CHAPTER XIV—BELIEVING HER GOOD

For a week he had no news of her. Then his father said to him one morning, “Oh, by the way, The Garden Enclosed is going to be exhibited. I asked Miss Jodrell to lend it to me.”

“Will—will she bring it herself?” he asked, trying to disguise his anxiety.

“Herself! No. She’s rather an important person. She’s gone to America.”

Then the news leaked out that Hal had gone too.

Some nights later he was driving back down Eden Row with his father. They had been to the gallery where the picture was hanging. Without warning the cab pulled up with a jerk; he found himself clinging to the dashboard. His eyes were staring into the gas-lit gloom of Eden Row.

Almost touching the horse’s nose, two men, a fat and a lean one, had darted out from the shadow of the pavement They were shouting at something that sat balanced, humped like a sack, on the spiked palings which divided the river from the road. They had all but reached it; it screamed, shot erect, and jumped. There was a sullen splash, then silence and the gurgling of the river as the ripples closed slowly over it.

The silhouette of the fat man bent double; the silhouette of the lean man, using it as a stepping stone, climbed the palings and dived into the blackness. It would have been a dumb charade, if the fat man hadn’t said, “Um! Um!” when he felt the lean man’s foot digging into his back.

Teddy was hauled out into the road by his father. Grampus puffings were coming from the river, splashings and groanings. The cabman was standing up in his seat, profanely expressing his emotions. A police-whistle called near at hand. A hundred yards away another answered. Through the emptiness of night the pounding of feet sounded.

In an instant, as though it had sprung out of the ground, a crowd had gathered. People started to strike matches, which they held out through the palings in a futile endeavor to see what was happening.

A policeman came up, elbowing and shoving. He caught the horse’s head and whisked the cab round so that its lamps shone down on the river. They revealed Mr. Hughes, his bowler hat smashed over his forehead, swimming desperately with one hand and towing a bundle towards the bank.

Men swarmed over the palings and dragged him safe to land. Clearing his throat, he commenced explaining to the policeman, “As I was walkin’ with my friend, I sees ’er climbin’ over. I says to ’im, That’s queer. That ain’t allowed.’ And at that moment——”

Teddy lost the rest. Letting go his father’s hand, he was wriggling his way to the front through the legs of the crowd. He reached the palings and peered through.

Stretched limply on the bank, her hair broken loose, the policeman’s bull’s-eye glaring down on her, was Harriet.

Vashti’s name was never mentioned in connection with the attempted suicide, but he quickly knew that in some mysterious way she was held responsible. When he asked his mother, “Was it because Hal went to America?” she answered him evasively, “Harriet’s a curious girl—not quite normal. That may have had something to do with it.”

For many months, as far as Orchid Lodge was concerned, Vashti’s memory was a hand clapped over the mouth of laughter. Harriet broke dishes now only by accident and never in temper. She went about her work without singing. Mrs. Sheerug put away her gay green mantle; after Hal left, she dressed in black. She spoke less about men being shiftless creatures. If she caught herself doing it from habit, she stopped sharply, fearing lest she should be suspected of accusing some one man. Her great theme nowadays was the blighting influence of selfishness. She was always on the look-out for signs of selfishness in Teddy. Once, at parting with him, she refrained from the usual gift of money, saying, “My dear, beware of selfishness. I’m afraid you come here not because you love me, but for what you can get” She spent much of her time in covering page after page of foreign notepaper in the spare-room where the gilded harp stood against the window. She did it in the spare-room because, if it so happened that she wanted to cry, no one could see her there. Questioned by careless persons about Hal, she would answer, “He’s gone to America. He’s doing splendidly. He’ll be back some time. No, I can’t say when.”

Her other two children, Ruddy and Madge, didn’t interest her particularly. Ruddy was redheaded and always pulling things to pieces to see how they worked. Madge was twenty, a cross girl who loved animals and pretended to hate men.

When at the end of two months the portrait came back from the gallery, a dispute arose which brought home to Teddy the way in which Vashti was regarded. She had written none of the promised letters, so Jimmie Boy didn’t know her address. He might have asked Mrs. Sheerug, but the matter was too delicate. He made up his mind to hang the picture in his house and had set about doing so, when Dearie put her foot down.

“I won’t have it.”

“But it’s my best work. What’s got into your head, Dearie, to make you so prudish? You might as well object to all Romney’s Lady Hamiltons because she——”

“Lady Hamilton’s dead. Romney wasn’t my husband, and Nelson’s mother wasn’t my friend.”

