Joanna Godden Part 44

However, when daylight came, and suns.h.i.+ne, and her breakfast-in-bed, with its s.h.i.+ning dish covers and appetizing smells, she felt quite different, and ate her bacon and eggs with appet.i.te and a thrilling sense of her own importance. The waitress, for want of a definite order, had brought her coffee, which somehow made her feel very rakish and continental, though she would have much preferred tea. When she had finished breakfast, she wrote a letter to Ellen describing all her experiences with as much fullness as was compatible with that strange inhibition which always accompanied her taking up of the pen, and distinguished her letters so remarkably from the feats of her tongue.

When she had written the letter and posted it adventurously in the hotel letter-box, she went out on the parade to listen to the band. It was Easter week, and there were still a great many people about, couples sitting round the bandstand, more deeply absorbed in each other than in the music. Joanna paid twopence for a chair, having ascertained that there were no more expensive seats to be had, and at the end of an hour felt consumedly bored. The music was bright and popular enough, but she was not musical, and soon grew tired of listening to "tunes." Also something about the music made her feel uncomfortable--the same dim yet searching discomfort she had when she looked at the young couples in the sun ... the young girls in their shady hats and silk stockings, the young men in their flannels and blazers. They were all part of a whole to which she did not belong, of which the music was part ... and the sea, and the sun, and the other visitors at the hotel, the very servants of the hotel ... and Ellen at Ansdore ... all day she was adding fresh parts to that great whole, outside which she seemed to exist alone.

"I'm getting fanciful," she thought--"this place hasn't done me a bit of good yet."

She devoted herself to the difficult art of filling up her day.

Accustomed to having every moment occupied, she could hardly cope with the vast stretch of idle hours. After a day or two she found herself obliged to give up having breakfast in bed. From force of habit she woke every morning at five, and could not endure the long wait in her room.

If the weather was fine she usually went for a walk on the sea-front, from Rock-a-Nore to the Monypenny statue. Nothing would induce her to bathe, though even at that hour and season the water was full of young men and women rather shockingly enjoying themselves and each other.

After breakfast she wrote laborious letters to Broadhurst, Wilson, Mrs.

Tolhurst, Ellen, Mene Tekel--she had never written so many letters in her life, but every day she thought of some fresh thing that would be left undone if she did not write about it. When she had finished her letters she went out and listened respectfully to the band. The afternoon was generally given up to some excursion or charabanc drive, and the day finished rather somnolently in the lounge.

She did not get far beyond civilities with the other visitors in the hotel. More than one had spoken to her, attracted by this handsome, striking, and probably wealthy woman--through Ellen's influence her appearance had been purged of what was merely startling--but they either took fright at her broad marsh accent ... "she must be somebody's cook come into a fortune" ... or the more fundamental incompatibility of outlook kept them at a distance. Joanna was not the person for the niceties of hotel acquaintances.h.i.+p--she was too garrulous, too overwhelming. Also she failed to realize that all states of society are not equally interested in the price of wheat, that certain details of sheep-breeding seem indelicate to the uninitiated, and that strangers do not really care how many acres one possesses, how many servants one keeps, or the exact price one paid for one's latest churn.

--12

The last few days of her stay brought her a rather ignominious sense of relief. In her secret heart she was eagerly waiting till she should be back at Ansdore, eating her dinner with Ellen, sleeping in her own bed, ordering about her own servants. She would enjoy, too, telling everyone about her exploits, all the excursions she had made, the food she had eaten, the fine folk she had spoken to in the lounge, the handsome amount she had spent in tips.... They would all ask her whether she felt much the better for her holiday, and she was uncertain what to answer them. A complete recovery might make her less interesting; on the other hand she did not want anyone to think she had come back half-cured because of the expense ... that was just the sort of thing Mrs.

Southland would imagine, and Southland would take it straight to the Woolpack.

Her own feelings gave her no clue. Her appet.i.te had much improved, but, against that, she was sleeping badly--which she partly attributed to the "noise"--and was growing, probably on account of her idle days, increasingly restless. She found it difficult to settle down to anything--the hours in the hotel lounge after dinner, which used to be comfortably drowsy after the day of sea-air, were now a long stretch of boredom, from which she went up early to bed, knowing that she would not sleep. The band played on the parade every evening, but Joanna considered that it would be unseemly for her to go out alone in Marlingate after dark. Though she would have walked out on the Brodnyx road at midnight without putting the slightest strain on either her courage or her decorum, the well-lighted streets of a town became to her vaguely dangerous and indecorous after dusk had fallen. "It wouldn't be seemly," she repeated to herself in the loneliness and dullness of the lounge, and went desperately to bed.

However, three nights before going away she could bear it no longer.

After a warm April day, a purple starry evening hung over the sea. The water itself was a deep, glaucous gray, holding strange lights besides the golden path of the moon. Beachy Head stood out purple against the fading amber of the west, in the east All Holland Hill was hung with a crown of stars, which seemed to be mirrored in the lights of the fisher-boats off Rock-a-Nore.... It was impossible to think of such an evening spent in the stuffy, lonely lounge, with heavy curtains shutting out the opal and the amethyst of night.

She had not had time to dress for dinner, having come home late from a charabanc drive to Pevensey, and the circ.u.mstance seemed slightly to mitigate the daring of a stroll. In her neat tailor-made coat and skirt and black hat with the c.o.c.k's plumes she might perhaps walk to and fro just a little in front of the hotel. She went out, and was a trifle rea.s.sured by the light which still lingered in the sky and on the sea--it was not quite dark yet, and there was a respectable-looking lot of people about--she recognized a lady staying in the hotel, and would have joined her, but the lady, whom she had already scared, saw her coming, and dodged off in the direction of the Marine Gardens.

