i
if the floods would but retreat! if the winter would but dissolve and allow spring to break over the land! then the rich black loam of the fields would appear in the place of the water,—that flat and cruel, unprofitable water,—and the country under the blush of green would cease to be so mournful, rayless, and forbidding. the floods were so dead; dead brown, dead level; there was no life in them, except sometimes under the red sun, a fierce, angry sort of life, and sometimes when the wind beat them; but now gray rainy day succeeded gray rainy day, mild indeed, but not spring, not the spring of clear sunlit showers and rainbows! it would be a dark, fertile country that came to light, curiously un-english in its effect of unboundaried acreage, wide ditches marking off the fields in the place of hedges. ditches and dykes would remain as the scar and testimony of the floods, the dykes that like some 126roman aqueduct stretched away into the flat and misty distances.
yearly nan lived through the winter in the hope of such a spring, and almost yearly it failed her. she was drawn towards spring with an instinct of unsatisfied youth. it appeared to her like a vista cut in the darkness of the life she led between silas and gregory.
the population of her world was so restricted; in very early days she had been sharply taught that gregory would neither welcome his wife’s friends at his fireside, nor allow her to go to theirs. she had never forgotten the written message he had left for her on the table in the first week of their marriage, having found her laughing in the kitchen with another girl: “no prying eyes here, missis.” the denes, she learnt, were as sensitive as they were savage and solitary, and, so strong was the legend that they had created around themselves, that she had found herself quickly alienated from the rest of the village and definitely regarded as of the company inhabiting the lonely cottage. silas, gregory, linnet morgan, donnithorne sometimes, mr. calthorpe. that was all. the two dominating figures were silas and gregory; she was more frightened 127of silas than of gregory, because of her secret knowledge, but gregory was like a stranger to her; she was submissive to him but felt no nearness, no intimacy; he was more closely allied to silas than to her. of linnet morgan she thought with shy and oddly pleasurable evasion. of calthorpe, with confidence; she liked his well-brushed hair, precisely parted down one side, and the close pointed beard that gave him a certain robust dignity and rather the appearance of a sailor; thinking of calthorpe was like leaning up against a solid and stable building. he looked at her with great kindliness now, when she talked to him; she had always wanted somebody to look at her like that. it awoke, too, in her a certain pride: she had trained this big man in the part she wanted him to play; she, so small, had taught him, so large, a trick, and whenever she brought him her confidences, and he responded with that look so full of kindliness, he was doing the trick she had trained him, against his will, to do. this gave her a proprietary sense in him. she found him very docile. he, on his part, loved her for her little domineering manner.
it was only when she returned to silas and gregory that she was made to realise her own 128futility. against the weak pushing of her hands they remained immovable....
then she fell sometimes into despair, and her courage crumpled. for days she would be silent, then with an effort she would bring out her zither and sing, until before their contempt her voice would trail away again miserably into silence.
she longed for the retreat of the floods and the end of the winter, because now the country and the year seemed to be conspiring with silas and gregory.
ii
once she tried to bring about a complete revolution in all their lives; only once. she was really half-crazy with despair when she made the attempt; nothing else could have given her the courage. as it was, she was intimidated by her own audacity, for by nature she accepted circumstances without questioning. inaugurations terrified her; yet here was she, nan, inaugurating.
she sat at the table, under the lamp, silas and gregory on either side of her, the remains of supper before them. she sat twisting her hands; swallowing hard.
129she began, “shall we be here always?” then stopped, then plunged on again, “living always here, with the floods every winter, all the winter through? why shouldn’t we go away, somewhere else, if we choose? why shouldn’t we?” she cried suddenly, in a frightened voice, as nobody answered.
she looked at silas and gregory; silas was smiling, and gregory was smiling too, in a twisty, derisive way, as though he knew what she had been talking about. yet he couldn’t know. silas had a look of surprise and amusement; grateful surprise, as though she had provided him with an unexpected amusement in an hour of boredom.
