Salome and the Head/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
THE DISASTER
At the Anchor you breakfast either in a little room whose door opens directly on that part of the garden which is adorned by two round flower-beds edged with the thickest, greenest box you ever saw—this is next door to breakfasting in the garden itself—or you do breakfast in the garden. Once upon a time you used to breakfast in a hornbeam arbour, but now that is given over to bargees. The landlord of the Anchor is a just man, and apportions the beauty of his grounds fairly among his clients.
The morning being a prince of mornings, even for June, Mr. Templar ate his eggs and bacon in the garden, drank there his three cups of tea, and there leaned back and smoked the after-breakfast pipe. There were birds singing in the alders opposite; the river, decorated with sunlight, looked warm and brown, like the shallow pools whose warmness quite shocks you when you dangle your feet in them from seaweed-covered rocks. That it was not warm, Mr. Templar knew, for he had plunged into it at his first awakening.
There were flowers in a big tumbler on his table—early roses, a late tulip or two, wood hyacinths and ferns, all squeezed tightly together in that lovely nearness that says as plainly as it can speak, “You are in the country now.” A wood-pigeon cooed in a big ash-tree over the water; an adventurous ant or so hastened across the white desert of tablecloth; there was a wasp in the marmalade. Nothing was lacking. It was a real country breakfast. Templar, soaking himself in country sights and sounds, remembered with a shock why he was there. He felt an affectionate if censorious pity for the man who had bought the false moustache and made those double-faced silly inquiries at the house-agents'. That man—well, the less said about him the better. But it would have been fun to go on being a detective. And it looked so easy now. All the real difficulties were surmounted. He had only to question the landlord or his amiable wife, or one of their agreeable children. . . and then. . . But he had seen, with an enlightenment too full for any re-shutting of the mind, that this was the sort of thing one didn’t do. Afterwards he came to be very glad that he had seen this, and seen it when he did. It was the sort of thing one didn’t do.
“But all the same,” his reflections ended, “I’m glad I came. I shall stay till Monday.”
He would not question the landlord or anyone else. He would ask no questions. He would just choose the likeliest of the little fleet of odd craft that lay below the landing stage, and pull upstream. A quiet day between sky and river would be good medicine, would cure the mental indigestion brought on by light and London and a fancy at loose ends of which he was now ashamedly conscious.
Do not ask whether he had, at the very back of his mind, a poor little devil of a hope that Fate might grant to his inaction what she had denied to his energy. I do not know. And he did not know. But if two people are abroad in boats on a short and narrow river, there are, to say the least, chances. He wondered in what craft Pan would take to the water, and imagined a canoe.
His light leap into the boat of his choice brought to his view an iron bar that lay at the bottom of the boat.
“Hullo—I say—catch hold of this iron rod,” he said. “I don’t want a cargo of rails on board.”
“That’s the crow-bar, sir,” said the man who had gotten the boat ready; “you’ll want it at the locks. There’s no one to put you through—you have to work the locks yourself.”
“Take off the rudder,” said Templar, and shot out from among the crowd of boats.
The Medway just above the Anchor is a river of dreams. The grey and green of willows and alders mirrored themselves in the still water in images hardly less solid-seeming than their living realities. There was pink loosestrife and meadow-sweet creamy and fragrant, forget-me-nots wet and blue, and a tangle of green weeds and leaves and stems that only botanists know the names of.
And, growing out of the rough wall below Stoneham Lock, Our Lady’s bedstraw, both the yellow kind and the white. Templar knew it, though he did not know its name. It was of that trailing stuff that the Forest dancer’s wreath had been woven.
He made his painter fast to the post of the tarred gate that lies across the towing path a stone’s-throw from the lock, shouldered the crow-bar and set out to get the sluice gates up. He was an engineer, and to an engineer, the Medway locks of course present no difficulties. Not so if you should be a stockbroker, or an artist, or a city clerk, or a poet. In those cases the crow-bar and the sluice gates combine to laugh at your inexperience, and bite pieces out of your fingers.
