O Genteel Lady!/Chapter 11
Her ticket was bought for the Isle of Wight. She was going to Farringford to sup with the Poet Laureate, greatest of living poets. It was some five years earlier that Tennyson had written his 'In Memoriam,' had become Poet Laureate, and had, after seventeen years of tepid courtship, married the wistful lady of his choice. They had moved but recently to Farringford, deep in its damp hollow among cedars and chestnuts on the Isle of Wight. There, if anywhere, might the Bard find the solitude so necessary to his genius. But even here autograph collectors and celebrity hunters had sought him out. Countrymen of Lanice, even from Boston, so far forgot their breeding as to climb trees to stare upon him as he played battledore and shuttlecock with his wife. Expectant tourists dotted the downs that he had loved because of their solitude, and turned their opera glasses upon the great, dusty, slouching frame of the Poet.
Lanice came as an invited guest. There had been some correspondence between the Laureate and Clapyard. Then, almost as terrifying as a summons from the Angel of Death, came a little thin wisp of a letter from Mrs. Tennyson. Now a cab waited for her in his great name. A brief jouncy ride shook out of her head all the appropriate platitudes that she had been months in culling. Next Freshwater Bay with cliffs and sunset sea, and the drive to the eighteenthcentury Gothic mansion. A giant behind a hedge in spectacles and a great cape trundled a wheelbarrow out from among the rhododendrons. Then the red drawing-room, and gentle, tired little Mrs. Tennyson rising nervously from her sofa. A soft grey gown, a soft, beseeching, wedge-like face, a woman who would give her life to protect the great man entrusted to her keeping, the woman who did more than any one else to build up the vast legend of his name. The two women fluttered towards each other. Lanice managed a few comments on the trip from Yarmouth Pier, a remark or two about the luxuriant verdure of the island.
Mrs. Tennyson expectantly glanced again and again towards the door behind Lanice, through which her giant might materialize. More breaks in the spineless chatter, more glances towards the door. A hush. ('Strange, Mrs. Tennyson seems as much awed by the idea of seeing Tennyson as I am.') And at the threshold stood the dark presence of the Laureate. The silence became awful as he advanced upon his guest. If it were he who had so recently trundled the wheelbarrow, his hands were now washed and his spectacles laid aside. He held in one hand a sprig of laburnum which he had intended to give the young lady as a keepsake, but already had forgotten. His dark, near-sighted eyes screwed her through as he waited Mrs. Tennyson's apprehensive introduction.
'Ah,' he growled amiably, 'you are by no means the first of your nationality to seek me out.'
Lanice, recalling with shame the tree-climbing opera-glass intrusions of her countrymen, was thrown into confusion. She gazed tongue-tied upon this swarthy, shambling man upon whose brow lay a Stygian darkness extraordinary for an Englishman.
'You have come a long way to see me,' he grumbled. 'Do you find what you expect?'
It was almost impossible to see in her host the author of 'Lady Clare' or 'The Talking Oak,' or even of airy 'Lillian.' The memory, the cadence of Ulysses, yes, this man looked like the author of 'Ulysses'; but not like any of his other poems that she could recall. She murmured some inappropriate thing about supposing him to be very fair, 'like a poet.'
'Oh, no,' he said in his cloudy way, 'we Tennysons are all foreign to look at, black-browed, black-blooded, too. ('Alfred!') Some even think we have gipsy blood, it may be Semitic.' ('Alfred!') The Poet shook his impressive head, half sternly, half playfully, at his wife who, after her two attempts to stop the turgid flow of language, relaxed again, invalid-wise, upon her sofa. A pause ensued which ached throughout the red room; even the Dante mask in plaster seemed to feel the horror of that hiatus and to be endeavoring to think of something to say. Lanice was dampened by an inelegant sweat and rendered inarticulate. The Laureate inquired for his dinner and his wife meekly slid from the room to urge on the servants.
'I have never heard of Mr. Fox,' he said abruptly. 'Emerson, of course, and Poe; and, let me see, there must be others, but never of a Mr. Fox of Boston.'
'He is very well known, even over here. I met many in London who...' she stopped, afraid that she was sinning against his omnipotence.