“go on!” he said to her.
at that she felt all her source of boldness, of inventiveness, dried up within her. what was the good of this struggle for escape when she was hemmed in, not only by the floods and the dykes, but by those two immovable men who owned her? but her terror urged against her hopelessness; and was the stronger.
“can you like living here?” she appealed to silas, trying to touch him upon his own inclinations.
“as well here as anywhere else,” he answered. “i work here.”
130she knew the bitterness that edged his voice whenever he mentioned his work.
“you tie up parcels in a packing-shed,” she said, “always the same,—work that a half-wit could do. yes, a poor wanting creature could do your work. why don’t you bestir yourself? why don’t you come away?” she talked so, knowing that she strained to pull a weight that lay solid against her small strength.
if only silas or gregory would get up, she thought that with that insignificant display of mobility her hope would revive; but they sat on either side of her, cast in bronze. if they were doomed men, then they made no effort to escape their doom. too proud, perhaps. they sat and waited. they seemed too indifferent to care.
“nobody’s put you in prison into abbot’s etchery,” she murmured.
yet they were so like prisoners, silas in his darkness, gregory in his silence, that she almost looked for gyves about their wrists and ankles. when they stirred, it should have been to the accompaniment of a heavy clank. when silas fought, when he cried aloud, it was the struggle of a chained man. but his struggles were so ineffective; nan, who was 131not oppressed from within, but only from without, thought that he could help himself if he would. she had all the impatience of the naturally buoyant with the dogged tragedy of the fatalistic.
“come away,” she urged. “what is it that keeps you here? there are warm, pretty places. let’s make the best of things.”
“i might get away from abbot’s etchery, i shouldn’t be getting away from myself,” said silas.
nan cried out, “can’t one get away? who says so? isn’t it in our own hands?”
“is it?” replied silas, letting drop the sorrowful query as though it were rather the echo of a perpetual self-communion revolving in his soul, than an idle response.
the old mournfulness, the old anguish, closed down upon them again. they were like haunted people, who would not help themselves. they seemed haunted by the past,—which contained indeed the death of hannah, a death so rough and dingy,—by the present, and by the overcharged future. but their dread was not to be defined; it was of the nature of a mystic sentence, presaged from a long way off. sometimes she thought that they were 132afraid of themselves; sometimes that they were too apathetic to be afraid. only silas made his dungeon clamorous sometimes with his wild revolt, that led to nothing, to no change, to no illumination.
iii
calthorpe found her sitting listless in a corner. she showed a hunted preference for corners, and for shelter behind furniture.
“why, you’re pale,” he said. he came closer, “you’re wan.”
she did a rare thing: she put her hand into his and let him hold it, which he did as though it were a child’s. he was overcome by her smallness and frailty; she seemed to be almost transparent, and her features were tiny and delicate, but her eyes were large as she raised them. “not ill?” he asked. “no,” she replied, “only tired and afraid.”
“afraid of what?”
“no, not afraid really; only worn.”
“yes, indeed; you’re like a little wraith. you’d blow away in a puff.”
he could not rouse her at all; she made no complaint, but sat very quiet and beaten, letting her hand lie in his. in reply to his questions, she kept 133on saying that she was tired. he knew that she meant spiritually, not physically, tired. she was very polite to him, saying “no, thank you, mr. calthorpe,” and he found her extremely pitiable, but his science failed him when he tried to think of a remedy. he could only sit alternately patting and pressing her hand. she gave him a grateful smile, at length.
“you do me good, just by being there.”
“come, that’s better; won’t you tell me now what was the matter?”
“i only want to be happy,” she said suddenly, and her mouth quivered beyond her control, so she bit her under-lip and looked away.
“oh, my dear! my dear!” said poor calthorpe.
“i want to run by the sea, over the sands,” she cried, as though her heart had burst its compressing bonds; “i used to live by the sea once, in the south, and i think about it ... and the birds nesting. there were gulls upon all the rocks. there were white splashes down the rocks. it wasn’t home. but i’m homesick, i think.”
