Elizabeth Von Arnim

“ Jocelyn stood a moment looking at the scene, smiling his rare smile because he was so content. How unlike the places he had suffered in since he last was here. How unlike the Pinner lair at the back of the shop, where he had burnt in torment, and the hideous dwelling of the Cupps, where he had been insulted, and the dingy expensiveness of the Thistle and Goat, and the other three or four cynically ugly and uncomfortable rooms through which he had trailed his passion. Impossible not to smile, not to laugh almost, with gladness at getting home again. ”

“ Sally had no cravings that he could discover; she was mere lovely acquiescence, content—and with what exquisiteness—to be.
Still, in this world one couldn’t just sit silent, and serene, and wonderful; and the minute circumstances obliged her to say something her discrepances worried him again. It really was surprising: pure perfection outside, and inside—he hated to think it, but more and more feared he recognised—pure Pinner. He must take her in hand. He must teach her, train her in the manners expected in her new sphere of life. ”

“ She could, she was sure, have managed Jocelyn, for had she not managed him all his life? And after marriage she could, she had no doubt, have managed Edgar too; but what hard work it would have been, what a ceaseless weeding, to take only one aspect of him, of his language!
The enjoyment—it was the only word for it—with which he had kissed Salvatia had spared her all these pains. Certainly it was beneath her dignity, beyond her patience, altogether outside any possible compensation by wealth, to marry and manage a man who enjoyed kissing other women. ”

“ Luke had shown herself in her true colours—a jolly good thing he had found her out before and not after marriage, thought Mr. Thorpe, who yet was enraged that he had,—as he wandered among his conifers after luncheon, nursing his grievances and glancing every now and then at the little house across the meadow, so insignificant and cheap and nevertheless able to play such a part in his life, he saw young beauty at last come out alone, and go round to the back of the tool-shed, and behave as has been indicated. ”

“ Gentlemen were difficult enough, but they did every now and then cast themselves at one’s feet and make one feel one could do what one liked for a bit, but a lady wouldn’t; a lady would always stay a lady.
The word struck cold on Sally’s heart. What did one do with a lady? And a lady, too, who seemed hardly older than her son, and as wide-awake and sharp as you please, Sally was sure. She had been imagining Jocelyn’s mother old and stout and whitehaired, and perhaps not able to see or hear very well, and therefore comfortingly slow to mark what was done amiss. ”

“ Miles from a railway, miles from the nearest town, only to be reached, unless one went to it by sea, along a most difficult and tortuous road that ended by throwing one down a precipice on to a ferry-boat which took one across the Fal and shot one out at the foot of another precipice,—or so the two hills seemed to Jocelyn and his mother, who had to push their bicycles up them—he considered it the place of places to hide his honeymoon in; to hide, that is, the precious and conspicuous Sally. ”

“ Holidays end, but life goes on; honeymoons finish, but wives don’t. Here he was with a wife, and upon his soul, thought Jocelyn, precious little else,—no career, no plans, no lodgings.
What a position. The lodgings, of course, were a small thing, but how being turned out of them rankled! His life had been so dignified. He and his mother had never once come across a member of the lower classes who was rude. At South Winch all was order, decency, esteem in their own set and respectfulness from everybody else. At Ananias what order, what decency, what esteem, what respectfulness. ”

“ Luke. Wasn’t she able, just as she was, to be a good wife to Usband, and a good mother later on to the little babies? What more could a girl do than be ready to work her fingers to the bone for him? And she could cook so nicely, give her a chance; and she could mend as well as any one; and as for keeping the house clean, hadn’t her mother taught her never to dream of sitting down and taking up her sewing while there was so much as a single speck of dirt about?
With growing horror, and steadily increasing despair, Sally listened to the talk at meals. ”

“ She also knew Sally was sitting on the edge of her chair, with her legs drawn up under her just as if she were trying to keep them out of something not quite nice; but no need to disturb a position which somehow seemed sheer grace. What a pity, what a pity, flashed across Mrs. Luke’s mind, that the child hadn’t happened to be born dumb! Was that wicked? No, she didn’t think so. She herself could imagine being very happy dumb, with plenty of books, and not having to talk to bores.
‘Wouldn’t you like to take your hat off, Salvatia?’ she asked, drawing Jocelyn’s chair closer to the little table. ”