The Poet muttered something, probably a doubt as to the man's existence. Lanice tried to turn the conversation from Mr. Fox's seeming obscurity to Mr. Tennyson's own wide reputation. The subject interested her host.
'I gather my verses are very well known in the States? Every day I receive baskets full of requests for autographs.' He gestured towards a very feminine and underdeveloped escritoire where Lanice saw cards with his name in its characteristic heavy scrawl spread out to dry. Suddenly she had a terrible suspicion as to how it was Mrs. Tennyson exhausted herself, while the Poet tended the rhododendrons.
'I am afraid that our admiration for you is sometimes inconvenient.'
'Oh, no,' said the Poet grudgingly.
Dinner was announced, and when once seated before the saddle of mutton the Laureate's mood mellowed. Little tapers of conversation were lit, glimmered a moment, and were quickly blown out by some gruff comment from the Poet. The blackness of the ensuing silence was palpable. Had she been affected with the mal de mer crossing the Channel? Mrs. Tennyson finally attempted. Lanice replied with more delicacy than truth in the negative. This stirred the Poet's imagination, and with some preliminary grunts he launched upon a story of seasick people. His Lincolnshire dialect grew so broad that the New England girl could not follow, but, judging by Mrs. Tennyson's frightened glances and futile attempts to stop him, Lanice decided that she was understanding quite enough for a delicate female. At the end came the Laureate's loud guffaw of approval, and a certain insecure sense of comfort descended.
By eight they were seated again in the drawing-room under the scornful Dante mask. The Poet, with some preliminary comments and a few words of sincere praise for 'my Queen,' at last began to read. Black and tousled and rough he looked, brooding over his clay pipe, sucking heartily at his port. As he read, his vowels lengthened prodigiously, and Lanice noticed his hollow o's and a's and the breadth and drawl of his mighty voice.
'Bury the greaaaat Duke with an Empire's lamentaaaaation,' he read, 'To the nooise of the moooorning as a mighty naaaation.'
'Now,' he said at last, 'I will read you "Maude." You will never forget it.'
After...'
The red drawing-room, the delicate lady upon the couch, the scowling grandeur of the Presence, and through it the powerful majestic voice of the Poet and the surging beauty of his lines. 'You will never forget it.'
But towards the end her pleasure was diminished by the thought that soon he would stop reading and an abyss of silence would open up into which she must throw some appropriate remark. It was well enough to say to other poets 'How tender!' but what can you say to a Tennyson?
I have felt with my native land, I am oone with my kind
I embrace the purpose of Gawd and the dooom assigned...'
The great voice dropped, and Beauty, which had beat her wings like a bird through the spaces of the red drawing-room, sank into silence. Tears gathered on her lashes. She was speechless. Under the excitement of the moment she had done the only right and appropriate thing—made the only comment that could have pleased the Poet. She had 'broken down.'
They gave her a big Gothic bed to sleep in. In the morning there was early tea and thin bread-and-butter. It was arranged that she should leave the house in a hired conveyance and catch her boat back before the Tennysons should awake. In the dull early morning she was glad there was no one to whom she must make a courteous and appropriate farewell—only the servants and the gardener's boy who stood by the phaeton and politely offered her a nosegay of purple verbenas and pink sweet peas. 'And a letter, miss.'
'Not for me!' But she looked and saw her name written out in a strange and very English hand. She had a dull presentiment that it might be from Anthony, although she knew his writing and this was not his. The thing was unsigned—ominously anonymous.
'In case it interests you, Mr. Jones has not yet sailed and will not until next Wednesday. He goes out on the Lux Benigna and stops first at the God-Begot House of Winchester.'
And Winchester lay but a few miles away up the Solent beyond Southampton. Winchester, upon its shallow bluish hills. It was very early in the morning and her heart was strong within her.
'I will go anywhere in the world but Winchester,' she said. 'I am not such a fool as to follow this man about. I will not go to London because Mr. Ripley is there—I cannot see him now, not until Anthony is indeed gone. I'll hide in the country and sketch thatched cottages and write a good article on the Tennysons.'