He got his boat through the lock, and went on upstream, only a very little saddened by the thought that perhaps The Wood House, which was Pan’s country seat, might be down the river, and not up. He passed three locks—the Medway strings them quite thickly on her silver thread. The last of them was just a round pool with heavy tarred gates above and below, and flowers and long grasses trailing in the water that brimmed it.
The next lock is Oak Weir lock, and there he paused for an easy and half a pipe.
There were big trees shadowing a meadow on the left, but the stones by the lock were warm to the hand and the tarred lock-gates were hot. He lay in the sun, his hat tilted over his eyes, and was glad of the summer and the sound of the water pouring from the full pen over the top of the sluice gates on the other side of the river. It was good to be here. And do not think less of him if I own that in the softened mood induced by muscles gently exercised and the summer scents and sounds he found himself thinking that he might well have spent a little longer with his great-aunt and great-uncle.
His father and mother were in India, too far away to inspire such regrets and remorses.
The plash and rattle of sculls roused him from something very like sleep. A boat, still invisible, must be coming downstream. If he allowed it to take the lock before he did, he would have to wait while the lock filled and emptied again; whereas, if he made haste to get his boat through, the water that rose with him would serve to bring down the other boat.
He got his boat into the lock and tied her painter to the boot-hook stuck in the soft grassy ground. Then he perceived that the other boat had come out of invisibility and was advancing down the upper river. He hastened to get the lower gates shut and to let down the sluices. Then he ran round to the upper gates and began to raise its sluices. You raise the sluices of a Medway lock quite simply: you just hike them up by means of your crow-bar, whose end fits into square holes in the side of the tall tarred post, that is, so to speak, the handle of the spade that is the sluice. You lever this thing up, one hole at a time, and to prevent its slipping when you have got it up, you put in an iron pin that rests horizontally on the top of the lock-gate, and holds up the sluice. If you are careless, you do not move this pin at every step of the crowbar, so that sometimes the pin is in the air, and four or five holes are raised between it and the broad tarred tree-trunk that is the top of the lock and also the lever by which the lock is eventually opened.
Now it was just at the moment when the pin was in this Mahomet’s coffin-like position that the other boat, creeping silently with the stream, came close above the lock, and suddenly, without warning, bumped its nose against the lock-gate on which Templar was standing. He turned sharply, and almost as he turned he saw that Fate had been kind—kind, incredibly.
“See how wise you were to be good,” he told himself: “virtue rewarded, if ever it was.”
For the person in the boat, and the only person, was the girl that he had spent time and money and detectives in seeking. It was she—without paint or powder—fresh as the dawn and pretty as a pink.
He was never quite sure whether it was accident or design that made him drop the crow-bar. He had certainly longed for some incident that should make an interchange of words unavoidable.
Having dropped it, he caught at it with commendable speed, and thus got his fingers under the pin just at the instant when the heavy sluice, shaken by the impact of the boat, shuddered and slipped back into its old place. The crow-bar splashed in the lock below, as the pin came down across his fingers, with all the weight of the sluice to hold it there.
There was only one thing to be said—if one spoke at all. And it is not possible to the ordinary hero to bear, in silence, the smashing down on his fingers of an iron pin enforced by the weight of a heavy sluice gate. If he thought at all, he thought that all the bones of his three fingers were broken. But that is no excuse. He said what he had to say.
And thus it happened that the first word which he ever spoke in her presence was: “Damn.”
She took no advantage of this conversational opening.
Bounders will say damn on such slight provocation—the slipping down of a sluice that doesn’t pin their fingers—the dropping of a crow-bar—any little thing.
If he did drop the crowbar intentionally, he got the deserts of the deceiver. More, even. The agony in his hand was intense. There was blood—he could see that.
He set his teeth and tried to raise the pin with his other hand. He might as well have tried to raise Mont Blanc. The girl in the boat below could see nothing. To her it was simply a clumsy man who had said damn because he dropped his crow-bar, and now instead of asking her for hers was fiddling about with the sluice. She wasn’t going to offer it. She wasn’t going to do anything to help a person who went about saying damn at every little thing.
