, then?

Away where?

Anywhere.

But she had n't been away, and so there was an end of it. He was n't dealing with what might have been, but what was.

And what was?

He did n't know. He only knew that he would n't wish his worst enemy to be on the rack as he 'd been on it all last night, and this morning. He had n't slept a wink.

Why had n't he slept?

Because he could n't sleep.

But surely that was funny.

It was n't funny at all. It was hell.

How could that be? If he found now that he 'd been taking a wrong moral turn, all he had to do was to turn back. His way was easy.

Was it?

It was ... if he were sorry he 'd gone wrong. Was he sorry that he 'd gone wrong?

Of course he was sorry. The difficulty was he 'd gone such a deuce of a long way wrong.

Ah! Longer, perhaps, than he 'd said.

Not longer than he 'd said, but quite long enough, without saying a word. To turn all the way back, at this stage of the proceedings--with explanation or without--was a desperately hard thing to do.

If duty compelled it, nevertheless?

Why should duty compel him to do anything so unpleasant?

But surely that was a strange way to speak of a duty which merely implied his obligation to the Other Girl. Presumably, as things stood, he loved her.

Presumably he did.

He had come to love her of his own free will? It was not a case where he had been "rushed"? There was no solicitous mother or obliging sister in the case?

None at all. Only he had had larger opportunity to cultivate her acquaintance than in the general run of affairs. She was a distant connection of his by a remote marriage, who, in view of her extreme personal connection with the family, had generally ranked as a cousin. In the days when he had had prospects from his uncle they were constantly thrown together, and it was in those days that he engaged himself. All the family looked with favor upon the match, and even encouraged it. Then this wretched old uncle took it suddenly into his head to be actively interested in the nephew's welfare. Wanted him to throw music to the winds as being unworthy of his high prospects, and went the length of telling him in a letter of six words or so to choose between music and the mammon of unrighteousness. Fool, perhaps, that he was, he chose for music. All his family rounded on him at once--or such family as it was; thank God, there was n't much of it--and wrote abject letters to the mammon, telling him how headstrong poor dear Maurice was, and how darling uncle must please give him time, and not be too severe upon his wicked indiscretion. Maurice, dear misguided boy, loved darling uncle very dearly, and would be shocked one day when he came to his senses, and saw how deeply he had grieved him.

And the Other Girl? Did she share the family reproaches?

On the contrary, she said he had acted nobly. He offered her her freedom, of course, as soon as he relinquished the mammon, but she would not accept it.

Had she said to him, for instance: "Dear Maurice, there have been times when I have been troubled to know which of you I loved; you or your uncle's money. And now that the horrid money 's gone, I think it 's you."

Yes, she had said that.

Did he tell her that it was n't for beggars to be choosers, and that if she cared to have a musical pauper she could have him, and there 'd be nothing to pay but his bills?

He believed he had made some witty allusion to that effect.

What did he call pauperdom?

He called two or three hundred a year pauperdom. With the assistance of a few pot-boiling songs under somebody else's name, including, to his shame be it said, a percentage of semi-sacred effusions with angels fluttering in the treble, and organ obligato, he generally managed to supplement this. He also wrote a few elementary teaching pieces for a certain educational firm, under the reassuring title of Ivan Fedor Ivanowitch, which returned him a pittance. There was no demand for his two symphonies or his orchestral suite or his first piano concerto in _fa diese_. That 's why he was writing another. Altogether, taking one thing with another, his income might be set down--except to the Inland Revenue--at about three hundred and fifty pounds a year. A man could n't be much poorer than that, and talk, Heaven help him, of marriage.

And the Other Girl? Had she expectations at all?

He hoped not, for her own peace of mind. She had this aunt by marriage. Perhaps she might be able to call a couple of hundred pounds per annum her own some day. But it would n't be much more.

And how long had she been engaged to him?

Oh, he could n't exactly say. Six or seven years. It had been an early and a lingering engagement.

Taking his statements into admission, one thing seemed very clear. He was under a strong moral obligation to the Other Girl.

He had never denied it.

Perhaps not, but his actions--judged superficially, of course--had shown a large tendency to overlook this obligation. However, let the past bury the past. He saw now the right way, and where he had strayed from it. Henceforth, since his sole desire was to purge his spirit of its temporary faithlessness, and gain grace to win back his claim to the Other Girl's confidence, henceforth his path lay clear.

Where?

Where? Surely he had no necessity to ask that?

On the contrary, he did ask that.

But there could be no doubt in his mind. Any way that did not lead him back into the old temptation was the right way.

If coming across the post-girl was temptation, there was no way in this district that did lead the right way.

Then he must depart to where there was.

Leave Cliff Wrangham altogether?

Precisely.

Why should he leave Cliff Wrangham--that is, before the Other One returned? Was he an infant that he must be packed off into the corner in disgrace, because he could n't be trusted?

He had proved himself an infant by the mere fact that he was no longer to be trusted. In other words, he had broken his trust.

He denied it. He 'd broken nothing.

When a nursemaid, who 's been warned, lets a child....

Oh, damn the nursemaid and the child, too! Serve it jolly right if she did. He was n't a nursemaid.

Perhaps not. Perhaps he was just a low, common blackguard, after all.

Perhaps he was.

He had his bath, but the salt water was all unfriendly, and there was no stimulus in its waves. It seemed to have deserted him at this hour of dark temptation. In ceaseless tussle the two of him returned along the sands and slowly back to Dixon's. Out of the drifting current of reasonings two things at least seemed clear. The conscience-bearer was dimly arguing for departure; the shuffling second self, that had been

## actively dodging investigation all this while, was trying to invent

counter-arguments for delay.