The sun was high and her heart was still strong.
'I will stay here in this village with only one street and the cunningest houses I ever have seen. It is best to be alone at times like this. Why did that dreadful girl send me his address? If I only have the courage to wait five days, he will be gone and all will be over. Now, keep up your courage and work—work—work.'
The sun set over the rolling North Downs and with the diminishing of light something weakened within her. She walked, a tragic figure, over the cobbled alien streets and counted to one hundred and back again and recited poetry so that she might not remember Anthony Jones.
The moon flooded her room. She pushed against the night with feverish, meaningless hands. She prayed to him as to a god. There was no strength left in her.
So it was, strong in the morning, but weakening every hour for three days and nights.
The House that Jack Built, and the House that God Begot...'that lay in the House that Jack Built.' Rat, rat eat malt, dog, dog bite rat...to put in the House that Jack Built, and a maiden all forlorn that milked the cow with the crumpled horn. Why, it was only a few years ago Mamma used to read her that story out of the old dirty brown book with the ugly little pictures, and yet she had completely forgotten it.
'And Morab begat Nadab and Nadab begat Abidhu and Abidhu begat Aleazar and Aleazar...Eleazar and Elezzar and Neleazar, and Neleazar—a weasel'...she laughed, pleased with her own sacrilege and screwed her mouth up to whistle, but succeeded only in a tuneless blowing. She had definitely decided to go to Winchester and Southampton and give herself the tragic pleasure of watching Anthony's ship drop down the Solent to the sea, and so pass forever beyond her. She told herself again and again that she did not want to see him—only his ship; that it was her duty to go to Winchester and learn what legends might still be current about Jane Austen; that the cathedral in Winchester was very fine; that the old city once had been the capital of England; and that here, by the Itchen, Izaak Walton had been accustomed to fish. There was every reason why she should go to Winchester. But already in her mind it had become a secret and delightful trip full of vague promises.
The God-Begot House, Winchester. It was time to start, now, immediately—oh, not a minute to be lost. 'Anthony, I fly, I come.' A dizzy rapture seized her—almost a nausea. Anthony—Anthony—she could see him quite clearly seated before the hearth of a strange inn, his back half towards her, his head thrown back with a pewter tankard of ale pressed to his lips. 'Anthony.' He turned as he heard his name spoken, rose and came to meet her. 'Anthony, I've come thousands of miles just to say good-bye! or, 'What, you! I had no idea that you were in England—I thought you were in Arabia.' But the first sentence was the one that came again and again to her lips—'Anthony, I've come thousands of miles just to say good-bye.' In her day-dreaming she had forgotten that there had been any other motive to her European tour, had forgotten that it was not Anthony, but his ship and his inn, that she had wished to see; she was only vibrantly conscious of him as a near physical presence. And Winchester could not be far; England was so silly and little. Her mood varied from extravagant gaiety to tearful melancholy; she cried over her breakfast as she spread the clotted cream upon her bread.
Again and again in the series of coaches and post-chaises that took her to Winchester, Lanice conjured up the scenes of the reunion, 'Anthony—I've come thousands of miles...' The back of his head or his profile always seemed so real she could put out her fingers and touch it; the moment before he turned to her at the sound of his name and her voice was as actual as any experience she had had with him; but there everything stopped. The truth bore cruelly in upon her that for some reason her memory had perversely failed her. She could not really see his face except from the side. She knew he had grey eyes and a sweetly sullen mouth. She knew how his tawny hair joined the two-inches of beard before either ear. She could have drawn his likeness—but she could not see his face. In anguish she realized that for the rest of her life he would never turn his face towards her, but sit in half-profile before a fire. Through the years she would come to know every hair upon the back of his head. She would see the cheek-bone, the curve of the jaw, the square, tight set to the shoulder. She would never—even in her memory—see the silver light of his sad grey eyes or the unsmiling droop of the mouth her mouth had craved. She clenched her hands in their yellow kid gloves, pressed her feet against the floor of the coach, gritted her teeth—shut her eyes until the gold Catherine wheels rolled through the darkness. She would never again really see him except in half-profile. Again and again she went through many meetings with him, and her mind and finally her body became so inflamed and her heart so wrecked by her memory's inability to see him as she wished, that she wrung her hands in the dusty coach and prayed to God to hasten her and to hold back the sailing of the Lux Benigna.
