A Child of the Age (Adams)/Chapter 12

by Francis William Lauderdale Adams

IV.

The next day after lunch, I went for a walk to Hampstead, and wandered about there, my thoughts alternating between the beautiful sweet nature about me and the past days of my first London weeks, till half-past six. Then I remembered that Rosy would be waiting for me at eight. It used to take me something under an hour to get from Maitland Street to Hampstead. It was now half-past six. What to do with myself for an hour?—from seven to eight, that was. Then my thoughts turned off in memory: memory of the many times I had come marching along this very pavement in those first London days whose second half was an age of weariness and woe. Here was the very corner at which I stood that dreary day. Was it all a dream? 'I stand still here to-day,' I said to myself, 'as I stood still here that day, and look at the brown cracked concrete of the low wall and the black sooty rails that top it. The windows are lampless too, as they were when I first stood still here. Will the left one light up suddenly too as it did then? No. Lampless yet. Who lives here? God knows? And yet, foolish though it be, will not the thought occur again: 'Is it nothing to you, all ye who pass by, my weariness and my woe.' Here I put my hand on the nearer cemented gate-post, brown and cracked like the low wall, and think of the figure that leant against it in that dreary rain of half-darkness when my body seemed all bloodless, and the girl hurried by me with her huddled-up dress and umbrella spread over her. I see her now—her quick glance, and that hurry by: the devil that rose in me——'

The door above opened and an old lady came out and, looking at me through the spectacles on her elevated nose, asked:

'Do you want anything, young man?'

I took off my hat and held it off.

'Nothing,' I said, 'madam, I thank you. I hope my stopping a moment to examine your gate-post has not troubled you? I see that the cement is cracked and peeling off. Now I am the patentee of a cement which is warranted——'

'No,' she said sharply, looking at me over the spectacles of her depressed nose, 'I don't want any of your cement, young man. Good-day!'

And was in and viewing me suspiciously through the glass panel of the closed door. If I had not been afraid of disturbing her feelings, I should have given a shout. As it was, I repressed the shout, and marched off quickly, laughing to myself.

It was a little past seven when I reached the canal bridge at the bottom of Maida Vale. I stayed a little there, looking at the flowers, finally buying a rose, and carrying it off with me. This I took to No. 3, and inquired of Mrs. Smith if Miss Howlet was in? She wasn't: as I expected. I left the rose, and went for a prowl about the streets.

All at once I found myself looking at the Marble Arch clock, by which it was five minutes past eight. Away I went up the Edgware Road, and was marching along at full speed, a little past Praed Street on the right side, when, passing before a gas-flaming fruiterer's, my eye took in a girl's form, and by the time I had gone five or six yards my heart was up in my throat at the sudden thought of—Rosy! I turned back at once. We met face to face, she smiling up into mine, I looking with a strange graveness into hers.

'Well,' she said, 'you were in a hurry!'

We were walking on together, I taking one stride to her two. It seemed to me remarkable somehow, this meeting. We had not shaken hands. I did not know what to say. We walked on together for a little in silence. Then I began:

'I am very glad to see you. And I hope you are well. If you have taken walks, as you told me you would, then I am sure you are better than you were when I left you.'

We talked of general things that did not interest me or, I think, her much, till we came to the corner of Maitland Street. Then ensued questions and explanations, and, in about five minutes. Rosy returned from her visit to No. 3, full of the beautiful rose I had given her.

'Beautiful rose?' I said. '… How do you know I gave it to you?'

'Because,' she answered, ' who else would?'

She was ready for the walk now. We set off at once, in a half-mechanical way Park-wards, beginning to talk like two children.

All at once:

'Here's your locket!' she said, taking it from inside her coat, and holding it out, small and round and silver.

'Nay, yours,' I said, 'not mine.'

'You gave it me, though.'

'I did. That made it yours.'

'But it was yours before that, or how could you have given it me?'

I acquiesced, with the reflection that Adam must have had some trouble to get an authentic account of the eating of the historic apple.

'What are you laughing at?' said Rosy.

'Have you forgotten the Swallow Song?'

'Forgotten it? O my gracious, no!—

"She comes, she comes, the swallow,
bringing beautiful hours,
beautiful seasons,
white on her——"

What are you laughing at?'

It was no wonder she asked. Peal after peal of laughter, quenchless, re-echoing, came from me. The more I tried to stop it, the more it came. At last I stood still, exhausted, with my hands on my hips. But a glimpse of her face was enough to generate a fit of laughter as violent as the first.

We went on together somehow or other, I still shaking with this second fit, she solemn to a degree. All at once it struck me that she was a little afraid I was mad. And then came the task of appeasing her outraged sense of dignity. I was sorry, I said, to have laughed in this way. I explained that what had made me begin was the way she scampered over the Swallow Song …, and so on.

Her outraged sense of dignity took a good deal of appeasing, but I managed it in the end. Nay, I pleaded so hard, that I obtained from her a repetition of the Swallow Song, as we sat on that seat not far from the top of Primrose Hill, which I knew so well, so well, and she too remembered perhaps.

We parted at the door of No. 3 at about eleven. As I marched away down the Edgware Road, I went through the evening I had spent with her, ending at her grave bow of the head as I went back from her at the door with my hat down in my hand; but, going across the Park, other thoughts came to me, and I had lost sight of the evening I had spent with her when I reached home.