When he tried to lift the pin with his right hand its movement communicated itself to the hand that was held fast, and it hurt him more than ever—but he did not say damn again. Instead, he turned towards her a face grey and drawn with pain, and said:
“I’m awfully sorry to bother you—I’ve smashed my fingers under this pin. Could you get a man and a crow-bar, do you think? I’m very sorry to bother you, but I’m quite helpless.”
Before he had got to “man” she had pushed off, and almost as he said “helpless” her boat bumped against the wall at the lock’s other side. She had her crow-bar ready in her hands, flung it out, jumped out after it, ducked under the long tarred timber and stood beside him on the narrow plank. A fool, he reflected later—oh, and many people not at all fools,—would have tried to come along the plank from the other side, and thus have had to pass him, jarring the hurt hand in the passing.
“Hold on tight with your other hand,” she said. “You’ll feel beastly when I get the pin up, and if you tumble into the lock I can’t help you.”
A crow-bar is a heavy thing, and it is not every woman who can use it.
She applied hers with a calm dexterity that won his surprised admiration when he had time to remember it. At present he held on with the one hand and hoped that her hands were steady. She raised the sluices a careful inch and held it levered upon her crowbar’s point.
“Take your hand away then,” she said impatiently, and instantly took it by the wrist and laid it on the top of the lock. Then she let the inch go, and the pin lay in its proper place on the tarred wood, with no flesh and bone between. She threw her crow-bar onto the bank.
“Come on,” she said; “hold onto me if you’re giddy.”
He did not hold onto her. He got to the bank, said “Thanks, awfully,” and lay face-down on the grass and sweet clover, and let his hand hang over in the running water, which reddened a little about it.
There is nothing more sickening than the pressure of water on a bleeding wound. He laid his head on his arm and the world went round a great deal too fast. But it seemed impossible to get one’s hand out of the water that hurt so.
She did it for him.
“Now don’t be silly,” she said. “Have you got any brandy?”
Of course he hadn’t. “No—it’s all right; don’t bother,” he said.
“I thought men always had,” she said, and laid a wet handkerchief on his head. He heard the boat’s hollow response to her feet as she leapt into it.
“Jove!—she’s in a hurry to get away,” was his last thought.
To faint at physical pain is a revolting trait in a hero, especially in an engineer who, one supposes, must so often be hurting himself with the hard materials of his trade. I cannot excuse him. And he was always ashamed of the incident.
But if he had plotted and planned he could not have arranged a better means of compassing his desire to “get to know her.”
When he came back to his world, his head was low at the water’s edge, his feet were raised on a tea-basket with a boat-cushion on top, and his hurt hand was lying on something soft, and was covered up in something softer.
A horrible smell insisted on itself close to his nose.
“Don’t,” he said, moving his head; “I’m all right—let me get up.”
He got his feet down and his head up. The girl was sitting quite close to him, with a woodpigeon’s feather, half-frizzled, in her hand, and on her lap a box of matches.
“It says in books to burn feathers,” she said. “I expect it’s all right. It would wake me, I know, if I were dead.”
He murmured something about being sorry he had been such an ass.
“You weren’t—you were awfully brave—standing there and speaking so politely. I should have screamed and tumbled into the lock if it had happened to me. Oh! I forgot—you couldn’t fall.”
She shuddered, because her imagination had made her a nasty, vivid little picture of a man tumbling off a lock and hanging by his crushed hand.
“You’re all right now, aren’t you?” she said anxiously. “If you’re really better, I’ll put the boats through the lock, and pull you down to East Peckham. You must have a doctor for that hand, at once, too. You just sit still. See, lean against the basket till I’ve got the boats through.”
She got the boats through, and she pulled him down to East Peckham.
“And don’t bother about steering or anything,” she said. “I can manage splendidly.”