“you’re just a child,” said calthorpe. “you want to play. poor little soul!”
“oh, how kind you are,” she said, and he felt her 134fingers flutter within his hand. “i get so tired of fighting, sometimes....”
“won’t you tell me just exactly what you’re fighting against?” he was very patient and full of pity, but believing her to be slightly hysterical he had the reasonable man’s reliance on a calm statement of her difficulties to disperse much of their bogie-mist.
she only said, however, “i don’t know.”
(“hysteria,” he thought. if she had said, “forces of darkness,” he would have started mistrustfully, without allowing himself to be impressed. but she was too ignorant to use the phrase.)
“come, then,” he said heartily, “it can’t be a very serious enemy if you can’t give it a name,—what?”
“it’s everything,” she said, “the floods,—i hate them,—the factory.... if the factory would stop, sometimes, but it never does: always that black smoke, and the men working in shifts to keep it going, and then the men always talking about wages, and sometimes the strikes. even the abbey gets to be like the factory.”
“you’re fanciful,” said calthorpe.
“anybody would get fanciful, living with silas and gregory,” she replied mournfully.
135how she changed! he reflected. sometimes she ordered him about, and sometimes she came to him like a child for consolation. whatever her mood, he never ventured upon familiarity. he told himself sometimes with irritation that he had never been kept so at arm’s length by an otherwise friendly woman. he was a wholesome and masculine man, and he had a wholesome and masculine liking for the company of woman in his hours of relaxation, and in regard to nan had certainly intended their friendship to run upon different lines, harmless enough, but perhaps a little more stimulating; he found, however, that quite quietly it was she who decided the direction, while he in aggrieved but unprotesting surprise fell meekly in with her wishes. he often told himself that he was wasting his time, and would go no more to the denes’ cottage, but he always broke his resolution.
“is morgan no help to you? he’s something young about the house.”
“i don’t speak to him much, he’s always in his books. i wish you lived in the house, mr. calthorpe.”
“i wish i did, nan.” but on the whole, he thought, he was glad he didn’t.
136
iv
morgan, whom nan represented as being always in his books, was by inclination a scientist, but for the moment, until he had the means to devote himself to his profession, he managed that branch of the factory concerned with scents and powders.
he worked among shining alembics and great-bellied bottles of dark green glass, standing round his room in rows.
the latticed window was hung with cobwebs. the table was littered with bottles, saucepans, test-tubes, and little flames burning. of all things in the room, the alembics alone were kept clean, gleaming bright brass globes, pair by pair, connected by twisting pipes, and ever dripping the distilled, overpowering scent into dishes put ready to receive it. they shone out from the disorder of the room. canisters ranged round the walls on shelves: benzoin, civet, frankincense, ambergris,—the names on the labels smouldered as a group of asiatics among ordinary people.
nan was sent up with a message to him in this room.
she appeared in the doorway, continuing to knock as she pushed open the door, in the bright blue 137overall she wore when at her work. she was smiling shyly, as though she expected a welcome. but he did not immediately see her. he was bending with great absorption over a little pair of scales, weighing a quantity of grains, and when he had done this he poured the grains very carefully into a kind of box, which he set above a small lamp to heat. then as he wiped his hands on a piece of linen, he caught sight of her.
“mrs. dene! what brings you here? what bit of luck? what extraordinary bit of luck?”
he went to her, drew her into the room, and shut the door. he gazed at her with incredulous delight. he wanted to touch her, to make sure that she was real.
“why don’t you tell me?” he queried, as she stood there smiling but not speaking.
as she delivered her message, every word seemed to give birth to an unspoken, irrelevant flight of words that fluttered round them with ghostly rustle of wings, finding no resting-place. when she had finished, she stood irresolute.
“i must go back.”
her eyes roamed over the room, and every now and then swept over him in passing. they caressed 138him in that quick, diffident, gentle way she had. they rested with a mild dismay on all his disorder, and a pucker of trouble appeared between her brows.
