The other was rather bewildered. Out of it all he dimly gathered that he was suggested as the present lover of Muriel, while Mersham referred to himself as the one discarded. So he smiled, reassured.
"How--badly?" he asked.
"Agreeing with you on every point?"
"No, I can't say she does that," said Vickers, smiling, and looking with little warm glances at her.
"Why, we never disagree, you know!" she remonstrated, in the same deep indulgent tone.
"I see," Mersham said languidly, and yet keeping his wits keenly to the point. "You agree with everything she says. Lord, how interesting!"
Muriel arched her eyelids with a fine flare of intelligence across at him, and laughed.
"Something like that," answered the other man, also indulgently, as became a healthy male towards one who lay limply in a chair and said clever nothings in a lazy drawl. Mersham noted the fine limbs, the solid, large thighs, and the thick wrists. He was classifying his rival among the men of handsome, healthy animalism, and good intelligence, who are children in simplicity, who can add two and two, but never xy and yx. His contours, his movements, his repose were, strictly, lovable. "But," said Mersham to himself, "if I were blind, or sorrowful, or very tired, I should not want him. He is one of the men, as George Moore says, whom his wife would hate after a few years for the very way he walked across the floor. I can imagine him with a family of children, a fine father. But unless he had a domestic wife--"
Muriel had begun to make talk to him.
"Did you cycle?" she asked, in that irritating private tone so common to lovers, a tone that makes a third person an impertinence.
"Yes--I was rather late," he replied, in the same caressing manner. The sense did not matter, the caress was everything.
"Didn't you find it very muddy?"
"Well, I did--but not any worse than yesterday."
Mersham sprawled his length in the chair, his eyelids almost shut, his fine white hands hanging over the arms of the chair like dead-white stoats from a bough. He was wondering how long Muriel would endure to indulge her sweetheart thus. Soon she began to talk second-hand to Mersham. They were speaking of Tom's landlady.
"You don't care for her, do you?" she asked, laughing insinuatingly, since the shadow of his dislike for other women heightened the radiance of his affection for her.
"Well, I can't say that I love her."
"How is it you always fall out with your landladies after six months? You must be a wretch to live with."
"Nay, I don't know that I am. But they're all alike; they're jam and cakes at first, but after a bit they're dry bread."
He spoke with solemnity, as if he uttered a universal truth. Mersham's eyelids flickered now and again. Muriel turned to him:
"Mr. Vickers doesn't like lodgings," she said.
Mersham understood that Vickers therefore wanted to marry her; he also understood that as the pretendant tired of his landladies, so his wife and he would probably weary one another. He looked this intelligence at Muriel, and drawled:
"Doesn't he? Lodgings are ideal. A good lodger can always boss the show, and have his own way. It's the time of his life."
"I don't think!" laughed Vickers.
"It's true," drawled Mersham torpidly, giving his words the effect of droll irony. "You're evidently not a good lodger. You only need to sympathise with a landlady--against her husband generally--and she'll move heaven and earth for you."
"Ah!" laughed Muriel, glancing at Mersham. "Tom doesn't believe in sympathising with women--especially married women."
"I don't!" said Tom emphatically, "--it's dangerous."
"You leave it to the husband," said Mersham.
"I do that! I don't want 'em coming to me with their troubles. I should never know the end."
"Wise of you. Poor woman! So you'll broach your barrel of sympathy for your wife, eh, and for nobody else?"
"That's it. Isn't that right?"
"Oh, quite. Your wife will be a privileged person. Sort of homebrewed beer to drink ad infinitum? Quite all right, that!"
"There's nothing better," said Tom, laughing.
"Except a change," said Mersham. "Now, I'm like a cup of tea to a woman."
Muriel laughed aloud at this preposterous cynicism, and knitted her brows to bid him cease playing ball with bombs.
"A fresh cup each time. Women never weary of tea. Muriel, I can see you having a rich time. Sort of long after-supper drowse with a good husband."