So he did not bother, but nursed the wounded hand as though it were a baby. She pulled easily and strongly, and he was now at leisure to notice that she wore a white linen dress, and a big Panama hat turned back from her forehead, and that she did not look like the girl who danced at the Hilarity, changed by the changed dress and surroundings, and by the absence of paint and powder; but like the child who had danced in the forest—like that child grown to womanhood—that child, come into her kingdom.
At East Peckham she said: “Can you get at your watch? I think it must be one-ish. The doctor’s at home between one and two.”
The hour was propitious.
“Thank you a thousand times,” he said; and “Good-bye” he said, too, for indeed he seemed to have come to a point where nothing else was possible to say.
“Good-bye? Nonsense!” she said. “Do you think I’m going to abandon my only case? I took the First Injuries to the Aided course—and you’re the first chance I’ve had of showing off. Of course I’m coming with you to the doctor. Or if you don’t feel up to it, I’ll fetch him to you here.”
“Of course I’m up to it,” he said, “but it’s not fair to trouble you.”
Nothing but the banal rises to the lips at life’s great moments.
With perfect self-possession she helped him out of the boat and made him lean on her arm. She had turned down the Panama so that it shaded and almost concealed her face. As they passed the Rose and Crown she stopped.
“Brandy, of course,” she said—coerced him into the hot little sitting-room behind the geraniums, ordered “Some brandy, please,” and saw that he drank it.
At the doctor’s she waited by the gate while he went in and had lint and bandages put on his hand and his fingers strapped together. As the doctor untied the blood-stained wrappings, Templar noticed that they were long strips of soft white stuff edged with lace.
“Won’t your wife come in?” the doctor said, glancing out through the window.
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Templar confusedly.
Presently she had got him back to the boat. They had hardly spoken at all.
“Now,” she said, “where do you want to go? Were you trying to get to Tonbridge?”
“Tomorrow would do for Tonbridge,” said Templar deceitfully.
“Then shall I pull you down the river?”
“I say, you are most awfully good,” he said.
“Nonsense,” she said impatiently. “Of course I can’t leave you stranded with a boat. Shall I get a man to pull you back to—to wherever you came from?”
Of course Templar could now quite well have got a man from the Rose and Crown or elsewhere, but he didn’t say so.
“Come,” she said, “here are the boats. What are you going to do?”
Then he became suddenly brave, “What are you going to do?”
“Find a shady place by the river and have lunch. But there’s plenty of time for that.”
“I was going to have lunch by the river, too.”
She looked at him, appraising him. Already he was endeared to her by the fact that she had done quite a lot of things for him. Among others, she had touched blood, which she feared and hated.
The day was fair—and life was dull in the Tower with the Dragon, the Eagle, and the Lion. And was one never to exchange two words with anyone but those three? A steadfast purpose is all very well, but one must have a holiday sometimes. She had never had just this sort of holiday. He was looking as imploring as he dared. And she decided that he looked rather nice.
“You’ve been so kind,” he said. “And I’ve been such an idiot.”
She understood that he was asking for time to show her that he was not always dropping crow-bars and pinching his fingers and saying damn and fainting. And she felt that she herself would have wanted the same chance had she perpetrated the same follies.
So she laughed. “Oh! very well—come along, then,” she said. “I’ll pull you up to Oak Weir again—if you can stand the tragic associations. And you shall tell me your name and station, and we’ll pretend we’ve met at a dinner party and been properly introduced.”
That was how it all began.
They had lunch together in that big meadow away to the left by Oak Weir, among the roots of the great trees that reach down to the backwater where the water-lilies are. And he told her his name, and she told him the names of the water plants and the riverside flowers, but her own name she did not tell him. Nor did he ask it.
She quite plainly thought herself safe in a complete anonymity. He told her, quite early in the game, that he was just back from eight long African years. Therefore, he could not have seen her at the Hilarity. Therefore, she was just like any other girl to him. She revelled in the resemblance. “Just like any other girl” was just what she had never had a chance of being—to any man. And he found that he was telling himself that she was a jolly little girl, with no sentimental nonsense about her, and that he liked her very much. So far was he, by now, from the Templar who had employed detectives to hunt down such a very different sort of woman.