The very life he was leading had become dear to him. He had lost slowly the desire to regain touch with the big centres of artistic activity, and seemed to be living somehow a purer life, in which he worked solely (or at least, thought so) for Art's own sake. The ultimate success of this concerto troubled him little. Before, he had been building much on it, as the most promiseful fruit of his muse. Now, if it were scouted, if he and all his labors were scouted, there was the blessed sense of being able to return here for solace and shelter. The Dixons would be sorry to lose him, he felt sure; glad to have him back. The Vicarage door would open as soon as his figure came on to the vicarial territory in front of the iron rails; the bland, beneficent hand of his Reverence would receive him, like the lost lamb gathered into the fold. God bless the Vicarage! His heart warmed, and his eye--a little emotionalised, it might be, by the crisis he was passing through--moistened as he thought upon that smallpox-blistered door, and the happiness that had been behind it. And last of all ... there was Pam. What a soft and soothing cataplasm she was for all the soul's inflammations; for all the chafing irritation of spirit brought about by contact with a rough world. Her breath was balm, and her voice like a soft south wind blowing through the strings of a lute. All her freckles would cry aloud in welcome; her lips would disclose the pure, milky greeting of those white teeth; her hands--that he had, with amusement and exalted joy, watched struggling in their dear, feminine tirelessness with the contrary humors of Father Mostyn's keys--he knew what those hands would do when she heard of his return. They would clasp themselves and go beneath her chin. He had not noticed her for nothing. And then his mind went on to the shortening of the days; to the harvest gathered; to the crisp September; to the autumn, with its long, cosy evenings in the Vicar's room, and the music; to the winter; to Christmas; to the meetings; to the happiness; to the sea....

And by Christmas ... perhaps ... he would be married.

Married!

Married and far away. All these days would be but a remembrance. Father Mostyn and Pamela something less, and something infinitely more, than the figments of a dream. He would be building up a new life for himself; a new habitation for his soul to live in, out of new interests, out of new ambitions (if he had any), out of new environments.

Last of all, out of the mass of arguments and sub-arguments, questions and cross-questions, considerations and counter-considerations, in one of those sudden lucid heavenly flashes of righteousness with which the soul's lightning has power to pierce, at irregular and unexpected intervals, the cloud of doubt, he received the inspiration of resolve. Departure, the Spawer decided, was the only thing to save him. The necessity was cruel, no doubt--to the Ullbrig girl, perhaps, as well as himself--but in the momentary lucidity of soul he had caught the glimpse of this as his sole honorable path, and he elected now to pursue it. To make the requisite retractions and yet stay on was out of the question. He could not bring himself to exercise those despicable economies of affection--palpable retrenchments even--in his friendship with the girl, lacking which, to remain in Ullbrig was not to stand still but to advance. No amount of mere passive rectitude could check the evolution of facts and circumstances. The world did not stand still because one chastened spirit resolved to hold back from the general march of iniquity. There was nothing for it. He would go.

Then imagination, intoxicated with the virtuous bitter draught he had drained, took wild flight into the future. He was going, truly, but not for long. Pam and this wife of his that was to be should become as sisters. He pictured Pam's coming to visit them. Long, glorious visits they should be. And he and Beatrice should return to Cliff Wrangham. They would make Cliff Wrangham their summer residence, their winter residence, their life-long residence. Exaltation carried him to the pitch of bigamy even. In his wild desire to squeeze the last drop of happiness from these deadly sweet berries of fancy he was deaf to the voice of reason. He scarcely perceived whether it was Pam or the absent one that figured, in this glorified vision, as his wedded wife. At times, for all the power he possessed to discriminate, it might have been both. Or perhaps, with fine prophetic oversight of worldly institutions, he visioned a sublime state of platonic bliss in which was neither marrying nor giving in marriage. For extreme righteousness knows nothing of reason, nor does it argue. Arguments are but the beatings of its wings to gain impetus for flight, but the flight, once attained, transcends all logic. The sublime picture of married felicity that the Spawer created would have been the scandal of any decent, respectably constituted community. Had there been a dozen Pams, indeed, he would have included them all in this spiritual harem, and yet--repugnant as this indiscriminate scheme of domestic association might appear to the many--there was no taint of earthly impurity in his conception of it.

Fortified with this blest vision of a paradise as reward for the pains of present righteousness, he swallowed a hasty and a tasteless meal, and set off without further thought or delay--lest the strength of resolve might in any way leak from him before his purpose was accomplished--down the Ullbrig road. For he knew that his composure was bearing a tremendous burden on its back, and he feared, if he retarded too long, it might break down, when ultimately he met the girl, into some stammering, faulty, broken-backed, weak-kneed, incomplete accomplishment of his mission. If possible, he wanted to drop across her as though by pure accident. He did n't want her to detect any traces of labored premeditation in what he had to tell. He held the manner of the news-breaking roughly formulated in his mind, but he was anxious lest she might discern, through any flaw in the outer agreement of his smiles (just sufficiently tinged with regret, he told himself, to be in keeping with the subject of departure, but no more), the horrible machinery, driven by a thousand heart-power, clanking away inside him, and manufacturing this leave-taking to pattern, like rolled steel.

He was so little sure of his capacity to execute his own purpose that, through mere distrust of doing what he wanted to do, he was almost ready to give the project up and declare himself beaten before the battle. And all the while he walked onward he began to accumulate doubts respecting the undertaking of such a delicate operation beneath the searching light of day. He had one revelation of the girl's great eyes fixed solemnly upon his lips, and watching him as he wallowed in his embarrassment, and his soul flinched. For a moment he had desperate thoughts of return. Then he sat, under the white flag of truce, on a rail. Then he moved slowly onward again, with fixed eyes on Ullbrig, praying he might miss the girl. And with this prayer almost moving his lips, at Hesketh's corner he met her.

*