“what’s the matter, mrs. dene?”
“oh, your things want straightening,” she murmured in tones of distress. “doesn’t any one have charge of your room? the dust,—look at it! the litter!”
she moved to his table as though her deft hands were yearning towards it. she made little tentative touches at his things, while he watched her. she looked at him to see whether she was annoying him.
“oh, do you mind?”
“on the contrary, i like to see you doing it.”
she gained courage.
“you haven’t a duster, have you?”
he discovered a duster in the table drawer and gave it to her; like all good workmen, she was heartened by the touch of an instrument, however humble, of her natural work. she picked things up and set them down more briskly, saying meanwhile, half in excuse for her briskness,—
“i must hurry, or they’ll be missing me downstairs.”
139“you can say i kept you. i’ll find something for you to take to the forewoman; that’ll be an excuse.”
“an excuse—is that right, do you think? but your room is in a mess, isn’t it? it can’t have been touched for months. does no one clean up?”
“no, i won’t let them.”
“you ought to have told me,” she said, greatly distressed. “i am so sorry ... i didn’t think. some men are like that, i know. they think they can find things better. but i haven’t tidied; look, nothing has been moved.”
“i told you i liked to see you doing it.”
“you were civil,” she said, not comforted.
“no, i’m never civil.”
“oh yes, mr. morgan; you can’t help it, if you’re civil in your heart. it comes kindly, to folk who laugh as much as you do.”
“you laugh too; i’ve heard you laughing downstairs, in the workroom. you and i laugh more than silas and gregory.”
“gregory can’t laugh,” she said gravely.
for a moment their chatter stopped quite short. then she began again,—
“i must go now, mr. morgan.”
140“no, stay; you shall look at some of my things,” he cried, making a movement to detain her. “these are the alembics where the scent is distilled,” he went on; “of course, these are only the small ones that i use for my own experiments; i expect you’ve seen the big ones in the shed downstairs.
“the shed all littered with sandal-wood shavings? i like it; it smells good.”
“it smells good here in my room too, don’t you think? that’s because of the scent dripping from the alembics. you see it drips into these pannikins that are put there to catch it. they are all new scents—new combinations of scents, that is—that i’m trying.” he was eager, both for the sake of his work and in his anxiety to hold her interest. “now i’ll show you some of the raw material; it doesn’t always smell good before we’ve been to work upon it.”
he wondered whether he might take her arm, whether he might venture. she was like the little bird to which he always compared her, and as easily scared! he turned the question over and over in his mind while he was talking, now bracing himself to be bold, now shrinking back; almost moving towards her; but while hesitation still swirled within his mind he found that his hand had, 141quite simply, taken hers. “it’s so natural, so fitting, for me to take her hand, that she hasn’t even noticed,” he thought with joy.
“these are the canisters where i keep my raw stuff,” he said, pointing to the tin canisters ranged on shelves. they stood hand in hand reading the names on the labels.
“ambergris—that’s the name of a scent i bottle,” she said, with a little laugh. “i use a lavender ribbon for that. and orris—that’s the powder. don’t they have queer names? opoponax, that always makes me laugh.”
they laughed together over opoponax.
“and there’s names out of scripture,” she said, “frankincense and myrrh.”
he took down the tin of benzoin, and made her smell it, shaking some of the brittle stuff into the palm of her hand; crumbling up her hand into a cup, and guiding it now to her nose and now to his own. they compared their tastes; “i think this sort smells nicest,” she said to him, gravely holding out her cupped hand, but he would not agree, after bending over it with the deliberation of a practised critic, and added a little storax, which, he said, brought out the pungency of the benzoin.
142“all these gums and resins,” he said, “come from trees; you cut a gash in the tree, and the gum comes from it like blood from a wound, oozing out. and one of them—labdanum—is got by the natives by beating the bush with long whips; or sometimes they get it by combing the beards of the goats which have been browsing off the bush.”
that made her laugh too, but she was impressed by his knowledge, and that made him laugh in his turn.