"Very delightful!" said Muriel sarcastically.
"If she's got a good husband, what more can she want?" asked Tom, keeping the tone of banter, but really serious and somewhat resentful.
"A lodger--to make things interesting."
"Why," said Muriel, intervening, "do women like you so?"
Mersham looked up at her, quietly, smiling into her eyes. She was really perplexed. She wanted to know what he put in the pan to make the balance go down so heavily on his side. He had, as usual, to answer her seriously and truthfully, so he said: "Because I can make them believe that black is green or purple--which it is, in reality." Then, smiling broadly as she wakened again with admiration for him, he added: "But you're trying to make me conceited, Miel--to stain my virgin modesty."
Muriel glanced up at him with softness and understanding, and laughed low. Tom gave a guffaw at the notion of Mersham's virgin modesty. Muriel's brow wrinkled with irritation, and she turned from her sweetheart to look in the fire.
V
Mersham, all unconsciously, had now developed the situation to the climax he desired. He was sure that Vickers would not count seriously in Muriel's movement towards himself. So he turned away, uninterested.
The talk drifted for some time, after which he suddenly bethought himself:
"I say, Mr. Vickers, will you sing for us? You do sing, don't you?"
"Well--nothing to speak of," replied the other modestly, wondering at Mersham's sudden change of interest. He looked at Muriel.
"Very well," she answered him, indulging him now like a child. "But--" she turned to Mersham--"but do you, really?"
"Yes, of course. Play some of the old songs. Do you play any better?"
She began "Honour and Arms".
"No, not that!" cried Mersham. "Something quiet--'Sois triste et sois belle'." He smiled gently at her, suggestively. "Try 'Du bist wie eine Blume' or 'Pur dicesti'."
Vickers sang well, though without much imagination. But the songs they sang were the old songs that Mersham had taught Muriel years before, and she played with one of his memories in her heart. At the end of the first song, she turned and found him looking at her, and they met again in the poetry of the past.
"Daffodils," he said softly, his eyes full of memories.
She dilated, quivered with emotion, in response. They had sat on the rim of the hill, where the wild daffodils stood up to the sky, and there he had taught her, singing line by line: "Du bist wie eine Blume." He had no voice, but a very accurate ear.
The evening wore on to ten o'clock. The lads came through the room on their way to bed. The house was asleep save the father, who sat alone in the kitchen, reading The Octopus. They went in to supper.
Mersham had roused himself and was talking well. Muriel stimulated him, always, and turned him to talk of art and philosophy--abstract things that she loved, of which only he had ever spoken to her, of which only he could speak, she believed, with such beauty. He used quaint turns of speech, contradicted himself waywardly, then said something sad and whimsical, all in a wistful, irresponsible manner so that even the men leaned indulgent and deferential to him.
"Life," he said, and he was always urging this on Muriel in one form or another, "life is beautiful, so long as it is consuming you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is glorious. It is best to roar away, like a fire with a great draught, white-hot to the last bit. It's when you burn a slow fire and save fuel that life's not worth having."
"You believe in a short
life and a merry," said the father.
"Needn't be either short or merry. Grief is part of the fire of life--and suffering--they're the root of the flame of joy, as they say. No! With life, we're like the man who was so anxious to provide for his old age that he died at thirty from inanition."
"That's what we're not likely to do," laughed Tom.
"Oh, I don't know. You live most intensely in human contact--and that's what we shrink from, poor timid creatures, from giving our souls to somebody to touch; for they, bungling fools, will generally paw it with dirty hands."
Muriel looked at him with dark eyes of grateful understanding. She herself had been much pawed, brutally, by her brothers. But, then, she had been foolish in offering herself.
"And," concluded Mersham, "you are washed with the whitest fire of life--when you take a woman you love--and understand."
Perhaps Mersham did not know what he was doing. Yet his whole talk lifted Muriel as in a net, like a sea-maiden out of the waters, and placed her in his arms, to breathe his thin, rare atmosphere. She looked at him, and was certain of his pure earnestness, and believed implicitly he could not do wrong.