What the land was that she passed through or what the sky or weather she did not know...'Anthony, I've come thousands of miles...and you will not turn and look at me.' But the day was crisp and golden, and the larks, hanging before the door of Heaven, poured out their bubbling song as though they were little miraculous pitchers forever emptying and forever full. From Basingstoke to Steventon, from Steventon to Stratton. Right now, and the road turns down and the lights gleam self-righteously in the cottages of good women—who never have heard the magic name of Anthony Jones.
She was alone inside the coach, and although she knew every word of the anonymous letter she must read it. A change of horses. She leaned out, 'Boy, boy, your lantern—for a moment.' Staring stupidly at a woman he considered beautiful, the uncouth lad, wrapped in an aroma of horse stables, leaned within and held his lantern so that she might read.
She folded the letter and slipped it back into her bosom. She sleeked her hair and swallowed. 'And to-day is only Saturday, isn't it?'
The boy smiled. His mouth grew and grew—his eyes diminished.
'Tell me,' she cried in a high voice—'tell me—this is Saturday.'
'Why, M'lidy,' he said, 'if it weren't Saturday or Wednesday you wouldn't be here. The coach don't stop here any other days of the week. And if it ain't Wednesday—and it ain't—it must be Saturday.'
She gave him a shilling.
'I must see him!' she cried again and again. 'I don't care if it is only for a moment. I must see him! I will! God could not be so cruel as not to let me see him—even if he burns me for a thousand million years.'
From Stratton to Winchester.
'I must see him!' she cried. 'Oh, God—let me see him even if it is only the back of his head...and then you may burn me forever.'
And so, unattended by the gentle memories of Jane Austen or of Izaak Walton, she came into Winchester at midnight and drew up at the door of that house which was so strangely begotten. A narrow Tudor house, very venerable and zebra-striped. She beseeched the chambermaid. 'You must call me early. I must be in Southampton by noon.' She followed the big country girl up two flights of stairs and into a low blue room, cut by the eaves into the shape of a tent. 'Yes—thank you, and you must call me early.' She undressed and threw herself into a dream-racked poisonous sleep.
They had not called her and the sun was abroad. She jerked at the cross-stitched bell-pull and heard it jingle far away downstairs. Although unrefreshed by her night's sleep, it had at least quieted her. Soberly enough she set about her dressing, buttoning and buttoning layers of garments, lacing her stays, hooking and hooking, and finally, in the thinnest of dull rose wool and with her India shawl and her bonnet in her hand, she began to look impatiently about the upper hall for the chambermaid. The door opposite stood ajar, and within she heard a giggling and humming suggestive of servant girls. So she knocked, and the door swung open at her touch. There were two maids half-heartedly engaged in tidying up the empty chamber. One was busy about the washstand. The other was hunting between the great canopied bed and the wall.
'He swore to me this morning there was a mousey hole back in here'—and both the girls began to giggle. Then they saw Lanice looking very pale, but in some mysterious way very wealthy, in the door. The big girl who had promised to call her was not here. She could not scold them for the other girl's negligence; instead she said, 'I rang and rang—and no one came.' The girls subsided into a frightened silence. 'But never mind—just find out for me what time it is.' The girl who had been hunting for the mouse-hole, glad to get out of the room, curtsied and ran to do her bidding. The other one said apprehensively, 'Lady, your bell rings on the first floor and we are up here. I hope your lad'ship doesn't think us unmindful...,' deed, your lad'ship...'
There was a faint and familiar smell about the room. Lanice felt slightly dizzy and sat upon the edge of the broad bed. 'Is there time for me to get to Southampton by noon?'
'Indeed, yes. One gentleman has left for there already—a big ship sailed early.' it would not be the Lux Benigna. She would not go out for three more days.
With a senseless childish cunning Lanice asked—'Is his name—ah, Pontifex—quite a large family—called Pontifex? Red face and white whiskers?'