 

Here the Journal has a single entry:

'O Claire, Claire, that we should have met here in the time of eternity, and so parted! Claire, Claire! Oh, it is a vile devil's earth, and good is only in the slave. To have held thee in my arms, and, with my eyes in thine, to have kissed thee once, and died. Death were sweet so.—But it is useless to think. This city is a market where souls are pledged for bodies, and bodies for souls, and wealth buys all. I will go out from it. Useless to think, useless to think!'

It was a few days after this that Rosy and I went our second evening walk together. There is no allusion to it in the Journal, and as I was during most of it in more or less of a half-dreamy, half-abstracted state, I cannot remember much of what we said. That walk was not what might be called a success. We went up to the top of Primrose Hill again, and I snuffed in the breeze and was somewhat revived; but (it had been raining heavily earlier in the day) that made me appreciate how stickily muddy it was going down, and I was forthwith driven into a state of utter saplessness and disgust. Rosy mocked at me as well as she could, but I took no heed. Finally she declared she wouldn't walk with me any more. (This was half-way down the St. John's Wood Road.) I acquiesced. We stood still, I looking in front of me at nothing in particular, not thinking of offering my hand. Then she turned and walked away. I did not look at her. When she had got some twenty yards, I looked at her with a comic smile: sighed: hit my iron-tipped stick-end straight on the pavement: said a little wearily, 'Oh dear,' and went with large strides after her.

I soon caught her up, and we walked on side by side in silence; till I observed:

'I'm sorry I was rude—if I was rude.'

'Then you were rude then!' said Rosy, tossing her head a little.

'Rudeness implies deliberation,' I said, 'now the best definition of sin is: the deliberately doing anything that may harm anyone else. Thus, it is sin to buy a pistol, intending to kill, and then absolutely killing a man: or, to ruin your body by excess, intending to beget, and then absolutely begetting, children.'

'You talk great stuff!' said Rosy.

'Dear child,' I answered, 'I intended you to apply my definition of sin to the point at issue, my rudeness or unrudeness. But this, like so many good intentions, has gone to the artificial protection of infernal causeways.'

Rosy vouchsafed no reply.

I proceeded:

'Well, be that as it may, considering the inability of the feminine intellect to comprehend anything of subtle in the matter of metaphysical psychology,—or anything else you like,—I shall proceed to admit that I was rude; and apologise accordingly.'

'I never asked you to apologise,' she said.

'I never said that you did, my dear—well, something or other.'

'You're very aggravating to-night, that's what you are!'

'Oh, Polyphemus and Abracadabra, did you ever hear such a libel as that?'

Rosy began to hum a tune shortly and defiantly.

After a little I said:

'Lady, it seemeth unto mine uncultured ear that thou warblest the melody of which men say the venerable vaccine one rendered up the ghost. Now——'

'You're very cruel!' she suddenly sobbed. 'And I hate you. Why do you go on at me like that?… (The rest inarticulate.)

'God bless our souls!' cried I, standing still, 'if——' And I proceeded in a brotherly way to comfort her. And so at last got her in a rather limp state to No. 3, where we said a final good-night after I had promised to write and tell her when I could get time to go for another walk.

If it had not been for my recalling friend Horace to the effect that 'Dulce est desipere in loco,' I should have been in a most disconsolate humour going home. As it was, I could not help laughing at the memory of my fantastic squabble.

The next entry in the Journal is a record of my having seen, or thought I had seen, at a theatre the girl of the nuts, her who struck me so on the night of my interview with Colonel James, (She was playing a second part in a 'realistic drama,' and not playing it badly, it seemed to me.)

'I was with the Strachans in a box made for two people to see comfortably in, and three others to be as miserable as they disliked. I asked the Professor, when we two went out for a stroll in the passages during an entr' acte, if he had seen her before, and he said that he had not.

'I should like to know her. She might marry me perhaps, and then I should be properly wretched for the rest of my life,—if I didn't murder her or she me before the honeymoon was over. Well, the original expression holds all right, even then. I wouldn't much mind her murdering me, if I was only sure she'd be hanged afterwards. I have thoughts of proposing to Connie. She is a sweet little cocotte, only wanting development. But it would be better fun to marry Isabel, and see what could be done in the way of ruffling her "grave sweetness" a little.—I'll stop here.'

My feeling towards the book was, at the end, nothing short of positive loathing. Strachan, I think, perceived this; for he did all he could to lighten my share of the work. And I accepted his doing so without remark. I remember his asking me one morning if I hadn't been a little out of sorts of late, and my answering that my bowels were not as they used to be, and that I feared I had trichinosis. I don't know what he thought of my answer. He said nothing.

Late on in June is the next entry in the Journal.

'Last night,—

'Something making me come back quickly from the corner of the street, I found that she had not opened the door with her key yet; or even taken the key out of her pocket; but was standing watching me seriously. I took off my hat, and stepped close to her with it in my hand. The moon was shining clear.

'Neither of us spoke. We looked into one another's eyes.

'At last:

'" What made you such a serious Rosebud to-night?' I said.

'She sighed softly:

'" … I don't know.…"

'"Good-night, Rosy."

'"Good-night."

'"Good-night?" turning, I repeated to myself, and put on my hat, and strode away.…

'Round the corner, I drew a breath of relief.—That was temptation.

'I will not see that child again.'

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