“ What would her father have said if he had seen her in the night in Laura’s bedroom, among all that lot of silver bottles and brushes{307} and laces and silks, and herself in a thin silk nightgown the colour of skin, making her look stark naked? What would he have said if he had seen her having her breakfast up there as though she were ill,—and such a breakfast, too! Fleshpots, he’d have said; fleshpots. And he would have said, Sally, strong if inaccurate in her Bible, was sure, that she had sold her husband for a mess of fleshpots. ”

“ She liked the look of the young man who so unexpectedly was to become her husband, and was pleased that he should be a gentleman. She knew nothing about gentlemen, but she liked the sort of sound their voices made when they talked. At Islington she had preferred the visits to the shop of the clergy for just that reason—the sound their voices made when they talked. She would have been perfectly happy during the fortnight between her first setting eyes on Jocelyn and her marriage to him, if there had been a few more smiles about. ”

“ He grew to hate the gentry. His face took on a twist of fear that became permanent. The other grocers were furious with him, accusing him among themselves of using his daughter as a decoy; and unable to bear this, for it of course got round to him, and worn out by the constant dread lest worse were yet to come, and some fine day a young whipper-snapper of a lord should be going for a walk in Islington and chance to stroll into his shop and see Sally, and then good-bye to virtue—for was any girl good enough and modest enough to stand out against the onslaughts of a lord? ”

“ Laura was continually making him sit out of draughts, just as if he were a damned invalid; arms were offered him if he wanted to walk a few steps—he couldn’t appear in the House without some officious member of it, usually that ass Chepstow, who was eighty if a day himself, ambling across to help; and every time he had a birthday the newspapers tumbled over each other with their offensively astonished congratulations. Couldn’t a man be over ninety without having it perpetually rubbed into him that he was old?
What he loved was his brood of young ones—Laura, Terry, and Charles ”

“ Good God,’ thought Jocelyn, driving himself back at a furious pace to Cambridge and throwing back his head in a fit of wild, nervous laughter. His father-in-law—that little man with trousers so much too long for him that they corkscrewed round his legs. His father-in-law....
But what was that in the way of grotesqueness compared to his being her father? There, indeed, was mystery: that loveliness beyond dreams should have sprung from Mr. Pinner’s little loins. ”

“ Charles threw away his cigarette, and with his hands in his pockets took a few quick strides about the little garden, excited, stirred out of his customary calm. Why, even if the old man did as little for her as interrupt his rest-cure for a few hours and take her into Cambridge himself, just for the girl to be seen with him, just for her to appear under his wing, would knock every obstacle out of her path, except that one obstacle of young Luke’s poverty. His father knew the Master of Ananias; his father knew everybody. ”

“ Thorpe knew, comes after marriage, not before.
‘Mark my words,’ he went on, ‘that clever son of yours won’t stop being clever because he’s married. Who’s going to take his brains from him? Not a loving wife, you bet. Why, a good wife, a loving wife, doubles and trebles a man’s output.’
‘How kind you are,’ murmured Mrs. Luke, who did find this comforting. ‘But Jocelyn—my boy—to keep it from me——’
‘Bound to keep something from his mother,’ said Mr. Thorpe. ‘Mothers are all right, and a man has to have them to start with, but the day comes when a back seat is what they’ve got to climb into. ”

“ She had learned to say nothing now but yes, no, thank you, and please, and either kept her eyes on her plate or, through her eyelashes, watched with pangs of envy the happy Hammond’s free entrances and departures. She herself never moved without Mrs. Luke’s arm through hers or round her shoulders,—‘We are quite inseparable,’ Mrs. Luke would say, smiling at Jocelyn, when the meals were over and the time had arrived for going somewhere else, as she either encircled Sally’s shrinking shoulder or put her hand through her limp arm. ”

