Merrick Leonard
The Quaint Companions
And while he boasted, he believed in the power of words, not knowing that he had preferred a face himself.
When he was alone, he cried, looking uglier still.
And late in the evening he wrote his first love-letter.
It was a very long letter. He wrote of the joy that the correspondence had brought him, of the years of loneliness and suffering that had made him afraid to own the truth. He wrote of the day the portrait came, his temptation, his weakness – of his longing to confess himself at Godstone, and of the fear that had still held him back. He poured out the story of his life, the story of his childhood, of his youth, and of his love. He prayed to her for pity, for tenderness, for "Heaven." He said that on the morrow he would go to her to hear her answer. And because the need for pretending ignorance of the name was past now, he addressed the letter to "Miss Hilda Sorrenford" in full.
CHAPTER XXIII
It reached her early the next afternoon. She was sitting before the dining-room fire, with a shilling manicure set in her lap, polishing her finger-nails. There was no one else in the room; Bee had gone back to the studio, and the Professor was at Great Hunby. The handwriting was unfamiliar, and she opened the envelope with as much interest as was natural in a girl whose letters were few. Astonishment laid hold of her at the first lines. She glanced instinctively at the address again, and then found the last page, and looked at the signature. Her lovely eyes dilated, her brows climbed high; truth to tell, she had a rather stupid air as she sat deciphering David's declaration, with her mouth ajar, and the file, and the rubber, and the little powder-box lying in her lap. Only two points were intelligible to her: the "Mr. Tremlett" she had met was David Lee, and he adored her. It can never be unpleasant to be adored; she by no means shared the opinion that his adoration was an insult, though she did not regard it seriously; but she was too bewildered even to simper. "Her photograph, their correspondence?" At every reference to these things she felt more dazed. By what extraordinary mistake could a man from whom she had never heard till now imagine that he had been corresponding with her?
After she had stared at the fire, and smiled at herself in the glass, she mounted to the studio, her eyes still wide, a glimmer of amusement in them.
"Just look at this! Read it through!" she exclaimed, holding the letter out.
Bee was writing, and rose confused.
"What is it?"
"A proposal!" She giggled. "I mean it From David Lee! It's a mystery."
Bee started. Her gaze wandered from the letter in Hilda's hand to the letter on the table. She did not speak.
"Read it," repeated Hilda.
"I'd rather not," she answered painfully; "it's written to you."
"What rubbish! Well, listen, then. You'd better sit down again, my dear – he worships me at great length."
She dropped into a chair herself, and began to declaim the pages with zest. In moments she looked up, with a comment or grimace. The woman sat passive, never meeting her glance. She listened to David's avowal of devotion to her sister dumbly – line after line, to the end – her hands hanging at her sides, her chin sunk. Only her meagre bosom showed that she was listening. For the first time it heaved to love words that were not ordered for the ears of all – for the first time in her life she heard a man's passion crying out to flesh and blood. When she raised her head at last, she was white to the lips.
"What's the matter?"
Contrition, love and pity surged in her. In the distorted body all the forces of womanhood beat at his appeal. She yearned over the story of his childish years like a mother, she trembled to his passion like a wife. The thin hands strained across the lifting bosom; she found her voice.
"There's something I must tell you. I – I ought to have told you before… It's I who have been writing to him," she said.
"You?.. It's you who have been What do you mean? Why does he write to me then?"
"He doesn't know. I always signed myself 'H,' of course, and one day he asked for my photograph. I – " She hesitated. She drooped before the girl abjectly.
"You sent him mine?" cried Hilda.
Bee nodded, her eyes to the ground… The pause was broken by Hilda's giggle.
"Whatever did you do that for?" she said.
The deformed woman spoke by a gesture. "Then he came to Godstone, and fell in love with you," she went on huskily. "I didn't know it was he when we were there; I only guessed when I heard he was – when I heard what his brother had told you about him. I was writing to him when you came in, to say that I had deceived him. It's too late, the harm is done, but I was writing!"
"It was an awful shame," exclaimed Hilda with sudden heat. "Supposing he has talked to Vivian – I mean 'Mr. Harris' – about it? I expect he has – he seems to know his brother's here. Why, what a liar I shall look! It was a beastly thing to do, Bee. What will his brother think of me?"