Dearie was obstinate and so, as though it were something shameful, Vashti’s portrait was carried down to the stable. There, among the dust and cobwebs, with its face to the wall like a naughty child, The Garden Enclosed was forbidden the sunlight. Only Teddy gave it a respite from its penance when, having made certain that he was unobserved, he lifted it out to gaze at it. But because she never wrote to him, he went to gaze at it less and less. Little by little she became a beautiful and doubtful memory. He learnt to smile at his wistful faery story, as only a child can smile at his former childishness.

New interests sprang up to claim his attention; the chief of these was a gift from Mr. Sheerug of a pair of pigeons. In giving them to him he explained to Teddy, “My friend, Mr. Ooze—he’s a rum customer—drops his aitches and was born in a hansom cab, but he knows more about pigeons than any man in London. Trains mine for me—goes out into the country and throws ’em up. That’s where he’s gone now. When he lost his precious Henrietta he nearly went off his head. His hobby saved him. A hobby’s a kind of life-preserver—it keeps you afloat when your ship’s gone down.”

His pigeons, more than anything else, helped him to forget Vashti. His soul went with them on their flights through wide clean spaces. The sense gradually grew up within him that she had betrayed him; this was partly due to the hostile way in which she was regarded by others. At the time when she had tampered with his power of dreaming he had been without consciousness of sex; but as sex began to stir, he felt a tardy resentment. This was brought to a climax by Mr. Yaffon.

Looking from his bedroom window one morning across the neighbors’ walled-in strips of greenness, where crocuses bubbled and young leaves shuddered, he noticed that in Mr. Yaffon’s garden the parrot had been brought out. It was a sure sign that at last the spring had come. As he watched, Mr. Yaffon pottered into the sunlight to make an inspection of his bulbs. Several times he passed near the perch; each time the parrot jigged up and down more violently, screaming, “But I love you. I love you.”

As if unaware that he was being taunted, the old gentleman took no notice. But the parrot had been accustomed to measure success by the fear he inspired. When his master tried neither to appease nor escape him he redoubled his efforts, making still more public his shameful imitation of a falsetto voice declaring love.

Mr. Yaffon rose from examining a bed of tulips; blinking his dim eyes, he stood listening, with his head against his shoulder. Deliberately, without any show of anger, he sauntered up to the parrot, caught him by the neck and wrung it. It was so coolly done that it seemed to have been long premeditated. It looked like murder. The gurgling of that thin voice, so like Mr. Yaffon’s, protesting as it sank into the silence, “But I love you. I love you,” gave Teddy the shudders.

Mr. Yaffon got a spade, dug a hole, and buried the parrot. When he had patted down the mold, he went into the house and returned in a few minutes with a basketful of letters. With the same unhurried purpose, he walked down the path towards his tool-shed, made a pile of dead branches, and set a bonfire going. A breeze which was blowing in gusts rescued one of the papers and led Mr. Yaffon a chase across lawns and flower beds. Just as he was on the point of capturing it, the wind lifted it spitefully over the wall into Mr. Gurney’s garden.

Teddy, who had watched these doings with all his curiosity aroused, lost no time in hurrying down from the bedroom. In a lilac bush he found the lost paper. It was a letter, yellowed by age, charred with fire and written in a fine Italian hand—a woman’s. It read:

My dear Penny-Whistles,

You don’t like me calling you Penny-Whistles, do you? You mustn’t be angry with me for laughing at your voice: I can laugh and still like you. But can I laugh and still marry you? That’s the question. I’m afraid my sense of humor——

Teddy stopped. He realized that he was spying. He knew at last what Mr. Yaffon had been doing: burning up his dead regrets. The letter had already slipped from his hand, when the ivy behind him commenced to rustle. The top of a ladder appeared above the wall, followed by Mr. Yaffon’s head. It sounded as though the parrot had come to life.

“Little boy,” he said, in his squeaky voice, “a very important letter has—— Ah, there it is. To be sure! Right at your feet, boy. Make yourself tall and I’ll lean down for it. There, we’ve managed it. Thank you.”

When the head and the ladder had vanished, Teddy stood in the sunshine pondering. The spring was stirring. Everything was beginning afresh. Then he, too, lit a fire. When it was crackling merrily, he ran indoors to a cupboard. Standing on a chair, he dragged from a corner a box across whose lid was scrawled the one word MARRIAGE. Tucking it under his jacket, he escaped into the garden and rammed the box well down into the embers. As he watched it perish, he whispered to himself: “Silly kid—that’s what I was.”

No doubt Mr. Yaffon was telling himself the same thing, only in different language.

Then the child, on his side of the wall, strolled away to dream of pigeons; and the older child, on the other side, stooped above his flowers.