Vickers believed otherwise. He would have expressed his opinion, whatever it might be, in an: "Oh, ay, he's got plenty to say, and he'll keep on saying it--but, hang it all . . .!"
For Vickers was an old-fashioned, inarticulate lover; such as has been found the brief joy and the unending disappointment of a woman's life. At last he found he must go, as Mersham would not precede him. Muriel did not kiss him good-bye, nor did she offer to go out with him to his bicycle. He was angry at this, but more angry with the girl than with the man. He felt that she was fooling about, "showing off" before the stranger. Mersham was a stranger to him, and so, in his idea, to Muriel. Both young men went out of the house together, and down the rough brick track to the barn. Mersham made whimsical little jokes: "I wish my feet weren't so fastidious. They dither when they go in a soft spot like a girl who's touched a toad. Hark at that poor old wretch--she sounds as if she'd got whooping-cough."
"A cow is not coughing when she makes that row," said Vickers.
"Pretending, is she?--to get some Owbridge's? Don't blame her. I guess she's got chilblains, at any rate. Do cows have chilblains, poor devils?"
Vickers laughed and felt he must take this man into his protection. "Mind," he said, as they entered the barn, which was very dark. "Mind your forehead against this beam." He put one hand on the beam, and stretched out the other to feel for Mersham. "Thanks," said the latter gratefully. He knew the position of the beam to an inch, however dark the barn, but he allowed Vickers to guide him past it. He rather enjoyed being taken into Tom's protection.
Vickers carefully struck a match, bowing over the ruddy core of light and illuminating himself like some beautiful lantern in the midst of the high darkness of the barn. For some moments he bent over his bicycle-lamp, trimming and adjusting the wick, and his face, gathering all the light on its ruddy beauty, seemed luminous and wonderful. Mersham could see the down on his cheeks above the razor-line, and the full lips in shadow beneath the moustache, and the brush of the eyebrows between the light.
"After all," said Mersham, "he's very beautiful; she's a fool to give him up."
Tom shut the lamp with a snap, and carefully crushed the match under his foot. Then he took the pump from the bicycle, and crouched on his heels in the dimness, inflating the tyre. The swift, unerring, untiring stroke of the pump, the light balance and the fine elastic adjustment of the man's body to his movements pleased Mersham.
"She could have," he was saying to himself, "some glorious hours with this man--yet she'd rather have me, because I can make her sad and set her wondering."
But to the man he was saying:
"You know, love isn't the twin-soul business. With you, for instance, women are like apples on a tree. You can have one that you can reach. Those that look best are overhead, but it's no good bothering with them. So you stretch up, perhaps you pull down a bough and just get your fingers round a good one. Then it swings back and you feel wild and you say your heart's broken. But there are plenty of apples as good for you no higher than your chest."
Vickers smiled, and thought there was something in it--generally; but for himself, it was nothing.
They went out of the barn to the yard gate. He watched the young man swing over his saddle and vanish, calling "Good-night."
"Sic transit," he murmured--meaning Tom Vickers, and beautiful lustihood that is unconscious like a blossom.
Mersham went slowly in the house. Muriel was clearing away the supper things, and laying the table again for the men's breakfasts. But she was waiting for him as clearly as if she had stood watching in the doorway. She looked up at him, and instinctively he lifted his face towards her as if to kiss her. They smiled, and she went on with her work.
The father rose, stretching his burly form, and yawning. Mersham put on his overcoat.
"You will come a little way with me?" he said. She answered him with her eyes. The father stood, large and silent, on the hearth-rug. His sleepy, mazed disapproval had no more effect than a little breeze which might blow against them. She smiled brightly at her lover, like a child, as she pinned on her hat.
It was very dark outside in the starlight. He groaned heavily, and swore with extravagance as he went ankle-deep in mud.