I do not know how he managed it. Such things are done by the expert. Certain it is that there was no word of love, of flirtation, of sentiment: and equally certain that when, at the long day’s end, they parted, it was on the straightforward, sensible understanding that they were to meet next morning by Stoneham Lock, each with a luncheon basket, at ten sharp, and spend the day together.
He went back to the Anchor to review and revise his impressions of women, and to bear the pain, which increased, of his hurt hand.
She went home.
Home was The Wood House, not fifty yards from East Lock, where Miss Alexandra Mundy lived with her aunt and cousin. The cousin was unfortunately deformed, so they received no company and returned no calls. They spent a good deal of time in town, going to the theatre and so on, local drawing-room gossip understood. Very quiet people, quite respectable. Rich, too, but kept themselves to themselves. The cousin’s affliction, no doubt. But the girl was odd, too—about alone all day long on the river. Probably half-witted, like the boy. One or other of them played the flute or the violin. You could hear it over the high wall of their garden. In brief, very queer people, my dear; something mentally defective, you may depend. The people in the poor, scattered cottages knew better. To them, as to the Dragon, the Eagle, and the Lion, Sandra was a princess.
•••••
“Well, are you rested, love?” the aunt, who was also the Dragon, asked when supper was over, and Denny had wandered out into the starlight. “You’ve had four days, alone all day.”
“I must have four days more,” said Sandra happily. “Has anything happened?”
“Nothing. We had been in the garden and Denny played.”
“Something has happened,” said Sandra with sudden conviction. “You look so queer. You’d better tell me now.”
“It’s nothing much, dear.”
“Tell me at once.”
“It’s only—it’s what I’ve always been afraid of.”
“Not. . . ?”
“Yes, dearest. It’s that man. He’s found us out, just as I always said he would. And he wants money. I knew he would some day.”
“You didn’t. You said you were certain he was dead,” said Sandra, white and fierce.
“Oh! what does it matter what I said? He isn’t, and now everything’s spoiled.”
“Tell me all about it,” said the girl, quite gentle now.
“He came here this morning. I opened the door. He asked for you. And then I recognised him and told him you didn’t live here. But he recognised me, too. And besides, he knew, he knew! I said you’d send him a hundred pounds. It’s the only way, love. When you’ve made your money we’ll go right away and hide somewhere where he can’t find us.”
“There isn’t anywhere where he can’t find us,” said Sandra dully. “I’ve always known that.” Suddenly she caught the Dragon’s arms above the elbows.
“He can’t make me live with him, can he? He can’t, can he?”
“No—no, my chickie dear, of course he can’t.”
“I might have known he’d turn up,” said the girl bitterly, and dropped the arms she held. “But I thought you knew he was dead, and had promised grandfather not to tell me for fear I should go and be a fool about some other beast. As if I hadn’t had enough of beasts to last me all my life!”
She clung to the Dragon now like a frightened child.
“We mustn’t come here any more,” she said; “he can’t get at me at the other house. You won’t let him get at me—will you, Aunt Dusa? You won’t?”
“No, no, my pigeon. I’ll take care of that,” soothed the woman, holding her.
“And I’ve been so happy!—oh, aunty! I’ve never been so happy as I’ve been tonight.” She had lost control of herself at last, and sobbed wildly against the other woman’s neck. And, as she clung, sure, unmistakable as a knife thrust, the knowledge of the full measure of that day’s disaster came to the Aunt.
“My love,” she said quietly, “there’s someone else. You’ve met someone—there is someone—?”
“No, there isn’t,” cried Sandra still more wildly. “I only thought there was. But there isn’t, there isn’t: there never will be while that man’s alive. There never will be anything—never anything for me. What’s that?”
It was a sound from the garden, heard plainly through the open window.
“It’s all right, my pet,” said Dusa, holding her more closely; “ah! have your cry out, my poor, my pretty. It’s all right. It’s only Denny.”
It was only Denny, stuffing his thumbs into his ears, and twisting his long fingers in his hair as he went blindly away among the shadows of the starlit garden.