“now i’ll show you the woods,—you said you liked the sandal-wood; well; this is cedar, don’t you like that even better? shall i give you some to take away in a little packet? you can keep it with your clothes, like the sachets you tie up downstairs.” he thought with a momentary panic that he might have offended her by referring to her clothes, but the hint of intimacy in the suggestion pleased and troubled him so much that he was glad he had taken the risk for the sake of that pleasure.
she was not offended; she only blushed a little.
“that will be nice,—but i’m taking all your time, mr. morgan.”
“oh no; i have plenty of time, and there’s lots more that i could show you. i could tell you a good deal, too, that might amuse you: how the egyptians 143used to embalm their mummies, and how an assyrian king caused himself to be burnt with all his wives on a high pyre of scented boughs sooner than fall into the hands of an enemy. and how the chinese hunt for musk; this is musk; it doesn’t smell nice in this state, but it’s very precious. this is attar of roses in this little bottle; smell very carefully. let me hold it for you. do you like my things?”
she liked his things very much.
“do you think my room less untidy and dusty, now that you know there are other things in it besides dust and untidiness?”
“all those tins, full of sweet scents,” she said unexpectedly. “only, i ought to go back to my work now, don’t you think? you said you would give me something to take to the forewoman.”
“but you said that wasn’t right.”
“no, perhaps it isn’t,—oh, i see: you’re teasing me. well, i’ll go without it.”
“but you’re frightened of being scolded?” he said, following her and laying his hand upon the handle of the door. “now aren’t you? confess! what do you say when the forewoman is cross? do you stand hanging your head and twisting your apron?” he was laughing down at her.
144“she isn’t often cross, but she will be if i stay dawdling here,—oh, please, mr. morgan!”
he saw with astonishment that her eyes were suddenly brimming with tears, and her soft mouth quivered.
“you are dreadfully unkind, getting me into trouble and then teasing me about it,” she said, nearly crying, but trying to conceal it from him. “i enjoyed looking at the scents, and i forgot the time, but now it is all different, and i want to go away, please. please take your hand off the door-handle,” she continued, trying to pull away his fingers with her weak ones.
“why, you have got quite excited,” he said gently; “look, i am not keeping you—i have let go of the handle—but won’t you wait while i write a note to the forewoman? i want to send her a message, i really do! won’t you wait for it?”
“of course, if you ask me as one of the girls, i must.”
“you’re terribly perverse!” he exclaimed, half annoyed.
“if you ask me as one of the girls....”
“very well; nan, will you please wait a minute while i write a note for you to take to miss dawson?” 145he was not sure to what extent she was serious or joking. then she flushed at his use of her name, but he saw that she was not joking at all. “what a strange, perplexing thing!” he commented inwardly, as he searched for a pencil among the litter on his table.
“if you’re looking for your pencil, i put it in the tray with your measure and the little thermometer,” she volunteered sulkily.
it was on the tip of his tongue to say, “you said you hadn’t tidied!” but a glance at her face, which was still quivering with her aroused sensitiveness, warned him not to tease her. he sat down and wrote his note while she waited over by the door, then he brought it across to her.
“have we quarrelled?” he said wistfully.
“is there no message with the note?”
“how severe you are!” he held the note just out of her reach, risking her anger if he might keep her a moment longer. “have you got the packet of cedar-dust i gave you?”
“yes.”
“where?”
she made one of the patch-pockets on her overall gape, and let him see the packet within. he gave 146her the note reluctantly, and opened the door for her.
“good-bye, mr. necromancer, with your alembics,” she said.
“stop! where did you get that big word?”
“out of a book.”
he could think of nothing to say but “what book?” in order to delay her, but she was already half-way down the passage. he watched her till she was out of sight, then returned to his room and shut the door. “she’s like a little delicate moth flitting through gross life,” he thought, and he wandered about his room, touching the things which had taken her fancy most.