"See, you should follow me. Come here," she commanded, delighted to have him in charge.
"Give me your hand," he said, and they went hand-in-hand over the rough places. The fields were open, and the night went up to the magnificent stars. The wood was very dark, and wet; they leaned forward and stepped stealthily, and gripped each other's hands fast with a delightful sense of adventure. When they stood and looked up a moment, they did not know how the stars were scattered among the tree-tops till he found the three jewels of Orion right in front.
There was a strangeness everywhere, as if all things had ventured out alive to play in the night, as they do in fairy-tales; the trees, the many stars, the dark spaces, and the mysterious waters below uniting in some magnificent game.
They emerged from the wood on to the bare hillside. She came down from the wood-fence into his arms, and he kissed her, and they laughed low together. Then they went on across the wild meadows where there was no path.
"Why don't you like him?" he asked playfully.
"Need you ask?" she said simply.
"Yes. Because he's heaps nicer than I am."
She laughed a full laugh of amusement.
"He is! Look! He's like summer, brown and full of warmth. Think how splendid and fierce he'd be--"
"Why do you talk about him?" she said.
"Because I want you to know what you're losing--and you won't till you see him in my terms. He is very desirable--I should choose him in preference to me--for myself."
"Should you?" she laughed. "But," she added with soft certainty, "you don't understand."
"No--I don't. I suppose it's love; your sort, which is beyond me. I shall never be blindly in love, shall I?"
"I begin to think you never will," she answered, not very sadly. "You won't be blindly anything."
"The voice of love!" he laughed; and then: "No, if you pull your flowers to pieces, and find how they pollinate, and where are the ovaries, you don't go in blind ecstasies over to them. But they mean more to you; they are intimate, like friends of your heart, not like wonderful, dazing fairies."
"Ay!" she assented, musing over it with the gladness of understanding him. "And then?"
Softly, almost without words, she urged him to the point.
"Well," he said, "you think I'm a wonderful, magical person, don't you?--and I'm not--I'm not as good, in the long run, as your Tom, who thinks you are a wonderful, magical person."
She laughed and clung to him as they walked. He continued, very carefully and gently: "Now, I don't imagine for a moment that you are princessy or angelic or wonderful. You often make me thundering mad because yo
u're an ass . . ."
She laughed low with shame and humiliation.
"Nevertheless--I come from the south to you--because--well, with you I can be just as I feel, conceited or idiotic, without being afraid to be myself . . ." He broke off suddenly. "I don't think I've tried to make myself out to you--any bigger or better than I am?" he asked her wistfully.
"No," she answered, in beautiful, deep assurance. "No! That's where it is. You have always been so honest. You are more honest than anybody ever--" She did not finish, being deeply moved. He was silent for some time, then he continued, as if he must see the question to the end with her:
"But, you know--I do like you not to wear corsets. I like to see you move inside your dress."
She laughed, half shame, half pleasure.
"I wondered if you'd notice," she said.
"I did--directly." There was a space of silence, after which he resumed: "You see--we would marry tomorrow--but I can't keep myself. I am in debt--"
She came close to him, and took his arm.
"--And what's the good of letting the years go, and the beauty of one's youth--?"
"No," she admitted, very slowly and softly, shaking her head.
"So--well!--you understand, don't you? And if you're willing--you'll come to me, won't you?--just naturally, as you used to come and go to church with me?--and it won't be--it won't be me coaxing you--reluctant? Will it?"
They had halted in front of a stile which they would have to climb. She turned to him in silence, and put up her face to him. He took her in his arms, and kissed her, and felt the night mist with which his moustache was drenched, and he bent his head and rubbed his face on her shoulder, and then pressed his lips on her neck. For a while they stood in silence, clasped together. Then he heard her voice, muffled in his shoulder, saying:
"But--but, you know--it's much harder for the woman--it means something so different for a woman."
"One can be wise," he answered, slowly and gently. "One need not blunder into calamities."
She was silent for a time. Then she spoke again.