"You're fond of Mr. Harris, aren't you?" inquired Bee humbly.
"Perhaps. Anyhow, I don't want him to imagine I'm such a hateful liar as to pretend I don't know a fellow I've been corresponding with for months."
"That can soon be put right; I wish I'd done no worse harm than that."
"What else have you done, for goodness' sake?"
Bee's lips tightened. She pointed to David's letter, which had fallen to the floor.
"Have you forgotten he loves you?" she asked.
"Oh!" Hilda was relieved. "Well, you'll have to own up to everybody, that's all," she said; "I hope you'll like it. But carrying on a correspondence with a man you've never seen – you! That's what gets over me. What on earth did you find to say to him?"
"I wrote about his work."
"And why should you have minded his knowing about your accident – what difference did that make? Really" – her vexation melted into amusement – "it may have been all about poetry and the fine arts, but it was going rather far, wasn't it? If I had done such a thing – A secret correspondence with a strange man! I'd never have believed it of you. I'm appalled. I shouldn't like to call you 'fast,' but – And he turns out to be a nigger!" Her laughter pealed. "Oh, it's funny! it is, it is, it's screaming!"
"He loves you," said the woman again, flushing to the temples; "try to remember it."
The ridicule in the girl's stare shamed her through and through. She picked the scattered pages up, and folded them. Hilda took them negligently, and stood struggling to control her mouth. Smiles still played hide-and-seek with the dimple in her cheek.
"Which likeness has he got of me?" she said after a minute.
"It was the one I took at Godstone."
"You might as well have sent the one you took of me in the tucked chiffon, while you were about it. That thing at Godstone didn't show the best side of my face."
"He loves you," cried Bee passionately. "Are you made of wood? You're the world to him, he thinks you understand him, he's coming to you to-day, praying for your answer! Have you got no feeling in you; can't you pity him?"
"Good Lord!" said Hilda, "don't go on at me like that. Of course I pity him; I'm very sorry for him indeed, I'm sure. I think I shall write him a very nice note after he has got over the shock," she added complacently, "hoping he'll soon forget me, and 'find comfort in his work.' I might do that, mightn't I? Something very kind."
"And when he comes to-day?"
"What, when he comes? You don't expect me to explain matters to him, do you?"
"No, I must do that, I know; it serves me right for not having told him before. But he'll ask to see you afterwards – to say good-bye to you. You'll go down and speak to him?"
"I shan't do anything of the sort, it isn't likely. To say 'good-bye' to me? Why, the man's a stranger to me, it would be most horribly embarrassing – I should feel a perfect idiot. You can tell him I had to go out – or that I'm not well. Besides, I shouldn't think he would ask to see me when he hears he has been taken in; why should he?"
"'Why should he'? Because he loves you, because he's hungry for you, mad for you. Because you're pretty and soft, and made for men to admire, and he'll want to look at your face, and touch your hand, and hold it for a second longer than he ought to. And if you let him, would it kill you? Would it be so much to give him? Can you read that letter – can you hear his life – and smirk and talk of your 'embarrassment'? To him it'll be worse than embarrassment, it'll be despair."
"You're very rude," said Hilda, paling. "I think you're in love with him yourself, upon my word I do!"
"Do you? It would be very strange, wouldn't it? I'm not pretty like you, and I've got a crooked spine – so I'm not a woman. You can hardly believe that I could be in love, can you?"
"I really don't know what to believe," stammered Hilda, "when you talk like that. I should have thought you'd have respected yourself more than to fall in love with a ni – with a mulatto, at any rate."
"I respect myself because I do love him – I love him better than it's in you to love anybody. You fool, you doll, you'll write him something very 'kind,' and think you're condescending? If that letter had been written to me, I'd have thanked God for it on my knees – God knows it's true! Yes, I love him – with all my body and all my soul, and if he had wanted me, instead of you, and I had looked no further than my own joy, I'd have given myself to him body and soul, and been proud."
"Ah, ssh!" the girl faltered, "you don't know what you're saying."