“ And she added doubtfully, ‘I ain’t ’alf bare.’
Laura, however, was just as bare, and there was ever so much more of her to be bare with, so she supposed it must be all right; but she did wonder what her father would say if he could see her now—‘Oh, my goodness,’ shuddered Sally, her mind slinking away from the thought.
They had dressed her in a cloud of blue tulle over a cloud of green tulle. Her loveliness was startling. It was like nothing either Laura or the lady from Paquille’s had ever seen, and they had seen most of what there was of existing beauty. ”

“ There seemed to him to be no steady fellows in the crowd in his shop, except the ones who were already married, and they couldn’t really be steady or they wouldn’t be there. How could a married man be called steady who eagerly waited for Sally to sell him groceries he would only afterwards have to conceal from his wife? While as for the rest, they were a weedy lot of overworked and underpaid young clerks who couldn’t possibly afford to marry. Sally smiled at them all. She had none of the bridling, of the keep-off-the-grass-if-you-please, of her mother. ”

“ No, she couldn’t stand pity; and pity because of Jocelyn, of all people! Of him who had been her second, more glorious self, of him who was to have been all she would have been if she could have been. South Winch couldn’t pity her if she married its richest man. There was something about wealth, when present in sufficient quantities, that silenced even culture;{119} and everybody knew about Mr. Thorpe’s house, and grounds, and cars, and conservatories. She therefore dropped like a fruit that no longer has enough life to hold on, into the outstretched hands of Mr. Thorpe. ”

“ After that, hardly an afternoon went by without young men hurrying through Woodles. Sometimes they were on motor-bicycles, sometimes they were on horses, sometimes they were in cars, but always they hurried. Where did they all come from? Mr. Pinner was astonished, and wondered uneasily whether Sally were not somehow at the bottom of it. But she couldn’t have been, for they never so much as glanced at the shop window, from behind whose jars of bulls’-eyes and mounds of toffee he and Sally secretly observed them. ”

“ Luke would wish her to travel first class, and it gave him a gloomy pride to buy it—that she was to take a taxi from Liverpool Street, and go in it all the way to South Winch.
He then, with the ticket, gave her a pound note.
‘It can’t be more than ten miles out,’ said Mr. Pinner, who had never in his life before squandered money, let alone a pound, on a taxi, but who tried to console himself with the thought that it would have been well spent if only it got Sally safe back to where she belonged; and though he was depressed he was also proud, for it, too, gave him a kind of sombre satisfaction. ”

“ And Jocelyn’s thoughts grew if possible blacker. This was to be his life’s companion—his life’s, mind you, he said to himself. Alone and unaided, he was to live out the years with her. A child; and presently not a child. A beauty; and presently not a beauty. But always to the end, now that his mother had deserted him, unadulterated Pinner.
‘There’s an h in heaves,’ he said, glowering at her, his gloom really inspissate. ‘I don’t know what the beastly things are, but I’m sure they’ve got an h in them.’
‘Sorry,’ breathed Sally humbly, casting down her eyes before his look. ”

“ On this one point she was like a rock; a polite rock, against which persuasions, though received sweetly and amiably, should beat in vain. So the Duke had the little house fitted up with every known labour-saving appliance, none of which Sally would use because of having been brought up to believe only in elbow-grease, and two bathrooms, one for her and one for Jocelyn; and he attached such importance to these bathrooms, and he insisted so obstinately on their being built, that Sally could only conclude the picks must need a terrible lot of washing. ”

“ Quite close to Cambridge, within easy reach of young Luke, and in it, all-powerful even now in spite of his age, certainly all-powerful when it came to putting the fear of God into an undergraduate, or whatever he was, his ancient but still inflammable father. Naturally at ninety-three the old man consisted principally of embers; but these embers could still be fanned into a partial glow by the sight of a good horse or a beautiful woman, and Charles would only need to show Sally to him to have the old man on her side. ”

“ Thorpe was a man of action. Not his to wring his hands and wait and hope; not his to waste time, either, confessing that he had behaved abominably, and begging Margery’s pardon. He did both, but quickly, economising words, and within five minutes was round at Almond Tree Cottage, and within ten minutes his car was round there, and within an hour he and Jocelyn were at Scotland Yard—Jocelyn, who also had no time for anger with Mr. Thorpe, who had no time for anything but searching for and rescuing Sally. ”