Warwick Deeping

“ The garden had been turfed and planted, and beyond the young yew hedge the masses of sandstone were splashed with diverse colours.
“It’s new!”
“Quite! I built it in the winter.”
She stood at gaze, her lips quivering.
“How does it please you?”
“Oh, I like it! It is just the cottage one dreams about when one is in a London suburb. And that rock garden! The colours are as soft and as gorgeous as the colours on a Persian dish.”
Canterton had the key with him. They walked up the path that was paved with irregular blocks of stone. Eve’s eyes saw the date on the porch. ”

“ It was the night of her last day at Latimer. She would be sorry to leave it, and yet, to-morrow she would be at Fernhill. Lynette’s glowing head flashed into her thoughts, and a rush of tenderness overtook her. If life could be like the joyous eyes of the child, if passion went no further, if all problems remained at the age of seven!
How would Canterton like the pictures she had painted? A thrill went through her, and at the same time she felt that the garden was growing cold. A sense of unrest ruffled the calm of the moonlit night. ”

“ Eve had been suffering, suffering for Canterton, Lynette and herself. She saw life so clearly now—the lights and shadows, the sunlit spaces, the sinister glooms, the sharp, conventional horizons. Canterton did not know how much of the woman there was in her, how very primitive and strong were the emotions that had risen to the surface of her consciousness. The compact would be too perilous. She knew in her heart of hearts that the youth in her desired more than a spiritual dream, and she was trying to harden herself, to build up barriers, to smother this splendid thing, this fire of the gods. ”

“ Try as she would, Eve felt less impersonal here than in the full sunlight of the upper garden. That other spirit that had sent her to Latimer seemed to follow her up and down the moss-grown stairways, to walk with her through the shadows under the trees. She was more conscious of Canterton than ever. He was the great, grave lord of the place, watching her work with steady eyes, compelling her to paint with a touch that was not all her own.
Sometimes the head gardener, who had tea made for her in his cottage, came and watched her painting and angled for a gossip. ”

“ Was one to tell Nature that she must stand aside, and order youth not to look into the eyes of youth? It might serve for the few. They were like children making castles and dykes and rivulets on the sands, within the reach of the sea. Eve imagined that Nature must be amused, but that she would wipe out these eccentricities so soon as they began to bore her. She felt herself in the midst of elemental things; whereas Joan Gaunt had studied botany in a museum.
That afternoon they marched on to Pulborough, and, entering an inn, announced to the landlord that they intended staying for the night. ”

“ To him this enchanted island had risen out of the sea, and floated, dew-drenched, in the pure light of the dawn. He saw no reason why he should bid so beautiful a thing sink back again and be lost under the waters. He had no desecrating impulses. Why should not two people look together at life with eyes that smiled and understood? They were harming no one, and they were transfiguring each other.
Canterton and his wife were dining alone, and for once he deliberately chose to talk to her of his work, and of his future plans. ”

“ The cedar of Lebanon and the great sequoia were black and mysterious and very still, the lawns a soft silver dusted ever so lightly with dew. Not a leaf was stirring, and the pale night stood like a sweet sad ghost looking down on the world with eyes of wisdom and of wonder.
Canterton strolled across the grass, and down through the Japanese garden where lilies floated in the still pools that reflected the moonlight. All the shadows were very sharp and black, the cypresses standing like obelisks, the yew hedge of the rosery a wall of obsidian. ”

“ When Eve had left for Latimer, the routine of Canterton’s working day ran with the same purposefulness, like a familiar path in a garden, yet though the scene was the same, the atmosphere seemed different, even as a well-known landscape may be glorified and rendered more mysterious by the light poured out from under the edge of a thunder cloud. A peculiar tenderness, a glamour of sensitiveness, covered everything. He was more alive to the beauty of the world about him, and the blue hills seemed to hang like an enchantment on the edge of the horizon. ”

“ He would be down in the rosery when the dew glistened on the petals, nor would he leave it till the yellow rays of the horizontal sun poured over the yew hedge, and made every flower glow with a miraculous brilliance.
Canterton’s catalogues were to be found in most well-to-do country houses, and his art had disclosed itself in many opulent gardens. A rich amateur in the beginning, he had chosen to assume the broader professional career, perhaps because his big, quiet, and creative brain loved the sending forth of rich merchandise, and the creation of beauty. ”

“ Eve lay and looked at the sky, and at the dim tops of the trees sliding by, trailing their branches across the stars. She could see the outline of Canterton’s head and shoulders in front of her, but never once did she see his profile, for the car was travelling fast and he kept his eyes on the winding road that was lit brilliantly by the electric headlights. They swept through Basingford like a charge of horse. Eve saw the spire of the church walk by, a line of dark roofs undulating beneath it. ”

“ Colour came into the landscape, the bronze and yellow of the budding oaks, the delicate green of young beech leaves, the sables of yews and firs, the blue of the sky, the green of the fields. It was all wet, fragrant, glittering, like an elf world lifted suddenly out of the waters of an enchanted sea.
Someone sneezed. Eve turned sharply, and found Joan Gaunt was awake, and sitting up. Wisps of hay had got tangled in her hair, her blouse looked like an impressionist sunset, and one side of her face was red and mottled from lying on the canvas knapsack. ”

“ Eve felt herself moving suddenly to a fuller consciousness of modern life. Her brain seemed to pulsate with it, to glow with a new understanding.
Conquest! She could understand the feverish and half savage passion for conquest that seized many men. To climb above the crowd, to get money, to assert one’s individuality, brutally perhaps, but at all costs and against all comers. People got trampled on, trodden under. It was a stampede, and the stronger and the more selfish animals survived. Yet society had some sort of legal conscience. ”