"And been proud!" she sobbed. "Yes, I do know, I mean it!.. Without fear – it would have been my honour. Body and soul – his and mine – one mind, one life, one flesh!.. I'd have gloried. That's love, that's human!" She shrank against the wall, and bowed her head there under the failures of her art. "Go away from me, don't stare at me! I'm a cripple, no one ever cared for me – I wish I were dead!"
In the hush of the next instant a bell rang. Their gaze met, startled. Neither spoke. Both listened intently.
The servant came up the stairs with slow, heavy feet. She said: "Mr. Lee to see Miss Hilda."
"Where is he?" murmured the girl.
"In the drawing-room, Miss."
The attic was still again after the servant went. Her footsteps struck the oilcloth of the top stairs harshly, and fell duller on the carpet, and subsided in the hall. In the silence the sisters sat looking away from each other, as strangers look.
"One of us must go down to him!" said Hilda at last in a nervous gasp.
"I'll go down as soon as I can," Bee answered.
CHAPTER XXIV
He waited restlessly. The suspense that had shivered in him on the journey – that sickened him as the fly rattled through the town – had culminated with the sight of the house in which she lived. He was in her home. There was nothing gracious in the shabby, formal room where the music and the elocution lessons were given. No flowers lent a touch of nature to the early Victorian vases on the mantelpiece; no piece of fancy-work had been forgotten, to humanise the asperity of the clumsy furniture with the hint of a woman's presence. But he was in her home – and everything in the room spoke to him. Things quite trivial, quite trite, woke emotion in him because they were familiar to her; they took unto their inanimate ugliness some of the fascination of her life.
He stood on the faded hearthrug, watching the door. After the servant's feet had clattered to the basement all was quiet except the clock, which ticked behind him sadly. He became acutely conscious of its tick in the long waiting; it stole into his nerves, and heightened his misgiving. At last he caught a sound outside the door; the handle stirred. For an instant it was as if Hilda were before him; he knew that upheaval of the chest with which a man sees the woman of whom he is despairing turn the corner. He moved a step towards the door breathlessly – and then blankness fell and Bee came slowly in.
"How do you do, Mr. Lee?" she murmured.
"How do you do, Miss Sorrenford?"
She did not offer him her hand – she felt that it would be unfair to make him take her hand before he knew what she had to say; she did not ask him to sit – she did not think of it. In the pause, the significant tick of the clock vibrated in him.
"You expected to see my sister," she began monotonously, reciting the sentence she had prepared; "I have come instead, because I have something to tell you."
"She won't see me?" asked David in a whisper.
She made an effort to swallow. "When she got your letter, I was writing to you. I – I have behaved very badly. I had no idea – I did not think of the consequences. Hilda has never – the letters you've received haven't come from Hilda… All the letters have come from me."
He did not start. Only his eyes showed that he had heard. He stood gazing at her – and she knew that she had killed something in him. The dark lips moved. Watching them, she understood that he said "From you?"
"Yes," she muttered. "It was I who wrote about your poems. I've written all the letters. Hilda hasn't written. Hilda has never heard from you before… She didn't send you her likeness – I sent it. You wanted mine; I'm deformed – I didn't like to tell you – I sent Hilda's… I didn't think it would matter – I didn't think long enough – it was an impulse. I shall never forgive myself as long as I live; nothing can tell you how ashamed I am!.. You're a stranger to Hilda; she doesn't – it's impossible – you're a stranger to her."
She was trembling violently. She put out a hand to a chair, and sat down. David still stood motionless, his gaze fixed.
"A stranger to her," he echoed.
"She only met you at Godstone. There was nothing at Godstone to – to make you hope she might care for you, was there? Was there?"
"No," he said dully; "no, there was nothing at Godstone to make me hope she might care for me. It was at Godstone I began to love her, that's all… Your name is 'Bee '?"
"My name is 'Hebe,'" she answered bitterly. "I am called 'Bee' for – for short."
"I understand; Hilda has never written to me – she has never heard from me before. I understand, of course; you've explained it, and – and I do understand, I think. But all the same … I have believed she – Oh, God!" he broke out, "it was a cruel thing to do. Why? What for? Wasn't I wretched enough? To do this to me – for nothing! to spare your petty pride."
She twisted her hands in agony. "All my life I shall be sorry."