'Indeed, they must have lodged at the George. There are always a certain number for the George. They who don't know Winchester. It's bigger than we are—but 'deed, it's common and the maids are all huzzies—A friend of mine, m'lady...'
'Or was it...let me see...a Mr. Jones?' The maid surprisingly came into life. Her thick bright cheeks eddied into unguessed dimples.
'Oh, Mr. Jones—that man—yes, m'lady. He's been here for five days—and he's always talking to me and Lucy about the mouse-holes under his bed...And we always must see to it that his bed is warmed for him—he hates our damp English beds—he says heathen countries have spoiled him for damp.'
'And his ship—when does his ship sail?'
'Why, she's gone out already, m'lady—they'd never miss the morning tide for a big thing like her. The Captain left by daybreak—seems like you must have heard him.'
Then she felt that she had always known she would not see Anthony again. She murmured incoherently about the Pontif ex family—but felt she deceived this servant no more than she had deceived Clapyard's little cousin—there seemed to be a strange freemasonry between the lovers of Anthony Jones the world over, and they were unable to keep from giving each other the secret sign. She added slowly and with dawning wonder in her voice:
'But I did hear him.' The slam of a door, the clump, clump of boots—these things had come to her in a dream, only realized, never heard. That was why she had dreamed of the bronze boxer Mamma had sent her for the stereoscope, and thought that he was trying to get in the window—clump, clump, clump—his massive metal feet...
'M'lady, you have had no tea yet. I'll fetch you some and thin bread-and-butter.'
Lanice thanked the girl and listlessly sat upon the edge of the bed and stared at the round dent in the pillow his head had made.
To her feverish hands it seemed that some of his bodily warmth still lingered in the tumbled linen of his bed. She shut her eyes and rocked her narrow body, opened them and looked again upon the pillow marked by the shape of his head. She stared, striving vainly to conjure up the true and living memory of his face. Incredible that this inanimate object that had so recently borne the impression of his being could so quickly forget, yet she—so far from inanimate—had been unable to carry his vision. Delicately—lest she break the mould—she pressed her face into the pillow.
'It is nine o'clock, lady,' said the servant, returning. 'No, don't move yourself because of me. Lucy is making you some tea.' The young woman, so fastidiously wrapped in thin wool, sat pale and speechless in an armchair while the maid deftly stripped the upper sheet and blankets from the bed. Lanice cried out in terror.
'That! What is that! Oh, what is it?' The maid laughed and lifted from the foot of the bed a red earthenware jug in the coarse semblance of a pig.
'It's just a bed-warmer. A big bottle filled with hot water—least, it was hot last night when Lucy put it in. The Captain would have the damp taken out of his bed. But bed-warmers shaped like pigs indeed are rare.'
The ugly squat red animal drawn from Anthony's bed had for the instant a hypnotic fascination. Lanice, mouth and eyes open, standing upon her feet, shrinking back from the sight, put out her arms automatically to touch and then to hold this water-filled clay idol of an ugly god. The thing gave off a small, stale warmth.
The pig—if so crude a thing could be called a pig—had little detail or feature to mark its species. The legs were turned in upon the body in an embryonic manner; only the snout and close-curled tail were truly porcine.
Lucy entered with her breakfast tray, and if she were surprised to see a beautiful great lady—perhaps a disguised countess—holding so humble an object she did not show it.
'Will you have your tea, here, m'lady, or in your chamber or down in the drawing-room? And I am to tell you that when you have had your tea, why, there's a gentleman to see you—waiting in the lower hall. A Mr. Ripley he says he is.'
The red pig slipped from the lady's arms. The broken crockery and liquid contents splashed upon the floor. Lanice looked down in amazement to see the leering smile of the snout rolling some six feet away from the curled tail. The tepid water had splashed everything—leaving dark welts upon the lady's elegant gown and soaking the cotton stockings of the maid.
'I'll go down.' Without waiting to dry her flounces or to sleek the hair she had disordered against Anthony's pillow, she fled below to Professor Ripley. The maid, still carrying the tea and the thin bread-and-butter, ran after her like a comic figure in a play.