The band began to play a waltz from "A Persian Princess." Joanna felt once more in her blood the strange stir of the music she could not understand. It would be nice to dance ... queer that she had so seldom danced as a girl. She stood for a moment irresolute, then walked towards the bandstand, and sat down on one of the corporation benches, outside the crowd that had grouped round the musicians. It was very much the same sort of crowd as in the morning, but it was less covert in its ways--hands were linked, even here and there waists entwined.... Such details began to stand out of the dim, purplescent ma.s.s of the twilight people ... night was the time for love. They had come out into the darkness to make love to each other--their voices sounded different from in the day, more dragging, more tender....

She began to think of the times, which now seemed so far off, when she herself had sought a man's kisses. Half-ashamed she went back to stolen meetings--in a barn--behind a rick--in the elvish shadow of some skew-blown thorn. Just kisses ... not love, for love had been dead in her then.... But those kisses had been sweet, she remembered them, she could feel them on her lips ... oh, she could love again now--she could give and take kisses now.

The band was playing a rich, thick, drawling melody, full of the purple night and the warm air. The lovers round the bandstand seemed to sway to it and draw closer to each other. Joanna looked down into her lap, for her eyes were full of tears. She regretted pa.s.sionately the days that were past--those light loves which had not been able to live in the shadow of Martin's memory. Oh, why had he taught her to love and then made it impossible for her ever to love again?--till it was too late, till she was a middle-aged woman to whom no man came.... It was not likely that anyone would want her now--her light lovers all lived now in substantial wedlock, the well-to-do farmers who had proposed to her in the respectful way of business had now taken to themselves other wives.

The young men looked to women of their own age, to Ellen's pale, soft beauty ... once again she envied Ellen her loves, good and evil, and shame was in her heart. Then she lifted her eyes and saw Martin coming towards her.

--13

In the darkness, lit only now by the lamp-dazzled moonlight, and in the mist of her own tears, the man before her was exactly like Martin, in build, gait, colouring and expression. Her moment of recognition stood out clear, quite distinct from the realization of impossibility which afterwards engulfed it. She unclasped her hands and half rose in her seat--the next minute she fell back. "Reckon I'm crazy," she thought to herself.

Then she was startled to realize that the man had sat down beside her.

Her heart beat quickly. Though she no longer confused him with Martin, the image of Martin persisted in her mind ... how wonderfully like him he was ... the very way he walked....

"I saw you give me the glad eye ..." not the way he talked, certainly.

There was a terrible silence.

"Are you going to pretend you didn't?"

Joanna turned on him the tear-filled eyes he had considered glad. She blinked the tears out recklessly on to her cheek, and opened her mouth to reduce him to the level of the creeping things upon the earth.... But the mouth remained open and speechless. She could not look him in the face and still feel angry. Though now she would no longer have taken him for Martin, the resemblance still seemed to her startling. He had the same rich eyes--with an added trifle of impudence under the same veiling, womanish lashes, the same black sweep of hair from a rather low forehead, the same graceful setting of the head, though he had not Martin's breadth of shoulder or deceiving air of strength.

Her hesitation gave him his opportunity.

"You aren't going to scold me, are you? I couldn't help it."

His unlovely, c.o.c.kney voice had in it a stroking quality. It stirred something in the depths of Joanna's heart. Once again she tried to speak and could not.

"It's such a lovely night--just the sort of night you feel lonely, unless you've got someone very nice with you."

This was terribly true.

"And you did give me the glad eye, you know."

"I didn't mean to." She had found her voice at last. "I--I thought you were someone else; at least I--"

"Are you expecting a friend?"

"Oh, no--no one. It was a mistake."

"Then mayn't I stay and talk to you--just for a bit. I'm here all alone, you know--a fortnight's holiday. I don't know anyone."

By this time he had dragged all her features out of the darkness, and saw that she was not quite what he had first taken her for. He had never thought she was a girl--his taste was for maturity--but he had not imagined her of the obviously well-to-do and respectable cla.s.s to which she evidently belonged. He saw now that her clothes were of a fas.h.i.+onable cut, that she had about her a generally expensive air, and at the same time he knew enough to tell that she was not what he called a lady. He found her rather difficult to place. Perhaps she was a wealthy milliner on a holiday ... but, her accent--you could lean up against it ... well, anyhow she was a d.a.m.n fine woman.

"What do you think of the band?" he asked, subtly altering the tone of the conversation which he saw now had been pitched too low.

"I think it a proper fine band."

"So it is. They're going to play 'The Merry Widow' next--ever seen it?"

"No, never. I was never at a play but once, which they did at the Monastery at Rye in aid of Lady Buller's Fund when we was fighting the Boers. 'Our Flat' it was called, and all done by respectable people--not an actor or an actress among 'em."

What on earth had he picked up?

"Do you live at Rye?"

"I live two mile out of it--Ansdore's the name of my place--Ansdore Manor, seeing as now I've got both Great and Little Ansdore, and the living's in my gift. I put in a new parson last year."

This must be a remarkable woman, unless she was telling him the tale.

"I went over to Rye on Sunday," he said. "Quaint old place, isn't it?

Funny to think it used to be on the seash.o.r.e. They say there once was a battle between the French and English fleets where it's all dry marsh now."

Joanna thrilled again--that was like Martin, telling her things, old things about the Marsh. The conversation was certainly being conducted on very decorous lines. She began to lose the feeling of impropriety which had disturbed her at first. They sat talking about the neighbourhood, the weather, and--under Joanna's guidance--the prospects of the harvest, for another ten minutes, at the end of which the band went off for their "interval."

The cessation of the music and scattering of the crowd recalled Joanna to a sense of her position. She realized also that it was quite dark--the last redeeming ray had left the sky. She stood up--