"Sorry! Thank you. All mine I shall be sorry, too. If you had wished to torture me – if you had tried! I love her. She's more to me than all the world, than the only soul I think of in the next. I love her! do you know what it means? To say I'd die for her says nothing – my life is empty; but the one joy I have had has been my work, and I would give all the work I've done, and all the power to do any more – I'd give it gladly – just to kiss her once… If she knew – if I could tell her what I feel for her, there might – mightn't there be hope for me yet?"
"No," she said; the tears were running down her face; "she's fond of someone else."
"Of Vivian?.. Oh, she is fond of him, is she? Don't cry, I didn't mean to make you cry. It can't be helped now."
"Forgive me," she sobbed. "Don't hate me! Say that you forgive me!"
"May God make her happy with him," murmured the man, deaf and blind.
"Forgive me, forgive me," she moaned. "It was cruel, what you said was true, I've tortured you – to spare my pride, to spare my vanity, but forgive me. Say you forgive me what I've done!"
"I forgive you," he said. "After all, you were no more cowardly than I was. You might have told me so; you didn't."
It was some minutes before either of them spoke another word.
"If she had loved me!" cried David, suddenly. He fell on to the couch, and hid his face in his hands. "If she had loved me!"
"If she had loved you," said Bee's pitying voice, "it would have been worse for you to bear; you would have had a harder trial. She couldn't have married you. It would have been wrong."
He raised his head. "Because I'm what I am?" he asked.
"No," she said – and her wet eyes did not fall before him – "because of what your child would be… Had you ever thought of that?"
"Yes. For my own childhood seems the other day."
"I know – I've heard your letter; don't grudge me having heard it. Your child would suffer too, not so deeply, perhaps, but the world wouldn't be kind to him; if your child were a girl, God knows the world wouldn't be kind to her… It is a very barren world for some of us, but we oughtn't to steal our joy, ought we? We oughtn't to make others pay for it. You know that; Hilda would know it. She couldn't have been your wife."
"If she had loved me," he said, brokenly, "she wouldn't have argued so."
"The woman who loved you with all her heart and soul would have argued so," affirmed the woman… "And you would have suffered more in knowing that she loved you, when you had to lose her. The knowledge that she loved you would have brought no light into your life; it would have made your loneliness lonelier."
"How can you say?"
"Because you are a man."
"And a woman? Would it be different with a woman?"
"Yes," she answered, out of her longing. "A woman's loneliness would be less for knowing she was loved."
"What is my sin?" he cried out. "Why should the freedom of other men be always denied to me? I have the same feelings, the same heeds, the same God put them in me. You are so righteous, you teach me my duty; have you no duty towards me? The world mouths the Scriptures that tell us all men are brothers, and persecutes me while it cants. From the time I can remember, it has been so. My own mother was ashamed of me. At school they prayed God to pardon the Jews and the infidels – 'Take from them all hardness of heart' – and came out from the Service and beat the 'nigger.' As a man, I have never had a friend. Is it charity, is it justice, to make a pariah of me? Why should I be shunned? I was given life, I didn't ask for it."
"No," she said gently, "but could you bear to have your child say that to you? It is a brutal world, a merciless world. When they tell us it is a beautiful world, they tell a lie. They speak with their eyes shut to everything that is painful to see. When Browning wrote, 'God's in His heaven, all's right with the world,' I think God must have shuddered. I know you believe in a life afterwards where all the crookedness down here will be put straight – all the crooked backs, and things: try to be strong, and wait for the Explanation – and the soul you spoke of. And you've your work to help you; if I could only work like you! I am not 'righteous,' I am not very patient, I have rebelled as passionately as you do; if it can comfort you to know it, I suffer as you do. We are alike, we two – you and I weren't made for happiness."
"Forgive me," said David; "I might have remembered that you suffer. You can understand me… But you always have understood me." It recurred to him with surprise that from her came the letters that he had treasured. It was difficult to realise that the mind within the bent little woman who seemed a stranger was indeed the one so near to him. Even, as yet, their affinity left him desolate. It was still to Hilda that his spirit turned – Hilda despoiled of all the qualities by which he had justified his love, but sovereign still, still Hilda. "How strange it is," he murmured. "Your letters used to make me very happy. And the letters are real, aren't they? I think I was ready to love her for what she wrote, only – "
"Only then you loved her for herself?"