“ The flat in Purbeck Street offered her other contrasts after the rain and the wet streets and the spattering mud from the wheels of motor-buses. It was eccentric but unwholesome, luxurious, and effeminate, with suggestions of an extreme culture and an individual idea of beauty. Coming straight from a cheap lunch eaten off a marble-topped table to this muffled, scented room, was like passing from a colliery slum to a warm and scented bath in a Roman villa. Eve noticed that her shoes always seemed muddy, and she laughed over it, and apologised. ”

“ It was too pathetic, her confessing that she could not trust herself. He was strong enough to be trusted for them both. The night had made everything more sacred. He would refuse to let her sacrifice their comradeship.
Canterton, too, saw the dawn come up, and the sun appear as a great splash of gold. He was standing on the south-east edge of the Wilderness, with the gloom of the larch wood behind him, and as the sun rose, its level rays struck on the stream in the valley, and the deep pool among the willows where the water lay as black and as still as glass.
A clear head and a clean body. ”

“ The talk on the lawn seemed so much gabble, and Eve wandered out, and round behind the great sequoia where she could listen to the music and be at peace. She wondered what the violinists thought of the crowd over yonder, these men who could make the strings utter wild, desirous cries. What a stiff, preposterous, and complacent crowd it seemed. Incongruous fancies piqued her sense of humour. If Pan could come leaping out of the woods, if ironical satyrs could seize and catch up those twentieth century women, and wild-eyed girls pluck the stiff men by the chins. ”

“ Her intuition recognised the admirable husband in him. This middle-class man had a rich vein of sentiment running through his nature, and he was not too clever or too critical to tire.
Dusk began to fall, and the fire was burning low. It was the hour for memories, and into the dusk of that little suburban room, glided a subtle sense of other presences, and she found herself thinking of Canterton and the child. If she were to have a child like Lynette. But it could not be Lynette—it could not be his child, the child of that one man. She sat up, shocked and challenged. ”

“ Her sun-hunger and her country-hunger had become so importunate that she had spent one Sunday in the country, taking train to Guildford, and walking up to the Hog’s Back. The Surrey hills had seemed dim and sad, and away yonder she had imagined Fernhill, with its fir woods and its great pleasaunce. She had felt rather like an outcast, and the day had provoked such sadness in her that she went no more into the country.
The extraordinary loneliness of such a life as hers filled her at times with cynical amusement. ”

“ But most people don’t ask Nature any questions. No wonder she despises them, the dullards, just as though they hadn’t an eye to see that she’s a good-looking woman!”
He erected her easel for her in the rosery, tilted his Panama hat, and marched off.
Eve sought out Guinevere and sat herself down before the prospective saint, only to find that she was in no mood for painting. Her glance flitted from rose to rose, and the music of their names ran like a poem through her head. Moreover, the June air was full of their perfume, a heavy, somnolent perfume that lures one into dreaming. ”

“ One must triumph over the senses. One must refuse to treat with men on the old physical understanding. They are the cries of extremists, and yet of an extremity that hopes to triumph by urging a passionate and protesting celibacy. A million odd women in the United Kingdom, over-setting the sex balance, and clamouring, many of them, that they will not be weighed in the old sexual scale.
Eve caught the spirit of rebellion, divorced as she was from any comradeship with men. It is so much easier to quarrel with the hypothetical antagonists whom one meets in the world of one’s own brain. ”

“ Eve, this sort of problem has always been so smirched and distorted that most people seem unable to see its outlines cleanly. I am going to make her see it cleanly. It may sound strange to you, but I believe she is one of the few women capable of taking a logical and restrained view of it. The thing is not to hurt a woman’s self love publicly. Often she will condone other sorts of relationship if you save her that. In our case there is going to be no sexual, backstairs business. You are too sacred to me. You are part of the mystery of life, of the beauty and strangeness and wonder of things. ”

“ She had accepted everything, from her bottle onwards, with absolute passivity. She had been a passive child, a passive wife, a passive widow. Life had had no gradients, no gulfs and pinnacles. There were no injustices and no sorrows, save, of course, those arranged by an all-wise Providence. No ideals, save those in the Book of Common Prayer; no passionate strivings; no divine discontents. She just cooed, brought out a soft platitude, and went on with her knitting.
Eve entered the house to put her things away, and to tell Nellie, the infant maid, to take tea out into the garden. ”

“ She suffered on account of the stillness and this atmosphere of isolation, and yet the nearness of some very human incident was as a stabbing pain compared to a dull ache. Leaning there over the window-sill, with the moonlight glimmering on the lozenged glass in the lattices, she knew that she was looking towards Fernhill and all that it represented. Lynette, the child; the great gardens, that wide, free spacious, colour-filled life; Canterton’s comradeship, and even more than that. The whole future quivered on one sensitive thread. ”

“ There were roses on the table, and her sensitive mouth smiled at them expressively. In one corner stood her easel, an old mahogany bureau held her painting kit, palettes, brushes, tubes, boards, canvases. It was delightful to think that she could put on her sun-hat, wander out into the great gardens, and express herself in all the colours that she loved. Lynette’s glowing head would come dancing to her in the sunlight. The Wilderness was still a fairy world, where mortals dreamed dreams. ”

“ We are both workers, aren’t we?”
Some days Eve got panic. A great cloud shadow seemed to be drifting towards her, and already she felt it chilling her, and shutting out the sunlight. She asked herself what was going to happen if she spent all her capital before she found a means of earning money regularly, and she lay awake at night, plotting all manner of schemes. Her sense of loneliness and isolation became a black cupboard into which Fate shut her ever and again as a harsh nurse shuts up a disobedient child. ”