Lanice had not stopped to think either what she should say nor what the temper of this meeting should be. Ripley had thought of nothing else for days. The two met only to stare and stammer, to look down and draw apart. The girl found herself first. She drew up haughtily and, holding to the newel post with one hand and clenching the other in the folds of her skirt, she asked abruptly:
'You know why I came?'
The man nodded and piteously turned away his eyes.
'I know why—Lanice.'
Then he in his turn straightened himself and asked the same defiant question—flinging it at the girl's feet, like a token for her either to stamp upon or to pick up.
'And you—you know why I came?'
She knew—and the reason humbled and soothed and hurt her. She answered very gently, 'Yes, I know.'
The man's love wrapped about her and strangely at this strange moment seemed more real than Anthony's desires. In spite of all he had not said on Bodmin Moor she knew that he loved her and would die to make her happy. She did not know the anguish or the turmoil of soul and body he had endured during the last four days nor how with the determination to go to Winchester—something—some power of self-control—had broken within him. He turned away from her slightly.
'I cannot any longer pretend to be your friend—Lanice, because I am really your lover—I think I have alwavs been...but that can wait. Now is not the time.' He did not expect or receive an answer. She stood and patiently watched him as he twisted the big bone buttons on his dark blue coat. 'I know you look upon me as a friend, and I know that it is easier sometimes to make hate and aversion over into what is popularly called "love" than it is—friendship. Well, Lanice, we will see. There are still a good many years ahead and in the meantime we can continue to be friends—can't we?'
'I hope so—that is, as long as you realize there can be nothing else.'
'At least I will act as though I realized it. Of course the present moment—is hardly the one I would have normally chosen to tell you how much—how very much—I have come to care for you—Lanice, but it's said now and why should I apologize? I hardly realized myself how much you—meant to me—until a chit in Clapyard's office told me that you probably would go straight from the Tennysons' to Winchester. You did, didn't you?'
'No, not straight.'
There was a troubled silence. Lanice broke it by saying, 'I think I had best drink my tea now, and then why couldn't we walk over the town?...' She hid the quiver of her lip against the edge of the teacup. 'The town, they say, is most worth while.'
'What would you like to see?' he asked humbly.
He knew that she did not care to see anything really, but admired the brave face she showed the world. Poor child! Most women would have been wistful—overcome with grief—prostrated, offended.
She sat upon the lower stair and sipped her cold tea and, as she raised her eyes over the teacup rim, she smiled at him.
'I'd like to see anything that has anything to do with Jane Austen and I want to see the Itchen and the cathedral and the school where they sing "Dulce Domum."'
'We had better start pretty soon if we are going to see all that—hadn't we?'
'I'll get my bonnet and my shawl—and my sketch-book. You'll give me time to make a few sketches, won't you?'
'Why, all you want,' he responded, but his heart bled to see how her eyes, which he had always considered long but not very large, had, through the strange alchemy of grief, grown to be enormous and meltingly tender like a madonna's.
She did not want a carriage, she wanted to walk, and he matched his heavier step to her light one and carried her sketch-book and her copy of 'Pride and Prejudice' and an absurd and delicious parasol, made of black chantilly lace, through which the sun might cast shadows of lace flowers and bow knots. He was versed enough in women's clothes to realize that the thing might be wickedly becoming to Lanice. It vaguely hurt him to think that if she were walking through Winchester on Anthony's arm she would unfurl this delicate weapon of her sex and for him display its coquetry. But he took heart to think she cared enough for him to take it with her. As she gravely stared at the cathedral, he as gravely stared at her. In the black and dull rose of her costume the turquoises in her earrings thrilled him with their vivid blueness and he noticed upon her finger a massive gold and turquoise ring that he was sure she must have put on when she went upstairs to get her bonnet.
Would she ever forget Anthony? And like an answer came her words, barely audible from the shadow of her black hat.
'Anthony is gone now—forever. I'm glad I did not get here in time to see him. I tried, and I prayed...'
'You mean you did not see him?'
'I was too late.'
The man began to laugh and his laughter hurt the girl.
'Why do you laugh?'
'I prayed, too. For once God answered my prayers. But I thought he had answered yours.'