"Yes… Vivian will marry her now. Vivian would be glad to know what I know; he is afraid she doesn't care for him. If – if, she wonders whether he loves her, you might tell her that I know he does. I boasted to him yesterday. How he might laugh at me to-day!"
"I'm so sorry for you. It's a worn-out word; it seemed an insult to you when I used it just now, but what other is there? The relief will come. You'll pour your pain into your poetry; you'll write something beautiful and great because of what you're suffering, and know that it is beautiful and great. The pain will fade a little because you'll feel you utter it so well."
He looked beyond her thoughtfully. "Yes," he said… "It sounds paltry, doesn't it? But it's true. Are we so shallow?"
"We?" she sighed. "I'm not an artist, I am dumb. I used to think – but what has that to do with it!"
"Tell me," he said.
"I used to think I must have genius; I didn't think a little gift like mine could cry so loud. If people knew some of the things I have done in my life, they would laugh, because – because one has no right to feel like that and be mediocre; it is silly… Did you know as a child that you had power?"
"I always longed… I remember telling my father once that it was in me. I lost hope afterwards… I've been so miserable."
"I could hear it in your work; you seemed to be speaking for me sometimes… I wanted to thank you for such a long while before I found the courage to do it. If I had guessed what was to come of it! I did nearly tear the letter up – so nearly!"
"I used to ask myself what you'd say if you could see me. I was frightened I shouldn't hear from you any more if you knew what I was like… I should have heard from you, shouldn't I?"
"Yes."
"Shall I hear from you still?"
Her gaze rose to him wonderingly. "Do you mean that?" she faltered. "Do you want to?"
"I don't know," he said.
"It would keep the pain alive. You wouldn't be able to bear it."
He was silent a moment, pondering. "Your letters made me happy," he repeated, "they have been all I've had – I shall be poorer without them. Yes, I must have them. I'll try not to think of her when I read them. I'll read them for what they are – what they were to me before I saw her… This isn't the end?"
"If you are sure you wish it, write to me; I will always answer," she promised.
The poignancy was fading from their tones, as the anger against her had already faded from his heart. By degrees they talked more freely. She lost the bearing of a penitent before her judge; the weakness was all the man's, and it became her part to comfort. A slow thankfulness that she had been revealed to him began to tinge the greyness of his outlook; in him, and in her, a sense was dawning that they could never again be so utterly alone. When she went to the door with him not an hour had passed since he uttered his reproaches – and upon the threshold he took both her hands, and she said, "It's not 'good-bye.'"
On the morning when David's father followed a blonde in crape along the Brighton sea-front, the band was playing "La Fille de Madame Angot": when David held Bee's hands, and she said, "It's not good-bye," the present century was born. So far as the lives of David Lee and Hebe Sorrenford are lived, the story of their lives is told. Where it ends, another is beginning, and to some of us it must seem that the story of their friendship can end only when the man or woman dies. For the sympathy between these two who in spirit are one cannot die. That must last longer than their youth, and longer than their passions; I who have said what has been, believe it must last longer than the bodies that belie their souls. The pages of the story are blank, and we can do no more than guess how Time will write it. But after Hilda has become Vivian's wife, and when the music-room is silent, it cannot be rash to think that Bee will make her new home close to David's, and, since Nature calls to both, that through some village street the figures of the quaint companions will pass together every day – and pass together for so many days that at last the rustics cease to point at them. Alike in their ideals, in their feeling for beauty, alike even in their weaknesses, how can they drift apart? Far on in the unwritten story I see no separation but the night. I see them working together, hoping together – hopeful of an immortality for David's verse which perhaps it will not win – but both happier, both braver, each of them fortified by the other's love. When the name of Ownie is unspoken and she rests as "Lilian Augusta, Widow of Elisha Lee," I see them together still, and I think there is no knowledge in his comrade's heart that David does not share, excepting that his history has held such love as women give to men where children sing. If I am not wrong, one day he will know that too, but he will learn it only where there is a fuller charity, and a clearer light – in a World where a hue of the skin cannot ostracise, and a crook of the body cannot ban.